Let's talk about Revision 34!

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Daynab, Dec 18, 2014.

  1. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    As is always the case, we'd love to hear your general feedback about the game's state with the latest update.
    How do you feel about it, what do you think needs touching up the most, etc.

    Let us know!
     
  2. Rahbek23

    Rahbek23 Member

    Seems pretty good and stable. With some variance. I love the new added stuff, though it seems cult talking is a bit overdone... I had cultists warnings less than 30 seconds from initial unpausing (was just checking something, so they were idle, but still that seems fast)
     
  3. ForestryTech

    ForestryTech Member

    Definitely too many cultists, the whole colony is lousy with them by day 3. Also the save/load issue combined with the constant crashes is still a thing.
     
  4. Coordinatorx

    Coordinatorx Member

    I second both the comments above. Also it appears that some a soldier just ran to a wall and got stuck on the wall for quite some time. She was hungry, but she survived 3 days without food. till... well the game crashed.
     
  5. maurizio

    maurizio Member

    I arriveduntilday19thencamethe mistake:FSMdrop_itembeingdisabled,soon aftercrashed, the error messagedoes notknow whatit means,but all in all the gameis stable,maybea few littlebugs, likethecemeterywhenreloadingthe gamecorpsesare outunderthe tombstone,hi.
     
  6. Mr147

    Mr147 Member

    Yes i have to agree. The cultists seem to spawn up more and seem likely to murder everyone within two days so far for me.
     
  7. Mr147

    Mr147 Member

    Also yes please lower the cultist popping up, at least lower the chance abit, Or maybe have an artifact within the game so that certain colonist that found it will most likely begin to start a cult. Because lemme be honest, Random people wanting to start a cult out of nowhere is kinda a blank goal, mostly cultist would start a cult to spread their message and commit murder because of a vision they must of seen, or some god like being coming to them and messing with their heads, (this is where the squid like god can come in when an artifact of his is discovered and wants the colonist who found it to spread his message and I would think this is how the cults should start or start when an artifact is found.) By all means, if theres another way the cultist can start then by all means i'll await abit more to see how this develops.
     
  8. This also doubles as my 'new-player' feedback.

    Military
    - Had them consistently run past the very nice fortifications I had them set up to engage a superior force in an open field.
    - Would be nice if they had different item carting priorities. More secure the guns and ammo, less move the wood of which I have plenty.
    - Seem quite happy to continue carting items even with gunfire and people dying nearby.
    - Need to stop putting down their guns when performing daily tasks. Would be nice if they stored them in a nearby cabinet when they're sleeping, so they don't run halfway across town to the gun pile when attacking fishmen wakes them up.
    - My NCOs seemed overly suicidal, which reduces the remaining troops to nigh uselessness. Would appreciate some survival instinct.

    Building
    - Colonists will quite happily build buildings with trees, shrubs, and resources right in the middle of them. Would be nice (and reduce the number of graphical glitches/ridiculous situations) if you were forced to clear the land/the NPCs auto-cleared before construction would take place.
    - Build order produces inconsistent results. For example, building a building, placing doors and then putting a stockpile underneath the doors works, but placing a stockpile before hand and attempting to place the doors doesn't.
    - Buildings ignore graphically empty item exclusion zones, so you can build on top of a kiln or stove.
    - The ability to cancel a building before you finish building it would be appreciated. Or even adjust the size when you've miscounted by a tile/the game decides that you really wanted a tile less than it was displaying.
    - Laying out farms acts weird when you checkerboard them between stockpiles. Some allow the 7x7 corner touch, while others don't. Being able to remove/resize farms would also be amazing.
    - I wasted a lot of time and resources building workbenches and other items before I realized they were effectively non-functional or cosmetic. A way to distinguish between the useful and the cosmetic would be very nice for new players.

    Stockpiles & Workshops
    - Would like more ability to set what goes in a pile, so the cabbage farm is next to the cabbage stockpile, which is right next to the kitchen which churns out cabbage stew as long as it has the ingredients available. Helps reduce needless carry distance.
    - Linked stockpiles/workshops. Ability to produce the items in the workshop queue indefinitely until the stockpile you're pulling from is empty, or the stockpile you're outputting to is full.

    Misc.
    - Colonists & Bandits seem to be able to pick up items through walls.
    - Would like the ability to specify the supply drop point so if I build my town away from where I start, it's not a major trek every time.
    - Cultistry seems wildly different between games. In my experience Day 5 can be either 'what cultists?' or '12 shrines and everyone's looking a little murdery'.
    - Noticed a significant stutter when building gaboins into chokepoints, one stutter per gaboin. I assume this is the pathfinding recalculating.
     
