Work in progress

That is exactly the kind of feedback I'm looking for. I already have this note in our suggestion tracking spreadsheet:

Archaeological followers (Followers):
Players don't feel very godly having to go around and collect chests, having archaeological followers with the ability to dig for chest is a common choice.

Any other suggestions as to how to amplify the cards-as-tech-tree, stickers-as-unobtanium (i.e. the equivalent of tiberium/minerals/Vespine gas) metaphor/symbolism?

This thread on Steam has some points relevant to this thread: steamcommunity.com/app/232810/discussions/0/540744934755378527/

Specifically this quote from George:


(There's that word 'polished' again)

I'm really surprised to hear that things like path-finding and trees are currently operating "in accordance with their design and within our technical limitations." Just how severe are the technical limitations? I assume this part of being dumbed down for the sake of the portable version of Godus?

Anyway, to give more specific feedback of the nature you have requested...

• The cost of actions/activities

The concept of spending something is fine as a mechanic, the problem in Godus is that it feels so forced and artificial. It's as if no one could think of a proper currency so they made one up - "belief", which is interchangeable with something like mana except mana would actually make more sense than belief. Why would your people believe in you LESS because you went and did a load of stuff? In Black and White, doing stuff that had a perceptible influence on your world and made people believe in you more and increased your power, which makes sense. Godus belief-dollars is a huge step back.

So the issue of having fake nonsense Monopoloy money to spend on stuff that should come naturally to a god is only compounded by the problem of how much everything costs, which makes it a waiting game. And waiting is further compounded by TIMERS. A watched pot never boils, right? Which is why we've got timers to watch. To make us spend Godus-dollars to speed it up, because watching a timer tick down is physchologically very irritating. Think "buffering...". Except we are playing the PC version, which everyone agrees is not going to have microtransactions, therefore having the psychological spend-money barriers is just annoying to the gamer. Instead of having a timer, why not make the timer invisible and give us a nice animation of the building being made or the building being improved as the followers prepare to start a family, or people worshipping and decorating their home to increase belief production. And it would also be nice to be able to influence that.

- If they are near a marble deposit, maybe they can build fancy ornaments to decorate their homes which increases belief

- Nearby trees/wildlife/land level could affect the clothes they wear and their behaviour - maybe in nicer weather they go to communcal churches and street dancing and stuff which increases belief.

- People build better if the environment is better suited to building, not because I deposited a monstrous Statue of Being a Faster Builder nearby.

- People reproduce faster if the environment is better suited to having a family, etc.

Basically logical actions having logic consequences, not I peeled a celestial sticker out of a box and stuck it on my trading card and now I have a slightly better means of grinding towards getting my next card...

22Cans needs to understand this. It's not just cost and time. Every game kind of boils down to cost and time mechanics, they just don't present them straight-up as a timer and a number. I don't think I've diverted a million miles away from the mechanics of Godus with these suggestions. If you think so, maybe Peter should rename Godus "Timers and Stickers" if this is really what it's all about? The rest of it just seems to be getting in the way of his vision.

• The time it takes for actions/activities to happen or for you to progress

See above. Time isn't so much of a problem if it's logical and it's going to end in a reward. A reward that is Godus-dollars that I immediately spend entirely doing one trivial thing is not fun. A reward that is another identical house being built in my massive estate of identical little houses so that my little person number can go up is not fun. A reward of opening a land expansion is pretty good but it's not 5 hours good.

I recently bought Plague Inc on Steam. This game can also involve a lot of waiting, but I don't mind it because I know there's a simulation running in the background doing all kinds of calculations and random events and suchlike are going to change the outcome of what I'm waiting for. We don't get this in Godus. The outcome of the timer counting down is 100% assured, it is literally a case of waiting for it to tick down.

• Homeworld level design

Do you mean the actual map we play with in the homeworld? I think it's fine. I have never unburied one of those monument things from under a mountain because they amount of time/Godus-dollars that would cost me is a piss-take. But the mountains and stuff, and the playability of the level design when you start up, and figuring out how to advance and learn through the tutorials etc all seems to be pretty good. I will say though that the tutorials take too long. I know having them skip-able is probably not going to happen at this point, but is it really necessary to make the user clear the ENTIRE circle for each stage of the sculpting tutorial? This is tedious. At the very least the circle could be smaller.

