[SUGGESTION] More guarded loot

One of the very few gripes I always had with Galciv is the fact that exploring space anomalies felt kinda hollow. You just explored and discovered something, usually not that thrilling. Everything was for free, nothing was guarded.

I got the same kind of feeling exploring loot in Elemental. I know it's a very early beta stage, so maybe this was planned already but I think it would be great to see the bigger loot (heavily) guarded. I thought the Age of Wonders series had a great way of exploring ruins, dungeons, etc where you could only see if the guardians were weak, average or strong. Likewise the loot would be small, average and big!

I think there shouldn't be too much easy loot on the map. Exploring should be exciting!

8,188 views 10 replies
Reply #2 Top

I loved the planets in Master of Orion II that were guarded by space monsters (cheese alert). With great rewards comes great battles :)

I second this!

Reply #3 Top

Sometimes you shouldn't even get loot, and sometimes you should get good loot from poor fighters, and sometimes it should do a stat check!

Reply #4 Top

I think it's by design right now. Be glad we have some wandring monsters. ^^ I'm not agaist some "free treasures" but surely, better treasures should be guarded even if it's just some bandits.

Reply #5 Top

First of all, I agree -- exploring stuff and fighting for loot is one of my favorite things about the genre. It's very strongly present in all the titles that I have played.

 

One of the gameplay problems that can get introduced with fighting random creeps for loot is the ability to get too much experience from it. (i.e. you are fighting relatively weak monsters that don't have the backing of another sovereign's magic, so the danger can be much lower.) In particular, hero-style units can get out of control quickly in this way. This is a major problem in, for example, Master of Magic. More recent titles have tried to balance this. For example in Warcraft III (admittedly a TBS, but similar genre), hero advancement gets capped at some point unless you are fighting another player. I don't love the details of this approach, but it's something to keep in mind.

 

Reply #6 Top

I think this is where the *dungeons*" will eventually come in.

Reply #7 Top

About the experience part:

Maybe a formula to calculate added experience for monster combats could be something like this:

Abbreviations:

  • AMC = Added experience from the current monster combat.
  • P = Parameter to adjust the amount to cut.
  • MCE = Previous monster combat experience.
  • PCE = Previous player combat experience.
  • OME = Original monster combat experience (the experience you are gaining in this current combat).
  • W = Weight of PCE compared to MCE in the multiplier.

Formula:

AMC = ((P + W*PCE)/(P + W*PCE + MCE)) * OME

Idea: In the beginning you gain pretty much normal experience, depending on P. Player combat experience is weighted much more in the multiplier of OME, so that if you have some player combat you will get pretty much maximum monster combat experience.

Examples: Let P=100, W=10, PCE = 0 (no combat agains players), MCE = 0 (No previous monster combat), OME = 50 (you gained 50 points in this combat)

Gained experience = (100 + 0)/(100 + 0 + 0 ) * 50 = 50

Next battle, also OME = 50 points. Now MCE = 50 from the previous combat.

Gained experience = (100 + 0)/(100 + 0 + 50) * 50 = 33

If you had done one player combat before the second monster battle, with PCE = 50, you would gain

(100 + 500)/(100 + 500 + 50)* 50 = 46 experience from the second monster battle.

Still, if you do no player combat at all, and you have 1000 points of previous monster combat experience:

(100)/(100+1000)*50 -> only 4.54 points of experience added.

This way it is easy to limit the amount of experience you can gain from monster combat. With big enough W doing only a bit of player combat will result in almoust full experience from monster combat. The size of P determines how long you will get almous full experience from monster combat. For example: no PCE, MCE = 50 and P = 20 you get 14 points from the 50 points gained in the second battle, with P = 1000, no PCE and MCE of 1000, you still get 25 points from the original 50 points.

Yes, fridays at work are a bit dull...

Reply #8 Top

Lots of guarded loot is definatly part of the overall plan  :)

Reply #9 Top

Quoting BoogieBac, reply 8
Lots of guarded loot is definatly part of the overall plan 
End of BoogieBac's quote

That's very good to hear Boogiebac, thanks for the heads up.