  9. Rahbek23

    Rahbek23 Member

    Actually I have a small complaint; Supply drops damaging stuff. I cannot chose where they land and it's pretty silly to have stuff destroyed when it comes in. I even had a guy get a affliction because he got a crate in the head.

    It makes sense, but it would be much better if the player could chose where the drop point is and it would spread around there instead, like you would do in a real life scenario. "OK boys try to hit this field outside town".
     
  10. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    My build order aggressively pursues booze and I'm still having problems keeping a lid on cults with this version. A stopgap is the fact forage is a job the colonists will still take on at night, so can be used to keep them apart rather than spreading cult gossip.
    • Are favours bought using the prestige menu supposed to cost prestige, or just have a minimum quota?
    • The redcoat squad is a nice prestige option (though they don't seem to come armed as advertised). Any chance of a vicar being a prestige option?
    • Being able to take immigration from two sources makes expanding the colony's workforce (both parties and labour power) much easier than before.
    • Military still seem to prioritise hauling over attacking entities or responding to alarms. When fish or bandits arrive, I turn off hauling jobs for all squads to get a reasonable fighting response (with or without rallying). I'm not sure I should have to do this...
    • Vicar-related jobs need some polish. My evidence is this screenshot of multiple colonists occupying the same space, to listen to preaching from a vicar who is asleep... Sleep-Preaching.jpg ...so perhaps remove the adjacency requirement for preaching (but not confession?), require the vicar and congregants be awake for either side's jobs to proceed, and allow sermon delivery to merely require vicar and congregants be in the same chapel?
    • Savegames don't restore day/night lighting on load?
     
  11. Rahbek23

    Rahbek23 Member

    I might have observed a minor bug - some colonist ate a crate of coconuts and the memory said that the cooked food was delicious (?!?!).

    So maybe crate of coconuts is tagged incorrectly?

    Edit; I just looked. It's tagged as "Preserved Food".
     
    Last edited: Dec 21, 2014
  12. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Then that tag is totally incorrect, and David will fix it.
     
    Rahbek23 likes this.
  13. Mr147

    Mr147 Member

    Cults really need to be toned down abit, Also we need a way to deal with them instead of just killing them off, or just trying convert them to not join a cult.
     
  14. Alephred

    Alephred Royal Archivist for Queen And Empire

    Finally had the opportunity to get some substantial play time in on this patch. Things are generally improving; saving and loading works more consistently, and I'm seeing fewer crashes, unexplainable or otherwise. I do have a couple specific observations:

    -I like Prestige Favours as they're currently implemented, as opposed to the way they were in 33c; by making them semi-regular, instead of constantly available, there's incentive to save up Prestige
    -Favours, together with regular immigration, let players grow their population very fast - rapidly enough to outstrip food production; not inherently good or bad, just another thing that creates an interesting choice
    -I like the parachute crates! I haven't seen them break anything, though, despite landing on my stockpiles and buildings
    -I really like the new Naturalist behaviour; I like the way he'll auto-explore, and I like the way he'll clean up his own explore beacons

    And in response to some of the posts above me, I too have noticed Cult thought seems to spread more aggressively now. However, in a couple of sessions now, I've just let it go un-managed (because I was trying to trigger the Fishman transformation and other occult stuff), and life in the colony proceeded more or less undisturbed, aside from a lot of purple gossip.
     
  15. Samsquanch

    Samsquanch Member

    I'd like to see cults develop more interesting behavior than build shrine --> murder spree. Right now I spend every night assigning foraging jobs to keep cults from forming and scrolling through the colonist list to mark anyone assembling a creepy shrine for frontier justice so that I don't have ten shrines uglying the place up.

    The prestige options make replacing cultist overseers and NCO's easy, which is nice!

    Farming has gotten better but could use some work. I struggled with a few early colonies because I thought it would be a good idea to make one large work crew that only did farming. Crops started spoiling and it took me a while to realize that my farming crew could only work on one plot at a time and the other crews weren't taking farming jobs because I had them busy chopping trees/mining/clearing land since I thought I had farming taken care of. Farming's priority seems to be pretty high, so if I leave the job available for all crews things are fine, but I like being able to specialize my crews.

    Stockpiling items takes forever. I don't bother foraging bandit camps anymore because it's likely that another bandit camp will spawn near it the next day and loot the goods before my peasants can haul them. It's a minor issue overall, but I really like gathering and stockpiling things.
     
