2011-07-12 10:48:13

Each time I want to apologize for double posting, there ends up being at least 1 post in between the first one, and the one I'm typing!  haha!  So THIS time, I won't even assume I'm double posting.

SLJ, I guess it's just a talent of mine, everyone's good at something.  To be perfectly honest, and this isn't intended to sound the way it probably sounds, I have people telling me I'm brilliant all the time, but I don't really feel like I'm extra smart.  To me, I just feel like I'm surrounded by a lot of dumb people, and I'm just normal.  Haha, if you knew the people I work with, it would be hard not to think they were stupid.  I have a theory actually.  For many programmers, I think they come up with the code as they are writing it.  This means they have to occasionally stop to figure things out, or they code themselves into a dead end, and they must go change things in other places that no longer work correctly, now that they've been adding to the program.  There are times that I do that, but the vast majority of times, I have almost completely written the program in my head before I ever sat down at the computer.  I'll take a shower, do the dishes, or unload trucks at work, and I'll fill my head with pages upon pages upon pages of working code.  When I finally do get to the computer, I can just type it out as quickly as you could type out a paragraph you had memorized.  A great deal of code can be typed in a relatively short period of time this way.  What actually slows me down, is if I keep sitting at the computer after i've typed out what I had in my head.  The new stuff I come up with isn't up to the same standard, because I think I focus too much on typing it since I'm actually able to.  When I can't be at the computer, it forces me to work out all of the kinks automatically, so I don't waste time coding bugs.  I've written entire games, from memory, that didn't have a single bug.  Haha, I'm still new to audio games, so my coding skills aren't quite that good yet.

I don't have a game engine, no.  I could make myself one, but I think that would bother me.  By typing it out from scratch, I don't have to worry about old code meshing with anything I thought up while I was away from the computer.  The most I ever do, is copy and paste in a few functions that never really change.  Loading maps is a good example, and I just grabbed that from Temporal since these maps load in the same way.

Believe me, I will continue to work toward some super cool, massively multiplayer online world!  haha, that would rule!

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2011-07-12 10:56:56

Hi Aprone.

No the game was not paused sinse I could here tick sounds and other messages were working, my hunters were stil hunting, my lumberjacks were stil okay, ---- they sleep all night and they work all day, ---- sorry, couldn't resist, my carpenter and mason were stil going etc, it just seemed to be the builders.

I did wait a good five minutes, hence why i believe it was a bug.

What you say about food makes sense, though I'd stil personally suggest you take out the bakery step of producing bread and have the cook do it instead.

Also, I was having a think about the status of children and mothers.

My progress actually got stopped because my main stone mason became pregnantk, and despite spending so much on building houses, I stil! didn't see any bennifit because the children just stood around and did nothing.

Realistically, in a medaeval society, this would not happen. Children and expectant mothers would both do smaller tasks to keep things running, even if they weren't able to handle heavier work like smithing, cutting logs or mining.

I've actually been reading various articals on childhood for my phd, and it was interesting to see that our modern idea of childhood pretty much didn't exist 200 years ago.

Children were either babies, under about the age of 5 or 6, but after that point, they were considdered pretty much grown up enough to take on a variety of more adult tasks, ---- especially considdering most would be maried at 12-14.

one thought I had to represent this in the game, was perhaps children and mothers could have some specialist, low yield jobs of their own, so that they don't become completely useless to you for such a long time.

i had several thoughts:

"Gatherer" increases your vegitables by a small amount, not as much as farming sinse it's essentially based on what can be found in the woods, but better than nothing.
"net maker" increases production of your fishermen, there are various historical accounts of fishermen's families doing this.

"scullian" increases production of your cook by essentially helping in the kitchin.

"harvester" increases yield from farms by a small amount by essentially doing all those less strenuous but stil vital tasks such as picking crops or weeding (if you read the bible, there are accounts of women, even with small children doing this, could work for any farm or vinyard.

"Weaver" to increase production of your tailor. again something there are many historical pressendents for, indeed in the middle ages according to a friend of mine who's very into viking reinactment absolutely everyone! men, women, children, old people and uncle tom Cobly and all would do this just because there was so much weaving to be done to keep supplies of cloth handy.

"nurse" decreases the amount of time it takes the doctor to cure someone.

