Should player progression be gated by the need to found multiple cities?
Are players expected to return to towns they have left?
I’m not sure the first one is a good direction, and I think the second may fight against a bit of what we’re hoping to do in terms of creating player attachment.
Now, this is pretty hypothetical stuff, and there are small tweaks and changes that can be made here and there as tradeoffs. Those two questions are the ones that hounded me around this pitch though, as there isn’t an inherent right or wrong answer, just a broad directional one. I have inklings of an answer to both, but not a solid one as of yet, which is why I’ve not completely discarded this pitch idea.
I think a more interesting question you have to ask first is, should a town get to 100 hearthlings? What is the maximum size we want a settlement to be?
Is this game worth checking out @SirAstrix? I’ve heard generally mixed things.
Yeah, this is a worry for me in this pitch, and why I’m unsure of revisitng a town after you leave. On the one hand pausing opens up the exploit you just mentioned, but on the other wouldn’t it kind of suck to come back to a town you hadn’t played in awhile and find it to be fundamentally different than you left it? Maybe it was attacked and wiped out, or the AI build a new house in a place you didn’t want it to, or etc.
Yeah, we generally try not to be destructive to old saves, but certain new features don’t get back-ported. That said, if you kept playing that town, all the new hearthlings that immigrated would have traits.
No need to do this btw. You can talk about other games all you want without citing a trademark.
Also no need to do this. I used to do this all the times on forums too, and then someone reminded me it was redundant because my name was always next to my post anyway.
Now here I would like to try and add my own perspective (maybe it helps). Depending on how the “multiple cities” system is implemented, we may have a situation akin to people having “twinks” in MMORPGs. Some people like to have a single “main” character and get enough joy from that while others train different characters on different servers. While the game usually does not punish you for this, it also does not encourage you to do it - the only bonuses you get are multiple different trained characters that cost you more time.
If we stick to this system (non-visited chars/cities are paused, the system does not punish nor reward you for additional chars/cities), it would probably work. Since it kinda already works. The problem rises when we want our “cells” on a global map to interact, work together.
The problem of Ogo camp makes me feel the game turning more to combat/military strategy direction. One possible solution for it can be that cells “controlled” by hostile forces (some cells or all cells?) do not go on pause. So Ogo may continue to “develop” his camp while we are away. he may also send scouts to our cell (which we may or may not capture) to track our progress, but we can do the same.
There are many questions stemming from this, like “should Ogo’s cell send raiding parties to neighbouring cells?” or “should Ogo’s camp migrate in time?”, but I feel like I’m diving too deep into particular situations while what we need first is a sense of direction.
Then again, sometimes strategy is based on many different small examples piling up.
Confusing.
If I would answer these two question, I’d say that
Multiple cities should be an option, not a requirement
No, because like any RTS, if the player chooses to “turtle”, and remain at home base, then that’s their prerogative. At the same time, if they choose to spread out, they can increase their resource intake at the cost of having to manage more than one area at a time. A risk for reward kind of setup.
Think of it as giving the player the ability to choose how large they want their empire to be. Someone like myself (and I assume many others) would love to have dedicated towns that supply our capital. And if diplomacy ever gets added, we could have trade towns that link to other players or to the goblins and orcs, etc. By having multiple towns, it opens the game up to so much more and so many more directions it could go.
Again this could be left up to the player. If they start a town, then say abandoned it for whatever their reason was, the Hearthlings there (after a while) could choose to move out, thus turning it into a ghost town to have to “reconquer” later, or even let the necromancer take it over, REALLY becoming a ghost town. Again, SO MANY story possibilities.
Multiple times you’ve stated you want player attachment. I want to ask what kind and why? For every player, the game is something different. For some, they just want to build, for others, they want to make a living village, and for others, they want to build an empire. To try and corral everyone into the second option, and trying to force all of us to like and get to know our 20 Hearthlings, just isn’t the flavor of Koolaid that everyone likes.
On top of that, as I stated earlier,
Again, this should be up to the player. If they want a small town of 25, let them. They want a capital city of 2K, let them. Sorry, but why limit them, when your game has the ability to cover a broad spectrum of desires?
