My Thoughts on Game Direction

[SirAstrix]

@DontCallMeSurly

From there, once in your selected tile, you could build as you please. If you backed out to the World Map, and then started building in the tile adjacent to the one you just built in, you could connect roads, establish essentially trade routes and deals, and share resources.

I’d fully support this idea, BUT, with one change. This worked great for SC4, but it always bothered me that it made the grids to the size it wanted to be. Say I had a massive island that I wanted to be one large city…too bad, it’s been divided into 3 or more. If Stonehearth is going to do this, I think they should instead take from RimWorld or Aven Colony in regards to setting out expeditions and finding new areas.

@DontCallMeSurly

I think for gameplay sake, your central tile would essentially be on ‘Pause’ until you return.

I’m going to argue against this. My reasoning in this is going to be the usage of resources as well as the manipulation of the game. Here are a few examples even with your idea:

• Say you find a tile full of minerals, but Ogo’s camp is sitting right on top of it. If non-used tiles “pause”, then what’s to keep me from going back to the capital, building up an army, and steamrolling Ogo? It takes the challenge out of it, and the strategy of expanding out of it.

• Food distribution would be a joke. I could have one tile that’s filled to the brim with a farming village, exporting waves of excess food. If all other tiles are “paused”, then I could export to all those other tiles, filling their stores, then go to those tiles, play a little, and only come back when more food was needed. With this, you’d only ever need one farm village for your whole map. Hell, play AFK long enough and you’d never even need a farm village as you could export from the capital.

@DontCallMeSurly

Can’t have 18 different maps / tiles / towns / cities, what have you all working and computer-processing at the same time… That’d be crazy!

You wouldn’t need the entire map running, just an RNG running. If the tile is an Ogo camp, the RNG could make a random number of troops leave from said camp heading to your camps at a random time. You wouldn’t need to know what’s going on on Ogo’s tile to have armies coming from it.

With your own tiles, everything would be set. The number of 'lings x number of days since last active = amount of food consumption. If Ogo attacks one of your tiles and you don’t do anything about it, then it’d be up to how many soldiers you have there vs the RNGod. But the Hearhtling’s AI wouldn’t have to be active, pathfinding wouldn’t have to be active, etc. Building progress would be timers so what’s needed on that too?

On a performance note only though, from my personal experience, the game is more or less optimized to run on a Moto Razr if they wanted to. Even with my current run that’s unable to be played, it doesn’t use more than 40% of a quad core 3.4ghz CPU; which by today’s standard is pretty average.

@DontCallMeSurly

Finally! There’s the idea of re-playability. Because, what happens after you build your empire? What happens when essentially you’re too strong? A common problem in a lot of games.

This is where I’m going to say multiplayer needs to be mixed in. Say you’ve reached that massive empire that the goblins can’t fight. Now’s the time to take on other player’s empires, and raid their resources. After all, if you’re that large, you’ve probably used most of the resources on your world map.

And say your friend (that’s now your enemy) came in and knocked over half your tiles, this opens for the goblins to move in as well, and thus you have your replayability of rebuilding your empire.

@DontCallMeSurly

Quests I think should be small, tiny little maps - inside a cave, in a swamp, mountain hills, whatever it may be - just specific locations to fight through. Story-wise, this not only allows for the development of the portals Team Radiant mentioned they wanted to include in their game, but also allows for the community to get involved and create maps themselves to share with everyone!

I completely endorse this.

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@Fornjotr

This idea with expanding maps sounds really great, but how would it look or function in multiplayer?

Each player would have their own world map, which then they could either find others at random or have an in-game friend’s list they attack regularly. ANY mobile game (Clash of Clans as an example) basically has this.

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@Brackhar

Some people play Stonehearth from the view that they want to have a single city that they invest in for a very long time, and others play Stonehearth constantly restarting, hoping to make a better city this time than they did the last time.

I’m going to say town levels as well as the wealth system the way it is now still would allow for this. If you made it that players had to reach a certain prestige, or build a certain trader’s object that they couldn’t right from the start, before they could set out expeditions or interact with other players, this would allow them to control when they want to deal with all the extra, and thus allow them to reset as often as they want. This would also allow them to decide whether they even wanted to deal with other tiles or when they wanted to start dealing with all that.

Hopefully, you get what I’m trying to say by this…

@Brackhar

Given that goal, I think for most players it’d be a pretty distancing/confusing experience when they went back to their main city. You’ve been away from it for hours, maybe days or weeks in real world time, and during that time you may have likely forgotten a lot of what made that town appealing the first time you were there, or any of the stories/concepts you had running in your mind at the time you left it.

This is a double edged sword and depends on whether you go with the pause method or not.

• With the stated pause method, your concern could happen. But I don’t feel it would be as confusing as you worry. Even if a player forgot about what they were doing on a different tile, and they come back, it’d give them the opportunity to meet new “people” and relearn of their past adventures, like finding an old toy they’d forgotten about.

• Honestly, this is where my proposed method would really shine. If all tiles are actively using resources, then it’d remind the player that they have other tiles they should return to. On top of that, it’d give them more reason to expand rather than just a map of multiple saves (for all intent and purporses).

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@MelOzone

Except not exactly, because each new Alpha pushes you to restart anyway. So it’s not “hoping to make a better city this time” as much as it’s adapting to the game’s dev cycle.

I don’t feel this way. I’ve been using the same save for a good while now (almost a year I think), and lately am even having better results with older saves than new games.