Nordlingmod Biome, Terraces, and Ladders

Modding Current Mods
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Again, I’ve been enjoying the Nordlingmod especially its biome, as it makes for a visually interesting map - I enjoy going with the Banner of Strength and building super-tall cliffside apartments for my Nordlings. However, I am noticing that the verticality of the biome maps make it difficult for the Goblin camps to be a legitimate threat when they spawn onto a terrace that they don’t share with my settlement. Goblins don’t have an ability to craft ladders, even just to exit their starting terrace.

I don’t know if this is a problem that is already being worked on, but if the solution ends up with Goblin (villagers/peons?) having the ability to construct ladders on demand, would that be functionality that could lead to siege ladders? I’d be interested in seeing that (in general - I’m sure I’d be filled with dread in having to come up with a solution beyond “build on a terrace, behind a tunnel door, watch raiding parties go poof”). If nothing else, I don’t want to consistently just laugh at the big-hatted Goblin chief’s demands, but actually have to consider them strategically.

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base game problem unfortunatelly, its been discussed many a time on the ACE discord aswell, at the moment no one (i know of) is working on it since its just bloody time consuming to do. not to mention even IF you put it in…the player could still game it quite easilly, depending on how its coded. so atm i dont think its seen as a priority. i have concidered at some point making ALL units door breaking, but that glitched out on me so its not currently being worked on, ill probably re try it once i get a bit better at code and stuff again :stuck_out_tongue:

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Not having any knowledge or experience with the engine or modding in general, but have you (TR/ACE/yourself) considered making it a job ability? Was bouncing ideas off of my brother, who also plays the game, and we were considering whether you could, for example, have the goblin thieves be “Burglars” that have the ability to create temporary “Grapple” ladders. Run up to a wall, twirl the hook several times (longer for a higher wall, but probably no more than 15 blocks at a time), climb, the hook/rope disappears, and the Burglar continues on to the target. May require that the Burglar level up at their campsite to unlock the ability - lower-level Burglars are reduced to the usual smash-n-grab. Giving the goblins jobs that they can level up in given time, would force players into a strategic choice of whether to mitigate the risk with a preemptive strike or hole up to take them out when they get to the wall.

Another option may be for a Sapper job, which could be like a combat builder (unfazed by damage* until low on HP, then run as usual), carrying forward objects that are starting points for battering rams and siege towers. Battering rams can be interacted with by line troops to break doors, while siege towers start at 5 blocks tall and allow line troops to climb over them to clear a wall. A Sapper would carry a number of resources to build up either the ram (more grips for troops or a roof for cover) or the tower (add levels to reach higher or a longer bridge to cross gaps from the tower to the target platform).

  • Unless running from the damage would be more disruptive to the defense - forcing troops into chasing after Sappers instead of staying at their positions.

I’m sure there could be some ways to cheese these counters to built defenses, but they would require some effort and imagination from the players, not just the simple steps I’m taking now. Again, I have no idea what has already been tried or how difficult it would be to implement - just some ideas. Thanks to everyone who brings us this game in the modded form we play it!

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What would you say about an orc party arriving in the middle of your town by a Zeppelin?
Not that I’m working on anything like, that, no, absolutely not…

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The biggest problem is: define a “wall.” And that still doesn’t address situations where they’re at a different level and need a ladder up or down. It’s easy to check if there exists a path between two points/entities; it’s a lot harder to figure out how to make a path between them in a sensible way.

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How about some flying goblins, that can infiltrate the settlement by air? :wink:
Would it even be possible to make a enemy camp aka zeppelin that is offset in the air and just connected through a pillar and a ladder to the ground?

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The simplest (and better) solution, imo, would be to add a “door breaking unit” to all (or most) invasions.

Having all units break doors is not so simple, has its own issues (ie: door priority is above enemies) and easily exploitable (make lots of doors near turrets, enemies distracted with doors forever and getting hit meanwhile)

All the other cooler and crazier ideas are, well, cooler and crazier… but very complex/difficult to implement. Ladder building goblins, catapults, flying enemies, etc… Lots of work for these.

So if all attack parties “received” a door breaking unit to invade with them, that would at least solve the “legit walls” - the ones that have doors/gates and can be breached.

Of course there would still be “non-legit” walls like terrain walls with quickly removed ladders and such… Or simply completely closed walls with no doors or access to the outside world.

