Let's talk about Revision 32!

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Nicholas, Oct 17, 2014.

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  1. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Revision 32 has just hit the Steams. This thread is for talking about it:

    - What do you like?
    - What don't you like?
    - How are we doing?
     
  2. Wariat

    Wariat Member

    I love the premise of this game and have been fiddling around with it, but I keep screwing up building placements. If ya have a spare minute, can you tell me how does one use the renovate tool?
     
  3. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Oh, just turn on the modules mode and move a module. They'll work fine if they're ghosted; we haven't totally finished "move a completed module" yet, but it'll be in for REV33. (I think.)
     
  4. Deluxe

    Deluxe Member

    The colonists are working MUCH better than they were in the past couple previous (experimental!) builds. Before where they were ignoring jobs to instead discuss the murder of their fellow colonists, they're now running to and fro and being productive while discussing the murder of their fellow colonists.

    The new module system is very nice! The ability to add more ovens to my kitchens as needed instead of having to build another kitchen is working splendidly. In a similar vein the function of assigning a work crew to a specific building is nice, though if the building they're assigned to doesn't have a job currently assigned to it that work crew just kind of mills about instead of trying to fill in for some work elsewhere. Of course, I can just unassign them from the building, but I can imagine that with lots of work crews and buildings this could get messy late into a session (my towns stay relatively small because of... things).

    The only game I played loaded my three soldiers with their allotted 20 bullets, and additional five crates with 100 bullets each. That's a lot of bullets. Might be a number to play around with if things get too easy. :p

    Overall, this a really nice build to play around in. I noticed big bugs at all while playing it.
     
  5. Wariat

    Wariat Member

    Ah, that's what I figured. Thanks for the heads up. I was wondering whether you could move/remove completed modules, demolish/rezone buildings, etc.

    The addition of modules is pretty great, being able to place them wherever is useful.
     
  6. Unforked

    Unforked Member

    Love the new revision! Haven't run into any issues yet after a couple hours of play (though I haven't attempted to load yet). You've done a tremendous job getting all these systems working so smoothly, and I'm pretty addicted.

    At this point I'm getting a bit content hungry. Really excited for the new economy system, vehicles, new Cosmic Horrors, etc... But that's my personal impatience speaking.
     
    magic_rat and zetjester like this.
  7. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    I endorse the new military alarm behaviour, much nicer. However, there is still the sticking point that soldiers who encounter a reason to fight while hauling or bringing logs to construct a gabion will return the object to the stockpile, potentially at the other end of the settlement, instead of the seemingly more sensible approach of just putting it down on the spot and getting to fighting.

    Fishperson guns are a threefold problem: should they use the human-made bullets, should humans try using them at all, and they are also afflict soldiers with the "don't quite close distance enough to shoot before stopping" problem that their original fishy bearers have.

    Flatten terrain and creepy shrine construction seem to have picked up the ability to obliterate nearby stockpile tiles; big no, for me.

    Direct assignment of crews to workshops should alleviate the biggest newbie trap I have observed watching others play.

    Keep up the good work, chaps!
     
  8. Mythophile

    Mythophile Member

    I really want to be able to prioritize work, but the jobs queue doesn't seem touchable. Colonists seem to need to get smarter on doing what needs to be done to get to whatever they're assigned to do. For example, the carpentry shop workgroup needs to understand that no wood means looking through the list for a tree chopping job and taking that job, then going back to the workshop once they have wood. Basically, if a workgroup runs out of resources, they hit the task list for resource gathering jobs that match their workshop. It queue I can't touch is driving me nuts!

    [Note: the above may be in there, but I haven't observed my assigned workgroups being very smart]

    Fields seem to be the lowest priority, which is exactly opposite to how it should be. Food should be the number one concern.

    I still say we need a way to contact the Empire for SHTF scenarios that would otherwise doom the game. Especially for bullets. The bullets must flow! Maybe we need some easy to produce primitive weapons we can poison? This issue might be solvable with traps (pit traps for example) as well, since44 wooden gabons are really fragile. I don't have enough troops or guns when the waves of fishmen show up in early game.

    I'm also not getting enough colonists fast enough for my taste.

    Fishmen need to have different ammo, perhaps from Clawbulbs or other evil thorn-bullet style plants? Strange coral on the beach? That would make killing fishmen for guns a high priority.
     
  9. Stuthulhu

    Stuthulhu Member

    I have noticed this as well, but it seems to me like it is purely visual, and not also a functional removal. People still seem to utilize the vanished spaces.

    In general flatten still seems to have some peculiarities, notably that once completed, the grounds still may not actually be flat. It's now workable, but shorter textures like crops and stockpiles have a habit of partially submerging, and the grid lines still show deviation, even though the "obstruction red" is eiminated.
     
  10. Mythophile

    Mythophile Member

    I'll add that walls should be solid and non-transparent. Right now, fishmen can hit through walls, and everyone can see through them, and it's just...odd.
     
  11. Akuma

    Akuma Member

    Combat is working alot smoother now and I even had an interesting run. For 6 days nothing happened, and then 9 fishmen attacked me just as 3 of my colonists transformed into abominations. Still the odd bug here and there but everything's working better then it once did.

    My only suggestion at the moment is to consider what to do about dropped objects that are very far away. For example in my game I had a solider lose their nerve and run very far away from the colony right into four fishpeople who happily murdered her. The problem arouse when colonists would walk for miles trying to reach this place and I couldn't support them with troops because they'd get tired or hungry before they reached the way point.
     
