Specific alerts sounds for zones, towns, armies

Suggestions
1

Hi all

First of all I am new in the forum but not new in this community. I just accidently stumbled across Stonehearth on 31. Dec 13, which was quite funny to right start with the alpha. I am from Switzerland, so I dearly expect to see cows and cheese very soon in the game. :slight_smile:

I begun to really love this game and also this community, and I think I can finally have something to contribute.
Maybe you can help me making that more popular, as I am not used to the forum yet.

So the idea is generally very simple, but I have not seen it in the big RTS games yet, but I hope Stonehearth could give it a try.

General Sound Alerts in other RTS Games:

When playing Warcraft 3, or Age3 you often find yourself in the state where your main army is somewhere fighting. A sound message like “you are under attacked” a horn or ring or whatever appears, followed by a little visible note on the minimap.
If you got 1 army thats ok. But what about different armies? You only got 1 kind of sound message. Hard to define then.
What even if your town is attacked? Still the same sound.
Let us think about the very likely scenario where you got your troops on the march, big fights are ongoing, sound alerts everywhere… AND your settles/town is being attacked ( by wolfes like in Age of Empires :slight_smile: or by another sneaky army) The game only delivers one alert sound. So often you will not notice that some enemys have begun destroying your town because you attached the alert sound to your own fighting army.
Big sh*** problem.

Proposed sound alerts for Stoneheart

I think about two scenarios.

  1. Just add a sound that clearly defines that your TOWN is under attacked, and one sound that your “army is under attack.”
  2. Make it a bit complex.
  • Let the player attache an alert sound to a specific army. Lets say you have 3-4 sticky bunch of soldiers, then let them give 3-4 alert sounds. Like “main army” “Scout troop” “Backup army”
  • For the "town alert"
    Let the player create “Alert ZONES”. Because the player got different towns, or 1 town and a very important but detachet Mining area.
    Basically the players defines an area that he defines as his homeland or detached area, and this will give an “Town Alert” as output.

Regards and thanks for feedback.

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I love the troop designations! How might the town zones work though? On the same Plane as the stockpile zones? more visible? Less visible? Invisible?

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first of all, welcome aboard @OnkelJorsch! :smile:

second, your timing is impeccable, as &Doug and @Raj provided an excellent blog update on the music in SH just yesterday…

http://stonehearth.net/2014/04/10/stonehearth-music-update/

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Hi @OnkelJorsch, and welcome!

Thanks so much for the post, and it’s nice to know there are gamers out there that care about audio in games as much as I do :smile:

Giving players the option of assigning different audio cues to different things is fantastic. I agree that sometimes in other games, hearing that one audio cue of “you’re under attack” doesn’t really help me too much, outside of the obvious. Your idea might be a very nice solution.

I’m going to bookmark this idea and most definitely revisit it when we get to a state in the game where micromanagement becomes more complex. Thank you!

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