Oh sorry Nightgaunt, I didn’t see your post before.
You can’t move a stockpile, but you do get the recipe to make new ones later into the game.
So evidently today (day before Halloween) Pumpkin patches appear. Harvesting them yields masks for your dwarves as well as some other goodies.
Craft the World is the daily deal on Steam and it is scheduled to officially launch in 4 days (11/24).
I’m tempted to buy it, but am curious: anyone have recent input or review feedback?
There have been some opinions voiced about it in the bargain thread today. Generally positive, I would say, especially at the price.
I enjoyed it a surprisingly big amount of time. After 10 hours or so certain overly simplistic mechanics become more pronounced, such as the defence structures of the dwarves being too weak to have noticeable effect, but it is still quite a lot of fun to play. I already had my money’s worth several times out of this.
Yeah, I agee with YourConscience, it’s a pretty good timewaster type of game. It shows that Dekovir comes from the casual games arena.
What eventually soured me on the game was the excessive difficulty of the invading monsters - I wished there was a difficulty setting for these, or even just a peaceful sandbox mode. Can anybody describe how this has developed in the last half year or something?
Other than that, I had some UI issues - for example the minecraft-style crafting interface which was totally unneccessary busywork serving no purpose at all - but it was a decent enough game otherwise. The graphics are neat and charming - once again, you can see Dekovir’s roots.
Worth playing for a couple of bucks, but don’t expect anything spectacular.
rezaf
Nothing has changed really.
However, I must admit I had the opposite reaction. I’ve always thought the invading monsters were too easy. In keeping with the casual game vibe they don’t really pose any threat no matter how many waves you go through.
I agree with that. After a while and when the dwarves are decently equipped it gets so easy that even if a dwarf or two totally fuck up and fall into the water in front of the Beholder and die, even then there is no real threat.
Actually, even if the monsters totall win and destroy your base, if you have built a second base underground far away from the first base you can always send the last couple of dwarves there and wait it out until the invading forces go away when the day comes back and then slowly rebuild from there. It’s even some fun to recover this way. I had to do this on the new highest nightmare difficulty level a couple of times.
You guys must’ve played a different game than I have played. It was a tad too easy VERY early on, but one day, Steam updated the game before I launched it, and they had changed the mechanic radically so the amount of spawning monsters quickly spiraled out of control.
The portal sprang open and released an endless stream of thinly packed undead, literally hundreds. Eventually, it’d just keep pouring out enemies until daybreak. I’ve had ten beholders clustered together and so many zombies and skeletons that it took them a single hit to destroy a block of stone wall.
Also, building a second base underground was impossible at that point, because you needed the base central thing (what was it, a campfire?) to which the dwarves would deliver everything, and to be able to build a second one you had to reach the far end of the “tech tree”.
My solution was a floating fortress, constructed so not even skeletions with shields building a ladder could reach it before daybreak.
But that was totally unfun to me and, like I wrote, it soured me on the game.
If this mechanic remains unchanged, I’m not going to bother with CtW again.
rezaf
Sounds like a bug to be honest. Never had anything like that even on nightmare difficulty.
I played 1.0 for a bit and, yeah, it’s totally NOT a bug and still like that. They even upped the ante further by allowing multiple teleport gates to open simultaneously.
I just had eight beholders pour from one of the gates, and three more from the other. At this point, this is actually a good thing, as beholders cannot destroy walls or cross narrow passages. There’s plenty of skeletons and zombies to go along with the beholders, though, and their numbers just keep increasing.
Their crafting progression tree is still a bit weird, and the odd resource shortage can easily prevent you from progressing for quite some time.
Thankfully, these days there’s the shop, so you can buy wool or berries or whatever it is you’re missing there if all else fails (and you find enough coins).
However, I found they removed building a second resource point from the crafting tree, so I think for longer games, going for a floating fortress is now basically your only option.
I think it’s also ridiculous that the resources wasted on turrets (which at least are a wee bit stronger now) vanish into thin air. This basically makes building them a no-go.
If they at least made the strength of invading waves adjustable or even allowed a sandbox mode without enemies, this would be a splendid game. But as it is, I think it just devolves into tedium at some point a couple of hours in.
Stupid russians.
rezaf
Damn - I was looking forward to playing 1.0 and this has really put me off.
It’s sad, really.
When life (in the game) is good, CtW can be a fantastic timewaster. There’s really tremendous potential there, and it’s a crying shame they basically haven’t improved on the game whatsoever since the time of their first published versions. Most criticisms I had when I first played it are still in the game - stuff like the utterly pointless crafting grid, tech progression that forces you to develop tons of crappy decorative items in order to get to better armor, early plateauing of your dwarf population, no easy long-distance travel, non-renewable resources, error-prone dwarf AI and so on.
Some things that actually heightened my enjoyment have been removed - for example, mana regeneration used to be tied to real-time rather than ingame time, so if you logged back into your game two days later, you were at maximum mana. Now, regenerating it is a tedious and time consuming affair.
