I think I can pretty confidently state that it won’t be the latter by default, or at least not unless they add in a DF-style Adventure Mode. As all the media etc released has made pretty clear, town management will play a crucial role in vanilla SH, just like mining places a crucial role in vanilla Minecraft.
When you only mention exploring and guarding and nothing else… yeah I’ll jump to conclusions obviously .
But aren’t they basically like trappers then? “Hey Mr Hunter, go hunt in this here zone, but don’t hunt in this other zone (hunting suspended) because there be goblins nearby” etc. The trapper works in exactly that fashion already.
This sounds like too little control over your military though. “Where’s Able Squad?” “Oh, half of them joined your druid on a quest, and the others are on the wrong side of town.” “WTF?!”
I may exaggerate, but the point of the military units, which is what, remember, you started talking about here, is that you have sufficient control to at least point them at the enemy. A military force that decides to bugger off and do its own thing without regard to you is an utterly unreliable one.
It adds tremendous amounts of frustration. If I decide to send a squad off on a quest, at the risk of my town being less well defended, that’s MY decision as overseer/god/the guy running the show. If they decide to do it on their own, then they can lose you the game.
I never said they were or should be automatons. But there’s a difference between “Footman Bob is easily scared and dislikes goblins” and “Footman Bob has deserted his post to go explore a dungeon”. The former is personality, the latter is a reason to hurl keyboards at monitors .
For reference:
[quote=Team Radiant]Stonehearth is a game about exploration and survival in an epic fantasy setting.
Offensive actions I’ve been thinking more on - I just made a new topic specifically to discuss this issue.
As for this specific point… no, if only because a patrol zone is useless without a squad ordered to patrol it. That’s somewhat more complex and slower to set up than just slapping a banner down.
[quote=“Scal, post:20, topic:7972”]The ‘Banners’ concept comes from Majesty (Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim - Wikipedia), which was a combination of many genres (like Stonehearth is) and it had a unique twist.
Instead of choosing an area for your units to go, it allowed you to set a gold reward, which made going to the banner and killing whatever is there much more interesting for the heroes in your kingdom, the bigger the gold reward you set in the banner the bigger the numbers of interested heroes.[/quote]
Honestly, that game strikes me as very gimmicky (though I note in the description etc it does make a point of saying you’ve got various spells as well as rewards etc to help herd the hired help in the right direction)… you clearly must be ruler of a fantasy kingdom if nobody has the brains to order your feudal barons to stop bickering, line up and do as they’re damn well told before the latest mythical beast razes half the kingdom.
Also note that the point, apparently, of Majesty was the combat. That’s not the same with Stonehearth: like Gnomoria or Dwarf Fortress, there’s a big element of… well other stuff frankly. Mega-projects, town management, etc - all of which cannot be done when you have no idea from one day to the next whether your idiot soldiers will actually be there to defend said mega-project.
There’s no sign of any heroes in Stonehearth, just the hearthlings you recruit and train up.
“Hey guys, my town is under attack by goblins! Help!” “Meh, goblins are low-level and its a safe zone. I’d rather go over here.” “But-” GAME OVER!
The best way to think of the military units in Stonehearth is like, oh, say the colonial militia in the New World when the English were colonising it. Ie, locals who chose to take up arms to defend their fellow settlers, as opposed to wandering Conan-wannabes after fame & fortune. Did those colonial militia go off and attack people? Sure, but they didn’t half-arse it - or if they did, that colony was in trouble the next time the native war parties came a-calling…
Yay, so instead of curbstomping the goblins about to stumble upon the trade caravan, I’m forced to have a vaguely fair fight and hope said caravan isn’t scared off, attacked, or whatever. Urgh.
For starters, your idea as written seems to assume that guarding stuff is something you must set, and that the exploring is the default option. “Hey newbie, want to be eased into this game called Stonehearth? Well tough, because your army wandered off and now everyone’s dead!”
Piffle. You start by apparently assuming exploration is the default behaviour, and describe only 3 modes: explore, guard, or micromanagement-banner.
[quote]Team Radiant:
Stonehearth is a game about exploration and survival in an epic fantasy setting.
The game is equal parts Sandbox, Real Time Strategy, and RPG.
[/quote]
Hunters, druids and beastmasters were used as examples, as evidenced by the word like ‘(like hunters, druids)’ and being inside a parentheses right after ‘units versed in exploration and more in tune with the wilderness’. I thought I had made myself clear enough.
