Let's Talk about Revision 33!

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Nicholas, Nov 20, 2014.

  1. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Hey, I didn't make an official "Let's Talk about Revision 33!" thread. So this is it! What do you think? How do you feel? Anything you love or hate?
     
  2. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    Observations (win7)...

    • Flatten terrain seems to work better, but overseers still don't take part in it
    • Return to civilisation seems to make colonists return to the embark site; if you build your settlement elsewhere, this makes the job "wander away from civilisation"
    • Lag on work crews panel when unpaused seems to have got much worse (this is the first time I recall having to task kill CE for an everything-except-music hang)
    • Standing order jobs occasionally disappear when the quota is met with the workshop panel open. They reappear if it is closed and reopened
    • Standing order jobs - and the commodities screen counts in general - seem to include items already placed into modules under construction for the quota. (If true, this means if you have no planks, set a standing order for one plank, then add a brewing vat, it will receive one plank and no more, meaning the module never gets built.)
    • Work party job dispatching, or possibly utility values, may need another look - initial feel is the dreaded "lazy" might be back, with "wander" being preferred over actual work.
    Task kill meant I didn't get far enough in to try vicarage features. Perhaps tomorrow...
     
  3. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    I can address a couple of these:
    • Return to civilization / embark site : Issue here is a bug that means buildings don't spread "civilization" when constructed (as intended) so it's always just a small area around the start.
    • Work party laziness : If this is to do with colonists gossiping and interrupting people doing real work, there are code changes being rolled in to greatly reduce this but it did not in fact get pushed for the actual update build so, uh, that'll all go into the next experimental. It should really help with productivity.
     
  4. Alephred

    Alephred Royal Archivist for Queen And Empire

    Random things:
    • I like the raider mechanic, but they're significantly more lethal than the same number of Fishmen
    • I also like tracking raiders back to their base camp to loot their tents
    • speaking of raiders, they will apparently loot things Fishman raiders lost in town, earlier, like coral clubs
    • I was once beset by both Fishmen and Raiders - I'm a little disappointed they aren't hostile to each other ;)
    • Standing Orders appear to be working properly
    • I didn't get any Vicars after building Chapels (I assume that was changed between 32 and 33)
    • colonists don't bury dead raiders - do raider corpses upset colonists?
    • I kind of preferred the older, more transparent buildings (the current walls are slightly more opaque), but that's a personal preference
    • AI tweaks seem to be working better - despite all the raiding I suffered, there were no chases or pursuits to the edge of the world
    • between raiders and fishmen now, the Jungle is very, very tough
    • I haven't been able to successfully save longer game sessions (very short ones seem to be fine)
     
  5. Jacq

    Jacq Member

    Is the ability of Overseers to change the name of their workshops new? I thought it was pretty neat but was a little unnerved by the "spiritual torment" face accompanying the info.
     
  6. Samut

    Samut Member

    I love it. Each monthly update has moved CE closer and closer to feeling like a fully working game, and this one is no exception. In particular:

    • Bandits! In a way this is even bigger than Fishpeople, since you have the skeletal workings of an actual society not under player control (as opposed to the Fishpeople who are still just individuals acting alongside but not really with each other). There's so much that can be done with this.
    • Jobs can call session variables. We can adjust utility based on whether it's nighttime. Yes!
    • The stuff with Chapels and Vicars is obviously at an early stage but helps the game by introducing some 'normal' behavior. Most of the cool stuff added previously has been about crazy horrible people or things doing crazy, horrible stuff. Boring vicars giving boring sermons is useful in that it fleshes out what a normally-functioning Imperial society should look like, which heightens the effects of all the crazy stuff when that society is disrupted.
     
  7. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    This was a work crew assigned to a kitchen with pending tasks. The overseer was asleep (legit) but her two plebs just stood around the starting supplies, alternating between idle and wander; no gossip. I'll have to dig through my replay pile...
     