  16. Wolg

    Wolg Member

    Also, while there is a stop farming button, its handling appears to be unimplemented in the backing scripts?
     
  17. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Yep, there's a bunch of small farm cleanup stuff that needs to happen in January.
     
  18. FIbinachi

    FIbinachi Member

    Cheerio Gaslamp and other intrepid adventuring bureaucrats (the best kind of bureaucrat, boldly doing paperwork where no man has wielded a triplicate cog requisition form before).

    Got a couple of comments on build 34.

    Performance: The game crashes consistently on days 10 or 11. I don't know why. Sometimes it manages to get to day 12. This could be a problem on my end, my hardware is erratic at best, but it seems strange that it should be so predictably consistent over 8 plays.

    Any building with the module: "Smelting Forge" - gets erratic building geometry rendering errors way easier than any other thing, and has done so in 6 out of 8 games for me. It seems to occur mostly when they're placed in a corner, and the chimney interaction gets all... weird and abstract. Could be the latest anti-pollution measure of Lord Flufffing, shunting all the industry byproducts into a nega-realm of geometric oddities. Probably just rendering faults.

    Speaking of forges, the Ceramic Workshop can sometimes be used to detonate bandit corpses, turning them into longpork. If they're dead and you blueprint out a workshop that covers the corpse, the corpse explodes. After some of my citizens were, err, volunteered for the cause, I can say the same doesn't hold for the corpses of colonists, who are instead entombed somewhere in the foundation, nourishing longpork forever out of reach.

    Cults
    :

    Noticed that cult talk starts more rapidly and spreads more, yes, helped very much by the night/day changes. This is thematic and excellent, and I love seeing people run into the larger buildings and huddle to discuss murder and pain while being afraid of the murderous painthings in the world. But it doesn't really seem to lead to anything. Everyone's terribly polite about the entire rampant occult fashion sweeping the colony, and there's hardly a murder in sight. Maybe 1 on the 6th or 7th day, despite people discussing The Act Of Murder several times before that. Could be good for warning new players, and makes sense they'd "plan" it out by having the talk a few times, but it is strange seeing so much Cult talk and no real Cult action beyond petty plant vandalism. Vicars / booze / cooked food / beds seem to make people happy enough to avoid murdering, and this is without me the player doing any darn thing to stop the folks who want to discuss all the weird glowing triangles they keep finding. Even without cooked food, beds, vicars and a while gently going: "Soooo, how about them beings from beyond the realm of human keen, eh, guv'nor, eh?" nothing much seems to happen. Could be intentional! Feels odd.

    This also ties into the prestige changes - you get more military and criminals, so mob justice is quicker. Once a murder finally does happen, it turns out the murdered colonist is the poor bugger who went for a sacrificial knife while six redcoats were lazing around the stockpile.

    Also, several times I've noticed a bit of an odd event - a subject of the empire, for seemingly no real reason, will erupt into a purple explosion of purple smoke, darkness and writing tendrils of nebolous gloomdoom, the people nearby will react with the "Afraid" emotion and flee in random directions and nothing more will come of it. The unfortunate smoke-explodee will have no memory of the event, and everyone calms down pretty quickly. This has happened twice while someone was just standing around, and once while they were sitting. Different games each time. Based on your patch notes, it's possible it's a transformation effect that displays the same "effect" as the malfesant clawbulb creation, but somehow doesn't quite trigger? Could the colonists be self-interupting their transformation? Unless the citizens of the clockwork empire are supposed to just randomly erupt in purple clouds of darkness and then carry on their day. Stiff upper lip and all that? Could be intention, seems odd.

    Adore the new "Extol the maddening horrors of the briny depths below", both the animation and the everything about it. Good stuff.

    Oh. and scientist seem to suffer no bad effects from terrible monstrous knowledge unmentionable. Just walk off peering into the depths of the Underworld. I keep expecting them to go mad, yet, nothing seems to happen there.

    Naturalist:

    Beacon search behaviors are a bit odd, since you have to "lead" naturalists around by placing beacons like tiny bread trail crumbs very close to where they are. If it's any further away than a good stone-throw, the local grass becomes more interesting. This is probably a reasonable game play option so you don't just order the naturalist out into every dark corner like the opening moments of a 2d fog-of-war based strategy game, but it feels very odd compared to soldier Rallying. They'll sprint happily across the entire map, scout it for you meanwhile, fight anything on the way, and reasonably stick together. Once you can order in squads of redcoats, sending them off to their doom is much more effective, controllable and immediate than placing down Explorer beacons and hoping your naturalist decides to follow your intricate chain of clues. The two system conflict a little, even if the military is exactly the sort of people you could order around while private citizen naturalists would react more strongly.
    If soldiers were a little less keen on rallying (those lads and ladies have some very impressive discipline for parade-grounding) it'd tie together better, or if naturalists detected beacons slightly further out

    The rest is great, and having them occasionally find bits of valuables is a nice touch that gives you incentive to explore.