• Discoverability of items

As above, I think this element of the game is fairly intuitive. You find a thing, click on it, and if clicking doesn't do anything you try to get your followers to interact with it. You dig stuff up. I know that 22Cans is very focused on stuff like this, and I do understand why, because when you've got a F2P mobile game there's probably a very tiny window of opportunity in which the engage the attention of the person who's playing in order to get them to commit to it. But maybe this is why you aren't getting a great deal of useful, in-depth feedback from PC gamers relating to this very specific type of feature? PC gamers don't particularly look for this kind of quality, espeically when they already paid full price for the game. We paid for it so we are going to give it a fair shot, regardless of if it's instantly super-easy to figure out or if we have to poke around a bit.

• Clarity of mechanics

As above. They are pretty obvious at first, though in my opinion it all goes downhill a bit with settlements. I know you guys are working on this. The whole idea of dividing my town of settlers in breeders, builders and 'buffers' (I don't know what that is supposed to mean) did not make sense. Now I think we just build a type of settle or something? I would rather the settlements are appropriate to the nearby environment and my followers figured it out for themselves. Right now Godus feels like Playmobil.

• The flow from one Age to the next

I think this is poor. My people kind of look and act the same regardless of what age they're in. The difference in ages seems to be whether you've got fields or coal mines. This massive over-simplification of the progression of humanity is pretty sad for the "regenesis of the genre". I would like to see more complexity and more gradual progression. I would like to get the sense of humanity progressing because of my people doing stuff on their own, and not because I unlocked a card that said "now your people can do this". That kind of abstraction is not fitting for a PC god game.

I'm starting to feel like we're getting to the heart of the matter here. A lot of suggestions are not going to happen for two reasons:

1. Technical limitations which are enforced because of the need to keep Godus portable
2. Peter Molyneux refusing to change his mind about things.

I think we're starting to touch upon the reality of this, and I think it's a massive shame.

That's the big one, there. This is why so much vitriol for stickers, and you summed up why they're not going away, and why 22cans catches so much heat for FTP mechanics (dig up chests!).

The best solve I've seen suggested all relate to tying sticker generation onto logical action/consequences instead of magically replenishing chests. Utilize followers, elaborate on what is already in place. Instead of just builder/breeder/buff, assign multiple rolls that generate the stickers in a sensible manner, and have these tasks advance and progress with the ages. A hunter generates meat and fur stickers, progressing to a herdsman who generates cheeses, leathers, felts, whatever.

Bullshit.  They are a lame excuse for dumbing down the game to not scare casual mobile players.  We have accepted 22cans is not going to fix this so if y'all admit it we can move on and perhaps save this travesty from total failure.  But, I assure you that if 22cans continues to ignore the many, many, years of experience contained in the kickstarter backers and go full "to hell with reality" into this mobile design, then there is no hope.
Farmville sucks not because it was a crap facebook game but because it was a crap "money first" design.

No, they're not comparable.

Tiberium was more comparable to belief, but thats still quite a stretch.

The main difference is that tiberium required strategic thinking and was well embedded in gameplay. There were different forms of tiberium and the more valuable was usually further away or in hot spots (more dangerous to collect). You had to protect your collectors and fields, had to think about how many collectors you want to use, which fields you want to harvest, how to disturb other players from gathering.

Stickers on the other hand don't require any thinking or strategy at all. There is no cost/reward you have to evaluate.

Just judging the metaphors, not the mechanics, tiberium also made sense in a scifi setting. Stickers don't make sense in a god game or fantasy setting.

The C&C games I played didn't had a tech tree like in Godus or civilization, instead you advanced through buildings and upgrades. Also quite different from Godus. In my opinion you can't call whatever godus has a tech tree. Its rather a tech branch. Or tech timeline... A tree structure would mean it would be less linear and offer multiple choices.

Actually I can't think of a PC game with a similar mechanic and metaphor as godus.

Here lies another problem, I guess. A lot of suggestions people make are based on other games they've played that are cool.