As of alpha 5, the trapper is not a class designed as a fighting class.
You have not thought that the player would hypotethically have at his disposal patrol zones, guards and defend banners. Also, banners always take priority if the questing warrior or party is close enough.
Sending unit by unit to acomplish individual actions, in this case quests, can be considered as heavy micro-management.
This is also a town management game and it is your duty to plan the town for your villagers. Build walls, towers, castles, train guards, equip your warriors with quality armor. When talking about balancing a game you can’t consider a feature alone, like if it was alien to the rest of the game world, you must analyze it among the entirety of other features the game has to offer, otherwise your points won’t hold water.
In this case, as you meantioned Footman Bob left his patrol post, suggesting that he is guard. Him being a guard he wouldn’t follow the same behavior of other warriors, as explained in my previous post, thus not leaving his post to pursuit a quest or join a group.
Not sure why you added those quotations thought, as they serve my points.
Clicking and dragging a square to create a zone is hardly a chore and no harder than selecting an attack banner and putting it in the ground.
The general subject adressed by the suggestions that I have brought up here is combat, thus bringing a Majesty - Stonehearth comparison is utterly unecessary, would contribute nothing to the discussion and could easily be considered off-topic.
This is why I didn’t and I won’t make a full comparison of the two games. Adressing combat concepts of another game is enough for a combat discussion.
Heroes as a synonym of warriors and units who are not guards
If you reach a point in the game where you have no walls, no guards, no low to mid level units, no workers and only one high tier unit who is coming back from a banner you set somewhere around the Pacific Ocean then it is your own fault you’re loosing.
Taking your colonial comparison further, after a colony was well established, prosperous and well defended many would seek new lands and riches further away. The reasons were many: more fertile land, gold, indigenous artifacts, legendary treasures and mythical cities.
Again, you should consider a real situation where you don’t have only one uber unit and a weak unit at your disposal.
By the time you have a high level unit (possibly upgraded trough the awesome level system Team Radiant is implementing), you will very likely own several mid level units and possibly the double of this amount of low level units and also probably already secured most trade routes with walls, towers, guards and patrol zones.
Your assumption is incorrect. There would be no ‘toggle’ option, as this would demand heavy micro-management when you have many units and would also encourage ‘turtling’ tactics in multiplayer.
As of now we can’t know if units will upgrade in class automatically when their level reach a certain number or if they need a new tool/weapon to upgrade or both.
If units upgrade automatically when reaching a certain level then guard units would need to be a different class.
If they only need a certain weapon/tool to upgrade or if they need both (required level and tool/weapon) then the guard units could be the first class of every fighting unit.
As Team Radiant works on class upgrades and releases more information about it the guard idea can be elaborated better.
[quote=“Scal, post:22, topic:7972”]Hunters, druids and beastmasters were used as examples, as evidenced by the word like ‘(like hunters, druids)’ and being inside a parentheses right after ‘units versed in exploration and more in tune with the wilderness’. I thought I had made myself clear enough.
As of alpha 5, the trapper is not a class designed as a fighting class.[/quote]
Look, you give an example of the sorts of classes you think would be better going off exploring without player control, and I counter it by saying “wouldn’t the trapper model work better for them?” then… you nitpick the units examples you chose?
Right.
It’s still a stupid design though. You’re having to jump through all these hoops and so on to provide a means of counteracting idiot soldiers not doing the most important part of their job - ie the defence of your settlement.
I’m the overseer of my town. I decide who shall farm, and where they shall farm, and what they shall farm. I decide who shall weave, and what they shall weave. I decide where they shall sleep, what beds they shall have, what their houses shall look like, and -
GOD DAMNIT ABLE SQUAD GET BACK HERE RIGHT NOW!
Can you see the part that doesn’t fit yet?
Given that we don’t know how the scenarios & dungeons will work, you can’t actually say that . It could be as simple as “oh hey, here’s a quest, I’ll pick Able Squad to do it” or as involved as, well, one of the Dragon Age games (I hope not, though).
Funny, I was about to say the same thing. I control who shall farm, and what shall be farmed, and where it shall be farmed. I control…
Remember that bit?
Well good thing I only have to be totally paranoid and hope that when I hired Footman Bob that I made sure to make him into a guard then, isn’t it .
No, I just left them in when quoting you because it was late and I missed them .
Half the point of patrol zones etc, which should have been obvious in my original post, was that you must choose a squad to, you know, patrol. Leaving aside terrain obstacles etc that make dragging out the zone slower & more awkward than dropping a banner down, you missed out the fact that after drawing the zone you’d have to assign someone / something to it.