"Teacher" Decreases the amount of time it takes before children are grown up enough to join the work force by giving them education. This would only be available to mothers.

"scout" decreases the amount of time for any job that requires wandering the map, eg, hunter, lumberjack, maybe some of the military ones. Would only be available to children sinse obviously expectant mothers can't walk that far.

Let me know what you think.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-12 11:07:47

hello
i'm going to download the game and start playing but anyway,

do you have any plans to make combat units at the game like sound RTS? plzzzz! that will be so cool!
like strong hold series

twitter: @hadirezae3
discord: Hadi

2011-07-12 11:19:00

Well, there are some combat units in the game already, though really the game is as much about your production as about fighting.

I think more military stratogy would require a different game, though if you fancy something with combat and stratogy Hadi you might try towers of war.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-12 11:32:34

(I think I'm just going to comment on things that seem iffy rather than all of the good stuff... assume that all goes without saying. smile )

The very first thing I noticed was that I wanted to press home to return to the start of a row while looking at the map. Then I read the readme file and discovered that there is already a method for accomplishing the same thing.

Then I tried to open notepad so I could comment while playing. I have notepad connected to an alt-ctrl keystroke on my computer. Jaws immediately stopped talking, and when I finally managed to get NVDA and the task manager opened, it turned out that castaways was devouring nearly 100% of my CPU, so I had to end task and start over.

Hmm, I've built a hospital and assigned a doctor, but my three injured people are still injured and the doctor is just standing around. Does the doctor require supplies, or have I just not waited long enough?

... I had a stone mason break his toes. Because toes are essential to making bricks. ^_^

Ah, I think the fact that I didn't assign a new cook that couldn't avoid injury caused said doctor to starve to death. I got a new doctor who could actually do the job.
But then everyone starved anyway. Except for my leader. Who caught one fish, then decided to surrender himself to the goblins and end it all.

Hmm, that only took two hours. smile. Let's see how many more times I can slowly starve refugees to death before I get hungry!
... I didn't mean for that last adjective to match the second-to-last verb. Really!

Heh, I made the mistake of building both a wheat farm and a vegetable farm, so my farmers were only working at half efficiency, since I didn't build a mill or bakery.
Two of my women got pregnant, but starved to death shortly there after.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-12 11:52:06

Well that's dysmal cae ;D.

I'd now like to see if a vegitable farm will let my peasants work more and get on without catching deseases, that will be interesting to know.

Btw aprone, I just saw your post about writing program code.

Funnily enough, i write my thesis in a very siilar way. I do lots of reading, sit and think for long periods, then will sit down and blitz write what's in my head.

One thing I will never tell my tutor is how litle time I physically spend writing, sinse I've been known to dash off about 2000 words in hour before.

The only difference is then I do check, and recheck rather exhaustively, but obviously when writing arguements in philosophy the process is a litle different from writing code and I need to make certain each bit is explained and logical, as well as that my sentence structure makes some sort of overall sense.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-12 12:56:18

Hi Aprone and ALl,
I had a second, somewhat more successful go at this tonight and thought I'd share it with you all.  I managed to get a modest economy going, with a tavern, quarry, sawmill, and hospital, and a butcher who consistently refused to do anything useful.  The goblins came somewhat close to me, but I was sticking largely in one corner of the map, and didn't run into them before starvation did me in.
Is the hospital code supposed to allow injuries to be healed without cloth for bandages?  It did in my experience, though quite slowly.  Speaking of slowly, the ALl Thumb's fault is a killer, I was waiting minutes at a stretch for my projects to be finished, though I probably could have sped things up if I'd thought of it at the time.
The issue I seem to have is one of balance: how do you create occupations for enough peasants without overspecializing?  At any rate, I was about ready to complete  a vegetable farm to supplement the meat diet of my people when they suddenly began to starve for some reason.  I'm not entirely clear on why, but they went in waves, a few at a time but inexorably nevertheless.  The ones who were left seemed to lose the will to do anything, waiting around in an empty tavern for food which never appeared.  I suspect the cook went first and that caused a chain reaction.
So there you have it, a depressing but still fun experience for all involved.  I look forward to another try and to future improvements.
Thanks for a wonderful diversion.
Best,
Zack.

2011-07-12 13:24:47

Hi Zack.

well i can't say that game went any better for me.

