dinelli wrote:Hey!

First forum post, and you can thank Stash for sending me here.

Couple of observations -
1, I've been playing for a year (almost to the day) and this is my first forum post. You guys have a serious problem getting people onto the forums. I think that's probably because it's kinda old technology, things move forward - social media is all facebook and twitter and instagram these days, people have 5 second attention spans, so don't engage in text-heavy forums. I don't know how you fix this.

2, I work in the game industry (have done for over 20 years), $3000 ain't a lot of money, believe it or not. For that, you'd likely get a few quick bug fixes and minor tweaks to existing features. Developing a whole new specialist is likely to take in the order of several man-months (and you'd expect to pay for those at around $8-10k). Not trying to put a dampener on things, just reining in expectations.

Few bug fixes, and minor balance tweaks are all we really need.

3, Talking of funding - kickstarter or gofundme might be options, although I would probably consider donating $5-10 per month on something like Patreon. I don't even care about getting some gold-embossed nameplate or medals. If a game is good, why the hell not pay for a subscription? WoW has millions of subscribers who pay $10 a month (for the last 12 years), clearly it's affordable at that price range. And this is way better than WoW. Maybe have a subscription as L3? L3 = Kudos only, when you stop subscribing you drop down to L2 again.

All those other platforms take a nice cut of the funds. A $10/subscription would work if more people played, but there's what? Something like 4,000 active people? 3% of 4,000 is 120. 120*$7= $840 pre Tax. - Maybe it will work. Maybe it won't. I still think a steam port what be a killer option, but thats also expensive.

4, Specialist stacking.
- I hear a lot above about "stopping stacking" effects, but maybe a better approach would be to make stacking have diminishing returns. For example, Admirals might take you 50% of the way towards x2 naked driller speed (which is frankly plenty). Initial admiral is therefore identical (as you go from x1 to x1.5), but the next one is only a net 25% boost (as you get 50% of x0.5 speed), the third is a net 12.5% etc. So, there's an advantage to stacking Admirals, but it becomes prohibitively expensive to get the gains after the first couple. I speak as a man who's had 5 Admirals (x3.5). Noone can escape me!

Yeah. Something of that nature is obviously the best to go. Stacking in the entire game is strange. And you want stacking, but at the same time you don't. But you already know what I mean.

- Continuing the example, with Kings - first king gives you 1 in 3 bonus (33%), 2nd is 2 in 4 (50%), then 3 in 5 (60%), 4 in 6 (66%, same as current 2 kings), etc. Again, the advantage increases, but to a point where spending two hires to go from (say) 60% to 66% probably isn't worth it.

That's too complicated. A simple fix would be better I believe.



7, Reduced / Zero hire rate for all-but-eliminated players. Again, not keen on this, but fully understand why you've suggested it. I think it'd take quite a bit of playtesting to get the balance right (given you start with 5 bases, does that mean you start with a reduced hire rate??). I don't think it's bad as it is. Your analogy to large country = large army is not quite the same, as the 1-base dude doesn't have a large (driller) army, but he still has a (civilian) populace, and that populace can generate key individuals at a similar rate to any other country. So I'd say leave that alone.

I'd assume it would be something like "if a player has <5 bases at the time of his hire, his next spec interval is doubled".

The analogy works just fine. Its been awhile since I've played Civ, but I referred it to the researching. The larger your nation, the more you can invest in research, and the stronger your stuff is, right?


-Dinelli.

coltspaesano wrote:I think it's a good idea, but I feel that a lot of us aren't really able to commit that kind of money to the game monthly. I, for example (and as a common situation on the forums) am a student. I have pretty limited income (even with two jobs) with most of it dedicated towards post-secondary. I definitely won't be asking my parents for a monthly amount of cash, and I wouldn't be able to commit enough to really make a difference. I don't know the percentages of players that can and can't commit to this, so I think that has to be investigated. Good idea though, I hope it can work

dane69 wrote:AGAIN—get the word out. Right now I am in a game with some pretty reputable folks that have played way more games than I. And when Niv mentioned the potential update in the public chat everyone was clueless. Players are NOT on the forums. We represent a very small percentage of the player base, let's get more people over here discussing and contributing.

marktheshark123 wrote:Another small idea is to turn off/on factories and mines