Things Impire REALLY needs.

[MisterSurreal]

So I've enjoyed the game for the most part so far, but there are a few really big oversights that I think really need to be addressed. I'll make a point here of noting that I'm addressing only gameplay and design elements, because the game for me has been pretty stable, with no major bugs or crashes.

-We really need the ability to demolish rooms and hallways. If we end up with a bad layout, we shouldn't have to restart the entire mission to rectify it. Additionally, it'd be nice to be able to get rid of the initial treasure room, once you build more, because in most missions it's RIGHT NEXT TO THE DUNGEON ENTRANCE. I realize that Cyanide has said they they will not change this, but by Tzeentch they really should. Charge us materials or gold to do it, whatever. Make Dwarf heroes dig towards treasure rooms and Throne Rooms. I cannot think of a single other strategy game of any sort that does not allow you to demolish buildings/rooms.

-We really need doors. Barricades. Anything to slow down heroes, because most missions have your initial treasure room RIGHT NEXT TO THE DUNGEON ENTRANCE. It's ridiculous. So close to the entrance in fact that there's not enough room for a good trap setup. Secret doors with a chance to be detected. Fancy doors to attract heroes. Iron doors to take a beating. Something to help your dungeon survive a wave if for whatever reason your squads aren't up for the task (just got done with a miniboss on hard, for example, and your squads are in bad shape.)

-We really need to be able to mark out patrol routes for our squads. It's irritating having squads wander aimlessly around unimportant rooms when they need to be keeping an eye on the treasure rooms, the first of which is RIGHT NEXT TO THE DUNGEON ENTRANCE. Additionally, Minions on patrol should eat when they move through the kitchen.

-We really need alarm traps, which summon all patrolling minions to the alarm when a hero trips it. Minions on guard mode and Baal protection duty would ignore it, but it'd be great for making more effective use of un-squaded minions in your base.

-We really need a global command for all un-squaded minions to go eat.

Just some thoughts.

 

[unmerged(601299)]

Work needs to be done on the un-squadded. There needs to be some way to group them or something...

 

[Scynix]

Saving and Loading prevents you from having to restart an entire chapter. I don't do it, but I've never (up to 3-4 + a few skirms) been in a situation where something I placed "ruined" my dungeon. Not once.

I agree with doors, if only because of how close the treasure room is to the entrance far too often. However, since beerhalls and monster den's attract heroes away from them, it's less of an issue, they should really put on the tool tip for these structures that heroes will go straight to them. I think it would help a lot of people when building their dungeon.

I don't really care about "marking out" patrols, I do wish I could see the range of their patrol however. I've been able to basically figure out what the range is just by trail and error, but it shouldn't be that hard to figure out.

Don't agree with alarm traps. I never used them in DK, won't use them here. I don't want my minions going to a fight before I have a chance to size up the enemy, and they don't "wander aimlessly", they wander around a central point based on where they were standing when you issued the patrol order. Either issue the order then move them in front of the treasure hall or vice versa, and they'll patrol the immediate area around the hall. They won't wander to the other side of the map.

I personally don't see a need for a command to send single minions to eat. I don't use my single minions to fight off invasions, only to destroy ladders which they don't need a full agg meter to do. They destroy them just fine on an empty stomach.

 

[unmerged(669344)]

The new patch actually lets your minions regenerate aggression up to 50% (according to patch notes) when standing still so guard duty basically. This means its now valid to leave a small group of unsquadded minions as bait and a diversion for heros rather indefinately and along with traps you can set up a good guard position infront of the treasury and have a few minions on patrol to just get rid of ladders. I also agree with doors as that'd be nice to fortify my treasury and give the workshop worker more to do. It'd also be nice if he passively worked on maintaining traps (and doors if they become available) just so I feel he has a reason to always be in the workshop even if it costs a few materials. So maybe that'd be an option you could toggle in the workshop just for to be more efficent and require less micromanagement. A fix that might be better then trying to destroy rooms like in Evil Genius would be to make it so that as long as you have a single treasury your ok. So it doesn't feel detrimental trying to get the 4th and 5th squads because your increaseing how many game over rooms you have. However im sure their are cons with that idea as well that im just not thinking of.

 

[City Builder]

The ability to cancel construction of hallways / corridors before they have started to dig them.

I tried to give Impire another chance after the .2 update but it turned out to be too frustrating.

I tried to build a simple hallway from the one room to the enemy room and found it wouldn't not find any way to connect, so then I tried to start from the enemy room and come back to my own room in my dungeon only to find the game would not let me make a connection so now I'm stuck with blue hallways blueprint lines because I have no way to cancel it.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=128562845

While I understand why they don't allow us to remove rooms once their built (according to pdox rep saying that we might trap in heroes etc, which could be countered with imaginative ideas on how to deal with that stuff, I'll accept that) but to not be able to cancel a hallway when it's not been dug is just well... bad design choice altogether.

To be able to think far enough ahead that removing a built room might trap heroes or allow the gamer to otherwise exploit the game, but to not think that a gamer might have problems connecting up a room shows that not the same amount of thought was given to many of the features as it should have been IMHO.

 

[MisterSurreal]

Seems to me that Ladders would have been a perfect solution to 'trapped' heroes and inaccessible rooms. Have either of those? Heros will spawn a ladder to get to where they want to go. Evil Genius did just this, with tunneling agents popping up in inaccessible rooms to cause havok. Pretty strong deterrence. And you know what? You're an evil overlord. If you can create a maddening inescapable trap dungeon for heroes, that should be a good thing!

