Incline Colony Ship RELEASE THREAD

[Beans00]

So Colony Ship was the last good game that I have played.

If you think this pile of shit was good, you must not have played many good RPGs.

 

[axedice]

An incredible game, so first of all thanks Vault Dweller , Elhoim and the team, for keeping the bar so high under these circumstances. I haven't been able to follow the progress of Iron Tower in the past couple of years, I know you will not be releasing AoD2 due to how the first one was received so that's a bummer, but I sincerely hope CS will provide you with the necessary funds to keep on developing games.

While the game is amazing overall, there are a some places to improve as well. However, the character system is not one of them. Feats on leveling and skill gains on use with a wide variety of builds and items to complement them, is one of the best ones I've seen in an RPG. Truly well done. The overall story and writing are also exceptional, as expected from an Iron Tower game.

I think the weakest point of the game is exploration. I can understand that climbing, squeezing and crawling etc. animations can be expensive to implement, it might have been better to remove those obstacles altogether for a better feeling of exploration, maybe except for the ones with difficult encounters afterwards. Regular obstacles on the map that teleported you to the other side are certainly boring. And the graphics are kind of weird sometimes. While the overall quality is good, textures are somehow blended together when you zoom out, so it is difficult to see an underpass from a wall sometimes, however this is not the case when you zoom in.

I have mixed feelings about the factions and their motivations though. Especially compared to AoD. I'll quote from Marat from the other topic

AoD had two parallel storylines, the one of whichever faction you aligned with and the one with the temple, whilst CS has just the one - and it is centered on a piece of technology that's the be-all, end-all of the setting. You get considerably less variance over the course of the story compared to AoD. You always visit the same locations and see largely the same things in them, when AoD showed you different storyline in each of the major cities and you could observe and influence events unfolding from different perspectives - a feature CS sorely lacks. I can't help but think it is what AoD would be like if you only had the quest for the temple.

I think a strong sense of involvement is lacking from the factions. In AoD , it was easy to play the part of a trader, a soldier, operative of a noble house etc. due to the initial story hooks and they got even better with possible betrayals later. Here, all we have is assholes that you meet halfway through the game, trying to uphold power with bankrupt ideologies while sacrificing their minions. I can see the grim appeal of reality here, as history and present is pretty much the same and the future of humankind will quite probably be the same as well. However, none of the factions offered a compelling reason to really ally with them, unless you're roleplaying as a caricature fascist, librul or religious nut. I agree with Marat here that the story would have progressed better if the factions were implemented earlier, with varying quests that bind your fate to theirs.

Overall I had a great time playing the game, trying to figure out the combat system and learning the history and mission of the ship. Hopefully we will get other games likes this in the future.

 

[Vault Dweller]

However, none of the factions offered a compelling reason to really ally with them...

You aren't allying with a faction as you're nobody but selling the machine to the lesser evil (or whoever strong arms you into selling the machine to them).

I agree with Marat here that the story would have progressed better if the factions were implemented earlier, with varying quests that bind your fate to theirs.

AoD was focused on the factions at the expense of everything else. Most side locations were very small and had a single point of interest/interaction as we didn't have time to do more.

 

[thesecret1]

You aren't allying with a faction as you're nobody but selling the machine to the lesser evil

That's the same thing for all intents and purposes. You pick a faction and help it to victory by running missions for it and fighting for it, while locking yourself out of content with the other factions. That the MC's motivation is just money or choosing the lesser evil (supposedly - player's motivation is unknown by definition) is irrelevant.

 

[Vault Dweller]

That's the same thing for all intents and purposes. You pick a faction and help it to victory...

That's generalization. Details matter. The way you join a faction in Gothic, for example, is different from the way you join (and later play for) in Morrowind or Tyranny.

Anyway, in AoD you join a faction and work your way up. In Colony Ship you remain an outsider and most tasks are related to assembling and delivering the machine, but not really working for the faction.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

In AoD the factions were the people you came across and the different projects they represented, while in CS the factions were the ideologies put forth by each one as political philosophical propositions, embodied to varying degrees and imperfectly by faction members. As a game design concept this is certainly the more difficult approach, as it's difficult to make the player care about philosophical abstractions, in general. The best ever game to do this, imo, was Alpha Centauri, not technically an RPG, but still an RPG in all ways that matter. Each faction in that game embodied its ideology fully(how they built, produced, waged war, how they treated their subjects and the planet and so on), with a perfectly internally consistent worldview emerging from the style of gameplay.

