Weird things that should be in CE

LOL

 

http://www.silentuk.com/?cat=4

Not really a weird thing, but a lot of these photos demonstrate things probably very appropriate for a steampunk theme, if perhaps not terribly relevant to colonies.

 

I'd like to implement Swift's "A modest proposal" but with poets and breed them as livestock. I think they will provide the townsfolk with sweet meats and supple leather. I'm sure such goods will make a fantastic export. Perhaps such an act will help me summon the elder gods and end the world.

I'd also like to rebel against the Clockwork Kingdom and fight a revolutionary war for independence. Some of the benefits and downsides of being a loyal colony should be in place. As a loyal colony, the player would have access to military protection however a very large % of all income generation would go to the Kingdom. Additionally, the player would be severely limited in what goods and services he/she could produce and who he/she can sell to as surely the Queen's land is not a land of economic liberty and is most likely run by guilds who prefer not to compete against unlicensed competition. This would provide a scenario where the player is unable to capitalize on many of the resources in the area unless he/she is willing to fight legions of Clockwork Knights. Additionally, you could have the Queen ask the player to complete random tasks to maintain her favor.

I also am disappointed to see that there are no ultimate win conditions. There is no reason a sandbox game like this cannot have them. I can think of a few right now.

1) You go the mad scientist route, summon the elder gods and die horribly while ending the world.
2) You go the capitalist revolutionary route, rebel against the queen for riches! and face increasingly difficult waves of military opposition until you ultimately achieve independence.
3) You follow the Queens tasks for you, and hobble through a long skirmish with the native resistance to your colony by currying favor with the Queen and keeping the military aide flowing. Your ultimate victory over the natives and knighthood would be the victory.

 

Daggles should be in CE.

 

While i dig the whole "if you leave them unattended, terrible terrible things happen" notion, there's really nothing "original" about the notion in itself. What would be way cooler is how you deal with the "terrible, terrible things" when they do happen.
For example, say some of your citizens get turned into monsters by some kind of mutation, being able to capture and use the mutants for research, consumption (as in, eat them), or cannon fodder would be amazing stuff.

 

Tesla's electric baths. To try to cleanse yourself of the festering filth that seems to plague the colony at an almost mental level. But, of course, no amount of work can ever make you truly clean.

 

What we need is a method of specifically causing the horrific beings from nowhere to appear: from what I saw, it seems like a danger element, but I'd very much enjoy being able to enslave beings from beyond time and space to work as haulers in my fortress town. Sort of like using extradimensional cage traps. Also, an analogue to Fun, Forgotten beasts and the like.

So basically, I'd like those elements of DF to appear more: the randomly generated super beasts that want you dead could easily be implemented as lovecraftian horrors, and Fun could...well, who says Diggles are all that weak?

 

I would also like to see the option of going "Dark side" - i.e. turn your back on the empire, receiving immense power in exchange for moral decrepitude and dimensional instability

 

Runaways forming counter "societies". (Not as labor intensive as it sounds; reusing existing town code minus player guidance and a few other minor changes. )

A lot of Lovecraft's works focused on a haughty disdain for ('uncivilized') rural people. This is also a colonial theme, of course, though more nicely embroidered.
Citizens should occasionally run off (madness, curiosity, explicit plans, fleeing law) and form counter societies of varying complexity. Being human, but "lesser" they would make for a nice tension of friend-cum-enemy and utility-cum-threat. They also offer political opportunities (both through interactions with them and repercussions from the empire for dealing or not dealing with them).

e.g.
*the farm stead run by the inbred family - far enough out there not to be under your jurisdiction, but possibly just useful enough to keep around for the diggle breeding or wildernerss reports (or perhaps there's a political cost to killing human outposts, even if not formal)

*the group of engineers that want to harness the volcanic power, but kept getting put off - making their own clockwork empire from reeds and coconuts (a la gilligans island <-- the wilders are always so creative)

*the mad visionary to whose genius literally won't be bridled - isle of dr moreau style; threat to civilization and wilderness alike, potential exporter of unique goods (and perhaps importer of 'undersirables').

*the runaways that form a roving band of bandits (and ride velociraptors!) - that know the wilderness well enough to evade your patrols, unless you're willing to risk sending them deeper for longer...

*the cult that tries to form their own village utilizing 'dark' powers - they either are moderately succesful and trade or seduce or kidnap your populace, or they're *really* sucesful and end up as livestock for fungus beings that then threaten your own town

*and of course, the failed mutineers who via for legitimacy - potentially having empire resources or immigrants diverted to themselves; can't be easily dealt with by force unless clearly shown / framed as 'corrupt'.


