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Some Gameplay depth suggestions

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unmerged(261635)

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Feb 2, 2011
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I'm really liking agoD right now, but there is a bit of depth lacking in some of the current gameplay features in my opinion. I have some fairly realistic (I think, at least) suggestions:

Mechanics
* Happiness: Other than the speed of dwarflings arriving, happiness doesn't seem to affect anything, while it's seemingly one of the more important features. Why not have Happiness affect things like: Worker speed, Military effectiveness, Farm production, etc. The current values could be default, but anything over 'unhappy' could give a slight bonus.

* Happiness (2): In concordance with pt1: There seems to be no bonus to having maxed out happiness. Perhaps full happiness could reduce the need for sleep/food (or increase the Energy/Hunger bar of all dwarves)

* Happiness (3): In concordance with pt1: Full or 'good' happiness is fairly easy to achieve by just tricking out one room, regardless of how giant you make your fortress. Perhaps along with the level of your dwarves, the area dug out vs the amount of decorations placed could relate to happiness increase/decrease somehow. I don't know if there's a variable that tracks 'functional' (ie: a room with at least one bed/table/scholar table/throne/farm) vs 'empty' rooms, but it seems kind of silly that all my dwarves are super happy with my fort that spans several levels and hundreds of blocks when all I've done is trick out the throne room and the upper level dining room with some wood plaster and slapped a few paintings around. The bigger the fort gets, the more happiness you'd need to maintain the same level, a happiness 'upkeep'. If you're 20 levels deep in a big fort, your dwarves might start wanting to see a few stone statues or some tourmaline walls for their efforts!

* Lighting: It seems like this is already somewhat under consideration in the latest dev vid, but perhaps well-lit rooms could receive a bonus to effectiveness: dining tables feed dwarves faster, beds grant slightly better sleep, etc.

Room Types

Right now it seems like you only need a few room types, and later levels (I'm not that far in yet) don't seem to expand on that other than digging limitations. Agod takes a lot of cues from Dungeon Keeper, and it had a bunch of room types thatwere not directly related to dungeon functionality, but were stilll useful. Examples somewhat adjusted for agod:

* Treasury - Passive boost to storage capacity for all chests built in a treasury (Implement this with a 'Vault door'?)

* Casino - Let dwarves spend time, but lose their pocketmoney that goes to your coffers as wealth with occasional jackpots won which reduces your wealth, but temporarily gives a big happiness boost. (Implement this with roulette tables/slot machines?)

* Jail - Add option to 'knock out' instead of kill enemies, and Mil. Dwarves interrogate prisoners for map info / chance of converting enemy to your cause. Mil dwarf level doing interrogation determines success of map info vs conversion. The downside here is that mil dwarvs spend time dragging knocked-out enemies to the jail, you have to manage jail capacity, and outbreaks are possible (why did you place wooden fences for orcs?!)

* Apothecary - Consumes rare metals and stone (or perhaps requires specific herbs planted in fertile ground, rather than food stuffs), but dispenses one-time health potions which dwarves imbibe instead of dying. Sort of like a get-out-of-death card.

None of those are really critical to your fortess functioning and you can well do without, but if you decided to invest in them, they would provide your dwarves with some interesting benefits.
 
In keeping with the treasury idea, maybe it can be expanded into a general concept where 'appropriate' props grant small bonuses as a reward for spending the resources and real-estate to dedicate rooms to a specific type.

For instance, bookshelves granting minor research speed bonuses if placed in proximity to scholar tables or training dummies placed near to trophies/statues lasting slightly longer?
 
The good question is how it would be implemented - Square ratio floor placables? (Like 2x2 pieces or 3x3 ones) that signify a room. Or do we designate rooms on a per tile basis similar to Dungeon Keeper? Tiles change wall and floor decoration.

Love the idea of rooms though - Would love to see private bedrooms for the elite few in my clan. Expert diggers, artisan craftsmen and heroic goblin beheaders.
 