  12. zetjester

    zetjester Member

    Impressed with the latest edition, much smoother gameplay and combat works very well. Like the selectable workgroup for each workshop. I did however end up with military in two games which did not seem to want to reload, despite plenty of ammo crates in the stockpile. Once out of ammo lots of retreating went on until the customary 'flee into the wilderness for a butchering'
    A few bugs - using level terrain to close to a stockpile or farm effects the graphic of the zone. Overall though great stuff a grand job ;-)
     
  13. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    The wiped out spaces ceased responding to clicks as stockpile tiles normally would, so something else may be going on underneath. It also plays strange tricks on farm rendering.
    Line of sight should be a known TODO on The Current Bug List?
     
  14. Viion

    Viion Member

    It seems smooth. The colonists seem to be less scatterbrained and actually do what they set out to do. At times they might be a bit dedicated as I spotted colonists calmly walking to sleep (indoors) and eating WHILE under attack by fishpeople. Not quite sure why they didn't react. This is a screenshot I took as and example (there were plenty others to chose from).
    224740_2014-10-18_00005.jpg

    My soldiers didn't refill with ammo even though there were ammo available. There were no difference between in combat, out of combat, rallying or idling. 0 bullets on soldier and about a zillion bullets in the drop zone. What might affect it is the fact I don't have a stockpile, but considering that civilians who stop hunting will drop bullets the fact that bullets aren't in stockpile shouldn't affect it, right?

    I did a pretty big "flatten terrain" order to prepare an area for settlement. The work gang did pretty well and worked hard. There were an interesting thing I noticed with the order they did flatten the area. Instead of choosing the closest square and do it they were doing it like a "typewriter". And by closest I'd think the order would be 1,2,3,4,5,6,12,11,10,9,8,7,13,14,15,16,17,18 or something similar. Buy type writer I mean they went 1-6, then walked back to 7 and then did 7-12, walked back to 13 and did 13-18. It's not very noticeable on smaller areas, but since I had selected quite a large area it was very noticeable.
    1 2 3 4 5 6
    7 8 9 10 11 12
    13 14 15 16 17 18

    Thinking I'd double check the flatten terrain job I went to the job tabs and opened the job. And everything froze (spining blue circle of non-responsiveness). After pressing esc panicky the job tabs closed after quite some time and things were back to normal after watching the game characters fast forward (the game seemed to continue in the background even though the window froze and task manager said CE was unresponsive).

    There was something I noticed before all this happened and that was that my graphics cards were trying to start a tornado in my living room for some reason. They haven't been working this hard on earlier builds. Not sure what's different. 2 x GeForce GTX 580 (SLI disabled) and driver version 344.11 (I'm about 90% sure they are ASUS, but I can't recall right now).

    As for the reintroduction of renovating buildings. I built a small lower class house with 1 bed and thought I'd expand the house as I cut down trees and flattened terrain so I could get a big and nice "Solidarity Living Under Management" where the workers could live. Firstly I never got a "building complete" message so that's missing, it seems. Secondly I never found a renovate building option anywhere. I'm assuming adding cots would be just select module and place them, right? I never did get that far unfortunately since I never found the option to expand the building. And how about if you want to trim down the size of a building? Or tear it down?

    The overall impression though was one where I had more influence in the game (a very good thing!). Even though there were some mishaps with soldiers and civilians I was having a blast and transferring people back and forth between work groups and jobs depending on what I wanted to be done "now". It was smoother and more "natural". Strange as it sounds this is probably the first time a majority of the time spent in a game session felt as "playing a game" and not "testing a new build version". It's been fun testing before and I've had fun playing then as well, but this is the first ratio of game vs test has been mostly game :)
     
  15. ForestryTech

    ForestryTech Member

    Good progress on the game, still stymied by some familiar nagging issues.

    Had a good long playthrough and these were the main annoyances:

    -Colonists reacting oddly to conflict...standing still while being attacked or continuously fleeing from a fishman, stopping to get clubbed in the head, then continuing repeating the cycle unto death, all the while running further away from safety.

    -Workgroup leaders failing to get jobs done. They idle with "no job" and their workers follow suit. The most obvious result of this is the lack of farming and mass starvation. Sometimes you can "fix" this by rotating workers to groups whose leaders are actually doing something, sometimes you just need to make more farms which will cycle "farming" to the top of the jobs list.

    -Saving and loading are still funky, leading to odd issues such as modules not being added to already-built buildings properly, crashes and people forgetting to do their jobs.

    -The build sequence of buildings, jobs and resourcing required to make even one box of bullets is beyond my gamer abilities at this time. You're telling me the closest sulfur is in the desert? Aw hell.

    Keep up the strong work.
     
  16. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Yeah, there is no concept of Line of Sight implemented right now. It's on the list for when we work more on the combat of the game.

    I can't comment on the other stuff yet but please do let us know in detail what issues you're having with saving/loading, we're hoping to knock them all out asap like we addressed about a dozen of them in this patch.
     
  17. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Thanks for the feedback everyone, keep it coming! We read it all even if we can't respond to each post.
     
  18. ForestryTech

    ForestryTech Member


    I will try to be diligent in reporting them in the Bugs section as I come across them, so far a crash on saving, module problems and potential AI issues are what I've experienced.
     
  19. Wariat

    Wariat Member

    It's clunky and super glitchy but I keep coming back for more. Game crashed when I tried to use the Flatten Terrain tool to try and remove a graveyard (because a few colonists' bodies weren't disappearing properly).

    Promptly started up a new game. Love that each colonist has a little history attached to him/her. The entire sandbox, city-building and management concept is really great. Love production chains, especially complicated ones like the one to make bullets.

    I'll forgo any complaints because it's still early access and things like "no ability to install windows" or things like that seem kinda petty. Glad I've got a fun game to play on the weekends.

    Love the concepts and styles.
     
  20. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    That's a weird one. Does the game *consistently* crash if you try to flatten terrain around a graveyard?
     
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