I actually thought things were going pretty well. i had 6 children (the dam peasants bred like rabbits!), a sawmill, quarry, vegitable farm, hospital,storhouse, tavern, mine and pretty useless butcher who never actually seemed to give any bennifit.

i was mining and smelting metal in hopes of building a barracks once my kids grew up enough to actually be useful, however it took so dam long! for the kids to grow, everyone starved first, and the idiotic peasants just had more and more and got themselves pregnant.

What was also confusing is the z key stil showed me as having 38 meat and 2 vegitables, even though I ketp getting messages about my population starving to death (is this a bug?).

There actually does seem to be an issue of specialty, sinse even to basically build and keep fed even without expantion you need about 8 different jobs going, and while I understand this is the point of the game, it just seems when you start having so many children you can't support them with the specialized bunch you have, and your peasants don't stop producing them either!

Some warnings about food would be nice as well, sinse I actually thought everything was fine. According to the Z key my meet production was steady, and while the one farm didn't produce much vedge it was at least there (I didn't have the man power for another), then booom! given the rather crazy breedding  ---- come on! I only built four houses! and the uselessness of children it seems logical that I would have food problems, but that was not what I was getting from the game's feedback.

Some warnings that peasant x was hugry would've been very welcome, then maybe I could've changed my specializations and produced some more food.

I actually think the child code really needs looking at, sinse it seems the amount of time you have to wait for a child to do anything for you is rather ridiculous, ---- and that's not counting the child's mother being out of action, pluss it does seem children take up a lot of food for a long time with nothing back.

As I said above, smaller jobs would be a nice way to solve this.

I'll next try a game with the strong swimmers perk and trogion man fault, ---- though given how that one turned out, methinks a bit of trogion forbearance might be a blessing in disguise! ;d.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-12 14:08:32 (edited by CAE_Jones 2011-07-12 14:11:16)

Hmm, I never went over four houses and never had a big population boom.
I actually got an extremely successful vegetable farm--well, two, but people seemed to refuse to eat their vegetables and focused on meat and wine. Even when some of them started starving (When I lost two or three people to starvation, I had around 70 meat and 134 vegetables and 2-4 wine! )

By this point, I became aware that the goblins were getting pretty close, so I focused on trying to get a mine and forge built. The mine went ok, but people absolutely refused to bring materials to the mine. For several minutes of ticks on fast, they just moved food around while the goblins began destroying houses and wrecking the farms. I think once all of my farms were wiped out, the people realized that transporting vegetables wasn't going to save them, and started bringing bricks to the forge... but before construction could be finished, the goblins attacked the forge. At that point I just surrendered.

Also, the first child born was named Genesis. She grew up to be a mighty lumberjack. And was the second to die of starvation. sad
My cooks seem to be the most commonly injured workers, lol. Talk about high risk, since injured cooks bring down the whole society!

Oh, and for that matter, both times I've played, now, I've had an issue with the doctors. I build a hospital and assign a doctor, who refuses to do anything useful. In the first instance, my doctor starved. In both instances, once I replaced the doctor with someone else, the second doctor actually became too useful to reassign. Well, actually, my second doctor on the second play through became a builder for just long enough to build a house, then move in and get pregnant immediately. So I went through three doctors, there.

Oh, and I've been keeping to the southwest corner to keep away from the goblins, but they eventually invaded anyway.

[edit] Oh, and one pointless asthetic thing... if the children are going to be useless, they could at least do something child-like other than just standing around. smile [/edit]

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-12 15:55:55

Blah. This round I'm doing much better--got the forge and a baracks built in time to get soldiers and a couple knights to hold back the goblins, which are plundering the outskirts of my buildings.

I'm basically running into two significant problems.
1, the doctors spend most of the time being useless. When they finally get to work, they do well, but it's getting them started that's a pain. I went through like four or five this round before I found one who was actually competent.

2, not really a problem, so much as a slight annoyance. When the goblins destroy something I've built, I'm not told what it is they've destroyed. Usually I can figure out where they attacked and remember what was there, but I've had a couple instances where I got the sound of them destroying things with no idea what they hit.

