REVISION 35A NOW IN EXPERIMENTAL BRANCH

Discussion in 'Clockwork Empires General' started by Nicholas, Jan 30, 2015.

  1. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    Things to Look Out For:

    • Fog of war!
    • Characters can have nametags toggled
    • Guns require reloading
    • Modules should place better
    • Events pop up w/o alerts - so you won't miss them (let us know if this is super annoying)
    • Food rebalancing
    • Social job rebalancing
    • NOTE: madness/cult effects are in flux and are effectively deactivated for 35A while they're "in the shop".
    Changelog Proper:

    • Nametags! Hit the nametag button to turn nametags on for everybody.
    • First stage of implementation of two-stage fog of war.
    • trees can grow again. (and WON'T grow inside buildings)
    • FIXED: problems with giving orders to remove saplings (and tree commands in general * received cleanup)
    • FIXED: adding/removing workers to/from workcrews with special uniforms now properly adds and removes said uniform as appropriate
    • added Stone/Brick/Iron Kilns for Charcoal & Ceramics, removed "Industrial Kiln"
    • FIXED: make gunpowder job broken again
    • gave in and added beetles to both biomes (because one or two slipped in to the rev35 patch)
    • FIXED: player will no longer receive notification if a fishperson hurts a bandit
    • beds can be broken by overuse (but don't explode)
    • FIXED: calling construction materials via favour was broken
    • FIXED: airdrop crates will no longer drop into buildings (and contents of airdrop crates won't * drop into buildings either)
    • FIXED: sleeping inside on floor no longer creates memory for sleeping outside on ground
    • FIXED: farm tiles becoming unfarmable after being destroyed by animals / other damage
    • added fuel requirement to smelting jobs (use charcoal, coal, or peat)
    • FIXED: minesshafts should no longer eat workers when you unassign them from the mine
    • FIXED: bandit corpses no longer turn crops into clawbulbs
    • FIXED: smelters should no longer play burning animation when not in use
    • made sugarloaf a "preserved food"
    • removing random nature objects ("clearables") is now in the construction job category rather than the farming job category
    • buildings will automatically remove nature objects they're built over (though it's a little hacky)
    • added icon for dead fishperson
    • added more variety to memory icons (related to combat)
    • balance: made trees take longer to chop down but give more timber
    • airdrop crate falling on people will no longer cause memories for "witnessed combat"
    • FIXED: Naturalists will show up and just do naturalist stuff rather than default workcrew stuff
    • balance: made return to civilization requirements a little less steep (now that civ works better)
    • balance: made criminal vicars spawn less often
    • workshop jobs limited to range 100 & will use closest commodity
    • guns now require reloading
    • Foxes will now eat delicious, delicious gibs.
    • Real simple first pass on burrowing beetles.
    • FIXED: exploration beacons (were disappearing instantly)
    • added reload sounds
    • FIXED: fishpeople using Wander (human) job
    • tweaked event timing so events are more likely not to trigger at the same time
    • made "butcher fishperson corpse" have way less range and be a less desirable source of food
    • beginning of rebalance of social tier jobs
    • addition of new memories which tend the characters toward positive moods to offset external effects.
    • miscellaneous cleanup of memory database
    • instances of "Fear" changed to "Fearful" because grammar
    • balance: adjusted tropical forest spawns slightly (more timber, fewer coconuts)
    • SHIFT-click now preserves module rotation
    • Moving a wall placed module directly up to a building, without actually moving your mouse into the building, correctly attaches it
    • Modules now display RED when not attached to a building and BLUE when they are. (This will be expanded upon later...)
    • FIXED: rotating a module will occasionally get stuck for no good reason.
    • tweaked event timing so events are more likely not to trigger at the same time
    • made "butcher fishperson corpse" have way less range and be a less desirable source of food
    • added some more character names
    • FIXED: ranged attacks will self-abort (then character will re-evaluate jobs) if target gets too far away (to stop endless retarget/follow cycle)
    • changes to feeling tired and hungry for balance
    • minor edits to some alert strings for clarity.
    • modules will now send a ticker message when completed
    • made science and chapel jobs less desirable at night
    • changes to upper_class jobs to make them less... annoying, but just a little bit
    • inspect painting converted to a "social" job and modified accordingly
    • added memory for discovering a weird artifact
    • shortened text on some food memories
    • balance: increased damage of ranged weapons due to need to reload
    • FIXED: crash when creating a stockpile and mousing over a building inadvertently when doing so
    • FIXED: save games do not load correctly (or, amusingly, save correctly, even though they seem to) on machines with Unicode path names
    Food Rebalancing:

    • Doubled time it takes to become hungry / starve.
    • Significantly increased time it takes to grow most crops.
    • Slightly increased time it takes to cook stuff.
    • Decreased chances of eating food when not particularly hungry.
    Essentially: food takes longer but is needed less often.
     