…
Then don’t bring up Majesty?
Ahem… “When talking about balancing a game you can’t consider a feature alone, like if it was alien to the rest of the game world, you must analyse it almong the entirety of other features the game has to offer, otherwise your points won’t hold water.”
Not in any dictionary I’ve seen.
Good to see you completely missing the point again, which is that the kind of AI you want the units to have sucks. When I say “Able Squad, defend the town”, I want Able Squad to defend the town now, not saunter over in their own time because it’s only goblins and they’re too high level to be challenged by goblins. I don’t care if they could defend the town by sneezing on the goblins and killing them that way. I only care that the units respond, instead of fighting my commands.
Uhm… English colonists in North America typically turned swords into ploughshares and let new settlers go off to the frontier and such. They also weren’t up against invasion algorithms that sent progressively nastier attacks the wealthier they got, which - guess what - would have meant keeping their military close at hand.
Let’s try again. I choose who shall farm, I choose what shall be farmed, I choose where it shall be farmed. I choose who shall weave…
[quote=“Scal, post:22, topic:7972”]Again, you should consider a real situation where you don’t have only one uber unit and a weak unit at your disposal.
By the time you have a high level unit (possibly upgraded trough the awesome level system Team Radiant is implementing), you will very likely own several mid level units and possibly the double of this amount of low level units and also probably already secured most trade routes with walls, towers, guards and patrol zones.[/quote]
But I don’t want to use my low/mid level soldiers against the latest goblin raid. I want to watch Captain Ironblood and co turn said raid into a combination of “how many hundred yards can I send this head flying” and a piece of modern art done entirely in red.
Then explain better in future so people don’t make wrong assumptions.
If there is no toggle option between exploring and guarding, how the devil do I stop them exploring when I don’t want them to? Micromanagement-y banner spam all the time?
Ok you guys have been talking past each other in 4 Very long posts where both of you keep (deliberately?) misunderstanding each other.
I will now try to make a solution for one of the problems.
What if the soldier just asks the player before starting to wander of to long and they will keep to their squad their where assigned to if they do. This way you won’t need to manually assign the soldier to ether adventure or guard they will wander a bit around the village and if they suddenly get a great lust for adventure they will ask permission and the player can decide to send them out or say “No stay and guard the village”
Could lead to some annoying popups when you’re in the middle of some construction or w/e though. If I want them to go off gallivanting I’ll let them know.
If they work in the same way as traders it won’t become a big annoyance you just need to make a decision at some point in a reasonable time span or your soldiers will get a bit annoyed.
Maybe, but still… seems a hell of a disconnect with the rest of the game. As I said to @Scal, I can choose who farms, what is farmed, and where they farm… but the military of all things is harder to control? That can’t be right.
Well i would love to see my farmers experiment on their own behalf and derp a bit around with how they do stuff.
But of course the buildings and farms need to be placed where you wish or the city planning would fall apart.
The part that makes the soldiers easier to give a bigger amount of freedom is that they are not necessarily need to be linked to a single (or a few) structure(s) or building (Like the farmer).
Of course it is a bad thing if your soldiers just wanders off when they want, but if you already have assigned soldiers to all the points that needs protection and you have a single squad of maybe 4 soldiers who wanders about doing nothing. They will of course get bored at some point and then they would want to go out and do something maybe walk a bit around the city or go to the pub and get drunk. If they wan’t to go out and explore they should ask of course but they should have the possibility to go out and do it if they want to. This makes the game alive and makes it feel more real instead of just get assigned to explore duty and then he is an explorer.
What i am saying is that everything is more fun if it is a active choice from the Hearthling because it makes them seem more alive instead of just being our minions.
wow, there is quite a bit of content to wade through here… but I appreciate you all having a (highly) detailed discussion, without resorting to tearing each others throats out …
Oh god no. I mean okay, “create farm => experimental crops” or something is one thing, but “create farm => plant turnips => WTF I SAID TURNIPS NOT PUMPKINS!” would get frustrating really fast.
Yes and no. Yes, because obviously you have a point. No, because of things like having to guard choke points, borders and such adequately means you’ll likely have to juggle where you place them, which can end up being more restrictive.
Now to me, that means I either have a reserve squad, a training squad, or a team I can choose to send off on adventures.
Lots of bored soldiers would make Stonehearth a very realistic game .