In Dungeon keeper, the floor tile type delineated rooms and upon further reflection this might be hard to implement in AGOD without stripping a lot of customization. Prop-proximity (as per post #3) might be easier to implement in terms of passive bonuses given. In AGOD, custom props could sort of delinate rooms - a nightstand with a bed nearby promotes rest for all beds in its small radius.
It might also require some AI changes as I've noticed dwarves don't really 'choose' beds more than they just pick the closest prop that increases rest: given a chair with +1 rest or a bed with +13 rest, if the chair is closest - they'll go for the chair.

Edit: Alterntively: Select-access doors. You build a bedroom, place a door to the bedroom, and limit access to only dwarves X and Y. To all other dwarves it appears as a locked door and is not part of their 'is there a prop nearby that gives me rest/hunger' logic, and the selected dwarves could 'prefer' the rooms that have doors for which they have access, assuming it's not beyond a given radius (you maybe don't want diggers going up 20 levels to sleep when there's a proper bed nearby)
 
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To continue with the room theme, maybe you can have an agricultural room where you can till your own, dirt only, blocks. For those of us who have OCD, it would be nice to be able to organize our crops more efficiently.

Maybe the drawback is the land is less fertile naturally, which would increase the time it takes for the plants to regrow. Eventually the land would become as fertile as the randomly generated plots.
 
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b0sc02 said:
To continue with the room theme, maybe you can have an agricultural room where you can till your own, dirt only, blocks. For those of us who have OCD, it would be nice to be able to organize our crops more efficiently.

Maybe the drawback is the land is less fertile naturally, which would increase the time it takes for the plants to regrow. Eventually the land would become as fertile as the randomly generated plots.
Click to expand...

A simple solution would be an expensive upgrade wealthwise to fertlisation stones, which allows you to convert 'dirt' blocks to 'fertile' blocks for a wealth cost for each block in its natural radius. And as you said they'd be less effective than natural blocks because the growth cycle takes longer, but become closer-to-natural over time. For example: 1000 wealth to upgrade the stone, and 200 - 500 wealth per dirt block converted to fertile ground.
 
I agree that the happiness system could be fleshed out a lot more than it currently is. Though to me it seems that point 3, about decreasing happiness in larger dungeons, already are in place? I've found myself at max negative happiness trend quite often from expanding my base considerably without adding any decorations - where I get it back to default happiness trend rates as soon as I have decorated the place with floor and wall tiles.

For the room definition system, I only really liked the idea of the treasure room of those mentioned (I always have a sizable storage room anyway!) and maybe the apothecary, but only if it also introduced an alchemist system (alchemists could maybe be an upgrade for workers) and/or the potential to farm herbs. Otherwise room definition isn't a bad idea and could be made useful in several ways (including a potential help for the path-finding system?). However, if only for the sake of a few extra bonuses and efficiency boosts then I personally would be hesitant if not directly opposed to the idea of having it implemented - it needs to have a greater purpose than that.

Another thing that could need an overhaul is the dwarfling system.
Increased cost to convert to a profession the higher level they get and level limitations have been mention in an off-topic discussion here: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?642457-Training-dummies
All good ideas that would likely make most players feel more comfortable about the dwarfling power leveling.

My personal request for improving gameplay at the moment would be a dwarf resource manager that could auto-sell resources that goes past max storage capacity - because really, when you keep hitting 5k+ wood every min in the later stages of a map it gets tedious to manually sell it all the time even with shift-clicking, yet its a need to sell like crazy if you want to afford the rare and expensive resources without digging up the bottom layers or to maintain any larger food and/or happiness producing farms (larger dwarf populations are too exhausting and not fun at the moment because of that).

As I see it the most interesting way to implement this would be to have resource managers unlockable through a high tier tech that let you upgrade researchers further to an Administrator for one specified resource - this way you would need several such dwarfs if wanting to have auto-sell for all resources as well as have a new use for your researchers once they gotten obsolete at the end (more techs, and maybe a tier 5 would be nice anyway though, I get like 50+ leftover points at the end of each map with just two researchers, and I prefer more content over a nerf).

