Could you add a few de-synth recipes please?

I don't suppose it would take that much time, would it? I think it would improve quality of life a lot if there were some way to get rid of all the trash we collect after a while, and to convert it into more useful materials. At the very least, a few recipes to turn pistols and muskets into planks or ingots or scrap or something. That would also solve the problem of me getting frustrated that my army never picks up the shiny new revolvers or carbines that I make.

 

hmm not sure it's quite worth the time to add at this point. Not really finding raw resources 'rare', and the military stuff should be addressed in the very near future once the barracks UI stuff comes into place hooked up to some of the new scripts I believe?

I could understand if there was some kind of blocker or balance problem that's coming from having certain things just sat around, but personally I've never really found that to be the case and instead I'm easily able to be swimming in 200+ produced planks/bricks and still have 100+ raw wood/clay, and once you get a single mine going iron stops being a problem and it all slots into place, the problem with iron is just finding a source for it to build a mine, and then needing a way to make iron first before you can build a mine shaft to extract iron.... hopefully that little detail will actually get addressed as it's quite common to get maps generated that have little to no iron surface nodes remotely close to your colony, so forcing a requirement of iron to be able to extract sub-surface sources of iron is a bit of a oversight.

In terms of military If anything military at the moment are actually too effective even without finer control on upgrading their equipment.

 

Yeah i could reliably fend off the stahlmarkian invaders several times in a row with only 2 fully staffed squad (inept to middling) with basic weaponry + the 5 prestige squad. And i fight in the open since i don't want them to come any where close to my colony so no gabions or anything. Even if I took heavy losses each time (usually the 5 prestige squad is wiped clean since i put it on the first line)
Of course i also had the help from novirus. but i don't really know how much that helped.

Then again that event is pretty mean, some games i never had it, some other i have it as early as day 16.

 

Would it take that long? It's not like any new art assets or animations would have to be made. The icon could just be a gun with a recycle icon over it, and the animation could be the generic workbench animation.

 

That's good, IMHO. Plenty of war games out there already; I'd rather have a logistics game. I was really sad when Gnomoria got taken over by the military and all the fun unique stuff stopped being important.

 

There's a difference however between something being a main focal point of the game, and something being pretty pointless to have due to its insignificance and mind numbingly straight forward it is to set something up that's too effective with little effort or involvement required.

It's never the "Black or White. No other way for it" situation you suggest has to be the case, where the game is either:

A "War game" by having a military/combat system that has a single ounce of significance to getting it set up beyond just "Make 2 groups and win"

or

A "Logistics game" by essentially being better off development effort wise not even bothering to have any kind of military/combat mechanics in place and instead just give the player the 'Win' troop resources automatically with no input or interaction from the player and maintain it for them without the player ever having to do anything about it except 'win' (AKA The Zenimax|Bethesda approach to game design).

 

I see your point about there being a continuum. However, I'm so bored of combat in games that I routinely play Dwarf Fortress with invasions turned off, so obviously I'm at a rather extreme point on it. If we must have military engagements, which I suppose we must for flavor reasons, I'm happy to have them as abstracted as possible.

 

Cool, that'll work too, though it seems like it might not be implemented for a while. One thing about trading - while it is a good gameplay mechanic, I am reminded about something that happened in Banished regarding the trading mechanic. Basically, firewood was so efficient to produce, and so valuable a trading commodity, that the best way to play became to mass produce firewood, sell it, and then trade for everything else. It made most forms of food production obsolete.

Hopefully you guys can keep that in mind when doing the balancing passes.

 

Combat in games like this can get boring or pull you from what you'd actually like to be getting into, but perhaps a good question to throw out there is:

How could CWE make combat interesting again whilst blending in with the other areas of the game rather than standing around isolated from them?

Rather than:

How can CWE avoid or downplay the significance of combat?


For example if it's in the area of logistics, perhaps military reactions to situations and planning defences is much more automatic with the player having a hands off role in such things, but to avoid your military getting slaughtered even with larger troop numbers the key factor is a strong and sustainable logistics backbone... better equipment, consumable supplies for your defensive outposts/towers, bringing combatants back up to fighting shape quickly between engagements to avoid morale or sanity issues and so forth.

The player role in combat/military areas doesn't really need to be in the combat itself for it to hold significance it could be entirely logistical, or initial strategic planning, or a number of possible ways.

The key questions are more those that help give some insight into those possible ways that appeal more to people actually drawn to this games concept to keep them interested in the combat side of things without it feeling alien to the rest of the game.

 

Only thing I feel I'm getting unnecessarily bogged down with at the moment is clay, so would love brick fences as an alternative to gabions.

 

I know I read somewhere that other forms of walls, with various properties, were in the hopper. Stone walls were explicitly mentioned.

 

I wish some airships came to exchange goods with my colony (kinda like the DF caravans)

 

I quite like the way CWE handles military so far. I don't have to micromanage it, just give them broad orders, and the combats are quick and lethal.
Pretty much all of the combat system hinges on your planning (defenses, equipment, training, logistics etc) rather than actually playing war.
If your military component is solid, you can mostly leave them to their devices and they'll take care of the threats by themselves in most cases.
Also the consequences of war are quite hurtful even after the battle, be it the rotting corpses attracting beetles, the wave of insanity that follow a quick succesion of violent deaths, the mobilisation of a significant part of your population for X amount of time.

All of this truly become apparent when you face a united bandit attack or a foreign military attack.


By the way having an interesting military gameplay is what the Anno series almost always failed to do, because it's totally detached from the core gameplay of the games. If the military part of Anno games was more about planning and logistics as the rest of the game, it could have been truly interesting.

 

One added thing Clockwork Empires has over other examples is thing like trade can actually have some sense of connection through the overworld and can perhaps allow for you to be much harsher with the value depreciation as resources become over abundant.

So having a colony in one biome region that has a over abundance of wood may help that colony early on through trading that back to the empire in return for food, but it could actually feed into a consistent 'Empire economy' on the overworld level so the empire as a global entity ends up having lots of wood.

If you then start a second colony in a biome with fewer sources of raw wood and establish trade you would find wood is valued much cheaper in order to bring into the colony but food values extremely high, so there could be strong incentives to actually establish many colonies across differing biomes and to have them feeding different resources back into the larger economy to support each other.

All sorts of really cool and interesting doors something like that would open.

To support more 'single colony focused' playstyles there could also be non-empire markets that act as a more neutral market not so tied to a persistent overworld economy but with smaller (or more tightly focused) stock, or perhaps with reduced return ratios.

 

I like the dwarf fortress approach to trade. A caravan (or airship in our case) comes our way every so often but remains a rare event. You can request goods but you'll get them only the next time the caravan comes your way (in dwarf it's a often at least a year iirc which is long) and the caravan wont have everything you want and won't trade you for everything you have.

This asynchronous and asymetrical trade system would fit perfectly into a game like CWE since it would greatly increase the sense that you're far away from the empire. I guess airship frequency and amount of goods they can carry would also depend on your distance from the empire (so Antipodea would have better trade routes than Sogwood for instance)

This could also tie in nicely with what Tikigod suggests

 

Sim Farm modelled changing commodity prices, Tropico games do this too. Since colonies mostly produce commodities and so operate as price takers, this could be modelled simply by having fluctuating prices. This creates an incentive to diversify and be self-sufficient (in Sim Farm this was also used to implement the cool mechanic of futures trading).

Trade caravans and airships might also find themselves blockaded by wars between the major powers, like how you could be embargoed in the Tropico games.