But they are our minions.
I mean, it’s one thing to say have your builders refuse to work because you mismanaged the town to the extent that they’re in the middle of a tantrum spiral or something - that’s your fault. But when they refuse to work because they’re just being ornery… that just leads to frustration and fighting the game to accomplish your goal.
The way I see it, if I want to build (and guard) a mega-project, then - provided I manage to run my town well enough, I should be able to build said project. But that becomes a lot harder when the farmer spontaneously decides he’s bored of turnips and wants to farm silk weed, or Able Squad wanders off to get drunk when they’re meant to be on duty, or… well you get the idea.
Hey thorbjorn I’ll get right back at you in a few hours with a new post
But Teleros left some questions in his previous post which calls for a well deserved response:
After reading this I looked back at your previous post and there is no sign of any intention to ask ‘wouldn’t the trapper model work better for them?’ as you claim. In said post it is asked something else entirely: ‘But aren’t they basically like trappers then?’, there is also a mention of the hunter and the affirmation: ‘The trapper works in exactly that fashion already’.
I went on my way to explain to you that the hunter name was just an example and that the combat concepts were designed only for fighting classes, not for the trapper. Closing with: ‘As of aplha 5, the trapper is not a class designed as a fighting class’.
If there was any intention to ask ‘wouldn’t the trapper model work better for them?’ then it was not clear nor it was expressed in your post.
But to answer this new question, the trapper zone was created as a working area for the hunter to work, where, when initially introduced, he (the trapper) could work anywhere provided the player guided him, this first concept was discarded due to the need for heavy micro-management and negative community opinion. As of alpha 5, trappers will work on their own, provided the player set a hunting ground for the trapper to work.
With the above said, it is clear the that role of the trapper and the hunting ground (hunting zone) is designed for a working class and not a fighting class, thus incompatible with the combat role and impossible as a combat concept.
Those are examples of indirect control as are the combat concepts I brought in this discussion.
You forgot:
You don’t get to choose if your villagers will assist in the construction of a house or gather resources or place items or eat or sleep or stand by the campfire.
In the same way you don’t get to choose what farms your farmer attend to first. You can select the area they farm and the crops in the farm, but from this point forward the farmers assume control.
You are an overseer, someone who has indirect control, not an overlord who controls every action of his minions. You set the goals and watch as they go on with their daily tasks, this behavior gives believability and immersion to the world of Stonehearth.
Wacthing the villagers build, eat, talk, sleep and do other actions on their own makes the player feel more and more attached to the game world and to his villagers, the workers aren’t worker #1 and worker #2 anymore, they have names, personalities and desires and act accordingly to the situations presented to them. And this in turn causes the player to care more for each of them.
This behavior is unusual in video-games and is what first made me buy Stonenearth and I expect that Team Radiant will keep this pattern in their game.
I don’t need deep knowledge of how scenarios and dungeons will work to know that having to give orders to several different units at small intervals is a horrible idea.
Think of what Assassins Creed did with the ‘Send assassins to missions’ feature, a frustrating method of micro-management, where you had to check your assassins every few minutes to send new orders again, collect gold, recruit more assassins, check new missions, send to missions, rinse and repeat. This kind of lazy mechanic deserves no place in Stonehearth.
You don’t control their direct actions. This has already been explained previously.
As explained in my previous post, there is no toggle function.
A boring micro-management mechanic for the player to go trough.
It is unfair and wrong to bring only a small portion of a text in order to subvert the writer’s arguments.
As already explained, it is unecessary for the goals of this discussion to bring a complete, feature by feature, Majesty - Stonehearth comparison.
The subject of this topic is combat, thus it is enough and adequate, when comparing Stonehearth to another game under a combat discussion, to give focus on the combat concepts, excluding the features which aren’t part of said subject.
For reference, the full text:
They can be used as synonyms, with no confusion or loss of meaning, for any effects of this discussion.
Alas, a quick browsing trough any search engine in internet shows in the first links that the words I used can be adquately used as synonyms:
I also put into question the necessity of explaining the above as the point of this discussion is combat, not textual adequacy. To bring such a discussion is to try to undermine another’s arguments with supposed textual errors, which is counterproductive.
There are a lot of games with direct control. Fortunately Stonehearth is not one of those games.
As already explained, the player would hypotethically have at his disposal walls, towers, guards, patrol zones, many low level units and mid level units by the time he gets a squad or party of high level units, thus being way above petty concerns about goblin raids.
