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Concerns about the game from a new player:

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by milskidasith, Jun 12, 2011.

  1. milskidasith

    milskidasith Guest

    Now, granted, I've only been able to play on one server because of the fact it was, well, the only server working, so these may not hold for all servers. However, I'd like to share my thoughts on the game so far:

    Maps are far too large with far too little inside them. Not only does this make mounting an offense both hard to set up and unlikely to succeed, but there's also far too little going on underground; the respective team's builders are mostly going to sit entirely without interacting with the enemy team, just digging up gold. The map was big enough that it could have reasonably put 40 people on each team without running out of space; the maps should probably be large enough that, by the end of the game, about 50-60% of the map has been dug out, not so that you dig out 2% of the entire massive map if you're particularly unlucky with finding gold.

    Structures are far too powerful and easy to build, and much too hard to destroy. Any sort of "offensive" class really can't do all that much against a passive defense, because it just takes far too long to smash through a wall (even without a wall built so you can jump over it but can't get back up) or doors, neither of which is particularly easy to set up. Just using the resources available within about a screen's width of where you start out, you can easily build a passive defense that is nearly impossible to breach even if all you actively do to defend is to throw out a couple bombs and jump to your death. Only an organized offense, which is hard because they have so much ground to cover without dying, can be stopped in most cases just by outwalling them. I'm sure that on more organized servers, passive defenses aren't quite as strong, but the fact you can reasonably defend your base against anything but the most organized group with maybe a couple minutes of work chopping and digging from a couple builders and a few knights constantly respawning seems off; the game should "work" at all levels of play, not just with exceptionally organized groups.

    There also seem to be some problems with the classes in general. The archer, while great at murdering people, can't really do anything relevant to the objectives of the game besides defend them (or kill people in a group push). The knight can do a bit more, but he's slow enough at breaching defenses (besides bombs) that he seems mostly better for the fact two of then can (reasonably) end a tightly grouped push bu just bombing everything. And of course the builder, who is the only class that can (effectively) attack (by subverting defenses with more buildings), sets up all the extremely strong passive defenses, and is the only class that can effectively help his team achieve victory.

    Then the big problem I see with the game is this: The way the game is designed makes the extremely strong passive defenses, difficulty attacking, and focus on simply digging out more gold almost necessary. Any (effective) offense basically destroys the defenders score and gives it to the side mounting the offense. Combine that with the fact that gold has to be relatively hard to find (or else games end far too quickly), and it's very apparent that if offense was effective, the game would be both extremely swingy, and hard to balance, especially because if both sides were focused on offense, there wouldn't be enough gold entering in the game for either side to win for a long time.

    I like the concept of the game, but I don't think it currently works out all that well in practice; the game is (possibly justifiably?) really focused on setting up a strong passive defense and then sending almost everybody down to go and mine out gold without interacting with the enemy. There are ways to fix it, but my thought is that if the map was much, much, much smaller and the focus was more on stealing enemy gold rather than just finding it hidden in the ground, it could play out in an interesting way because you could use digging to create new routes of offense and subvert the enemy defenses, playing a tactical game of capture-the-gold instead of just digging a lot.
     
  2. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

    Messages:
    3,730
    We're changing the official game mode from gold hunt to capture the flag soon (likely next build if possible), so the focus switches from getting a horde of builders to dig for gold (no fun) while you defend them (kinda fun) to attacking each other's castles in a bid to steal the flag. Gold will be used to produce offensive items (bombs mostly, they might factor into ram and catapult creation too) and thus to win indirectly rather than directly.
    Stealing a flag just seems a lot more climactic than "Well, we dug out a bunch of gold. Sweet, I guess".

    Smaller maps do help (I've made some 256x128 maps in the custom maps thread that are certainly more frantic than the default maps) but we're working on changing the core gameplay to be more fun too :)

    Good observations.
     
  3. milskidasith

    milskidasith Guest

    CTF with gold as a unique "power resource" sounds like a much better plan, and should do a good bit to alleviate many of the problems mentioned. I still feel like the other classes could use a slight bit more utility with regards to getting past passive defenses (walls, doors, etc); maybe if every class could make ladders at 1:1 wood so they'd have some small way to be more mobile, or just more capable of breaking down defenses (or capable at all, in the archers case), it might help out.
     
  4. Furai

    Furai THD Team THD Team Administrator

    Messages:
    3,124
    @milskidasith: out of pure curiosity - maybe you remember the name of the server on which you were playing?