While in AoD the different factions also offered different playstyles, in CS the factions stand towards each other in nearly perfect symmetry, with the varied approaches in gameplay in the various quests and locations not usually linked to the the player's faction. There are advantages to this, but what, then, is supposed to guide the player's identification with a certain faction other than some kind of moral bias(and the desire to see another ending if you're replaying)? Furthermore, each faction is meant to represent the "extreme" version of a reasonable idea: order, liberty, transcendence(and "pessimism", I suppose, if you hand it over to the machines), so they're not even meant to be compelling moral choices, only lesser evils.

 

[jaekl]

Ok what's the most op character build in this? Don't show me a guy that talks a lot or I will be upset with you.

 

[lukaszek]

Ok what's the most op character build in this? Don't show me a guy that talks a lot or I will be upset with you.

lazy question so dunno what you really want. Perhaps go with this since its solo and could do almost everything

big thanks to Alpharius for idea, my everything hybrid run is over
View attachment 44242

didnt do 100% towards the end as I couldnt be bothered to finish all the fights. Not like they would make me stronger considering I wear best everything.
Ultimately I did fail. Turns up that point in cha was important, without it you fail in 2 things, due to single missing point...
- convincing new mother to shut down the engines
- convincing Stanton to help hydro at the end
Annoying as I could do it, could just drop 1 point in dex at char gen.

Anyway, this is my first solo hybrid to kill belzebub!
Also managed to keep pit free(commies path)

throat slitter was crucial to kill everyone in front of armory and call romeo over, picked it at lvl10 for that reason alone.

resolved every single check game was throwing at me(except for Stanton, still would have passed with +1 cha), slotted every piece of cyberware with upgrades. Stole everything, sneaked everywhere, convinced everyone, was able to win every fight(well, didnt try monks).
It was surprisingly easy to keep smiles alive, as with this low evasion everyone targets tank.

mother fight was the hardest, but then I didnt use single stasis/disruptor grenade through whole game so I could trivialize it. As such hardest is act1 as you are very weak combatant.

Picked streetwise whenever I could, clearly no need to have so many speech skills in this game.

In general, if you want to copy this, you resolve problems in following order: speech > sneak > combat. One exception was infiltrating fort, as without it I was missing some sneak xp for habitat.
I was very happy I went with pistols, I often fought in smoke.
char gen:
4 str, overclock to get armored warfare
10 con for fake bio tag
7 per(so you gain access to feats without overclocking, also some secrets require 8per)
7 int (so you can get tag and skill monkey without overclocking, otherwise sneak will fall behind)
5 cha(so you learn from me)
rest into dex

its super hybrid character, so you can easily change the focus, like discard talking in favor of combat. And/or drop sneaking and just pick feats that sound fancy or mention pistols

 

[jackofshadows]

Ok what's the most op character build in this? Don't show me a guy that talks a lot or I will be upset with you.

The most op is probably high CHA shooter, 4 man party for some reason is waaay better than a solo guy. But solo is the way to play imo. This is mine release time build for reference, only planning to do a second run after all these patches.

Finished. Had a lot of fun. Brutal, unforgiving combat as usual, at least with my build. When it came online though, sometimes I was able to trigger a huge chain of kills. In that sense, I was missing some crazy encounters ala AoD when you in the late game but agaisnt a whole lot of enemies, even if weak. Maybe there wasn't just on my chosen path. I also craved for one more really tough stealth section but alas (the best for me was the black hand). Anyway, playing a stealth ranger again was fun, although gameplay is for aquired taste (typical glass canon, more or less)

Spoiler

Regarding the writing: I liked it even though I'm biased towards Vince's style. Consicely when it needed, wordy where appropriate as well. Plenty of great dialogues. As for the setting and a bigger picture - it amused me that some guys ITT couldn't recognise a simple, blunt as possible satire when it comes to factions in this not just dystopic but antiutopic setting. 'Muh church' complains etc. Like, come on.