I honestly can’t answer this. Personally, I love the game Moon Tycoon from when I was younger. This game is a modern take on that…that’s honestly left shallow. The number of buildings available to you is…limited to put it nicely. The maps aren’t that big, not to mention have different annoying features about each. And the AI is very touchy, to where if you mess up in the slightest, you’re basically done.
All that being said, I’ve got a couple hundred hour into this game. To me, it almost becomes addictive to battle against the AI to see how big of a colony I can build before one stupid thing ends it. So in the end, I can’t say rush out and buy the game, but if you have a few extra bucks laying around, you’ll regret buying it at first, but it will grow on you.
Regardless of my “review” on it, the expedition part of it I think is something Stonehearth needs to “steal”.
To explain it a little, your base is in the middle of the map, and you build expedition centers to send ships out to explore the area. It has it’s own version of fog, and there’s different types of events that can be found. Now the game kinda RNG’s the encounter when your ship gets there, but Stonehearth could then take a page from RimWorld and make these instances/quests the player gets to play out.
This is where I would say it shouldn’t change. If you started a house before you left, and had enough resources, then it should be finished when you got back, but the AI shouldn’t be running on a level that it’s built additional houses. As for being attacked, I’m going to reference Fallout 4 on this one, where you get a notification that your settlement is being attacked. If you go to it, you can help defend it, and thus it’s directly in your hands to whether you win or lose. If you choose to leave it, the RNGod does its work, and maybe you won, maybe you didn’t. In this instance, maybe some of your Hearthlings were killed, maybe they defended themselves.
But that being said, I think that the tile being “paused” for all intent and purpose isn’t fully bad, for both machine processing purposes as well as player reasons, but at the same time, the tiles should cost resources to maintain / own. SimCity 4 did this decently.
Why wouldn’t he send parties out? Isn’t that the point of any enemy? In means of replayability, it would give us a constant enemy to fight rather then just owning the world.
This. If everything depends on RNG, you can lose hearthlings you grew attached to. Which can lead to battle notifications popping up when you in the middle of building another city, and you’re like “damn it, I’m trying to do something here, but these folks will probably die if left to themselves”. Not exactly the desired scenario.
On the other hand, an enemy who poses no danger isn’t very interesting. And manually capping his power to leave hearthlings wounded but not dead seems… artificial. On the other hand, currently the power of an enemy somewhat depends on the overall estimated “strength” of your town anyway, so…
If you’re attached to a specific heartening, and you get a notification that their town is under attack, wouldn’t you go and make sure they lived? If you just left it to RNG to secure their safety, did you care that much in the first place?
Attacked period wouldn’t be desired. But in this instance, you take a second to go defend them, come back to finish what you were doing, then when done, send a party to attack Ogilvie yourself. If whatever you’re doing is too important to leave alone for a sec, then let chance decide for you.
Really this is no different than the system we already have now, just on a bigger scale. If you’re on one side of the map building, and get a notification that an enemy approaches, your soldiers still run to it. But without you there, they may fall, they may not.
When you’re on the same map, checking the odds takes seconds. Maybe the combat doesn’t need your attention after all. You are in control, you feel like you’re in control. When you’re on a different “cell”, switching to battle, then switching back takes time (possibly with loading screens breaking immersion).
It’s not simply about it being “too important”. It’s the fact that it is an artistic process, and any artistic process requires what I call “channeling”, a certain state of mind. It’s the same with drawing, writing novels or programming - you need the right state of mind and concentration to do it. Kinda like meditation. Naturally, when your mom calls you to wash the dishes and you are knee-deep in the process, it causes frustration. And frustration is something I would like to avoid in Stonehearth. I would like to avoid sacrificing things like this.