    KillerKidClever likes this.
  2. Kiojan

    Kiojan Member

    "FIXED: bandit corpses no longer turn crops into clawbulbs"
    Huh, thought that was a feature; it kind of makes sense - blood of the fallen fertilizes corruption and madness.
     
    Tarod and Samut like this.
  3. Alephred

    Alephred Royal Archivist for Queen And Empire

    Just a couple of early impressions:

    - the overall effect of the forestry tweaks seems to be that wood production (in the Temperate biome) seems to be about the same, or possibly a little bit more plentiful
    - I experienced a new bug where chairs were never completed; planks were delivered, and the blueprints subsequently disappeared (reported in the bugs thread)
    - the overall effect of the kitchen and food tweaks was approximately neutral, as far as I could tell in my short session
    - name tags are a nice touch
    - the pop-up events seem fine
    - fog of war seems to be working as intended - the effect is surprisingly creepy, and feels claustrophobic; it's much harder to see where escaping bandits are going
    -the red footprint for invalid modules is a nice touch
    - although Fishmen become invisible once they leave line of sight, their floating weapons can still be seen moving around in the explored areas
    - smelting zinc causes a fatal hang (reported on the bug subforum)
     
    Last edited: Jan 30, 2015
  4. Kiojan

    Kiojan Member

    Initial impressions

    -Many of the decorative/optional modules, such as windows, carpets, pictures, etc. are not built and are seemingly cancelled after a short period. Many players don't bother with these, but I always do. Same for furniture. Essential workshop modules (i.e. furnaces, stoves, beds, etc.) are still constructed.
    -Activity/event sounds are considerably muted unless you zoom in. Maybe I accidentally tweaked the sound settings?
    -Dynamic music is gone. The same song plays whether you're peacefully building your colony or defending it from ravaging fishpeople, speaking of which...
    -Bandit raids and fishpeople raids can still be overfrequent due to their random nature. As in, multiple same-day raids by day three by 4-5 member groups. Also, it seems as though New Antipodea now also features wandering fishmen, which raises the difficulty a notch.
    -The reload action has nerfed soldiers considerably (or something else has). It's now very difficult to prevent a group of 5 bandits (or more) from stealing your goods unless you have a large army as it takes 4-5 shots to bring one down (and an absurdly high number in the case of an armored bandit). I had all four of my soldiers properly positioned to fend them off yet three of the five simply ran past them, sucking up bullets like they were toffee, grabbed my stuff and sauntered off.
    -Colonists definitely eat less and crops take longer to grow. Haven't seen how this will affect the later game because it got too frustrating to play after day six.
    -You might want to increase colonist sight radius; it seems a bit too small right now. That said, fog of war is working just fine.
    -Pop-ups were a bit irritating. Maybe restrict them to fishperson and bandit raids; things that demand your immediate attention.
    -Colonists seem a bit more prone to gossiping.

    EDIT: Almost forgot to mention a very amusing incident. During immigration I got a capitalist with the 'brutish' quality. Soon after her arrival a fishperson started harassing a lower-class colonist. I sent a squad a soldiers to rescue her and little while later the redcoats were chasing after the fishperson...closely followed by the aristocrat, who had apparently acquired a rifle. She started shooting the monstrous creature and dispatched it with ease, thereby saving the poor laborer. Whatever you do, do not alter the game so that this sort of thing is no longer possible.

    All hail Preshea Seawidow! Entrepreneur, Explorer, Adventurer, and Hero of the Empire!

    PresheaSeawidow.jpg
     
    Last edited: Jan 30, 2015
    Turbo164 likes this.
  5. Samut

    Samut Member

    Agreed. And any corpses should work, too - clawbulbs shouldn't be snobby about blood. It's all delicious.

    In fact, this gives clawbulbs a little personality, as a sort of proto-Audrey II.
     