By the way, AI in this game is just great. Still abusable/not perfect sometimes, of course but overall - top tier.

Will certainly do another run for charisma-oriented char, probably some time later though.

And also: did anyone able to beat

Spoiler

the monks on the "back to earth" route? was way too much for my solo build. Maybe will try it some more but it looked completely hopeless

 

[Alienman]

Ok what's the most op character build in this? Don't show me a guy that talks a lot or I will be upset with you.

Guy with a shotgun, that is always aiming for the knees.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Ok what's the most op character build in this? Don't show me a guy that talks a lot or I will be upset with you.

Guy with a shotgun, that is always aiming for the knees.

Dammit, all the Bethesda bashing and it's Vault Dweller who ends up making Skyrim with guns.

 

[PlanHex]

Ok what's the most op character build in this? Don't show me a guy that talks a lot or I will be upset with you.

The most OP is picking the easy mode when the game starts

 

[notpl]

Ok what's the most op character build in this? Don't show me a guy that talks a lot or I will be upset with you.

Strongest combat build is Juggernaut knife-user with the Berserker feat, close second is Dodge This! pistolero.

 

[jaekl]

Vault bro, after playing this and reading all the doom and gloom about the studio dying due to not enough sales, I think to myself – who in my life could I possibly recommend this game to? The answer is no one. Everyone I know except me would hate it. I actually like your games a lot, I think you make a great atmosphere but you tune them way too hard for anyone even a smidgen less of a turbo dork than I am. Your easy modes (when you have them) are actually harder than 95% of rpgs and your normal modes are harder than every rpg I’ve ever played except maybe wizardry1, knights of the chalice and underrail. We make fun of studios appealing to trannies and failing because they’re such a tiny niche, but appealing to people like us is the same thing as appealing to trannies. We are the trannies of RPG enthusiasts. You can only do this if you’re a lone autist so you can keep all the money yourself.

Anyways, why does every combat need to be your team walking into a successful ambush? It’s insulting to your players who are likely smart enough to look around an area and choose more favourable ground for a fight. Or make their own ambushes? Traps? But you’re afraid to let your players loose on the world. You’re too worried about balance (I loathe balance). The only way that you’re allowed to be creative and think outside the box is by using items and balancing numbers. But no matter how many points you put into INT, your character will still walk into the middle of 10 heavily armed slavs and start talking even after the 20th time they’ve been ambushed in the same way. Meanwhile me, a 5 INT guy, is wondering why I can’t poke my gun through the half-open doorway and shoot the enemies instead of squeezing myself inside first.

Build a combat character to make fights easier. Ok, I can do that because I know how crazy your games are so I’m going to research before I play. But normal people are going to look at your stats and see that every stat looks super important for combat. So they’ll probably choose a bit of everything and fail. Asking new players to get fucked over and have to restart when they’re on easy mode is asking A LOT with how many games there are to play now. You’re killing interest at the start before they’ve even had a chance to get sucked into the world you’ve created.

Ohhh but you can make a character that talks instead and then the stat choices will be simple and you won’t have to do get ambushed all the time! Fantastic, we can remove all the fun stuff like killing people and replace it with more reading. It’s like being punished for failing a test by getting grounded and having to study instead of playing video games.

Experiencing your games is like being handcuffed and led around by a chain. We must never deviate from what is specifically allowed. We must always be limited on every single resource, even exp. Everything is binary, can’t even hope for a lucky roll on a skill check. Oh, we’ve eliminated save scumming on skill checks! But hold on, I have to save every 3 steps in this game anyways because I never know when I’ll be dumped into another combat ambush so why does save scumming skill checks matter if I’m doing it regardless? Why can’t you allow your players to BREATH?

This was pretty good even though it pissed me off a lot but it doesn’t top dungeon rats imho. I liked dungeon rats so much that I bought 3 or 4 copies for friends. But no one would play it because it was too hard.

 

[Beans00]

Anyways, why does every combat need to be your team walking into a successful ambush?

Because this game has zero player agency.

 

[Optimist]

I think that "We are the trannies of RPG enthusiasts." is a good candidate for the page's tagline.

 

[agris]

We are the trannies of RPG enthusiasts

DarkUnderlord new forum description just dropped

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

Liking difficult games makes you a tranny?