Then don’t send Captain Ironblood in a campaign across the globe and he will be close when you need him.
My post is clear and well written. I am not to blame for assumptions you create regarding arguments I hadn’t opened.
Yes you have a quite good point here. A solution would be a patrol city option or something that you could give your soldiers when they ask for something to do. Would that work foe you?
Yea. But they are also our citizens which makes it more fun if they could take an initiative to ask to do something instead of just getting the order. Explorers and adventurers are mostly people who took the choice them self. Right?
What i am saying are not that they should refuse to guard the town. Just ask if you would be cool with them taking out on a adventure. This would fully be a choice you make of course. (So basically an event)
Of course it would be irritating if the villages messed things up and Fx planted pumpkins instead of turnips but what i am trying to say is that isn’t it more fun if the Hearthlings make a few choices on their own or at least asks if they are allowed to do something different.
I’ve been reading trough your suggestions and your discussion with @Teleros and I may have found a ‘merge’ between the varied concepts. I’ll share this new view possibly by the end of the day.
My god teleros, you clearly have never played majesty, if one has many “heroes” (classes prone to going on quests) and they are well designed, they can usually clear out the map pretty easily, and they also have to constantly return to teh village for supplie sanyway.
Also they are very unlikely to go wandering very far from the village if they dont have an explicit quest to do so.
If the player is the one giving quests via placing banners and setting rewards, i belive all of the “issues” you conjured up would be null and void. Not all heroes would go for the same quest either, only 1 or 2, or a couple groups, if you are effective you should have plenty of units left over to defend your village in case of attack.
And the player should be able to cancel a quest at any time.
Basically im suggesting the player always be the one to make quests, think of your self as the dm of the game. You tell the heroes to go on quests when you want them to go on quests;. Or you encourage them to go on “quests” that you set up via rewards. think a “reward flag” over a monsters head that YOU explicitly put there and set a reward for. Or an Explore flag.
This way the player has “control” but not total control. and you don’t have to micromanage them. The heroes would hopefully have ai that can handle itself in the big bad world of stonehearth, and the ai should be smart enough to stock up on supllies on its own and fight the monsters as strategically as possible.
Also, defending the village should take priority…
Take hints from Majesty Radiant.
Majesty is one of my favorite game sto ever exist, and if radiant did a soldier system similar to that game, I would be very happy.
Of course if radiant were to take this idea and run with it, i expect them to adapt it themselves, perhaps instead of a reward you assign the heroes to the quests as you see fit, without the need for a reward.
(this seems more stonehearthy to me) But you sill do it via “flags”.
perhaps radient could even expand on this by allowing players to make “defense flags” or “dungeon raid flags” the first of which would give heroes a quest to defend a specific building for a specific amount of time (or until the reward, probabbly gold, runs out), and the second of which would tell units to “raid” a dungeon or goblin home/village by going inside and clearing it out.
I could see a ton of possibilities, and you cna mak eteh flags as tactical as possible.
Of course i would also be fine with radiant going about control of units in a sort of age of empires fashion or warcraft fashion, but its better to come up with various ideas of how to go about this. And we already saw a backlash from direct control.
One ,more option is to go about it dwarf fortress style with the player choosing squads and giving squads direct orders, but when they are not on duty you cannot use them and have to rally them.
I would also like to be able to assign soldiers to a barrax (sorry i dont have time to look up how to spell this). No matter which way radiant goes about it.
For @thorbjorn42gbf & @untrustedlife, scroll down to the bottom for my responses to you two, as responding to @Scal is the great majority of this wall of text .
I agree to the extent that a “kill bad guys here” zone would probably not work very well for offensive combat. Defensively, patrol & guard zones should be fine.
I just feel you’re taking the indirect bit too far.
No, but you know who will. The carpenter if he’s free, and any workers if they’re free. Same issue with gathering resources.
These are all trivial issues though. If your carpenter wants to eat first then finish the last bed you ordered him to make… it’s no biggie, and is the sort of thing you should expect from a town management game anyway IMHO.
True, but as it stands this really isn’t a big issue - especially given how plentiful food is ATM. If providing sufficient food for your town becomes more difficult, then yes I’d expect to be able to assume more control over what each farmer does etc (eg assigning farmers to plots, or suspending work on certain plots so that they can hurry to complete another one, eg to stave off starvation).
Bolded my issue with your ideas. From where I stand (sit?), your arguing for a military that is much more apt to set its own goals, which - especially for the military - I think is both potentially disastrous and very much against the style of the game.