I've started construction on two guard towers, but my peasants are apparently too hungry to transport all the materials I need. My soldiers and knights are holding the goblins back, but I'm not sure how long that will last. So far the goblins have just destroyed houses, which would be fine if not for the fact that I could really use some fresh blood at the moment. tongue

... Why do I like the fact that it's using Lunimals sounds at the moment? ^_^

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-12 16:07:28

Well that last game went better, i even got some military units built and held off the goblins. However, the goblin invasion as per the speed of child growth really! seems quite extreme.

Thanks to the trogion man thing, I didn't have a population explosion, and with two vedge farms and 2 hunters was actually raising my food level. When I got up to a population of 20, I just added an extra hunter and an extra farmer and that worked out fine up to a point.

I got the mine and forge both up and running, and created a barracks. Due to me misunderstanding what guard towers were I idn't place one over near my houses which is ultimately what did for me, I thought making five soldiers was enough, sinse goblins came in and startred recking my houses down on C row, ---- as I said, the goblin population went a bit nuts!

The one weerd thing was how I lost.

I'd just built my 6th house, and was attempting to build a textile and a butchers' shop to generate cloth, but then suddenly, after the goblins destroyed a house, even though I stil had two hunters and two farmers my meet production dropped dramatically, even though my vedgitable production, 2 farmers on three farms was fine.

I had 120 odd vedge and 70 meet, and then suddenly boom! my population start dying of starvation, ---- I deffinately think there be a bug here.

Another thing that struck me as odd was how long it took the blacksmith to get off her behind and doo! something. I thought it might be that I needed a certain amount of metal, but even when i had ten bars worth she only seemed to use about 1 per sute of armour which was odd.

that actually brings me to an interface suggestion.

I started ghetting on much better when I realized that some jobs wouldn't actually be of any use until the resources to support them were in place, namely builder and metalergist.

I thus attempted for a while to have a miner who switched to smelting once there was enough ore, ---- though for some reason the game stil showed me as having 4 metal ore while the metalergist was standing about idel, but once I sent him off to do some more mining and got him smelting again things worked fine (possibly another bug).

The same is even more true for builders. There's no point having builders standing around idel while you waith for the peasants to cart all the rmaterials into the building site.

So, How about for builders, instead of lots of messages telling you when a peasant drops something off, just one single message to tell you when all materials are at the site and when a builder can start work. This would make things much more ificient.

another idea (though I'm less sure of this one), might be fore second or third stage production jobs that require a resource eg butcher, tayler, carpenter, metalergist, if you do not have anyone in the first stage give a message when the person runs out of a given resource, rather than every single time a given resource is used.

Indeed, for a higher level game function, you might considder some sort of in built ai for second order jobs, that should they run out of the necessary resource, they will automatically switch to a first order job and go and get it!

For instance, a metallergist starts mining when he/she runs out of metal, a carpenter starts lumberjacking when he/she runs out of trees to cut, a butcher goes hunting etc, this might be a bit much for third order jobs, sinse having your tayler wander around, try butchering, then try hunting would be a litle confusing to say the least, but for second order jobs it'd be a nice way of both releaving message spam and making the players' life easier.

Possibly this could be in an options menue if people didn't fancy it automatically.

Btw, I've stil! not tried wine production let alone bread, sinse I just don't have the man power to spare.

In that last game, I was struggling as it was, especially with the amount of time I had to spend with children.

I finished up with 5 soldiers, 2 peasants, 2 hunters and 2 farmers and one of all other jobs I could squeeze in, ---- heck, that's why I was having more children, to get enough people for a butcher and tayler, I only had two peasants and that was after starting with the strong swimmers perk, and when you considder bread would take a farmer, a miller and! a baker, as well as 3 separate buildings just for one resource, that's really going it when you've got so litle people to spare anyway.

As I said, I'm stil in favour of taking out the bakery step and leaving that to the cook.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-12 16:26:05 (edited by CAE_Jones 2011-07-12 16:35:52)

Wine production is actually as simple as building a vinyard, since your farmers will work there and on vegetable and wheat farms as well. Barrels don't disappear (at least, not as quickly as their contents).

I'm still on the game I mentioned in my last post. I finally got my guard towers built, for the goblins to over run one of them. I had the problem with the blacksmith not doing anything, despite having metal to work with, so for now I sent her to smelting. I'm trying to throw up houses wherever the goblins are least likely to attack, since I could really use more people, and the goblins keep destroying my original houses. (They've also gotten one of my farms since my last post).