If not wanting them to be a class that behaves like dwarflings with a passive bonus then it could be expanded upon further with stockpiles, assigned with cheap pallets for example, that would act as a temporary small and cheap storage solution (maybe +10 per pallet) for any resources that goes past the ordinary maximum storage capacity that the managers could work with. I don't think the previous idea of resource-specific managers would work well with this however.

A simpler (but less depth boosting) way to implement resource management could be to have it as a possible upgrade for the prince through the influence system.
 
I kind of like the dwarfling system as-is. They consume food and beds with no benefit until you convert them, so they add a drain to your resources. I like the auto-sell idea, but perhaps this can be solved with an extra prop, something like a trade crystal or dock or Market or however you want to implement it. You place a market stall and define what things you want to sell over a certain threshold, and it will auto-sell anything over that threshold. Higher-level Workers/Researchers get better prices than newbie ones, but never over 'normal' market value.

Edit: Also perhaps if you had a properly leveled-up marketeer, you could get better prices for BUYING resource. You'd get the same amount of wealth as normal auto-selling stuff eventually, but you would get discounts buying resources as opposed to manually getting it from Hemfort.
 
It sounds like their is no connection between dwarves actually being near decorative items/statues etc etc and the happiness generated. Perhaps this could be done by having every dwarf occasionally drop invisible 'traffic' seeds every once and a while, say you keep 8 per dwarf in a rolling succession and then do a short range radius check on each one to determine if their was any good decorative stuff around it and you have a good average for how much the decorative items are actually being seen and enjoyed. Have another node each at the last place the dwarf slept, ate, sat or worked to bring those factors in on a permanent basis too. This would be computationally low in cost but give a very good pattern as you would be focusing on your high traffic areas without being forced to decorate miles of low occupancy shafts.

With regard to rooms, I like rooms but only as a means of achieving working assignment controls. Much like the growing stones and defense flags any room worth having should have the labor allocator +/- buttons. The rooms could be based on a constructed furniture like item (like the stones) or just an efemoral and movable marker (like the flag) but the basic concept is the same, they might be a tile-area-drag-rectangle kind of thing like DK/SimCity or just a radius around the marker too.

Current potential rooms include most of the DF things were familiar with, Bedroom, Throne room, Laboratory, Barracks, Dining hall. Treasure rooms might make sense if your able to assign guards too them but are marginal if they will still use the underlying container based storage limit.
 
I like most of the ideas suggested, especially the treasury and the casino. However what I really miss from Dungeon Keeper is "It's Payday"

If there were a casino then we would have to pay our dwarves for working for us, and I'm TOTALLY in favor of that and miss that. I would much rather of seen "It's Payday" as the homage to DK rather than the teleporting, but since it is what it currently is, I'd love to see that we have to pay our dwarves and if we did not then they would leave our fort/kingdom/princedom etc. Adding the need to pay our dwarves adds another level of game to the game in my opinion and when coupled with the idea below in bold, it reduces the micromanagement of having to do so.

ImpalerWrG, you are correct, there is no line of sight between happiness of the dwarves and what is around them. You could essentially build a 2 story room and fill it with the large stone statues and the dwarves would still get happiness from it. I think I like this better than needing a line of sight to happiness items, I think. Not 100% positive but I think it works better than I could see it working with needing a LOS to a happiness item, especially for my digger dwarves that are likely to be away from any happiness producing items for a long period of time.

Like one of the suggestions above, I also made a similar suggestion in the suggestions topic where I should be allowed to set a predetermined amount for each resource and anything that I get over that amount is automatically sold for me to Hemfort so that I don't have to keep going to the hemfort window to sell off 8,900 wood, it becomes tedious very fast.
 
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I would love to see some sort of Treasury/Vault room. Currently you can have your storage chests anywhere, with no need for them to even have access for Dwarves (once they are built that is). If monsters could attack your Treasury and make it important to defend, that would add a great layer to the game.
 
LittleMikey said:
I would love to see some sort of Treasury/Vault room. Currently you can have your storage chests anywhere, with no need for them to even have access for Dwarves (once they are built that is). If monsters could attack your Treasury and make it important to defend, that would add a great layer to the game.
Click to expand...

Very cool idea.
 
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