  8. Viion

    Viion Member

    I was hoping for a final fix for the save issues I'm experiencing. I've yet to actually play a multi session game since the game isn't able to detect the save files for some reason. I've been in dialogue with the devs and I'm confident they will find a fix for it, but I'll have to admit not being able to play a multisession game is taxing my enthusiasm.

    But I agree that for each iteration the game becomes more and more fleshed out and fun. Love the new stuff added and it's been quite a while since I've actually experienced a CTD.

    Unfortunately I was plagued in the last game session with fleeing into the wilderness and to the map border. Where upon they were beset by fishpeople. The squad I sent as backup ended up being unresponsive and rapidly changing between drop/pickup orders. It might be because at that time the NCO decided it was a nice time to start sacrificing people. I created a new squad, transferred the soldiers to that one, but they were still unresponsive to the point of letting the murderers attack them without fighting back or fleeing. It could seem they were for some reason locked in combat with a fishperson that fled, but they were unable to chase him and caught in some kind of logic loop.

    The only other issue I had was self inflicted. I'm considering making gluttony a firing offence (Literally fire AT them!) since I was plagued by colonists moving raw foods to depot, then eating it instead of handing it over to my waiting kitchen team for refinement. Even with the foraging parties at work I wasn't able to keep my head above water and was considering having a few "accidents" to lessen the food shortage. And then I had another fishperson invasion (they seem very much smaller now hehehe) and a bandit raid fire as a 1-2 punch and the colony was heading for Bad Times. All in all very, very interesting and fun session and if it weren't for the "flee to border" and "stuck doing nothing" and "Can't load saved games" it would have been an epic game to see if I would have been able to crawl myself out of the ditch I'd been tossed in :-D
     
  9. eclecticonic

    eclecticonic Member

    Honestly, I haven't really had much of a chance to try any of the Rev 33 content. The scripting errors in the workshops make the game more or less unplayable for me... right away, even simple jobs or job type additions/switches seem to trigger them. I would really prefer to see a bugfixing update than more content added to the game at this point. I've never been able to progress through the tech tree because of this ONE issue. It drives me absolutely nuts.

    The bandits do seem a little OP, however... you have a 1 in 3 chance of running them off, depending entirely on where your soldiers are at when they arrive. Soldiers run and hide as soon as they get near, and then it's a rout. The added gameplay variety is nice, though. I'm sure they'll be fun with some polish.
     
  10. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    ... have you had a chance to try the new experimental version, 33A? I think it should address everything you brought up here.
     
  11. Ecte

    Ecte Member

    I'm on a Mac, running 33A, and my biggest issue is that I'm forever running into workers picking items up, walking a step, and putting them down again incessantly. It's eerie, and means everyone is so preoccupied it causes those affiicted to starve themselves. Also the Explore beacon can never be seen or removed, meaning workers explore and re-explore the same spot. Overall, while theres a way to go, it seems an improvement on 32D.
     
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  12. Rahbek23

    Rahbek23 Member

    My impressions for 33A.


    Seems pretty stable, however it also seems considerably easier than before. I'd frequently have a little trouble with cultists when being busy on the wiki and alt-tabbing all the time. In my current game I left the computer to talk to my roommate, brought cocoa drink from the kitchen and tabbed out to write on the forums, including this, and have yet to experience any sort of problem of any sort.

    I'm of course well aware that the difficulty level of the game is nowhere near it's final adjustement, just wanted to chime in my two cents..
     
  13. Alephred

    Alephred Royal Archivist for Queen And Empire

    My impressions of [r33a]:

    • Dev Tool button, what fun!
    • land ineligible for construction is now a lighter orange (and not red)
    • new workshop, crop and commodity, flax and cloth: great - ideally, cloth will eventually have more than one use, because one flax harvest provides more cloth than I ever need
    • beds and cots require cloth: makes sense, good use of cloth, and spamming beds everywhere because a more thoughtful affair (i.e. food production vs. cloth)
    • I'm not sure what the spinning jenny produces, since the textile workbench seems to be the one necessary for cloth - is it like the carpentry workbench versus the power saw (i.e. faster, or accommodates more workers)?
    • decorations seem to be a bit buggy: the Hat Shop sign seems to be rotated 90 degrees, and rugs can be built, but are never visible
    • save / load stability seems to have gotten worse over the last couple of patches - loading in particular
    I also appreciate the tweak in raider spawning - previously, bandit thefts or combat could cripple an early colony.