If you’ll forgive me for being circular, we want to have a game where players attach to their hearthlings because that’s the type of game we want to make. We’re trying to make a community builder game, in the vein or Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, where emergent stories can appear as a result of the player’s attachment to the people and the world around them. To achieve that goal, it’s important that the player views their hearthlings as individuals and has some sort of relationship with them. We are not trying to make a city builder in the vein of SimCity or Caesar, where the game is more about the town as a whole and the individuals inside of it are mostly interchangeable.
That’s not to say there isn’t room for a pitch like this (as I mentioned I had pitched something very similar to this), or that there are ideas from city builder games that we should incorporate into Stonehearth. We want to make the best game that we can, and make something that players who engage with Stonehearth will be delighted by and remember for a long time. We are not trying to make a game for everyone, and I believe attempting to do that is foolish. It’s better in my view to make a wonderful game specifically made for your players, and if you do a good job your players then will help you bring others into your game. However, if you set out to try to make a game for everyone, you end up making a game for no one.
well…i got over a 1000 hours in this game and i would pick a refund gladly if i could… that’s how much i feel this game has fallen apart…So i agree with @SirAstrix you guys need to tell us what you actually have in goal for this game?
Since its not a dwarf fortress clone anymore…lately it feels a LOT more like a sims wannabe game…even changed my review to not recommended anymore…thats how much it has fallen from grace to me…
And i have a hard time seeing this is even the same game as the kickstarter…leaving me bit with the feeling of being ripped off…
Even screenshots on the kickstarter, vastly upscales the game for what it is. And what it can do…And that’s okey… but you need to admit defeat then and say our tech can’t do that…so we need to take the game in a different direction.
or you need to go back to the roots and make a dwarf fortress clone is how i see it…im tempted to think thats what most of us payed for…
People have tried to recreate the concept art before. There’s a few items missing, and the towns are always much emptier than they should be for the amount of buildings they have, but it’s not impossible.
I think it’s important to remember that Stonehearth is more casual than Dwarf Fortress and more light-hearted than Rimworld, and so it’s necessarily going to have changes from that formula. That doesn’t excuse every change, though.
Do I approve of where this game is going? I don’t know; I’ve mostly approved of changes so far but I honestly have no clue where this game is headed. And, for all their updates on how they’re thinking about it, I feel like the team doesn’t either. That’s what worries me more.
I get the impression that what they want the game to be is being shaped by what the dev team can achieve from a technical perspective. Considering how much time they spent over the last few months working on optimization, that’s probably a difficult obstacle they’ve run into. Of what they originally wanted the game to be, they now have to step back and say, how much of this can we actually achieve. What on the list of goals is feasible and what will end up being far too hardware intensive for what the average player has at their disposal?
Someone earlier mentioned, why can’t we have a city with 2000 hearthlings. The simple answer may end up being hardware limitations. We’ll see how that turns out.
Personally i dont feel i can even compare stoneheart to dwarf fortress anymore. Again pointing a bit back to what you said as well…no clue where this game is going.
And really dwarf fortress is a incredible relaxing gaming experience its the learning curve that will break your backbone and murder your family and eat your pets.
And i have a bit confusion about the causal marker, im tempted to say it will easy take 2 hours building something fairly small and simple including build time. And im not sure that can be considered casual as such.
And again that makes me wonder a bit what is the aim for the game ? like what am i gonna do while my heartlings mine and build their hearts away if i dont have some complexity?
Then i ask myself where does the game shine? And to me its the build system, overall the template system is cool as hell and that alone is almost worth a game…just not sure if its this game yet
I’m not 100% on board for all the changes they are making, but we do have one thing that’s going for us.
The team is diligently working on the game. They haven’t abandoned it, and have actually added more members to the team. The spirit may feel different (i agree), but I haven’t played an update yet that has made the game feel less like Stonehearth.
When I load up the game after a major update and suddenly say “This doesn’t feel like Stonehearth.” Then you can count on me voicing my concern.
Until then, I see the a team that is trying to right a tilted boat that seemed to have been falling apart at the edges (See: Engineer, building). They’re taking out the problem areas of the ship and rebuilding them to fit in with the rest of the design.
The other nice thing is we know the team is watching these threads (Hey guys and gals!) and reacting in some fashion to the things we praise and the things we worry about. It’s a pretty cool community that we and they have built.