    Also! Asking for a naturalist in the prestige menu consistently gave me an extra artisan overseer instead, even if my naturalist was very, very dead.

    Military:

    The ability to prestige in criminals who often have Brutish, then conscript them, and chuck them at the enemy means it hardly seems like I need that many bullets. Footsoldier Cogsspinner is disturbingly keen on applying her bayonet to... everything.

    Economy:

    As longer production chains are implemented, they start becoming more vulnerable to accidental sabotage. Colonists don't seem to differentiate between food products, so if I want to make laudanum for instance, I need grain (eatable), beer (eatable), whiskey (eatable) and raw opium (oddly, not eatable). At any step in the process, odds are good the person that just made the grain, the beer or the whiskey will drop it off at the stockpile, then immediately pick it up again and eat it.
    I have not yet managed to make laudanum, alas. The same holds a little less severely for other stuff, where multiple base reagents are needed for one final product. If some part is snagged along the way, you're stuck. You can micromanage your way out of it by watching the job menu like a hawk, turning off workshop jobs and shunting workers around, but that feels like fighting the game.

    It would be good to be able to mark a stockpile as "emergency only", or something, forcing colonists to look for substitutes in other stockpiles before going through whatever the player is stashing. That also allows people to save things up for when stuff inevitably goes wrong. I don't know how micromanagey that is, or if it defeats the purpose of some other systems. Alternatively, the ability to prioritize a commodity as "only for consumption" or "only for construction" would be very helpful (and maybe then I could finally get the peasants some bread before they eat the damn grain.) Of course "of a criminal element" colonists might not care, and starving people certainly wouldn't...

    Once trading is implemented, it'd also be quite useful to have some way to amass stocks of items to send off without having to surreptitiously frontier justice anyone caught near the grain stockpile.

    (Let the cultist be, says I, it's the whiskey thieves what truly bothers the nation!)

    Dismantling workshops makes me so, so happy. Also something that makes me happy? The little supply crate dropping from the sky, and the ability to find and forage wrecked supply crates on the map. It's a tiny, tiny touch that just adds a giant heaping of character.

    Especially when it hits a redcoat and gives him and oozing wound affliction.

    Population

    The ability to ask for criminals is great, and adds exactly the thing that was needed, a bit of colonialist out-of-sight policies. I'm a bit worried it's too good, though? I was always getting it two seconds before being asked about immigration, which allowed my colony to grow by 6 people in 2 seconds or so. That might seem bad foodwise, but foraging vastly outstrips food requirements, even for 52 people and 6 people is a lot of extra hands to farm and forage. Because criminals are often Brutish, they're good conscripts (or seemed to be). With the Cults apparently only acting as Polite Discussion Clubs About Possibly Occult And Arcane Matters, there didn't seem to be a downside to flooding my colony with criminals and n'eer'do'wells. I'd be worried about a violence outbreak, but by calling in some redcoat squads and getting lucky with immigration I often had 10 or 12 soldiers, which was a force to annihilate even that one wave of 19 fishmen (which was a bit weird to see stumble across the screen. Freaky)

    If they were weighted towards more negative traits (drunk, murderer, rage, stealing, stabbing, craven to counteract stuffing them into military squads) that'd be a good reason to think about it carefully, The "of a criminal element trait" doesn't seem to do much by itself. Alternatively, instead of sending precisely 3, randomize the number slightly so the player risk getting that one extra mouth too many to feed, and has to balance dealing with the shock of variable people with how useful those people could be.

    I don't know, just feels like too much reward for the effort.
     
    Marak likes this.
  19. Samut

    Samut Member

    I love the Extra Criminals option; you're right that there isn't much down side right now, but that's because there aren't too many potential crimes to commit right now. Once all items have ownership specified, that will hopefully give plenty of incentive for criminals to start doing some dang crimes.
     
  20. Rahbek23

    Rahbek23 Member

    I just had to quit a game because my colonists just kept running into a swarm of fishmen. I lost 5-10 colonists on that alone... just because they really wanted to haul that long pork.