Home Trending Latest threads New posts Developer diaries

Demolishing rooms and misplaced hallways

Jump to latest Follow Reply
  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Unclean: Thats not right. If I could take Starcraft and Age of Empires as two etalons of RTS (well, others are realy uninportant, such as warcraft 3, I was talking about RTS, not RPG), in both building placement is REALY important. As you are not just using chokepoints, you are creating them. As in later game it not may be in mutch importance, the effect in early game is huge, as you could defend with lesser ammount of units and thus boom more.
 
Colombo said:
Thank you. Could you be even more wonderful and provide us with (if) how your company would tackle the ladder problem?
Would units gain more "freedom"/"free will"/AI? (as non-squaded units are realy hell to operate)
Click to expand...
Few suggestions, that IMO should improve usability and should be easy enough.
1. Add toggle all button. To allow you to set all unassigned units to patrol at once(or run to train), instead of having to set each one separately.
2. Add alert icons for ladders, that would work like the room indicators.
3. Dropped units near ladders should attack them. Right now only units with potrol set will do so.
4. Improve the patrol function to avoid the patrolling units travel in huge stacks, thus unable to take out all the ladders.
 
Last edited:
Colombo said:
Unclean: Thats not right. If I could take Starcraft and Age of Empires as two etalons of RTS (well, others are realy uninportant, such as warcraft 3, I was talking about RTS, not RPG), in both building placement is REALY important. As you are not just using chokepoints, you are creating them. As in later game it not may be in mutch importance, the effect in early game is huge, as you could defend with lesser ammount of units and thus boom more.
Click to expand...
Fair enough. It's just that in dungeon builders the setup of your rooms and halls has a major effect for the entire game, and Impire is definitely taking a page from them. Comparing them to an RTS setup is weird, they're just really different systems.
 
Thoram said:
A room yes, in the management mode, there is a small folding window on the right. You can click on the X in the corner of the window in cue.
For corridors, no.
Click to expand...
I understand why you wouldn't want to allow undoing things, but IMO an option to cancel construction for unfinished buildings is must(corridors inlcuded) this can be accomplished with a context menu with cancel option, which would appear when right clicking the unfinished building on the map.
 
Last edited:
My biggest problem with building is how restrictive hallways and room placement are. If you don't have EXACTLY the right amount of space, you can't place a room. If you don't have a hallway in the right place, you can't place a room. Let's say I have a space that might be big enough that if I put a hallway in the middle, I can place storage rooms on either side of the hallway. So I save my game and try putting a hallway and seeing if I can fit the buildings. Whoops, my hallway was a little too much to the left. Reload and try again.

We should be allowed to "place" rooms before they can be built for the simple purpose of laying things out. They would have their place marker present on the black area but just would not build until you have the right hallways to connect to them. Especially when you can't create hallways that are more than one square wide. If I accidentally extend my hallway half a square beyond what I should have had, it would screw up the entire placement of all of my other rooms across the next layout I was planning.

In Dungeon Keeper, you could empty out an entire cavern as big as you wanted. Building and planning out your dungeon was easy and enjoyable. I find it to be tedious at best in this game. You should be able to mirror flip rooms as well, since rooms like the kitchen are extremely annoying at times to fit well with other rooms.
 
It's unfortunate but if you make a mistake with hallway placement you'll have to work around it. I made a mistake of starting at the opposite end of where I wanted my hallway, and then found out that the game refused to connect my blue (blueprint hallways) hallway with my existing hallway. I can either just leave it there, or I can start over but at the moment it's just a blue outline that I didn't know how to get rid of the last time I tried playing.

I agree that the restrictive nature of the game as far as room and hallway placement is pretty bad. That's what I loved about some other "dungeon" type of games and being able to squeeze in little rooms where I felt I needed them. I said this is a bad mechanic to use (the pre-fab rooms) in the past and now that I've finally gotten to play the game, I stick to my words. It's a bad mechanic that makes the game not have a customized feel to the dungeons at all. When I mentioned it in the past, I was told basically "but you'll get to make your own hallways/cooridors", whoop de-f-do, so now I can make my own hallways but I can't even choose to demolish them if I decide I don't want them and an imp hasn't even started on them yet? Yeah, great! Besides which of the braindead AI and the random ladders it's just pointless to make hallways. The game basically begs you to NOT make cooridors as it's just more space for the ladders to spawn into. Definite poor design choices all around in this game one after another after another.

It's a game that was not well thought out IMO and or didn't have the resources and or ability to execute well.

The only thing I can really say good about Impire is that the graphics are cute, I especially enjoy the vomiting wall man trap. But as we know, graphics/eye candy is only part of the whole of a game it doesn't substitute for poor overall game mechanics/design.
 
Last edited:
Thoram said:
I won't go into details, but we decided early on that rooms shouldn't be destroyed because that could create a lot of problems and exploits (such as trapping heroes, isolating the entrance and such.)
Click to expand...
A major part of the complaint isn't about destroying rooms but planning the dungeon.

The special difficulty in Impire is that you cannot place rooms without corridors.
And if you place corridors first, you cannot see which exact size of space you need to leave so that the planned room will actually fit!

A solution would be to allow placing room "blueprints" on the map without having a corridor connection.
Simple as that.
Corridors are much more flexible so they can easily be placed afterwards to connect the room... so that it's excavation can start.
 