    I'm also a bit confused by the food changes - do colonists eat once a day, like clockwork (at which time, the quality of the food they eat makes them happy / unhappy)? Does food value come into it at all (i.e. is there any reason to bake pie instead of stew)?
     
  14. Euel Ball

    Euel Ball Member

    Forgive me for being a total nube-ie, but how in Cog are you able to update your Mac version to 33A? Of course, I'm new to Steam... :(
     
  15. dbaumgart

    dbaumgart Art Director Staff Member

    The Spinning Mule needs to be animated & hooked up to everything properly: OC-2437 and OA-1729
    Hat Shop sign will be re-aligned (& given some textures applicable to workshops that exist in-game): OA-1727 and OA-1728

    Colonists eat once per day before they start getting desperate. The food number value will not be used, but we will be hooking up some sort of negative effect from eg. eating only raw cabbage. OC-2438. Expect that as "cost" of a food goes up, it will be better.
     
  16. Ecte

    Ecte Member

    I am getting steam to use the experimental branch (accessed by right-clicking the name of the game entry for Clockwork Empires, choosing properties, then choosing to opt into the experimental beta by going to Betas and choosing experimental from the drop-down list.)

    [​IMG]
     
    Euel Ball likes this.
  17. Euel Ball

    Euel Ball Member

    Thanks!
     
  18. Samut

    Samut Member

    The old food system needed some fleshing out but this seems like a step backward. Under the old system a food value of X meant it would cancel out X seconds of hunger. That made it pretty easy to get a feel for the usefulness of the various types of food.

    Was the issue too frequent eating? I feel bad now that I didn't push it out, but I had a hack where simpler foods would be more likely to be consumed on the go. By contrast, cooked meals were the ones taken back to a table. And the colonists would gravitate to the higher valued foods within each group (e.g. eating cabbage before wheat). Now that we have a longer day (yay), colonists grabbing a snack in the field midday wouldn't eat up too much time.
     
  19. TheDrgnRbrn

    TheDrgnRbrn Member

    Ive only had a few minutes to toy with the latest revision, but I am liking it so far. The food change puts me of two minds though.

    1. I like the change. It frees up work time for 'teching up' my colony by building refineries and such, and I dont feel so pressured to keep throwing more people into farming to try and build up a surplus for the inevitable collapse of civilization as we know it. I dont feel like everyone is stuck in a loop, too busy stuffing their faces with raw cabbage because my pair of kitchens cant turn it into swill fast enough.

    2. I dislike the change because of the way it simplifies things. I like complexity in my games, and I liked working on supply chains to make pies and such. I feel the change lessens that.

    Overall, I think its a positive change, and I think that as the economy gets fleshed out I believe complexity will be re-introduced into the food system, so I am not worried about it.

    Havent even messed with the other new stuff, Fail on my part.
     
  20. Rahbek23

    Rahbek23 Member

    The current food iteration of the food system is definitely not that great, in 33A, which is still WIP I know (I don't even build a kitchen, it's not really needed in any way or form). I just turn my maize/wheat to chicha/beer and any unhappiness is out the door no problemo, however as more penalties for unprocessed food or boring diet is introduced I think it could be ok, however I don't think it's much of an upgrade from the other system, except for having less numbers that might seem a bit arbitrary.

    I'm obviously no game designer and I trust your judgement, but at a glance I'm not sure about this seemingly less flexible (IMO) system is that great, but maybe once it's more fleshed out it will stand better on it's own merits. I would really like to hear a 1-2 paragraph explanation about the pros and cons of the two systems, and why you felt the change was needed, because I'm sure you have your good reasons. (devblog wednesday hype?)

    Also devs, you're breaking my heart. My food value article on the wiki is now useless :(