ALPHA 44: THE MEMORY OF INFINITE TERROR OF MALIGN VASTNESS

Soldiers : if they are allowed to do any other work such as foraging then as soon as they reach a rally point, they seen to wander off to the next task (forage, collect wood etc.).

Edit : Yup - makes a squad really hard to control even if you turn off all tasks; they arrive and promptly return to base

 

They'll still only work 1 field at a time, but with crop growth as it is a small crew handling a medium and small field works perfectly fine, as there's a fair bit of 'void space' between pretty much any crop being tended and it needing attention to grow again.

So during that time, the workcrew will instead shift over to the other field to make up the empty period.

If you just 'Americanise' all your field sizes though, yeah you're probably only going to only be able to have 1 crew per field.

 

Naturalist : walks straight into hostile troops but just wanders around while they shot him to death - no attempt to run away

 

I can't wait for 'hat enthusiasts' to be able to pick up and collect all these hats lying around ...

That being said, just faced my first real invasion from the Republique. I had 4 squads (which included one that was lent from the empire) and 1 squad from Novorus totaling 25 soldiers. They had about 20 soldiers. Trying to rally all the squads together didn't work as quickly or smoothly as I had hoped, while the Republiques forces were all bunched up together in one big death ball. Luckily many of the Republiques soldiers were distracted shooting non-threatening colonists so we eventually won. Are there plans for opposing armies not to walk so closely together? Cause any splash attack (eg. mines/steam tanks with explosive steam shells) would would make quick work of them.

Afterwards I had a colonist who was starving (because she was stuck in some module) and was willing to eat long pork(I think my food stockpile was empty at the time, so she proceeded not to just butcher one corpse, but all 15 corpses. But she was still hungry because she didn't bother to eat any of the long pork, and just went to go to sleep. . In her character portrait it said she was forced to butcher people for sustenance, and yet, she didn't eat any of the long pork for sustenance. Mind you it did make her a little mad.

Lastly, because of all the injuries I built a barber shop but didn't have a free overseer to work there until much later. When assigning an overseer I got the following UI glitch.

 

Could we have the workshop interface altered so that when it's open when a module is finished the related production options become enabled?

I wait on that screen quite a bit when I'm aware an option is going to become available and its a little irritating

Other than this, everything seems very stable and the kitchen ovens seem much more worthwhile now.

 

Personally I'd much rather have it so the greying out is purely cosmetic, and doesn't actually disable using options.

The whole idea is great as a feature for letting new players know what they're lacking so they don't try to tell colonists to build a orbital laser platform when all they have is 5 planks of wood, but the moment it stops you from building ANYTHING because your last stone block was just used to build something, even though you have 3 workcrews actively mining for stone and will have stone in the next 20 seconds, then the system is doing nothing but getting in the players way and making things a hell of a lot more clunky to use.

Same goes with workshops, I already know that I'll need cookers to make food. That's why I have 8 cooker blueprints lined up already. Stop telling me I can't prepare food orders because I might not realise I need cookers! Just leave the order icon greyed and include what's missing in the tooltip.

But at no point should it ever stop players planning ahead knowing already what they have set up to generate resources over time.

The game can't factor that in, that's fair enough. So just accept the fact the player has more awareness than the game and let them plan things based on the future. Don't refuse to let them map out blueprints to something just because right that second they don't have exactly the needed materials.

If there's a consistent problem with most new players who aren't familiar with resource requirements having a hard time even with a greyed out icon and colour tooltip text telling them the problem, then the problem there is immediate notability of the prompts and that's what needs to be addressed.

Not chopping everyone else's arms off because some people are still trying to stick forks into live plug sockets and haven't noticed the giant sign saying "THIS IS WHAT WILL HAPPEN!".

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That said, no developer should ever constantly chase after the exception fringe examples so hopefully that isn't what happened with the decision to just outright remove the ability to do things unless the resources already exist.

No matter what you do, there will always be someone, somewhere that is something like:

* Can't read tooltips no matter how large and detailed you make them... like seriously they have some kind of mental filter that just denies the existence of anything on their screen other than the single thing they expect to look at. You could have a tooltip that screams "YOU DON'T HAVE WOOD FOR THIS!" and spans the entire width and height of their screen, and they'll just instinctively click off the tooltip and not even register anything about it, the game made some weird loud noises and annoyed them... that's about the extent it registers.... good chance this person does a lot of streaming and have a reasonably sized following.

