Whew, I haven’t written one of these in a while! I’ve been doing some weird back-end programming for a bit, but a few things that I’ve been working on is finally ready for an experiment, so let’s talk about them.
Alert framework
We’re rolling out a new, more robust alert framework.
“To the heliograph! We must alert the Ministry that the cogs have whizzled too far this time!”
The old alerts were good for a few things, but not great for most. They began their life out of a need for a system for opt-in decision making, since we didn’t want to be pushing major choices to the middle of the main screen every time a player needed to make a choice (e.g. what to do about bandits), but the initial implementation of icons down the left side of the screen caused problems: icons alone aren’t enough to get across specific information, and there was still important information in the “ticker” (aka dialogue) box at the top of the screen because of this. Some news like “you got some planks” just didn’t make sense in a dismissable icon with the same weight as “pick your bandit foreign policy”.
Thatched Roof Cottages
Back in the day I used to play Warcraft 2 over Kali. A popular strategy was developed called the “wall-in”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, perhaps in a more recent game? To execute a wall in, you’d build farms to close the gap between your town – and it’s precious, vulnerable line of gold-mining peasants – and the outside world so that if some punk tried to pull a grunt-rush, you’d be safe and they’d have wasted their time. When you were ready, you just had a peasant chop a tree next to your farm to open it back up to access the outside world to expand.
A partially executed wall-in.
A similar move has existed in Clockwork Empires for quite some time now. It is possible to build absurdly long, skinny buildings at very low cost due. And enemy AI treated them as untouchable, impassible barriers. So you see the problem here: cheap, invincible walls. At least back in Warcraft 2 the walls were legitimate buildings that would be attacked automatically.
{ read this article }
14 Comments