Build 963 - Crash fix, Anti-Doorspam, Helpful Tips

A few quick changes, a crash hotfix and a bit of under-the-hood work in preparation for some admin changes next week.

• Doors require at least one adjacent solid tile
  This means that doors have to be constructed “sensibly”, potentially marking the end of the era of “door fort best fort”. RIP.
  Here’s how the densest possible 4-direction-passable door fort looks now - significantly less nice to maneuver in, more annoying to construct, and consumes more material per block between the enemy and your flag. We’ve made a point of being careful of getting in the way of sensible building - the doors will take 10 seconds of wobbling before collapsing so you can still put down both doors before the wall above if you’re a fan of doing so.
  
• Builder menus have context sensitive help info in them
  Perhaps a bit late, but with another wave of steam users from KAG being the daily deal this should help new players get up to speed quickly with what does what. It’s not particularly pretty but that’s life. Hopefully this means less “what does X block do?” and “How to build workshops?!”
  
  
  
• Crash fixWhen exiting to the menu, occasionally (often?) the lighting algorithm would try to access the objects that had just been removed. Hopefully this helps with crashing in general as it may have happened in a few other circumstances as well.

Full Changelog:

[fixed] saw button not always popping up
[modified] potential fix for bug #1213 Lines or "Strokes" in the
water - vertex coordinates are offset a little to compensate
for ugly scaling/rounding on some graphics cards
[fixed] 1303: +1 username bug removing "s" on names
[added] Ej "Rasmus" head, congrats
[fixed] mook heads are wrong
[modified] doors require adjacent solid tile or they collapse in 10 seconds (anti door spam)
[added] per-tile description of tiles in builder inventory
[modified] saw costs 100 stone as well as the wood cost
[added] keys cannot be overlapped and cannot use system keys (tab,chat,function,home)
[fixed] debug video recording not saving report after exitting game
[fixed] crash in map lighting
[fixed] cc_key being overwritten on game start

Have fun!

Max/Geti

Original DevBlog post.

 

is this game offline, because every time i connect to a server it automatically disconnects.

 

good to know that i cant anymore use R as action3 because it is reserved by nothing


edit: autohotkey refuses to work too ;;

 

Woo! Congrats Ej :D

Pst, what does it look like ingame?

Oh god. Fuck me. This is like, the worst possible way you could have tried balancing the saw, in my opinion.

Except being able to assign multiple actions to a single key can be useful, unless this means something else.

 

It's an owl head that actually looks like an owl head:

 

Oh shit, that is fucking sweet XD

 

Not a very useful opinion when you don't give arguments as to why. I think it's a good change, any deterrence to saw usage (and therefore wood spam) is. Even if you like saws this hardly makes saws nonviable.

 

Because the best solution is to make saws give less wood. All this does is make it impossible to make saws in the end game when stone is out. Not only that, but 100 stone?! 25, 50, sure. But the same cost as a tunnel? That's insane. People already waste time not making millsaws in the beginning of the game so we can have wood to make needed shops, now if they forget to use the 100 stone at build time for saws (Which, btw, should be used for something else, like DEFENSES. And don't get me started on crappy mill-traps) then we'll have no saws at all once the match starts.

Or what about when I do the sensible thing and make a couple saws, but some noob tosses them in a trap? Now it's a wasted wood generator being used as a crappy trap again. I'd get it out but I'm more likely to fall in and die, not to mention the wasted time grabbing it again and the likelyhood that the same noob will curse and put it back in his useless trap when I've walked away.

This is really the worst change to saws I've seen yet. Just nerfing the amount of wood they give would have been a good change.

 

all defenses you need actually cost less than 200 stone in total lol

e: you can make them out of wood too

 

If you think a wooden wall will hold back any decent knight, let alone protect your flag... you're wrong. And there's no way builders who mine stone will make saws because "stone is for doors and spikes and walls lol" and emphasis on the spikes. I have little faith in the ability of steam newbies, especially when it comes to using millsaws correctly.

 

well i also use knights to deal with knights but if you want to do it the hard way...

 

saw traps are great

 

Saw traps are terrible. These are the reasons why. (I have adjusted them for the changes in saws as well as of this build.)

1. Saws and their traps are fucking expensive. Three trap blocks is 75 stone, and a saw costs 100 stone now too.
2. They're only three blocks wide, so they're easy as fuck to jump over, and even if placed at the closest to the base of a tower as possible, I can still slash jump up a wall and bounce off it if I don't make the jump without falling in the trap.
3. They're only THREE BLOCKS WIDE. Let me reiterate that again. You need at least 6-7 blocks for many enemies to fall in. If you make your saw trap wider, congratulations because it's now even MORE ludicrously expensive.
4. Now that the cost has been increased for saws, people who put them in traps waste their true use as a way of quickly gaining wood resources. Guess how many people say "oh look there's exactly one saw at the base, better put it in a trap"? Too many to count. If people were smart and grinded a bunch of wood and mined stone to make their own saws, this wouldn't be an issue, but people are stupid.
5. The only people who die to saw traps are noobs, whether knight, archer, or builder. And those people usually aren't helping their team out as a knight or archer anyway, they just feed the enemy free coins on death (Because their combat skills are utterly terrible). And a saw kills them without giving coins to your own team.

TL:DR, now saws are a colossal resource dump for your team, wasted by noobs, still waste coins that a dead enemy would have given, still give obscene amounts of wood resources, and still have balance issues.

Realistically, if you want to keep saws the way they are, you should give whoever made the saw 10 coins for every enemy that it kills. I'd actually think, given it's new expense cost, that this would be a great solution. Then, even if it's being wasted as a trap, you see a little notification everytime it kills someone (Much like if you buy a keg and pass it to an ally and it explodes giving you the coins) and you get a constant supply of coins throughout the game whenever moron enemy knights fall into your stupid little saw trap.

 

so now the saw traps bomb jumpers hilariously landed in cost +100 stone along with the stone costs of trap blocks, the obvious solution would be to limit how much wood you get from saws or how fast trees grow... making saws cost stone is shit

Doors are now hilariously under powered now, now with one well placed bomb stone doors can be voided because the doors fucking fall...

> Decisions
> KAG Devs
> 2013
>The Movie

 

I can make a good saw trap. Steam noobs cannot. The trick is putting a block two space away from the trap so enemies have to hop over it and they fall into the trap. Everyone just spams flat surfaces.

I'm glad Arcrave gets the fucking point. By bomb jumpers though, are you referring to your own teammates? Because obviously killing enemy bombjumpers is actually a good thing.

You already can't even grab an enemy saw trap. What are you talking about "turning it against them" that was never doable in the first place.

 

I think that anti-doorspam system is good but-

- let us place doors like that, 2 doors on one normal block.



- or like that


- or like that.

In my opinion it would really make it better.