Doors would be nice just for the ability to hide workers in rooms from LoS. Ideally I make my hallway to the Throne room without branches, so heroes don't get distracted. Some maps however, that's no so feasible, and heroes will detour to kill workers in a kitchen or workshop. Not game-ending, but annoying. And sometimes you just don't get to the ladders in time, and heroes drop in right next to your treasure room. The defeat condition being just ONE treasure room is fine, just give us some more options for security!

If you don't like to use alarm traps, that's fine, but the availability would not be a bad thing. I like to have my non-squadies trained up and equipped, and they're decent enough at keeping heroes busy until I can teleport a few squads over.

 

[unmerged(141552)]

Several good suggestions here:
http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?668477-User-interface-improvement-suggestions

Also:

Few suggestions, that IMO should improve usability and be easy enough to implement
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.

 

[unmerged(669344)]

Seems to me that Ladders would have been a perfect solution to 'trapped' heroes and inaccessible rooms. Have either of those? Heros will spawn a ladder to get to where they want to go. Evil Genius did just this, with tunneling agents popping up in inaccessible rooms to cause havok.

Their is another thread about ladders and Evil Genius already although I still woulden't mind doors...or maybe some sort of lure traps that can draw heros to them so no matter where heros spawn they will head for the lure first. It'd be nice to have a little more control over these burrowing glorified rats that keep mucking up my dungeon. I dunno if Impire really needs lure traps though its just a thought.

Ive heard the arguement and thought about it needing 'soul' but maybe im spoiled by Evil Genius and Dungeon Keeper where my minions roamed around and did things but on the other hand most of the time it wasn't really entertaining to watch them either so I think thats perhaps people (and myself) are being harsh when they say the game lacks soul. Sometimes it was funny to watch minions go to get healed in Evil Genius but other then that I can't think of a whole lot of 'entertaining to watch' moments in either of thouse two games. So maybe the hallways largely being empty is the problem but then I could make 10 minions and have them patrol to solve that.

I dunno originally when I came to the forum I despised ladders instantly but I was really here because of my steam cloud problem. The more I think about it though I do find Scynix is right to defend the game from some of the arguements against it because the arguements against it feel kind of hollow. Dungeon Keeper 2 was fun but it was a different 'style' and this game has a bit more real-time stratagy mixed in then the dungeon and minion management of Evil Genius and Dungeon Keeper 2. Still I do find the ladders obnoxious and the need to send my minions to the kitchen every couple minutes annoying but these are gameplay issues that can easily be tweaked (and as of the latest patch the aggression has been tweaked) and honestly when Evil Genius and Dungeon Keeper 2 first came out they had problems as well. Dungeon Keeper 2 was downright unplayable (it HATED my video card) and I didn't get Evil Genius until after all the patches.

So what I think Impire really needs is for the developers to fix the major bugs (my steam cloud dependancy being something although I still complain about but from the patch notes its a known bug so yay! the developers are listening) and tweak the key things then come out with DLC to fill in the gaps players want. I woulden't mind buying a new dragon lair room that requires 250 materials to build and like 200 mushrooms to summon the dragon but thats definately DLC stuff.

 

[Zironic]

Ive heard the arguement and thought about it needing 'soul' but maybe im spoiled by Evil Genius and Dungeon Keeper where my minions roamed around and did things but on the other hand most of the time it wasn't really entertaining to watch them either so I think thats perhaps people (and myself) are being harsh when they say the game lacks soul. Sometimes it was funny to watch minions go to get healed in Evil Genius but other then that I can't think of a whole lot of 'entertaining to watch' moments in either of thouse two games. So maybe the hallways largely being empty is the problem but then I could make 10 minions and have them patrol to solve that.

No, you weren't harsh and putting minions on patrol does nothing to solve it. The key to the game having 'soul' is that your dungeon/lair has to actually feel like it is a dungeon/lair and the monsters actually feel like they're monsters. This is the reason that games like Starcraft has individual voice acting and idle animations for all the units, so they feel like more then pixels moving around on the screen.

Still I do find the ladders obnoxious and the need to send my minions to the kitchen every couple minutes annoying but these are gameplay issues that can easily be tweaked (and as of the latest patch the aggression has been tweaked) and honestly when Evil Genius and Dungeon Keeper 2 first came out they had problems as well. Dungeon Keeper 2 was downright unplayable (it HATED my video card) and I didn't get Evil Genius until after all the patches.

Well, the game would get quite a lot less annoying to play if they simply gave us a few keybinds. For instance
A) Keybind to upgrade weapons on all selected minions
B) Keybind to upgrade armor on all selected minions
C) Keybind to teleport all selected minions to cursor
D) Keybind to eat food with on all selected minions
E) Keybind to send all selected minions to training

Though I think the game is fundamentally bad. From the perspective of dungeon design the pre-fab rooms, the useless and boring traps, the number of useless rooms, the teleportation and the fact your treasure room is always next to the entrance leave you with no interesting design choices. From the perspective of RTS the game has no interesting minion micro at all, the minions do their thing and you just have to hope that they're beefy enough to win. Making the game a good RTS or good dungeon builder would require completely redoing the game from the ground up with that in mind.