Again, you can’t actually say that, because as I thought I’d made clear, we don’t know how the scenario/dungeon model will work. To repeat myself: if I decide to send a squad off on a quest, at the risk of my town being less well defended, that’s MY decision… If they decide to do it on their own, then they can lose you the game."
That’s about as micromanage-y as responding to the trader events that occur in-game at the moment. I think you’re misunderstanding my position, which is that a quest model like the trader events is, IMHO, a good model:
A wild quest appears! / You discover a dungeon! / You discover a scenario!
Do you want to do it? Yes/no?
If yes, which squad will you send off on it?
However, as we don’t know what the quest model will be like, we can’t exactly say much about it either way.
Indeed, it sounds like they should’ve added some decent automation to do at least the following:
Alert you when the assassins are back.
Auto-stockpile the rewards etc.
Alert you when new missions appear.
I… am getting annoyed with you now.
Way back at the start of all this, you said (point one) that military units you recruit will explore the world on their own, and THEN (point two) that they could be set as a guard.
That is a toggle.
Then you go on to say (I’m paraphrasing, but w/e) "units not versed in exploration will prefer to hang out at town unless they decide to do a quest or are in a questing party. Again implying that their default behaviour is to potentially abandon their posts and go off playing D&D in the wild. Thus reinforcing the idea that you need to turn off their abandon friends & family exploration behaviour.
That is a toggle.
And then, you say in response to my stuff about Footman Bob, that “…suggesting that he is a guard. Him being a guard he wouldn’t follow the same behaviour of other warriors… thus not leaving his post…”
AGAIN, implying that if I want Footman Bob to be a guard, I have to TELL him to be one.
That is a toggle.
So please, stop it. Either the default behaviour of military units is to explore, in which case I must toggle off that behaviour, or it is to defend my settlement, in which case I do not need to toggle off the exploration behaviour. So far, you’ve consistently said and implied that it is the former.
Course, then you say “there is no toggle function”, which if anything makes it worse by implying that I can’t even set my idiot soldiers to guard so as to stop them from seeking fame and an early grave two biomes away instead of defending the town like they’re supposed to.
Yes, but that’s why I made a separate topic to consider how best to handle offensive military actions.
Don’t contradict yourself then .
Thanks for saying in advance, was my point…
[quote=“Scal, post:22, topic:7972”]Alas, a quick browsing trough any search engine in internet shows in the first links that the words I used can be adquately used as synonyms:
A synonym is a word that has exactly, or very nearly, the same meaning as another word.
Hero, warrior, soldier and guard DO NOT mean the same thing:
A D&D barbarian is a warrior, not a soldier. He is not a guard unless he is guarding something or someone.
A person who deserts their post and flees is not a hero.
A member of the Waffen SS (yes I went there) is a soldier, and may be a guard, but he is not a hero.
A prime minister who rallies his country during a tough war is a hero, but is not a soldier, warrior, or guard.
Now do you see why using these terms interchangeably was perhaps not the brightest idea?
If you used English properly then there wouldn’t be any cause for misunderstanding, and so no need to make me give you a lesson in English language comprehension…
Way to miss the point. Again.
If you look closely, you’ll notice the second half of my sentence, specifically “instead of fighting my commands”. And, if you’d read my posts, you’d know that I consider things like “toggling all my military units to guard mode so that they’ll do the job I hired them for” is what I consider to be a case of having to fight my own units to get them to behave.
Glad to see you know so much about how the combat engine in Stonehearth is going to look.
Oh no wait, you don’t.
By the way, have you ever seen some of those Dwarf Fortress LPs that include goblin attacks? You can get 50+ goblins (I think I read of an 80+ strong goblin attack once)… that is a serious threat to a fort, which typically has no more than 200 dwarves in it, tops. Now, you may be a good player and you may have prepared enough traps, magma pumps and the like to wipe out the entire Chinese PLA in one fell swoop, but then again you may not have.
I would, but your apparent fixation on having military units default to “let’s go exploring!” makes it that much harder…
Uh-huh.
[quote=“Scal, post:22, topic:7972”]Your assumption is incorrect. There would be no ‘toggle’ option, as this would demand heavy micro-management when you have many units and would also encourage ‘turtling’ tactics in multiplayer.
As of now we can’t know if units will upgrade in class automatically when their level reach a certain number or if they need a new tool/weapon to upgrade or both.