Now, I personally consider these a non-issue. For a very simple reason: Stonehearth is not a competitive multiplayer game (or competitive at all); it’s not a game where “cheating” of any sort affects others or really interferes in anything other than the player’s own experience. That said, it doesn’t really matter how they play - if they wall in on hard or just play peaceful, if they cheat items in with Debug Tools or not, etc… it’s all about your own conscience and what you want from the game. A player that doesn’t like the walling-in strategy should simply not use it, even if their town is about to fall… And a player that doesn’t care about using it can use it - and both are happy.

So I personally don’t think we should “fix” an “issue” that only exists if the player creates it - it’s not an issue, it’s a choice :merry:

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That’s probably the only sane approach because even parachuting goblins are subject to the wall off strategy: just add a solid ceiling… Given that a good implementation would involve some anti-aircraft weapons and it would still not remove the walling off ability completely I think I’ll drop it but it was fun to test.

What I think could work is the reverse: rewarding the player for making their town accessible. Consider a quest like that: a point is marked far away on the map. You get some deadline telling you a trader or whatever NPC will arrive at that spot and if they reach your town you get a reward. The quest would either spawn some enemies on their way or have a short timer so if an NPC does not reach their destination on time the quest fails. Player’s job would be to make a path and maybe escort the NPC.
As for how you got to know they will arrive without them arriving: a cute mailbox/bird feeder hybrid entity for messenger birds should do the trick.

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The idea is cool, but the spawning mechanics would definitely need to be fixed before that since the game loves spawning things in places they definitely can’t reach you (or even stuck in walls) :jubilant:

An alternative to something less common or exceptional would be to tie it to a more common system, like the merchants
That way you also “free” the game/performance from the hurdle of actually having to spawn someone - it could just try to path inside the town and if it doesn’t succeed the player could get a bulletin like “Traders are not able to reach your town” or whatever

As for the spawning, a random thought that comes to me is something that was done in some older games - a fixed spawn point signaled by certain map elements. For example, let’s say that when the map is generated, each side of the map randomly receives a “road sign post” near the edge. This represents like… The town connections to the nearest roads, etc…

That could then be used by all “friendly” spawns like new villagers, merchants, quest npcs, etc… Thus ensuring that the player has entrances to the town that will always be functional because they can predict where friendlies will come from, you could even build roads and such to the signs. And being more reliable than the random spawns, it can also be used more for quests and events like escorts, leaving town, etc…

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That’s precisely what I had planned for Adventure Mode. The problem is the whole mod is unlikely to even happen. I also thought about making one of such quests a Tier 1 prerequisite so the player is forced to open up to progress through the campaign (maybe also to get new lings so they don’t appear out of nowhere).

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I thought of that spawn method, too, and was going to suggest it as an alternative to Pawel’s random spawning, and then I realized the flaw in it: it still suffers from the same wall-in issue, because you can just (with a little extra effort) wall in straight pathways/tunnels to those edge points. Random spawning with limited time to prepare for accessibility to that point is the only way to ensure the player actually remains open to the world (assuming they want to interact with the game mechanic) instead of just walling off.

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True, but again looking back into those games, they did have some solutions. One of them (Stronghold I think?) also had a stripe on the edge of the map where you couldn’t build or dig at all (like, let’s suppose, 10 tiles from the edge of the map), which is the same stripe where the sign would be, thus always ensuring that you can’t surround or funnel it in any way.

Now, I honestly don’t want to do that in SH. For the simple reason that it would restrict some freedom, like these “Anthill” builds where people dig underground at the edge of the map and you can see it from the sides, etc… these are pretty cool.

We could, of course, try something like just forbidding touching the immediate area around the sign, etc… but again this only means they’ll need to do a larger wall around it.

So to be honest I feel like this returns to what I said here:

Now, I personally consider these a non-issue. For a very simple reason: Stonehearth is not a competitive multiplayer game (or competitive at all); it’s not a game where “cheating” of any sort affects others or really interferes in anything other than the player’s own experience. That said, it doesn’t really matter how they play - if they wall in on hard or just play peaceful, if they cheat items in with Debug Tools or not, etc… it’s all about your own conscience and what you want from the game. A player that doesn’t like the walling-in strategy should simply not use it, even if their town is about to fall… And a player that doesn’t care about using it can use it - and both are happy.

So I personally don’t think we should “fix” an “issue” that only exists if the player creates it - it’s not an issue, it’s a choice :merry:

If someone is going through the trouble of SURROUNDING ALL THE SIGNS with walls and all that… Then maybe they should just play peaceful. Or maybe that’s ok, it doesn’t really matter. Thing is, that model would allow for creative builds (real roads, etc…) and would allow for “legit” walled in bases (bases that have walls but also gates/doors) as long as we also add the invaders with door breaking abilities to all or most attack parties.