The game is not even that hard unless you play solo and do every optional fight. Was that jaekl's case? Anyway, I don't think hard combat has anything to do with the game's poor sales, there's actually a big market for that. It's the whole C&C design that is highly unpopular(even among Codexers, it seems).

 

[jaekl]

Liking difficult games makes you a tranny

I hope English isn't your first language or else I'm going to be very upset with you.

 

[Ol' Willy]

He's not wrong all the newfag edgelords coming out of the woodworks in recent years all have the same schtick and it's become increasingly tiresome. Now we probably don't need to block every new poster, just throw all the bad apples in the prosperium for a year when they repeat offend. 'tards would probably start correcting their behavior after seeing 3-4 dozen users winding up there.

Assuming it's not another alt

I suspect it's from the same guy that did TemplarGR

 

[notpl]

Devs of Drova: Foreskin (inarguably, a much bigger game than either AoD or Colony ship - a full blown open world RPG with gorgeous hand-drawn art) did a stream where they said the game has vastly outperformed their expectations and they're very pleased with it - sitting at 900 reviews on steam. Definitely going to keep making games. Based out of Germany rather than some cheap third world shithole like ATOM devs, so again, it seems like the issue with ITS games isn't lack of sales, it's poor business management in some way. Or maybe they're just silicon valley americans who have completely insane expectations of return on tech work, I have no idea where they're based.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Hard combat is not the problem with Iron Tower games. A lot of games have hard combat and this doesn't make them any less appealing among the core audience. And quality wise, IT games have awesome combat.

IT games do have a style of their own which puts them apart from other similar titles, and in my opinion, it is the fact that they have the progression philosophy close to adventure games from early 1990s.

A lot of obscure stuff, which you may fail to notice even on subsequent playthroughs. Very specific sets of actions to achieve a certain outcome. Ability to screw yourself and learn about it way later.

IT games are more forgiving, you can still finish it even by fumbling around - I did finish the AoD on my first and blind run alright; but I missed the absolute majority of side content. On subsequent runs I was amazed at how much stuff I missed.

The idea is understandable - you play it again, and using your own meta knowledge discover more and more. Promotes replayability.

But this goes against the solid C&C base of the game. AoD is good as you can have several runs that are very different from each other based on your choices, but in that case, you're not accumulating as much meta as you need for the given path.

So you need multiple runs of the same C&C path, and here comes the fact that inside the given path, the game is very linear. Practically no RNG involved, the gameworld is very tightly designed, and you could have runs that are nearly identical to each other.

This creates game design dissonance, where game simultaneously encourages you both to try different choices but also make the same choices again and again. And obviously, treading the same path is not that entertaining due to lack of variety.

In my opinion, without the compromising the underlying principles of the studio's game design, the only way to improve it is to add a way more RNG based variety into the game outside of the fixed progression points

 

[Fenix]

This was pretty good even though it pissed me off a lot but it doesn’t top dungeon rats imho. I liked dungeon rats so much that I bought 3 or 4 copies for friends. But no one would play it because it was too hard.

After last patch I never won it in IM mode, so it was too hard for me too.

 

[Marat]

In my opinion, without the compromising the underlying principles of the studio's game design, the only way to improve it is to add a way more RNG based variety into the game outside of the fixed progression points

I agree. I think the game should have more of the Fallout/Deus Ex style short-term reactions from the world and characters. Some could potentially influence narrative down the line, like the quest giver recalling that you solved his previous quest by sneaking and dropping a line about that (or even only giving a certain quest if your sneakery impressed him two story acts before) or some character from a (previously) unrelated questline being dead and events unfolding differently - conversely if he survives his participation, he could react to player differently in his quest in turn. Colony Ship lacks a lot of those "little things". Come to think of it, MC's attributes are considerably more rarely used than AoD would have me expect.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Devs of Drova: Foreskin (inarguably, a much bigger game than either AoD or Colony ship - a full blown open world RPG with gorgeous hand-drawn art) did a stream where they said the game has vastly outperformed their expectations and they're very pleased with it - sitting at 900 reviews on steam.

They got 900 reviews in a week; 2,600 peak players vs 1,380 for CS and 700 for AoD. In a year they'd probably have 10k reviews.