[edit] And they got my hospital, my other guard tower, all of my farms and vineyards, and now everyone's starving. The goblins win again![/edit]

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-12 16:33:32

Hi all! I have allways the same problem with Aprone's games; i can save the games but can't reload them; every time i try to load one, the game crashes; for example, in Castaways i just reloaded my last saved game and all my people are ded; and examining the map i see just numbers. What can I do? Thanks for your suggestions and, as allways, Aprone, this is an other great game of yours. Congratulations! Bye for now! Claudio

Claudio

2011-07-12 17:48:36

... I tried again. Incompetent doctors is I think what drove this one into the ground. I had four people get sick or injured rather quickly. I had two doctors and it took forever for them to fix two of the people. They never touched the other two, who eventually starved to death. I've had instances where I could only really spare one peasant because everyone else was either doing something important, or was too sick or injured to work. (I actually had one of my doctors get injured and never healed).

Maybe it's just a random coincidence, but I tried to start out more toward the mid-south of the island this time to stand a better chance of building up my resources before the goblins reached us. The first wave of goblins seemed to be starting a little further south, as though they were adjusting for my strategy...

Something that seems to be happening is that I'll get several logs, but noone will bring them to the carpenter, so they don't get cut. Does the Z key only tell you what's in the storeroom?
If I could pull a dogwhohatestoast and tell a peasant to go get the log from the storeroom and place it in the saw mill, that'd be nice. Eh, peasants gotta eat.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-12 18:15:41

Dark, I'm still not sold on removing the Baker step, but you do have my taking a closer look at things, so perhaps there will eventually be a change.  When it comes to the pregnant women, I could word things a little differently in the messages, but I justify them not working, by assuming they only stopped working once they were too far along to really do much else.  When it comes to the children, I assumed they actually were very young, so the phrase "children" was probably not the best choice for me to use in the game.

I do, however, really like the helper jobs you've suggested.  I'm not entirely sure yet, how I would want to work them in to maintain balance, but I guarantee I will be adding some of these eventually.  They are just too good of an idea, to leave out.

Hadi, Dark is correct, there actually are currently 2 different kinds of military units, and I will probably add a few more when the game has (use) a place for them.

CAE_Jones, wow, the CPU usage thing really surprises me.  There's nothing in the game that should tax the processor, but I will begin hunting for any type of bug or typo that could do that!  If someone is just ill, the doctor doesn't need any special supplies to cure them.  If a person suffers some physical injury, broken toes for example, he needs to use a cloth bandage to cure them.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2011-07-12 18:49:43

Hi Aprone,
Concerning hospitals, I still think there may be a bug somewhere in that code. If I recall correctly one of my people came down with a sprained wrist at one point, which was subsequently treated, without any cloth as far as I could recall.  Is that classified as an illness by the game?  If so, that's what should have happened, but if not, there's something strange going on.
The discussions about rebalancing are interesting, though I've not made it quite far enough to comment meaningfully on them yet.  I'm willing to test any new changes proposed, of course, and am sure I'll enjoy them once I figure them out.
Best,
Zack.

2011-07-12 18:51:12

Zkline, your hospital question is hopefully answered in my response to CAE_Jones.  Sometimes you end up with a "perfect storm", meaning that seemingly harmless events all happen at the right moment, and things go terribly wrong.  It's possible that you didn't have enough peasants restocking the tavern, or a huge wave of people all got hungry and cleaned it out too quickly.  If those few peasants happened to become too hungry to work, then they aren't restocking, and if your cook starved first, it wouldn't matter if any peasants showed up at the last minute to restock.  I'm only speculating, but these chains of events can happen when you're unlucky.  For me, if I ever see someone starve, I immediately pause the game and figure out what's going on.  I'll usually switch more people over to become peasants, and I'll assign a second cook.  Of course I only do this if my storehouse actually has food in it!  Haha!

Dark, the people will only get pregnant if you have built enough homes to allow for population growth.  Perhaps wait on building the homes until you feel you are better prepared to support the children.  Of course bugs are always a possibility, but my first question is, was you tavern stocked?  If not, then there was a peasant shortage.  If it was stocked, you must have lost your cook somehow, perhaps due to injury, pregnancy, or reassignment by mistake.