Thoram said:
Let me answer some questions about room building.

1. It is possible to destroy rooms that have not started being dug. Once a pickaxe touches soil, it becomes permanent.
2. The halls are permanent the minute you click the end portion of the hall.
3. It's not planned to make changes to this behavior because this was a design choice from the start of the project and changing it now would require major code changes.
Click to expand...


What about the way the hallway blueprint works, while being placed? It's so restricting how the hallways planner works. Is this how you intended it to be?

Edit: Noticed that my question has already been asked, hope the devs will answer.
 
Last edited:
Unfortunately you are punished for laying out a hallway/cooridor blueprint even though no axe has touched soil, it could mean the difference to placing a room someplace or not having room and having to start over. It's just a plain bad game mechanic that should never have been considered for placement in this game.

I fully understand why (in this game) you would not want to remove rooms already built (for reasons mentioned by Thoram, although let's be honest here Thoram, designs could have been thought up that would counter your reasons if the developers had given it enough thought) but to prevent hallways from being unclickable when no ax has touched soil only makes the game feel less dungeon customizable and more restricted and that's not a good thing (IMO) in a game that says it's part dungeon management part RTS.
 
So because you can't undo your hall placement, that somehow correlates to the game being "less customizable" ?

Save, place, reload if you're having that much difficulty. It has absolutely nothing to do with customization.

You know why I don't reload every time I misplace a hall? Because I just learned what I did/why it's misplaced.

That's how games work, especially strategy games. Trial and error. If you could make the perfect layout every single time you played a strategy game, NO ONE WOULD PLAY THEM.
The games would just provide you with a prebuilt base, there's no point to designing your own dungeon if you can't figure out what works for your method of playing.
 
unclean said:
There's a difference between UI and gameplay duder.
Click to expand...

You're absolutely right. And most of the posters in this thread wants the UI rectified in such a way as to completely remove the trial and error method of learning to build your dungeon.

Don't misunderstand me, I don't really have an issue with being able to clear layouts or any of that, but *I* don't play games because I want to spend six hours staring at a paused design screen. I did that in Evil Genius, and I figured out going with my gut and making mistakes was a better way to play. Trying to solve your own mistakes is part of what makes strategy games fun.

Or have we just completely given up on people learning to be better players?
Don't we already have enough games with no death penalties, no punishment for failing, no negative consequences?
That was all fine and dandy when I was 8, had the attention span of a fruit fly and didn't understand why Midnight Rescue was so hard, but it just doesn't fly now that I'm an adult and I want a challenge. You know what else they could do with the UI? Add a button that wins the chapter for me instantly. That would be the most optimum UI ever designed. Nothing else on the screen, just a giant "Win mission" button.
 
Scynix said:
Don't misunderstand me, I don't really have an issue with being able to clear layouts or any of that, but *I* don't play games because I want to spend six hours staring at a paused design screen. I did that in Evil Genius, and I figured out going with my gut and making mistakes was a better way to play. Trying to solve your own mistakes is part of what makes strategy games fun.
Click to expand...
For sure, I think my favorites moments in these kinds of games is when you screw up and half your base is on fire/exploding. Order is boring.

I just don't think the UI should factor into that.
 
Scynix said:
So because you can't undo your hall placement, that somehow correlates to the game being "less customizable" ?
Click to expand...

Yes Lady White Knight of Impire, it does make it so that your dungeon is then less able to be customized. You place down a hallway that then find out it can't connect, you are now stuck with that blue hallway that you can't remove. That area is now dead area. You can no longer customize (what little there actually is in Impire) your dungeon in the way that you want, so yes, it is less customizable

I don't play by cheating, and the whole - save, oh noes things wents wrong, reload - is a form of cheating to many players and has an actual name for it that most gamers call it, but I won't say it here to avoid offending some of the more easily offended. While I won't use that method as I do consider it to be an authorized form of cheating (i.e. the developers allow you to save and reload to correct your mistakes) I won't oppose people that wish to use that method, but I won't use it.

But the whole point is that not being able to remove hallways that have not been started yet is a lack of foresight on the developers part and I don't believe it was interntionally designed that way at all, I believe it was simply oversight. They decided to make rooms not removable once they'd been built for their stated reasons and nobody thought any further towards removing hallways that hadn't been dug out yet. There is absolutely no reason not to have the ability to remove hallways that have not been dug out yet, it's poor design.

/ignore button found - feel free to hit that button for me too so that you need not read or respond to what I want with your solid white knight attitude.
 
Last edited:
Scynix said:
Or have we just completely given up on people learning to be better players?
Click to expand...
No, but having to hit the perfect half block of terrain while building your corridor so that the room will still fit into the remaining space is not about being a better player.
It's a haphazard building interface.

It's not a decision you're making, no gameplay item. It's a problem of getting the game to build things where you want them.
The decision has already been made at this point! All that's left is fighting it out with the UI... which should not be necessary.
 
The UI isn't forcing you to click a second time. Click once, see if it fits, right click if it doesn't. It's not rocket science.
I do think a lot of the footprints are larger than what we see, which is the real problem, but we should be addressing *that problem*, not using hyperbole to turn it into some ridiculous statement like "the decision has been made for you!". No, it hasn't.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back