* Can't grasp what "You need stone to build this. Until you have stone, colonists can't complete this order" and large greyed out icons actually represent in the overall sense. They understand what's being said, but because they WANT that item to be made, they focus purely on what they want and just mashing clicks to get that order placed and not on what's being relayed to them.... they're not here to think and be told what they want can't happen... if they tell colonists to do something, they'll do it. Because that's how games work, right?

* Already know everything about how your game works even though they've never played it, because they know how they want your game to work... this person in the case of CWE probably played Banished... like they played Banished A LOT.

In doing so they already know everything there is to know about how Clockwork Empires works, because they know how Banished worked and they expect this game to behave like Banished. No matter what you try to explain to them, no matter how clear you try to make how it differs obvious..... it won't register.

They know right down to the core how your game SHOULD work, when they do something they already have decided exactly what should happen as a result.... if the game doesn't deliver that, then the game is poorly made, that features need to be changed until the results deliver EXACTLY what was expected, or the game just isn't fun.... until the game is redesigned to just be exactly like whatever game they've come here expecting, then everything will just be wrong. The problem isn't their expectations, the problem is the game is clearly buggy.



Those types of examples should fall under the cut off point of spending development time redesigning features and adding new ways to exposure things clearer. There's really no hope for such cases and it's just one of those things that will always be there.

 

Lots of good changes here! Excited to get back in the game.

 

One of the random names for a fishperson-based cult must be "The Cyän Bivälve Cult."

 

Is it me or does 'Cook Basic Food' not automatically turn wheat into bread? It has bread in its icon, This might be confusing for players. It worked when I gave a separate order for bread.

 

Bread was removed from the basic food rotation so as not to starve the brewery at the time. Hard to make beer when the wheat is all going into the oven.

 

Got me a script error! Wooo!
something to do with serving drinks. I have had it happen twice so far in this particular game.

Also, loading a save game makes the schedules revert to default. at least according to the AI.

 

Played a round until crash again. Quite stable. until the crash. crashed while giving a butcher order on some beatles...
I still have some problems keeping cooked food in stock.

 

Well, I'm getting this
and then this

so I said yes, sure why not? Freedom of Religion in my colony.
Now some of them dress up and go to their church/temple whatever you call it

When I build a chapel for the Cog worshippers, Leslie claimed the chapel for himself (but I gave it to someone else with seminary training). Would be interesting to see what would happen if I didn't though.

P.S. Is anyone else getting the issue where you cannot cancel landmine placement orders?

 

Wow, you actually pulled it off... I guess everything aligned perfectly somehow. And they have robes now? I must make this happen.

How big did your cult get? I'm sure at least three members since that always triggered the shrine request.

 

They switch to robes when the go worship at the shrine and go back to normal clothing in between. Not sure of total number of shriners, For sure the founder, an overseer, and a militia soldier. An interesting thing is that my Vicar will occassionally attempt to convert a cultist.

Maybe this will help/maybe not. I had:

• insufficient sleep facilities
• was friends with fishpeople (drives madness up for some colonists, ie the cult founder Leslie Rivet, kitchen overseer, had "Fishy Behavior" trait)
• no chapel built (which decreases cults besides alcohol)
• little alcohol production

P.S. do your items get merged/confused sometimes? My colonist is trying to mine stone with her cornaxe

Also, is anyone else getting their people frozen in place? I had a frozen starving Vicar stuck after praying over a grave, and another farm worker starved to death right at the exit of my chapel. and days later it happens again, with 3 people stuck in church and later, same thing happens

Furthermore, managed to catch a pic of the elusive land dragon as well as a French vs Fish battle

 

• I never build sleep facilities
• I never start a game unless I roll at least one fishy colonist
• Always make friends with fish people, then eventually slaughter dozens for madness and fish guts to study
• Never build a chapel (When I DO finally form a cult again, I will build one and make a cultist a vicar)
  
• Never produce a single drop of alcohol
• Purposely force mass mining parties to dig for artifacts
• Force periods of starvation.
• Do all kinds of science.

Believe me, what you have there is miraculous, treasure it.

 

I made the mistake of raiding and foraging two bandit camps. Somehow my two maddest got hold on alcohol or something and returned normal. Talk about disappointing.

 

maddening even

 

Not really worth a suggestion thread to ask, so is there any chance we could get a "Quit to Main menu" option any time soon?

The only options being to close the game fully is quite annoying at times.