I’m still not 100% sure about how the controlling of military units are handled. I’m curious on how it is planned to be!
What I mean is, will it be like a regular RTS with Left+Click select and Right+Click to move for example? Or will it be a different approach, like Majesty Series? Where you target a enemy and available military units will go there and eliminate the threat?
Also in the video of the Kickstarter there was said to be some micro management in combat, in which way?
Some questions that I have been wondering about, so thought to throw them out to get a clearer picture!
I hope its like Dwarf Fortress or Gnomeria where you don’t have direct control over any unit. They just decide to listen to the order whenever they feel like it.
I was curious about the same thing so i messaged Radiant Entertainment this message,
“I was wondering how your villagers/AI worked, can we select them and control movement, what they did, etc. like in Starcraft with the point and click system? I have one last question this game reminds me of a really old PC game called Knights and Merchants, i dont know if you guys have ever played that lol but if you did, was it any inspiration to the making of this game?”
The answer i received was by Radiant was,
“Right now it’s more like you select something that you want built or done, and then the appropriate people nearby go do that. The idea is to think about the tasks in terms of the city, and less in terms of the people, but we’re still evolving the mechanics, so stay tuned and we’ll see what we have by beta!”
It fits with the mechanics of Gnomoria. And for the combat you select an enemy and attack. The military units will do the rest to the best of their abilities and/or their equipment, training, formation, standing orders. Not the RTS style.
I would like to see military formations I think. Something so that if your grand epic swordfighter runs off and gets surrounded by 5 baddies, you can make people go help him or form up to stay close to help.
I followed the live-streams and blog-posts, but there is not much more information there, or is it?
I was wondering about unit control along the same lines: How much direct control over the citizens will the player have?
I really dislike indirect control in most games because it is frustrating if the AI thinks I want something different from what I actually intended. (Worst recent example is Godus.) Other games however do a pretty good job simulating needs vs job-orders, i.e. dwarf fortress.
The list of questions around this subject goes on and on, because obviously it has impact on every gameplay mechanic mentioned so far:
Can the player decide which citizen takes up a certain profession or is that also a proximity driven decision the AI does for us?
If special food-items improve mood / productivity / boost skills: Can the player assign groups / individual citizens to be the only ones allowed to take that item?
The player found this super-awesome ore and now can craft this hyper-magical-monster-killer sword and the newest recruit picks it up because she happened to be nearest. (Along the lines of the previous point…)
You decide. If you go to 1:46:00 in [the latest livestream][1] you’ll see some sneak peek early gameplay of the carpenter. You don’t control each units movements directly … they have their own ‘free will’ if you like … but from what we’ve seen and heard it would seem that you guide and orchestrate your settler’s behaviour in a similar fashion to dwarf fortress et al.
[1]: Twitch[quote=“Remus, post:6, topic:145”]
If special food-items improve mood / productivity / boost skills: Can the player assign groups / individual citizens to be the only ones allowed to take that item?
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No answer to this yet … there has only been passing comments regarding special food if I remember rightly, and as for restricting access to certain foods we’ll have to wait and see.
From a gameplay point of view it would make sense that if you created, for example, a food item that improved combat ability, you’re gonna want a combat unit to consume that, and so having a free for all over who gets to eat it would just make the item a bit redundant. Ultimately - watch this space.
My guess would be that perhaps certain gear will have prerequisites for use … for example a unit’s level/ ability in certain areas might effect the weapons/ gear they can utilise? I wouldn’t worry about new recruits picking up the gear you want your best soldiers to have, I’m sure there’ll be the system in place to prevent such things from happening
Oh snap. Now that you mention it, I remember that he actually told the guy to go and become a carpenter.
Hm, I agree that in some cases these kind of decisions are trivial and therefore easy to control by the AI. But other cases may not be, i.e. food item (or whatever non-class-specific goods) that bolsters productivity of crafters. It’s easy to come up with a situation where you’d like a specific crafter to consume that item and that not happening if there is no control over such things. (I remember that in Dwarf Fortress the whole drink / food / equipment / stock-pile management was the thing that bugged me the most because you had so little control over it.)
Oh, yes, unit levels something I didn’t consider when pondering over this. That’s actually a pretty obvious choice of parameter to handle such things.
Of course all these discussions are highly speculative and I trust that the Team Radiant will continue to make good decisions. However, I am a bit worried about the passivity of control, since it is a system that seems to be very easy to make annoying.
