Pretty quiet in here from the devs. Just curious what kind of morale yall have and what kind of stuff will be done to the game from here. I can understand if nothing else is coming, I can understand if tons more is planned. I have no clue what kind of impact a less than warm release has on rebounding later on for sales numbers. Not sure if it is possible to have the reviews it has and to be able to recover enough to justify sinking months or even years into it from this point. I truly don't know, but I am curious as to what is left for CE. Like I said in the last post I left here after yall released it, people who are leaving negatives are still playing solid hours before leaving those negatives. I wish steam would add a neutral review to the options. A huge chunk of reviews that are left as negatives are really neutrals, but they leave it as negative since neutral always feels closer to bad than good in the perspective of most people. Id be curious to know how many copies of the game were sold also if that isn't private, or at least a formula for steam if a game has X reviews it sold Y copies. I am sure it varies from game to game, but I would assume 8-10% of people review a game on average? Just a wild guess. Regardless of what goes on from here, I had a lot of fun playing CE, despite wishing it had more end game/purpose to play late game. I truly feel like that should be the biggest priority if the game is going to be worked on, if you can keep the buggy feeling from getting any worse, but add late game content I think people would be extremely excited about it, it just seems pointless to push past the first cult survival or building everything. Once you do that it is just like watching a movie again, and it was a bit lacking of control of your colonists. Rimworld has a similar setup to DF or CE as far as the way work gets done, but they did one great thing where you can just right click a pawn and send them to do a job instantly, it makes rimworld instantly twice as good as it would be if you couldn't do that. If there was no option to do that, rimworld would but pretty frustrating. I almost wonder, had yall decided to go with a 2d topdown view similar to rimworld or DF or prison architect (or theres a new game called another brick in the mall, they took that view and just blew up the faces of people, it works really well and I could see that working in a 2d version of CE really well with the characteristic changes when people go into despair) how successful the game would have been, it would have killed a lot of the great artwork obviously, but it would have been far easier to program I assume and you could have added a shit load of more events. I would honestly like to see this project turned into a 2d top down project after this is done, I think the cult stuff would work really well (I stumbled across a mod for rimworld where it adds cults, its called cult of chtulu I think, and I wouldn't be shocked if this game had a bit of influence on it) I feel like the 3d made a lot of the problems for this game just because of the difficulty of programming stuff... Most of the bugs I recall had something to do with things not "snapping onto a 3d grid correctly?" (I'm not a programmer, but a ton of the bugs I saw were floating items, building related, the flattening terrain etc) Also, though the graphics were excellent in this game, if you have good mechanics, good story line and good events people don't really care for graphics in this genre. I hope to see Gaslamp hit a home run though, you guys are great and deserve it. Just don't lose the communicative nature yall have had during CE and you will always have fans and support from that. I will buy any game yall release in the future (unless yall decide to make a Princess Fairy Cupcake Bakery Pretend Play World or something even dumber sounding) I have tried to turn people onto CE, I have def sold a couple copies to friends for yall, and def had some friends say no cause of the reviews, though reviews should be looked at with a formula, like always consider 1/3 of the negative reviews to be positives, since people just love to leave negatives so they feel smart. (people are dumb though - I was looking at reviews for factorio and it has like 24k positives and 200 negatives, and someone posting comments on the negatives saying "ty for this review, you saved me from buying this game"- jee, great dipshit, you let one of the 200 talk you out of what the 24,000 told you was a great game)
According to Steam Spy there is between 15k and 20k owners of the game on steam. Which is not a lot. Of course the game just got officially released but the EA has been around for quite some time. You can compare those numbers to Rimworld, in the same genre (DF-likes), which has about 450k owners on steam. Even more low-key DF-likes such as gnomoria have 200k+ owners (but unlike rimworld this one has been around for quite some time now). (PSA : be careful with the numbers! Those are estimates only, and owners don't directly translate to sales. Any attempts at estimating revenue from owner numbers in steam spy is fortuitous!) As with most Early Access games, you have to find and convince your audience that the game is good during the Early Access, then build the hype. 1.0 being the crowning of your achievement. (see Prison Architect) If the game still did not find its public after hitting 1.0, there's sadly little hope (as updates slow down and as there probably won't be any more major overhaul to the engine/gameplay/content etc.) As a player of both Rimworld and CWE, it's hard for me to nail what rimworld did well that CWE did not. After all rimworld has barebone gfx, a developer UI, not a lot of content etc. If you look on the surface, CWE should be superior in every aspect. But in truth, Rimworld just plays better. Everything go quickly and efficiently, you can act on every issue without (much) delay, the releases so far have been very stable despite being labeled "alpha". Another thing being the mix of details/abstraction and randomness allows the game to generate tons of weird/fun stories which are not scripted in the slightest. I for one, despite following CWE for years, hope that Gaslamp move on to another project soon enough, and use their mad genius on a new game, hopefully with glorious 2D graphics.
