Moving Cities - a heads up 16SEP10

scottfitz wrote: What about sovereignty squares for the moving city, will they be lost, or will the claims have to be rescinded in order to move? Can a city  move to a square that has a sovereignty claim?

Good questions, and I'll add the answers to the main post.

Yes, you will have to rescind your sovereignty in order to move.

No, you cannot move to a square that has a sovereignty claim on it.

Best,

SC

Brids17 wrote: Isn't this a little bit unfair? I mean, why should I be punished by some "kill everything that's not an orc" AI faction just because you guys decided to place it next to my city? I'm sure whe nyou do release them, they'll be made so they have to be an X amount of squares from any given city but if the closest AI faction to my city is going to hassle me for being a dwarf simple because of the place my city randomly spawned, I'm not going to be very happy. As for the rest of the planned update, don't you think this game is getting a little too complicated? At some point you need to stop and realize this is a game and not real life. Do we really need to suffer travel complications due to terrain it passes over and needed boats to move it across a river that spans for like 400 squares? Do my boats really need to get swallowed up be a hurricane? It'd be one thing for a boat to die to a sea creature because it wasn't properly defended but when things that no one can control are destroying things, it's not fun. Every time I read a preview for an update I cringe at how complicated you guys are making the game. I think you guys need to work on either "dumbing" the game down a bit or making extensive tutorials. At this rate, no one will be able to tell the difference between a bug and a complicated chain of event.

Hi Brids,

As has been mentioned, the factions will be placed before we permit people to move their cities.

We are highly unlikely to be placing rabidly hostile factions anywhere near where a brand new player might randomly appear.

We are also very aware that players do not like "random" events, and so we will be endeavouring to make things as non-random as possible.  However, players do understand "random propensities" just fine.  For example, if a player who is an enemy of the bandits chooses to send an unsupported caravan though bandit-held land, then he might get a random event that's not to his liking - and we think most players understand this to not be the fault of randomness and more of a causality linkage.

We are certainly adding layers of depth to the game, however we're also very keen not to overcomplicate things.  The long and short of it is that this is a sandbox game, and we want players to choose their level of involvement.  If you don't want to go through the hassle of loading troops into boats because it's too complicated, then don't settle on an island and your problem is solved.  Equally, don't expect to be doing much overseas trading with the Merfolk.

We're definitely not going to dumb the game down.  If that's what people are after I can point them to many other games out there that are extremely simple to play.  It's not what Illyriad is about; we're about options and depth, which aren't necessarily the same as complexity.

We do, however, certainly agree that the tutorial and the help files need vast amounts of work - and we also agree that there are many game features that could be made simpler and less repetitive to perform (and more intuitive through changes to the User Interface) and there are plans in place to do all these things.

Best wishes,

GM Stormcrow


Edited by GM Stormcrow - 16 Sep 2010 at 19:11

GM Stormcrow wrote: We're definitely not going to dumb the game down.  If that's what people are after I can point them to many other games out there that are extremely simple to play.  It's not what Illyriad is about; we're about options and depth, which aren't necessarily the same as complexity. GM Stormcrow

This looks like promessing upgrades, but I don't understand something; why would you make allhostile faction. whats the point? who would bother settling there?

GM Stormcrow wrote: If you don't want to go through the hassle of loading troops into boats because it's too complicated, then don't settle on an island and your problem is solved.

Is it though? You'd need a boat to cross a river would you not? Our alliance is potentially about to go to war with an alliance on the other side of the map, if units couldn't cross rivers would we not need multiple boats to get our armies there? And please don't suggest that we could always "go around" them.

GM Stormcrow wrote: We're definitely not going to dumb the game down.  If that's what people are after I can point them to many other games out there that are extremely simple to play.  It's not what Illyriad is about; we're about options and depth, which aren't necessarily the same as complexity.

Options and depth are fine but when those options and depth start penalizing players there's a problem. Take the caravan update that was talked about a while ago. It was mentioned that they'd all have different carrying carrying capacities, different speeds, limitations on what they could carry and gold costs. That's potentially going to over complicate something simple. If you want to add depth, fine, make some caravans carry more but move slower and others carry less and go faster. Make the new caravans cost gold and the old ones cost nothing. There, depth and options.

However when you add in gold costs on all caravans and carrying limitations, it gets to be too much. I'd have to assess how much of what resource I'd need to be able to move, do I want to be able to move a lot of livestock or weapons? Gold or resources? How many caravans am I going to need in total? For each resource?  Are my taxes going to need to be raise to make these caravans? Do I need to kill off my troops or diplomats or get rid of one of my sov squares to afford them? If I raise my taxes will my food go negative? Will it kill my production? I could go all day with this.

GM Stormcrow wrote: We do, however, certainly agree that the tutorial and the help files need vast amounts of work - and we also agree that there are many game features that could be made simpler and less repetitive to perform (and more intuitive through changes to the User Interface) and there are plans in place to do all these things.

I'm glad to hear, there's a lot of things in this game that it seems no one knows the answer to.