So I’m strongly on the side of optimism with constructive criticism and a healthy dosage of cheering on the devs will eventually lead to a beautifully finished Stonehearth akin (or as close as they can get) to what we dreamed of in the Kickstarter.
(This isn’t directed really at you @coasterspaul, more towards the general negativity that has been permeating throughout the discourse)
I’m sorry you feel that way, but I’m glad you are still participating in the community. One thing that’s worth noting, if “make a dwarf fortress clone” is the main goal you’d like to see for the game, is that all of the features we’ve added in the last year have analogues in Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. Concepts of happiness, personal preferences, room quality, and individual personalization are a core part of both experiences. Those features may not be the things you immediately think of when you consider those games, but they are an important part of what makes those experiences tick.
To be clear, we don’t want to make the sims, or a sims like. We want to make a community builder in the vein of Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress. I’d encourage you not to mistake our desire to have systems that allow hearthlings to react differently to the same event for a desire to not accomplish that goal.
I agree with @solus here. I mean, I can understand if people think the spirit is off, because of alot of complexity in one area versus just a little in another. That may make it feel a different game, but the game is also alpha, so I don’t think it is weird if the game is build up assymmetrically. All the complexities of trading, building and combat are just still to come. And I believe they will be there eventually, because the development is still going on after ?how many years already? and they are still at it, which you can’t say about other early-access games, or so I’ve heard.
I love the idea of having different cities tied together. So switching between towns/tiles would be like loading another saved town, except they’re tied together. Also the idea of quest areas as separate map areas ya load into is a great way to get dungeons!!!
This right here is the bit I think is causing the most confusion. I’ve always understood the “storybook” aspect that Stephanie talks about to mean that we should care about the characters (hearthlings). You care about the characters in any good story…or it’s not good. Folks keep mistaking this for some sorta impersonal civ city/empire building game. This is part of the reason why every mention of PvP in multiplayer is a sore point, hearthlings fighting one another goes against the very nature of the game. The devs have a vision and theme, and I don’t expect them to go against those things. Now I wasn’t here from the very beginning, so I can only speak for the time I’ve been here, but I can honestly say everything they’ve done from that point until now has been true to the theme that I got from watching streams. (I do have to say that @sdee has been the single largest influence on what I gathered to be the purpose of the game. If you listen to the endearing way she talks about hearthlings, the way they interact, and the game concept, you’d understand that the game is about them. You’re there to guide them on their journey and make their “lives” better.)
I actually brought this up in another post, which can be read here, as to what’s still promised and what’s not. Yes, there are some hardware limitations that prevent say 2000 ACTIVE Hearthlings in a single city. At the same time, though, there’s been multiple debates on how that can be achieved, as well as there are things they are more than able to do…but have chosen not to for various reasons.
Reminds me of Eve Online and X3.
How can you say that it would even be close when half of the Kickstarter has basically been thrown out for various reasons? I ask that legitimately in the hopes that I missed something rather than blind optimism.
Well, that was one of the original selling points…
Again…another selling point / promise.
If that’s the case, then why can’t they share it? Why are people like myself, @Psyduck, and @coasterspaul not seeing it? I don’t know when you came in or started following, but many of us that have been around since the Kickstarter days, or right there in after, are basically lost.
Well shut yer mouth and say it ain’t so! It certainly is on there… This game never struck me as the empire type of game, when hearthlings start to become numbers and not individuals you can throw half the systems out the window. The game becomes a lot less personal and that’s just sad.
Yup, it’s on the Kickstarter and I think that whoever put it there made a HUGE mistake. So they’ll basically have to go against the concept of the storybook like hearthlings maintaining their innocent childlike behavior by ruthlessly slaughtering other hearthlings and stealing their goods…got it.
So here’s my take away from reading the Kickstarter page. The game has evolved from just a city building sim to be a more complex personal experience. You don’t get the same sprawling empire nonsense you can get from a dozen phone app games that are soulless reskinned clones of each other. You’re actually supposed to go on a journey with motley crew of hearthlings and actually care. I am curious when that shift happened.