I may adjust the amount of time it takes for children to grow up.  A few people have expressed concerns with the amount of time, but I'm still on the fence, because others seem to be doing fine with how things are.  Actually, I think I've just made up my mind.  I'm shortening the time a little, and that change will be in the next version I post, whenever that is lol.  They will grow up about 20% faster after the change.  I was actually going to suggest that you try the Trojan man fault, haha!

CAE_Jones, wow you were doing excellent with vegetible production it seems!  I'm not sure why they wouldn't be eating them, by any chance did you save the game?  If there is a bug, it is the first time I've encountered it, and the save game file would be helpful.  By any chance did you have the forge turned off so that peasants didn't take supplies to it?

Since I'm adjusting the children growth rate, I'm also adjusting a few things that people have brought up.  For one, cooks and bartenders will have a far higher resistance to illness and injury.  Overall, everyone will be a little more resistant, since I think illnesses and injuries are happening too often in easy mode especially.  When it comes to a having a doctor, I rarely keep one on duty unless I have injured people.

Oh, when it comes to Goblins, I think the sound and message are just out of alignment.  Some special messages have sounds, and others actually pause the game to make sure you can't miss them by mistake.  There is a persistant bug which sometimes causes the message not to line up with the action of pausing, or the sound.  It's possible you're hearing the building destroyed sound, but the actual attack message is the next 1 or 2 that will be displayed.  The Lunimals sounds comment made me chuckle.  There's just something soothing about the pause, unpause sounds from Lunimals.  I've also grown quite fond of the tick tock.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2011-07-12 19:11:55

haha, I have so much to respond to this morning, that I'm just occasionally hitting Submit to break it into chunks.  As I'd anticipated, new posts from other people have been filling in, in between.  smile

Dark, did you happen to save the game when you had 120 veggies and people started starving?  If this is a bug, a saved game would be very helpful, because I can't seem to get it to happen when I play.  I believe the blacksmith needs 2 metal bars to make armor, but I could be wrong.  The metallurgist thing is strange.  I don't know if it is a bug or not, but I'm assuming the 4 metal ore you had were in your forge, and not in your storehouse.

The idea for condensing messages is still in the works.  I'd like to have options for turning off certain types of messages, if you wish, and also settings to simply change them in case you don't want them completely gone.  For example, your idea to only notify you of a completed construction site, rather than announcing each item drop off.  As you might imagine, changing the messages is actually a big job, and it will take me some time to get it right.

Your idea of a secondary job is brilliant sir!  I shouldn't have much trouble implementing that, at all, and I'm sure people would be very happy with such a feature.

I think people are possibly too focused on spreading out into all of the building choices.  Having the buildings is a good idea, but trying to man them all constantly is a bad idea while your population is still low.  When I'm playing myself, I will focus only on the basics until my population grows.  By waiting to tackle the longer chains, I rarely have any trouble using them once I feel ready.  At least the way I tend to play, I wouldn't dare try to support all 4 food types until I had like 30 or 40 people.  If you were able to easily run each type of business early on, the game would get pretty boring as you expanded, because there wouldn't be anything new you were striving to do.  I think a lot of people are starving because they aren't pacing themselves, but that's just a guess, lol.

Oh, I wanted to give a few tips on using guard towers!  I think some people are waiting for the enemy to come to them.  In a lot of ways that seems good, because it gives you more time.  For me, I try to put guard towers at the choke points in the forest.  Basically look for where the Goblins will have to squeeze through, because if it is a smaller opening, they can't come through as easily.  If you put a guard tower in the middle of a huge field, the Goblins will eventually surround it and attack it from multiple directions at once.

claudiogaranzini, I was thinking of you yesterday, believe it or not!  I was brainstorming a new way to set up the loading code, so that you would be able to load games.  I don't have it coded yet, but I'll work on it.  Could you send me one of your saved games?  It would help make things faster.

The Z, X, and C keys only tells you what's in the store house.  Also, if an item is in transit (being carried) it won't show up in the storehouse or the destination building.

I'm taking steps to make the game easier.  At first I chalked it up to people being new, but I'm thinking that isn't the case haha.  I'll try to post an update shortly, that will address some of these concerns.