This works, but I’d say that it’s less cool/fun - and in this case we should (if we hypothetically do this) think of what would be cooler first rather than trying to prevent something that can still be done/will be done anyway (walling in) by some that for some reason like/enjoy it?

It’s just a thought, really. My moot point is: at which point walling in is a player choice, at which point cheating is right or wrong? All things considered, in the end of the day, any method is intrinsically failed because they can, as a last measure, simply teleport the entity inside their walls. How different is this from walling in and how should/should we even account for that when designing something for a sandbox game? :thinking:

Edit:
Or in simpler terms:

“because you can just (with a little extra effort) wall in straight pathways/tunnels to those edge points.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is that any person that would be willing to do this ^ would also be willing to cheat/teleport/etc. their way around the supposedly “better” way. So the better way, in this case, should probably be the cooler/the one that plays nicer and can be explored creatively.

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Strong disagree on this. If I’m playing a game where cheating is an option, I’m still not going to use it if at all possible, but I absolutely will min/max to exploit non-buggy/cheating game mechanics (i.e., if it’s some buggy mechanic where exploiting is essentially cheating, I won’t do that, but if it’s an intended mechanic then it would be intentionally putting myself at a disadvantage to not use it).

At least for me, if I’m trying to avoid all combat it’s because I’m focusing on a different part of the game for now. Later on, I’ll still want to do combat, and playing on peaceful would be the wrong option for me, as would cheating.

In a voxel manipulation game like SH, having set areas is really hard/annoying to actually protect in a way that you can’t build/dig to avoid or funnel units through them; even if the entire edges are protected, it still just means a little more work to dig that really long moat, and then you still have a single funneled entrance that’s only susceptible to monsters that spawn on the edge of the map. Whereas having random locations that they can spawn means you actually have a meaningful choice to make as a player: do I try to wall off, protecting myself from all enemies, min/maxing primarily on defense, or do I put more resources into combat so that I can take advantage of opportunities from random spawns? I think encouraging the player to do the latter and making it an actual choice is better than just making it harder for them to still be able to do both simultaneously.

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Fair point, though technically nothing classifies “Debug Tools” as cheating, it literally comes included with the game (you can use console “teleport” without it as well); but even without it, you can quickly place or remove stairs, or have a “wall door” that you destroy when someone arrives and you replace it as soon as the NPC passes by, so there’s lots of options that are almost as efficient as just plain “cheating” (if we consider the use of console commands/debug tools cheating) so, in a way no method is perfect, that’s what I meant, more like it. It all depends on how far you want to min/max it

Edit:

To be honest, I just realized that these two ideas (signs for certain quests/arrivals/etc or random spawns) are absolutely not antagonic. Like, you can literally have both, depending on the type of quest or npc arriving, etc.
So there’s that as well :joy:

One thing I think is a must though is to have “door-breaking” units on all (or most) attack parties.

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I would even suggest a pair of melee + ranged door breakers in case the player went too creative with moats etc. It would also allow modding a proper drawbridge which cracks open when brought down to 0 HP. Not to mention the fact a siege machine attacking portcullis from far away with rest of the raid guarding it without engaging in pointless fight would be incredibly immersive.

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so you sally forth to engage the weapon? sounds cool

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I would be in favor of two big changes (assuming they’re not in there already):

  1. Positive quest targets (e.g., merchants, stranded travellers) that spawn in at random locations that need to be able to reach the player’s banner and do so without taking significant enemy damage. This would require that players make areas of the map accessible and that they either patrol the main paths regularly and/or send escorts to the quest targets.

  2. Enemies that can at least jump down from an elevated spawn point. Defeating a player’s efforts to engineer the map to their advantage is probably a losing effort, but keeping the enemy camps viable (i.e., still able to send raiding parties) when they’re in a less advantageous spawn position is critical IMO.

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That’s a problem I’ve bumped into a few times too. It’s sometimes even difficult to tell of a goblin camp has a viable route to the players settlement. Sometimes I just didn’t notice an enemy spawn. I actually ended up building ladders to make the terrain traversable. Could it be done with altered terrain generation? Say, generating land slides or natural stairs somehow?

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It’s something I’m trying to do for my biome but I don’t think I’ll manage to do that. The first problem are diagonal chunks on the same level and I managed to get rid of them but connecting levels themselves is beyond my scope for now. It’s already a noticeable improvement though because if you build 4-6 ladders to reach stuff you need you have like half of the map connected because chunks on the same level are connected (I called the script ‘ziggurat’ not without a reason).

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