Aside from adding a different dimension of interaction that parallels some of the colonial feel apparently parodied by the series (which has a distinctly human-to-("lesser")human dynamic) it also helps add to the feel that you are a source of your own obstacles and allows the player to further flesh out their own stance on complicated issues, both of which tie into the 'player generated narrative' theme nicely. It also sounds like a lot of the code for 'counter' societies will already be written to make the primary town work; so potentially a lot of bang for the buck. Basically just autonomous mini-towns with themes (since degeneration is partly built into the primary town anyway it sounds like). Rounding out the AI and town-to-town interface (similar to multiplayer???) and of course, gamebalance, would all take work however; unique art assets probably not required.

 

AI controlled societies confirmed, so the above sounds much more plausible as a possibility now.
Yeay.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/28/i...-mad-incredible-vision-for-clockwork-empires/

Realized after reading the interview that how madness is handled would have to be tweaked. Allowing a softer descent for the degenerate groups vs. the slightly harder descent for empire towns. (Appropriate given the tensions of maintaining a strict Elizabethan mien resulting in more self-destructive breaks as opposed to leaving the Empire (where appropriate) and becoming one with the madness.)

 

I'd just really love to see economic liberty be a primary motivator towards rebellion.

Say you discover that your colony is on the mother load of all unobtainium veins, however the Clockwork Trade Guild frowns upon unlicensed dealers steeping on their carefully bought turf. So you have to choose, do you rebel against the Queen and build an economic empire or do you quietly go back to paying the local poets in laudanum to write flattering prose to the Queens benevolence in hopes of a few crumbs from her table?

Capitalist rebellion, wooohooo! I think free-market revolutionaries need a bit more love. Hey, maybe it wasn't unobtainium but a vein of rearden metal all along

 

Honestly I think rather than including SPECIFIC devices it would be better to implement a procedural gadget generator. (or a less procedural one)

So like you can not only have a death ray and a reverse slaughterhouse that makes cows out of meat, but a ray gun that turns meat back into animals, and a slaughterhouse that disintegrates your livestock instead of butchering it.

(...I mean like, they're obviously not supposed to all be useful. )

(Also I'd be kind of shocked if they hadn't thought of this, since it's sort of the obvious direction for it to go)

 

Ooh, ooh: the best way to study eldritch horrors? Raise them in captivity. Best way to raise them in captivity? Obtain the eggs. Best way to obtain the eggs? Build a giant clockwork-powered robot eldritch horror to copulate with the mother.

 

Hot.


(Though getting fertile eggs out of that arrangement would require some significant aetheric and high-dimensional biological engineering. Good for omelettes and gross titillation though. [yes, yes, pun intended, sue me ])

 

Hm. Is Gaslamp even able to look at stuff like this? I've heard that copyright something something lawyers.
Anyways here are two more "ideas."

-The gap between dimensions is bridged following a night of too much drunken science, resulting in the sudden appearance of another colony, identical to yours in every way except for the following factors:
1. Their color scheme is even more dismal than yours
2. Everyone's left and right sides are reversed
3. Everyone has a goatee, even women and children
4. Their only goal is the extermination of all life, especially yours.

That sounds pretty tough to implement so here's the other idea, which is a lot simpler.

-Machines with a certain level of complexity, no matter their original purpose, have a tiny chance to spontaneously develop sentience, at which point they will either commit suicide out of existential despair or go on a killing rampage.

 

Are those the only possibilities? What if it's a toaster or something? What if i just wants to make toast for people and for people to love it? Can't a robot love too?

 

No. A toaster can only burn things.

Robots love? Maybe in Japan.

 

The interview mentionned that GLG wanted to bring back to life dead theories and failed inventions from the Victorian era.

As we were talking about man-eating computer on another thread, I remembered about the story of the first computer that never came to be, the Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage.
Which happened to be a Clockwork computer. It was never actually built although part of it was prototyped later on and should be found in some museum.

Designs of clockwork computers involve lots of cogs/gears : click for gears !

It would be great if the devs would use it as inspiration, preferably for something that could go terribly, terribly wrong.

 

The Difference Engine was built and the Analytical Engine would have worked if it was finished. Hardly failed inventions or dead theories. Simple mechanical control systems are used to this day, but not general purpose computers, however, there may still be some modern day applications for mechanical computers. Nanoelectromechanical single-electron transistors resist heat, radiation, and electric surges and require very little energy to operate compared to conventional semiconductor technology, so it might see applications in places like car engines or spacecraft. However, compared to conventional circuits they switch much more slowly, vastly limiting how much you can clock them. IBM made special-purpose computers based on electromechanical relays, as well, in the middle-20th century.

For good ideas on some of the things that could be put here, it might be worth reading Jules Verne, and various freely available scientific and pseudoscientific texts available from Project Gutenberg by the likes of Darwin, Boyle, and Newton.

What I am hoping gaslamp does do is make sure that the lost principles used in this game were not already already understood to be false by the time of the victorian age, eg. phlogiston or the key of solomon which were both known not to have any credence.

 

M. C. Escher architecture style factories that crank out Perpetual Motion Machines!