I absolutely LOVE this game. Problem is the terrible, very long lag and crashes start coming after I reach a certain point. I have tried to keep playing by limiting population, limiting number of items in stock and limiting things built. Nothing seems to work. After about 200 days in, no matter how conservative I keep a game it either starts to lag so bad that it takes a colonist 5 minutes to walk 10 squares or I crash constantly. I would LOVE to keep playing this game. Even if there were no plot arcs or anything interesting. I just love gathering/building games. And this has been a problem from the first game where I learned to play and didn't get wiped out. I have just started new games. In harder bio domes with the hardest load out. Different angles to what I was doing. But that has played itself out. I am on Christmas vacation and was looking forward to some lovely uninterpreted playtime. But the game I have now, where I finally got to where I could produce the resources to make Steam Knights, won't run for more than two minutes without crashing. And I have to *Not* click on anything in those few minutes. I keep posting my games and .dmp files, but I have had no word back.
I am going to start a new game and see if I can overcome the end game issues. But I can only imagine this will be my last try at this game until some improvements are made with the crash/lag issues.
I would definitely not mind seeing a new project from Gaslamp Games. They're games just have got that something, which no other games have. I do not know what that something is, but I do know that I like it very much. At the same time I feel like Clockwork Empires has got some untapped potential. Of course, making games is never just about the games themselves. Sales are also important. And I'd prefer seeing a new game from GG to seeing no game at all. And if another GG game means more music from Matthew Steele, I'm definitely in.
I'm far from an expert but if I had to guess, I'd say the "acting on issues" has much to do with direct control we have in Rimworld (even tho it's temporary). It's very annoying to lose colonists in CE because they wandered in the wrong direction, chased an eldritch horror while punching it or because you can't easily order soldiers to go somewhere and defend a place / patrol - you rally them somewhere and 5 seconds later they get bored and go back to doing push-ups on the stockpile. Depending on (relatively bad) AI leads to frustrating losses that you feel weren't really fair.... and the fact that we can't build walls and defended settlements like in Rimworld, funneling attackers instead of getting attacked from wherever, with no strategic defensive locations, doesn't help. However I agree I'm curious what happens now. I love Dungeons of Dredmor and even with all it's flaws, CE is one of the dearest base builders to me, both because of its theme and because of some very innovative (I'd say groundbreaking) new mechanics (I still think that work crews is a genius approach to managing bigger number of colonists). I'd love to see it expanded.
Sorry to say, this is also my experience. (Not so much the lag, but definitely the crashes). Every time I feel like I'm starting to get ahead, the game becomes unstable, and eventually reaches the point where it crashes within a minute or two of reloading. Every time an update comes out I give it another try to see if THIS is the time I can actually start experimenting with stuff like Steam Knights and aristocrats, and every time... nope. Also, the bugs where components shown as prereqs for building an item aren't the actual prereqs, so I just have to churn out lots of everything in the hope that I'll eventually satisfy the prereqs by accident. This isn't game-stopping but it's particularly frustrating because it seems like it should be so easily avoidable by using a single source of truth for both 'display' prereqs and actual build prereqs. I keep trying because as long as the game IS working, it's a lot of fun. I enjoy the atmosphere, I like building games, I like that it gives me a lot of influence over how combat-heavy I want the game to be. But... I can has stable game nao, pls?
To build your items, look at the recipes on the module that will build the item. That is reliable. But if you have things "stuck" in your inventory, you will have to ignore those amounts. I once had a number of copper pipes and plates stuck in my inventory list and couldn't count them when make the components for a new item because they weren't really there.
