Game News Natives get a spanking in Expeditions: Conquistador

[Avonaeon]

And now for an "accelerated animations" option in the menu.

That one will definitely be in there.

 

[Jonas]

Yeah we already have hotkeys to speed the game up and down, I figure in the final version we'll have separate sliders for speeding up enemy and ally movement and animations, so if you want to watch your own turn unfold in normal time while speeding up the AI turn a bit, that should be possible.

The game is currently not easy. You can take my word for it or not, but the thing is that I have been playing it perfectly. I brought the maximum amount of units and an ideally balanced party into both fights, along with a good amount of barricades and traps. In the second fight, I'd levelled my guys up a little more than you'll probably be able to have them at that point, so I could show off their second-tier abilities. As it stands, if you play the game perfectly, you will win, and I played the game perfectly (for obvious reasons). Johannes pretty much sums up my feelings on the point: randomness is a great way to add unpredictability and keep you on your toes, but too much of it makes the game less tactical and more arbitrary, and that can be great, but it's not what we're going for. I should say on my first attempt I chose another fight and actually made a critical mistake early on - I sent two of my soldiers forward too soon, and the AI completely creamed them. The entire rest of the fight was an uphill struggle towards my inevitable defeat. I would've posted it for the hilarity of watching a game designer get demolished by his own game, but unfortunately the voice-over didn't turn out very good in that recording.

Remember that you can't bring a character into a fight if that character isn't in good health, so it's quite likely especially later in the game that you won't be able to bring an ideally balanced group or even a full party of six into a battle, you'll just have to make do. Since losing our battles never means a game over (just the failure of a side mission or a branch in a major questline, along with a larger probability of injuries carrying over to the world map), we can make our battles very difficult indeed. All that said, of course the game balance is still up in the air. I like the way it is right now, most people find it pretty hard, but as we introduce more of our planned elements (two more character classes and a bunch more abilities and items) we'll undoubtedly disrupt the current balance and have to re-adjust it

Enemies can place traps - you won't see them until you walk into them. We're talking about giving our Scout class the ability to spot traps, we'll try it out and see how it works. Our goal is that anything the player can do, the enemy should be able to do as well, so the AI will be able to spot traps too, if we go with that.

 

[almondblight]

...we can make our battles very difficult indeed.

Please do.

Our goal is that anything the player can do, the enemy should be able to do as well

Great.

 

[Captain Shrek]

^ Please make them tiered. As in, let us choose the difficulty. Keep the current at Normal. Slightly made for kids, as easy. Please introduce harder tiers for some of us.

 

[Avonaeon]

^ Please make them tiered. As in, let us choose the difficulty. Keep the current at Normal. Slightly made for kids, as easy. Please introduce harder tiers for some of us.

That's the plan

 

[Morkar Left]

Jonas
Thanks, that was a good introduction to combat.

How is it outside of combat? Do you have any details about that? It's a bit hard for me to imagine how the whole game will play at the end. Is it like Kings Bounty? Or more like Fallout? Or Jagged Alliance? Burntime? NWN2 - Storm of Zehir?

 

[almondblight]

Just make sure to make the "normal" mode pretty challenging. It's annoying when you have to set games up to the highest level just for a challenge. Even more annoying when said "challenge" is HP bloat.

 

[Jonas]

If any of you have played The Nameless Mod, what we did there was, you had four sliders that each controlled one aspect of the difficulty of the game - 1) how much damage does the player take, 2) how much health do enemies have, 3) how many enemies are there, and 4) how many items (weapons, health pickups, ammo, etc.) are there. Then we had four difficulty presets that were simply specific setups of those four sliders, with the option "Custom" if you wanted to adjust things yourself. None of the difficulty levels actually had all four sliders turned up to max, but it was fully possible to make the game ridiculously unbalanced in the enemy's favour if you wanted. The plan is to do the same thing in Conquistador (though of course with different sliders, though two of them are probably still going to be enemy health and player health). There will be sliders for combat difficulty as well as sliders for expedition difficulty (that is, the metagame).

And Morkar, we'll put out a video or two showing a part of the world map with a completely playthrough of one or two quests. Obviously we're a little scared that it'll be very hard to demo properly, since it doesn't look very good, there's mostly a metric crapton of text, and it's hard to see in a video what makes it interesting. You guys here at the Codex can probably see past that, but I worry about other parts of the Internet. Nevertheless, it must be done, of course

 

[Morkar Left]

Thanks, that would be nice to get a better picture. Interesting things to show here would be how quests are handled, plays food/water a role in exploration, is there a skillset choices depend on, what's the maingoal when you start (getting rich?), things like that.

And for presentation, just talk a lot about what's going on, maybe how your choice affects the outcome, how many outcomes there are etc. Maybe even show a different outcome and how it changes story/events/stats. Well, I heard romances are well received in other parts of the internet...

 

[asper]

Dumped 15$.

The game looks really good, and most importantly, deep gameplay-wise.

I don't really like the theme, but I'm starved for good squad combat. Oh, and go and play Jagged Alliance 2 immediately, it's the best game in the genre.

 

[EG]

^ Please make them tiered. As in, let us choose the difficulty. Keep the current at Normal. Slightly made for kids, as easy. Please introduce harder tiers for some of us.

That's the plan

You monsters! You'll ruin it!

 

[Stelcio]

I'd like to see AI using more of this neat teamwork you utilize in your tactics. The AI seem to work more as a couple of individuals than an actual enemy team.

 

[villain of the story]

Obviously we're a little scared that it'll be very hard to demo properly, since it doesn't look very good, there's mostly a metric crapton of text, and it's hard to see in a video what makes it interesting. You guys here at the Codex can probably see past that, but I worry about other parts of the Internet. Nevertheless, it must be done, of course

Just add voice overs for the video but make it look like it's part of the game. Eg record someone reading descriptions and edit those sound records into the video every time you mouse-over something. People love voices for the sake of it and it makes everything look better.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

I want to see what they do later on with the game before I say I'll purchase.
But it looks like it could be good.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Damn unless they get some prominent coverage from RPS and the like they have no chance to make it.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Isn't that the fate of most indie games?
I think they'll do well Indie wise, but they need to finish up and get out there, really whore the game out to the masses as an old school with a bit of a historical tint.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Damn unless they get some prominent coverage from RPS and the like they have no chance to make it.

Sad but true. I hope they have at least tried contacting whoever it is at Kotaku, RPS and Eurogamer who usually cover Kickstarter campaigns.

 

[Avonaeon]

We have. No bite so far, but we'll keep trying.

 

[Tolknaz]

Too bad. Like someone said in the other thread, you guys jumped the gun without building hype first and in the end it could cost you your campaign. I'd really hate to see that, because i think based on the materials you have shown us so far, you have one of the best if not the best working prototype game among all of those kickstarter hopefuls of past few months. Your game is kind of tough to sell, because you: a)have no big name attached to the project b)have a setting, that is bound to be disliked by wannabe neo-hippies due to the subject matter c)lack magic (that's an instant turnoff to many morons who would otherwise probably support you).
I really hope you'll either get solid coverage from a big news outlet soon, or you have a decent backup plan in case your first try at kickstarter fails.

 

[EG]

$20,000 / $70,000 . . . 23 days to go.

Hm.

I'm not seeing the doom.