CE Under the Hood compared to Other City games

While failing fantastically can be fun, so can looking back on success. So I hope that while we're picking over the corpses of Phlogisburg, New Phlogisburg, and New New Phlogisburg in our game world, we occasionally get a chance to trade with the successful colonies of Old Phlogisburg and Nova Phlogisburg as well. After all, who is going to trade with Dannyopolis?

 

I don't really like the idea of failure being a foregone conclusion. "The game world is trying to kill you and will eventually succeed" sounds like playing is pointless. I understand that there's much to be said for the journey, but to borrow terms, Dredmor wouldn't have been fun if there were infinite floors and after a while every floor was filled with monster zoos populated with nothing but Digula clones at 300% base stats.

 

Simple enough - give players a metric ton of toys that don't necessarily make a lot of sense outright, and give them an unreasonable challenge. Tweak numbers up/down (and/or) add/remove toys until you achieve the desired level of difficulty. It's important to keep in mind that in this age of Dev/Player interaction, Gamefaqs, wikis, and game forums, very hard is nowhere as hard as you'd think it to be.

 

Thanks for the reply! I like that approach much better, mainly because I like to do both depending on mood. You guys are much more on the ball than me, but here's the way some other games have handled it, should they have slipped passed the Pit Fighting Docket:

Dwarf Fortress: A calm, temperate forest is much easier to play than, say, a haunted glacier. Where you embark vastly affects the early years, and the design of your fortress itself. Many of the best stories (Nist Akath, Boatmurdered, Migrursut Oceanbled) came from triumph over adversity. And as you say, there's always bluemetal.

Caesar III: Civil vs Military goals. Peaceful missions had rare and low-powered invasions, but high civil engineering goals. Picking a border territory to establish was as risky as it sounds.

Tropico 4: Character traits and mission goals factored in strongly. Bringing a flatulent non-combat softy to an island overrun with rebels could make things far more interesting.


There is also a certain appeal to (if the campaign mode is still a thing) following the tragic career of Duke Cogsley Cogsingtontonsworth as he bounces from one doomed colony to another, running each into the ground and getting shuffled off to continually worse assignments as the Queen tries to forcibly retire him.

 

I'd be impressed if you managed to achieve both. In my experience, games that have tried to achieve two seemingly mutually exclusive objectives... tend to fail, as it turns out. Funny how that works, huh?
That being said, Dredmor achieved a lot of those of those objectives (e.g. A rogue-like that's actually LIKE rogue, but still has enough going for it to feel like its own game), so i think gaslamp deserves the benefit of doubt. So far, the notion of 'opting in' on a dubious risk vs. massive reward proposition seems like a good way to have your cake AND eat it. Remains to be seen how it will work in practice. Based on what i've seen, you're angling for a game where "chaos" (let's call it that, for want of a better word) is present, and the player starts every game by nominally representing "order". Over the course of the game, they can choose to resist chaos (within and without), or try to tame it, generally at a cost (which they may, or may not be able to pay).

 

You had roadblocks? We just had to hope they didn't decide to wander off into the industrial district or down the six hundred tile long road into the city from the edge of the map. /Caesar 3

 

The best way to accomplish this seems like it'd involve making a perfectly balanced machine explode with tentacles.