Balancing was way on the easy side back in the day, as the spawning undead never increased in number (iirc). So once you were in a position to defeat them, you’d basically always do so.
To make combat less trivial, they changed it so each successive spawning will be stronger than the last. But now, as I described above, you quickly reach the point where defeating all enemies is no longer possible - which means you cannot get that XP reward for doing so, further limiting your progress.
There’s a guy on the Steam forums who wrote a review I totally agree with on all accounts.
rezaf
Here is my steam review. I did give it a thumbs up because I did get a fair amount of enjoyment out of it. However I do agree with the above criticisms. The tech tree layout is terrible and the mana regen is a real problem. I do hope they change it or some mods come out for the game to fix things.
Nice review DeepT, but once again I have to wonder why some people write combat becomes utterly trivial once you get decent armor.
What is decent armor? Mithril?
It is relatively easy to be relatively safe by building a floating fortress, but the function that decides where portals spawn is arcane. I’ve had some spawn on the roof of my floating fortress…
Other than that, the sheer numbers become so big, I’m amazed somebody can say it’s trivial. Thirty skeletons swinging their sword in unison will one-shot a dwarf in gold armor (I haven’t actually gotten further than that), and if two hundred skeletons can spawn in a single night, how do you easily deal with that?
Serious question, give me a howto.
rezaf
I have 275 hours into the game so far, between EA and release. It sounds like some of you might be missing the progression of the game. The reason rezaf is seeing harder and harder spawns is because you’ve stayed too long on that world. There’s a progression in the game that’s meant to take you to the next world after you discover and rebuild the portal, There will be 5 hidden rooms in the depths of your world, each guarded by a boss that you have to kill to loot one of the 5 portal pieces (actually a recipe for the piece which you craft). Once you have all 5 recipes, and the materials to craft the portal, you click on it and move to the next world. (My only gripe with the game is that there is no carry over from one world to the next. You literally start over on the new world.)
Each new world has different challenges. For example, the second world is snowy, and so trees and water are harder to come by.
There should be a sense of urgency to finding these bosses and defeating them (they are very hard and can take several attempts to kill them). The urgency is driven by the fact that the undead spawns get harder each time. If you get to the point that you’re getting the double spawn, then you should already be gone to the next world, or very close to it.
It may seem like a more casual sandbox game where you can take your time and mess around, but that’s not meant for the campaign mode.
That’s actually a sound explanation Spect … however, I have to say the game does NOTHING to communicate this to the player except continuously increasing the number of spawns.
I have a hard time imagining how you can finish the world before the second spawn, but if you’re TRULY rushing it, I guess it’s possible. I imagine you have to be pretty lucky and/or exploit the shop, though.
I know I always had something holding me up, like not enough Wool to craft all that crap requiring thread or fabric, or not enough berries, or even not enough iron. An in the new version, I just ran out of mana. If you have to get anything from the other end of the map and you’re out of mana, it’s going to take a friggin’ eternity. And after you reach 10/11 dwarves, you can no longer rely on level ups filling up your reserves.
In any event, how’s that a fun goal in a game where you craft your own fortress? You never get to decorate your existing fort with all the crap you had to research and instead progress to the next world, where you start from scratch? You gotta be kidding me! (that’s aimed at Dekovir, not you Spect). All the parts about this game I consider fun are about building my fortress, not rushing through the level to get to the next to rush through that one as well.
Like I said, they need a true sandbox mode where you can just toggle off all enemies or just a better progression. Why not do it like the old single-floor dwarf fortress did, progression is dictated by how deep you have dug?
rezaf
I agree that the game needs to do a better job of letting you know about the progression in Campaign mode.
As for the sandbox mode, I haven’t messed with it too much, but try starting a new game, choose Custom Game, set the difficulty to “Very Easy” and I think you’ll end up with something more like what you describe, where enemies are minimal and you can take your time to build up your fortress and decorate it, etc.
If I had to guess, I would say that Dekovir put in the progression and Campaign stuff as a way to give players a challenge. During the first parts of Early Access there was a lot of feedback and discussion about this, and I’m pretty sure that’s where it came from. Personally, I prefer the challenge of progressing to just a sandbox.
I agreed earlier that it was too easy early on.
However, I think the strictly time based approach now used in the game is wrong on several levels.
And way back when I first tried it, there was discussion about a sandbox mode without enemies, yet nothing ever happened.
Basically, nothing ever happened during development whatsoever except a few cosmetic changes to the crafting tree and the ramping up difficulty you describe.
rezaf
As spect posted, you probably had hung out way too long. I got gold armor for everyone along with some nice weapons and took out the big guys. By that time, the spawn waves were not an issue. Now if I just screwed around for a very long time they might have become problematic. I didn’t find the towers too useful either. They did help, but overall I do not think they ever did all that much. I did make a double tesla tower and it felt very “meh” in its power.
I did play on the 2nd world a bit before getting bored. This one has a higher difficulty and I did lose some dwarves early on. They do respawn after a while though. I am guessing you can’t really lose this game unless there is a special condition when everyone dies.