If units upgrade automatically when reaching a certain level then guard units would need to be a different class.
If they only need a certain weapon/tool to upgrade or if they need both (required level and tool/weapon) then the guard units could be the first class of every fighting unit.[/quote]
This is actually worse than the toggle idea you started out with.
If (game design in which I find I don’t want to use certain units = bad game design) then (your idea is bad game design).
Meh. Call me a tyrannical overlord if you want, but the journal / NPC chat window is where they can do their complaining . You’re in the army now, son," and all that.
An adventurer class / profession that is entirely separate from the military I have no problem with. Choosing to create a unit to go off and explore, have adventures with or whatever is very different from having your city guard members doing it. I get that it’s nice to see more character in the individual hearthlings, but really IMHO that’s for the journal or again, the NPC chat log.
(Also: RATTLESNAKES?! )
Not IMHO. I tend to approach these things with A Plan, quite possibly complete with technical diagrams, spreadsheets, and screenshots of awesome looking buildings. I don’t want the AI asking me “hey boss, can we screw things up do XYZ?” instead .
I am entirely ignorant of it, and have gone just by the stuff @Scal has said.
You say that, but then immediately after…
No! No! Bad hearthling! I want Alice to do this quest, not Bob!
[quote=“untrustedlife, post:36, topic:7972”]Basically im suggesting the player always be the one to make quests, think of your self as the dm of the game. You tell the heroes to go on quests when you want them to go on quests;. Or you encourage them to go on “quests” that you set up via rewards. think a “reward flag” over a monsters head that YOU explicitly put there and set a reward for. Or an Explore flag.
This way the player has “control” but not total control. and you don’t have to micromanage them. The heroes would hopefully have ai that can handle itself in the big bad world of stonehearth, and the ai should be smart enough to stock up on supllies on its own and fight the monsters as strategically as possible.[/quote]
As per the other thread, certainly I’m open to ideas on how to get military units to do specific (mostly offensive) actions, and yeah, perhaps a “target this” banner or w/e would work for that when Cthulhu comes along. But if I can’t tell Able Squad specifically to target Cthulhu, and just have to hope that the veterans in Able Squad do it instead of the clueless newbies in Baker Squad… urgh.
Going to snip most of the flag suggestions just to this, because perhaps they belong better in the other thread?
Personally, I can think of only two ways to use direct control (ie StarCraft-style unit controls) well in Stonehearth:
Individual hero units.
When you take a break from town management and go take a handful of units into a dungeon - imagine it as a Baldur’s Gate mini-game or something.
Whether those actually make it into Stonehearth is another matter of course.
That might work out well. Little leery about direct orders to a squad, but it might work out okay.
Still - get these ideas in the other thread !
Agreed. I mentioned this specifically as a type of Ownership Zone in the opening post .
I agree, the patrol zone is a good mechanic to set where you want your guards to defend.
No, you’re still setting the goals, or giving quests and objectives as @thorbjorn42gbf explained.
Then it is better to postpone this discussion in particular.
No, I did not. Nowhere in my posts I wrote or supported a toggleable function for guards.
There is no implication. What is written is literal in meaning, units who dislike exploring will tend to remain around town, unless if in a party. They are not guards.
There is no implication, you misunderstood what is written. If you want Footman Bob to be a guard then keep him as a footman, because, as explained in my previous posts, the first classes of every fighting class fulfill the role of guards until upgraded to a stronger class.
With the above said, plus everything that has been written so far, this is clearly not the case.
The guards won’t leave their duties, they don’t follow the same behavior of other units. They will patrol around the patrol zones and answer the call of any defend banner nearby if there is no enemy in sight.
For a contradiction to exist there must be at least two opposing arguments coming from the same person. A quick read trough my previous posts clearly shows that this is not the case.
For the effects of this discussion they are synonyms.
There is no confusion or loss of meaning in using one for the other in my previous posts, as I carefully introduced one after the other, the subject (unit, warrior or guard) can be “renamed” in the text, excluding the need to repeat the same name over and over. This is a literary trick which is commonly used. The reader is able to understand the text and comprehend it, thus there is no need for further changes.
However this discussion about textual adequacy is irrelevant by the reasons expressed in my previous post.
The english grammar rules were respected and used properly. You don’t need to justify yourself because I like this kind of discussion, however, as already pointed in my previous post, this is not the right topic to discuss textual adequacy.
The above point is invalid as it disagree with a supposed ‘toggle mode’, whereas my suggestion does not support the use of a ‘toggle mode’, as explained before.