When the dev team started out with just a few folks did they express a concern for individual hearthlings or were they just going through the motions to get a game going? Is that part of the problem with the community right now? The Kickstarter folks are in a twist because they feel they’ve been victims of ye ol’ bait and switch? I know part of the problem is the featureless nature of the patches this year. Almost everything has been systems that don’t really affect gameplay so it seems like no progress has been made even though they’ve stated multiple times that these systems will help tie future features together better and make the game a solid experience. Folks just don’t have the patience for that.
If the concept of the game has evolved to the point where it no longer meshes with the original Kickstarter campaign, a dev really should bite the bullet and let the community know. If for no other reason that the folks that are questioning the direction can finally get an answer, realize they may have made a mistake (Kickstarters are a gamble not a guarantee, if you don’t understand that you shouldn’t be backing them), and move on. That would allow folks to adjust the way they think of the game, or stop wasting their time on the forums. I understand being confused about where a game is headed and desperately holding onto hope.
No seriously, Tom had mentioned in a couple streams they wanted to make the Hearthlings more alive in the future. It’s been so long now that if he did mention a specific on how, I don’t remember it, but I do remember it being talked about, because he didn’t like how drone like they were.
The current team’s take on it (in my opinion) hasn’t done much for it. We’ve got traits, which create a sudo personality, but that’s about it. There’s promise that there will be more in the future…
It’s kinda becoming the theme.
I can’t speak for everyone, but for myself, this isn’t entirely true. From back in the day, it has come a long way in performance and respectfully needed it. At the same time, the amount of time being focused on a single system lately makes it seem as though they’re only running part of the team at a time. As I’ve asked a couple times in a couple threads, why is it that we spent 5 weeks on conversations and still left that unfinished, finally get to the building UX, and don’t have much to show for it. Even a month after that, so two months in…it hasn’t progressed much, and as shown tonight, there’s confusion and miscommunication within the team.
If it legitimately was a waiting issue, I don’t think there’d be so many people that are concerned with how slow progress has gotten.
So many of us have been barking up this tree for months, and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere. And even so, the direction keeps changing fluidly. An example of this, is at the beginning of the year, having Stonehearth reflect RTS elements wasn’t an issue and was looked foward to. Now, it’s all but been scrapped from what’s said on the forum.
If this had been Kickstarter only, I’d totally agree here. But the fact that Riot bought them 2 years ago with the promise of not changing the game…and they did, I can’t say I agree with this Kickstarter idea anymore as it’s not a Kickstarter project anymore.
A thing i keep thinking about when the issue with the kickstarter campaign backers bark, is how was that vision of SH? I dont mean the actual text or presentation, but how each indiviual backer, visualized what Stonehearth would become?
I did not join in on the kickstarter, but contribued at a later date through steam. Thats another thing i wonder about… Why do it seem that kickstarter backers have some kind of special pedistal that gives them some kind of extra weight to judge the developers work?
No matter what, the team that made the kickstarter promises, are not the team that makes the game today and so it seems strange that the vision of the new members would be precise the same as that first idea? If anyone holds a grudge on this subject, then it might be better to vent and move on, start a game project themselves or accept that change happens in every part of reality and adaptation is the best way to stay ahead of the game…the game
But lets hear what the individual visions where? Maybe a bit more detailed than “a dwarf fortress clone”?
I’ll have to go back and check out some of the older streams, I’m just not big on the coding stuff as it’s all greek to me lol. I attempted to watch a few and just couldn’t manage to get involved. It wasn’t until I saw some Allie and Stephanie streams that I really felt like this is a game I could absolutely love.
Unfortunately I can see how it’s a looming fear given how many Kickstarters (not just gaming ones!) end with no result.
Ooops I forgot to put “lately” in there. I meant the changes they’ve been making lately, not all of them from the beginning. It just seems like pretty much all of the updates this year have been on behind the scenes stuff that don’t really affect gameplay. My bad lol.
