So I went deep north of Savant...

[randomg]

Started to get a little nervous, but I could not, for the life of me, find a town.</a>

A suggestion dawned on me though - when discovering a town, perhaps a discount for the first deposit of 50% after the first level?

This would reward risky play when hunting for new towns, instead of the safer but slower frequent checkin method.

[rob]

Hey randomg,

I think I want the flow to be something like the following:

1. A scout in a stealthy tank, carrying no gridshards (just in case) sneaks out into the wilderness hunting for towns. Maybe he finds one, in which case it's marked on the map. Maybe he dies, or maybe he teleports to safety just before he dies. But his job is done.

2. Pioneers start hacking through the wilderness to get to the new town. This may take a while.

3. When they reach it and it's connected to the rest of the society, they upgrade it to level 1.

4. Once it's level 1, people can teleport in and start clearing out the surrounding enemies.

5. Once the nearby enemies are cleared, the players can grow the town a lot, making it a base for further exploration.


This doesn't exist yet. There are no stealthy tanks yet. I'm only just thinking of requiring that towns be connected by a ground route before they can be leveled up. The game currently doesn't limit leveling up towns when enemies are nearby. Also, the concept of "grow the town a lot, making it a base" currently has no meaning, and figuring out what that will look like is a major chunk of future work.

Another major open (3-part) question: why level up one town and not another? Why explore in one direction and not another? What makes the world nonuniform, and thus interesting?

Rob

[linkshot]

Make each colour on the world matter for how a town grows, or just the general area.

Red: Avoid it! Enemies will actually respawn here periodically to put your path or town in danger!
Yellow: Avoid it! Enemies will become more aggressive here!
White: Good for towns! They'll grow faster here! (less shards required for buildings and town)
Blue: Good for towns! Increases chance of a building being available to level up! (building (lab/extractor/resonator) sockets aren't always available, and blue increases the amount in a town)
Purple: Good for roads! It makes commuting faster! (faster movement speed)
Green: Good for farms! It increases rewards! (10% chance to level up the drop)

Town tiles are neutral, except for white and blue, which will change the tint of the tile to show portions of the town carrying the beneficial colour. Roads would work the same way with the purple tiles.

[amitp]

I very much like the flow that Rob described. At least I think I will like it. There are always surprises…

Why level up one town and not another? Would it be interesting or annoying to have a “collect all 10” type of game mechanic for winning the world? There could be various resources all over the world and each town is on only one of them. You need to build up cities that can extract 10 different resources. It does no good to have 3 farm cities because we don't need that much food, so if, after scouting, you find that northeast is mostly farm, then maybe we don't spend as much time going there. But we have 0 iron deposits, and there are some way deep on the west side, past tons of enemies, so we need to work our way west and establish a major city there to get iron. These resources wouldn't actually do anything but each resource gained would give victory points, and advance the game towards the end. (e.g. you got the first farm city, get 100 victory points, but you got another farm city, 0 victory points, so the victory points make you treat the world nonuniformly)