    Last edited: Feb 13, 2015
  6. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    (The brutish member of the upper class is *not* a bug - merely a thing nobody's noticed yet! We've been busy.)
     
  7. Kiojan

    Kiojan Member

    Never said I thought it was a bug! It's just the first time I've ever seen an upper class colonist do anything besides bury a corpse.
     
  8. FIbinachi

    FIbinachi Member

    Agreed - corpses to clawbulb is a nice touch.

    Few things:

    The fog of war combined with the wandering fishpeople in the jungle biome makes it claustrophobic, hellish and difficult. My colonist were *dying* like flies because it wasn't possible for me to presciently rally squads to where the wandering fish people were. The colonists would wander about, get scared away, and then chased into the wilderness to die as more fish people attacked.
    I love it. Great implementation of the fog of war.

    Instances of people getting items "stuck" in their hands is up approximately 20000 %. Quick head-count right now on the pc running the game gives 11 out of 25 colonist with bricks, clay or wheat stuck in their hands.

    Sounds are muted. Music is static as noted, all sounds are muted. Did notice a new track in the jungle biome that was very lovely, but the "dynamic track" effect is gone.

    Food changes:

    Unintended side-effects? Crops take longer to grow, and colonists eat less. But the output of item per farm is still the same, just over a longer time schedule. I adjusted by making one more farm. The longer crop "cycles" means work-crews can more easily manage more farms without crop loss, and suddenly, my food availability just *bloomed* and overtook my stockpiles. Per writing this I have 57 wheat items with 2 work crews working 5 farms, and that number keeps rising. It makes setting up the initial farm-system harder, because it takes longer to kick into gear, but once you have farms giving off crops you have a lot, and colonists eat less.

    On the other hand, it did mean I could stop worrying about food after the first 5 days, and focus on other things. Makes it a bit more pleasant to build up industry and such.

    Jobs and fog of war

    Colonists can still do burial jobs in the fog of war, along with foraging, hauling and other such. This means they'll often go to a place where the player can't see what they're doing to haul back corpses. This eventually made sustaining a colony in the tropical biome impossible, because a colonist would get chased off, die, others would wander into the fog of war to pick up the body, get killed, and it'd bloom out of control. Obviously this has been happening for a bit, but the fog of war makes the cycle just that tad more vicious.

    Stumps texture effect

    Stumps have started giving a blocky texture loss effect. Pine, aspen, broadleaf stumps occassionally just form a square grey cube.

    Criminals and prestige

    It's possible to lose your NCO in initial bandit or fish-people attack, then require a new one. This is even more likely with the fog of war changes. This moves you into negative prestige, and results in even criminals becoming unavailable for order in the prestige event because they cost 0. I guess the prisons of the empire are bad, but still preferable to exile in the fish people jungle.

    That seems unintentional? A better idea might actually be to give the player *more* criminals with negative prestige, or criminals with higher chance of worse traits? That way you encounter initial misfortune, require favours that push you into negative prestige, and through that get a way to get back by gaining more colonists, increasing general colony effeciency. But the colonist you do get are worse chaps all around, so it'll create more problem down the line.
     
    Samut likes this.
  9. FIbinachi

    FIbinachi Member

    I've now had occassion to play around a little more. I can second Alephred from earlier, a couple of items never get build. Plans are delivered, the person dropping them off also performs the "building animation" by hammering on it...and the chair remains unfinished, ghostly.

    The same goes for cabinets, windows, spice racks and pots and pans. After a while, the ghostly blue-print disappears and the planks remain. So far no one's been inclined to haul them back to the stockpile, so my guess is they're tagged as "part of the chair" or "waiting constructor"; despite no blueprint being set.

    Vicars don't really "vicar", either, which might just be part of the job-rejiggling.

    Edit: I should mention cots and other such do place a lot better, so that's delightful improvement all around. Huzzah!

    Edit-edit: Speaking of odd jobs - Colonist not assigned to a workcrew working in a Labratory still sometimes grab Artefacts and take them to study. A colonist from kitchen-crew grabbed some Obeleskian stones to look at. I can't tell if this is intentional or not, since no other example of people doing workshop jobs not assigned to their workcrew is readily apparent. On the other hand, science is weird, and it makes sense if people sneak peeks at stuff.
     
    Last edited: Feb 2, 2015
  10. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    The building-modules-not-getting-finished-on-completion bug is known and has been fixed for Revision 35B.

    I'm not sure what's up with vicars.