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2011-07-12 19:14:40

hi

aprone, the game's atmosphere is  verry nice,
usually i don't like the games which there's less combat fingey in it, but the game's strategy just pulls me toward it.

adicting, can i say? hee


the game is a bit hard, and i sometimes get my self stock in it and all people finally die :d

but well, basicly i just figure the things out myself and follow this thread.

at dark: that tower of wars is verry enjoyable, just i guess verry verry hard!

twitter: @hadirezae3
discord: Hadi

2011-07-12 19:43:47

... I have no idea what just happened.

I was doing all fine and well, my population was growing at a manageable rate, I had soldiers fighting goblins and was feeding everyone all fine and well, and was working on building the less essential things like a bakery and a butcher shop, when suddenly all of our food disappeared and everyone started starving.
I have no idea what could have caused that, since I had three fishermen and a couple of farmers, two vegetable farms and a vineyard...
I checked with Z and checked the tavern, and sure enough, there was absolutely no food. I have no idea where it all could have gone.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-12 19:47:15

Well that certainly sucks!  Do you think it was maybe slowly decreasing and you didn't notice?

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2011-07-12 19:54:11

That's possible. The only thing I can think of is that those construction projects were taking up too much time for peasants to transport food, but that'd be new, and at the time I think I only had one building that needed materials. (The first person to starve was actually my lumberjack, then a soldier, then a bartender...)
The soldier I can understand because the goblins weren't getting as close as they had last time, so the soldiers were having to travel a lot to fight. The lumberjack I can understand because they seem to spend so much time working that they could easily forget to eat, lol.
It was when the bartender died that I became suspicious.

I haven't even tried saving a game yet. I should probably do that when things are going good.

I generally find myself assigning jobs based on names, unless I desperately need a role filled. I'm sure that if I ever get a Peter, James or Andrew, they'll be fishermen. smile

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2011-07-12 20:16:11

Hi Aprone.
glad to here about the changes. I think once the building cycle is in it'll make things much easier to monitor what is going on. Also, i do like the idea of secondary jobs, sinse what I'm doing in my current game is basically having a hole bunch of peasants, one consturction project on the go, and when that building is ready changing most of the peasants into builders then back again.

interface wise, this is a pest to do, having to constantly select and decelect people, and just something like "the building is finished, your builders go back to being regular peasants" would I think do well.

Sadly i don't have the game with the food issue. I suspect what happened was that because i was running out of people and using more soldiers, i had few peasants to move the food around.

I'm not sure how the current game will work, sinse one of my peasants has a broken leg and it'll be a loooooong time until I can afford a butchers shop, let alone a textile mill.

Why couldn't the stupid man go and sit in a fishing bot? ---- heck, that'd robably make his leg feel better ;D.

I'm glad to here the child thing is being fixed, sinse right now that's one of the most frustrating things I've found about the game thus far, the amount of time it takes for new people, ---- also why i suggested the miner jobs for kids as helpers just so that they aren't a complete burden on society, ---- though fair enough if you want to reduce this for pregnant women.

I am also trying a vinyard now, so we'll see how that works. i was however pleased that my cooper could make barrels far more quickly than they would be used, so can essentially do that part time to her other work.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2011-07-12 20:39:40

CAE_Jones, I actually put focus on the people's names for that exact reason.  For me, it made the game more fun to have the names, but I also knew it would help people organize their people.  Name and gender really helps you identify with the people, and the jobs they have been told to do.

I'm nearly finished with the next update, and I'm sure everyone will be very happy to get their hands on it, because many little things are fixed up.

Oh and Dark, I had never heard of the title cooper before, lol.  That's why I went with barrel maker.  big_smile

- Aprone
Please try out my games and programs:
Aprone's software

2011-07-12 20:49:08

Hmm. I wound up running out of food again with no idea as to how. There was actually food in the storehouse, but none in the tavern, and the only people that weren't in the tavern to get food were working (one of them was a fisherman!).
I think two of the children became old enough to be peasants, then somehow reverted to unemployable children! Since I'd reassigned a couple people based on those two extra peasants, that could certainly have put a dent in my food transportation... but I'm not sure if I believe that's what caused all of the food in the tavern to disappear.

I remembered that I should have saved it a second after I closed the game. sad

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.