It is disrespectful to use irony to counter someone else’s arguments.
With that said, there is nothing wrong with the post you quoted, as it is explicitly shown that it is using an hypothesis, which considered a Stonehearth game after the proposed suggestions of this topic were implemented.
For reference:
*Marking done in this post.
With all the above said, this point is made invalid. It has been thoroughly explained that there is no ‘toggle’ function in my suggestion.
General negative is counterproductive to any discussion.
Well if you haven’t given them any specific orders yet they are not complaining. Just wishing to serve you in the best possible way
I personally really like the idea of the hearthlings personality being shown in their action as well as their chat log. But every man his taste
But their aren’t messing up your system/plan. this would just be a request from time to time from your inactive people if they aren’t doing anything.
As an extra note: yes @Teleros it is important to have a control over your soldiers and to decide who they attack and where they go (as in patrols and defense points). But as i and @Scal have been pointing out the last
Your own words condemn you, from the very first post you made in this thread:
[quote=“Scal, post:8, topic:7972, full:true”]…
You recruit the units (craft weapons and promote) and they would
explore the world on their own, attack enemies, run from danger, get new equipment,
make parties, help friends, follow a quest, etc, like if they were playing an RPG.
Any low level warrior like the footman for example could be set as a
‘guard’ and he wouldn’t follow the behavior described above. Guards
would stay around the town perimeter, protecting the villagers and
the stockpiles.
[/quote]
That is the very definition of a toggle-able action.
Excuse me? “Will prefer” and “unless they decide to” are NOT, I repeat NOT phrases calculated to instill a measure of security. You could have written “units not versed in exploration will hang out at town” for example, but no - you wrote “will prefer to”, which absolutely implies that they might have other preferences etc, and will thus not always hang around at town.
No, I understood exactly what was written, but you keep scrambling to catch up and make changes instead. Like this tripe:
That was a possible (and bad) solution you mentioned, and one of several in fact.
Not sure if serious.
Stop evading the point.
Read slower.
Clearly they are not. I first mentioned “heroes” in reference to possible unique, individual units you had direct control over, as an example of where direct control might work. YOU then mentioned “heroes” in reference to heroes being interested in banners based on the reward and/or danger quotient of the banner.
Gee, I wonder why someone might get the wrong impression.
Respect must be earnt.
[quote=“Scal, post:38, topic:7972”]General negative is counterproductive to any discussion.
Expecting a more concise answer.[/quote]
“I have no need for unit X” = bad game design.
Concise enough for you?
Or do you actually mean you want a fuller explanation? Right then…
I want my soldiers to guard my town.
Upgrading my footman to an axeman means the upgraded soldier will want to explore (for sake of argument).
Therefore I will never upgrade footmen to axemen.
Therefore all the work on designing, coding & balancing axemen is useless.
Got it?
Just for fun, let’s go over all your posts again, because I’m getting fed up with your backtracking and general duplicitousness…
Post #8
I think we should use the Majesty model, like this…
You train units, they go exploring etc.
You can toggle them to be guards instead (but it’s not a toggle, because ~reasons~).
Disagree with the idea of using military zones for Stonehearth.
Post #10
I made some changes to post #8.
Post #20
Even though I totally implied in post #8 that exploring was the default behaviour for soldiers I meant it was just one of several options.
What’s the default behaviour for soldiers? God knows, I’m not saying.
I’m also going to imply that soldiers “prefer” to remain at town unless “they decide to” go off on a quest or are in a quest party.
Military zones are totally cool BTW.
I am TOTALLY not being inconsistent BTW.
Post #22
Even though I implied the above, I actually mean that exploration / guard behaviour will be determined by unit class.
Again, I am TOTALLY not being inconsistent.
Also, I am TOTALLY not pulling new stuff out of my ar uhm, I mean thin air, or backtracking. No sirree.
Post #31
Going to roll with my ideas in post #22 and ignore any inconsistencies.
Post #32
Irrelevant to debate.
Post #34
Irrelevant to debate.
Post #38
See Post #31.
And now, a special tip from Santa Teleros…
If you have an idea for how this should work, EXPLAIN THE IDEA. Don’t start with a red herring about units defaulting to exploring and then being set to guard, because you’ll come across like, well, like you, frankly. Or if that was your original idea and you then decided against it, at least be honest enough to say that “yeah, my original idea wasn’t so hot, but how about this new one?”
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… it tastes so nice 
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