My suggestions are all in the direction of making Godus more like Black and White, because that was a really awesome game and I would love to see a game that builds on B&W with all the advantages of modern technology and optimisation and expanded ideas that would make into something truly epic. Frankly, it's a waste of time - Godus is simply not going to be the next Black and White. It's not trying to be. Did it initially pitch itself as such? I'd argue yes. But that's a topic we've already hashed out.

I don't think Godus wants to be "if you liked X you'll love Godus", I think it wants to be something new and original and mould-breaking. So maybe this is why 22Cans is so stubbornly sticking to its guns over things like cards and stickers. These unique and brilliant concepts DEFINE Godus, they shouldn't be removed at the ill-conceived whim of nostalgic PC gamers. This is probably what Peter Molyneux is trying to express when he talks about us dumbass players simply not getting it and not playing the game properly.

It's sad that Godus gained most of its funding through appealing to people's nostalgia for PM's older, greater titles, but has subsequently distanced itself from all the things that made those games so appealing.

Fun is definitely what Godus lacks the most. At the moment I'm getting the feeling that it's trying to put itself out as some sort of bonsai tree to be trimmed and snipped with thought and care over a long period of time. After an age of playing the game you'll be able to look over the civilisation that you have cultivated with a light of pride in your eyes and say "I made that. It took time, but I made it." The issue is that I (and while I don't really want to speak for others I can't help but feel I'm just repeating what other people have said anyway) don't think a bonsai tree makes for a good video game. At all. I don't feel any sense of calm while I play the game, either, but maybe that's just me being terrible and accidentally clicking when I shouldn't which costs me belief.

Oh, if this is meant to be a feedback thread, I would just like to put out that I don't understand why destroying trees and rocks generates belief while shaping land doesn't. I can understand generating belief, sure (Oh my! That tree was just struck down by some almighty force! Oh gee! The rock was split asunder! The wrath of the gods is ever present, we should believe in their power!), but why would shaping land cost me belief? Yes I get that it gives purpose to the entire resource mechanic in that you need something put in place that forces you to gather it, but as far as actual fluff explanation goes I haven't read anything that explains it. I would expect it to generate belief more than anything (Oh look! A plateau has conveniently appeared overnight! Surely this is a sign from the gods that I ought to build upon it!)

Please forgive my ignorance if this has already been explained.

It doesn't want to be something new, it wants to be a profitable cash cow that can be maintained with small effort. Of course they don't want to say that (because it sounds greedy and unethical) buts its obvious, isn't it?

"So far, it's produced a freemium distraction that can't yet admit that's what it truly is, an iPad game that seems to only have landed on PC to soak up some extra funding, and a god game that, when I play it, makes me feel like I'm even less significant than I already am in the real world." - Eurogamer


"The problem with Godus is that it feels like it’s a Free-To-Play without any of its benefits." - Gaminglives

"Godus is more like Farmville". - Micromart

"Where, then, is the struggle and the strategy?" - Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Its not innovation, thats just a fancy word for peter to disguise his true intentions with godus. It simply sounds better than to say that they keep these mechanics because their statistic shows that they are quite profitable.

I fear that the PC sprints will be of similar nature. Saying that they think about changing the metaphor but not the mechanic is just a fancy way to say that all they want to do is to give godus a new taint, a new wallpaper instead of removing the asbestos that underlies. Fancy words to disguise the true intention. It seems like all we will get is a new animation for our followers instead of real strategy and simulation.

Using fancy words to disguise the true intention and actions (making money, ignoring our complains) isn't new for 22cans. Just like iterative design (How many features can you list that they have dumped because they didn't worked?) "we just want to test that new mechanic that nobody likes and maaaaaybeeeee we dump it later if it doesn't work out..." is just a way to silence concerns while saving their face at the same time. Or pretending to not know what we want (its not like there have been hundreds of posts and threads or collections and summarizations by danjal. Its like faking incompetence to not be judged.), purposefully misunderstanding us (you don't want to click so much? Okay we now implemented dragging...) and pretending to not have time for us because they work soooo hard. And at the same time pretending that we asked some questions just a week ago instead of a year ago.

Its all pretending and disguising in a fancy way.

Believing that peter just wants to test some mechanics or wants to be innovative is naive at this point. So is believing that the PC sprints will be more than a new taint or not just a way to develop buildings that can later be sold on the mobile version. Why should they care about the PC version after 1,5 years were most of their players are already gone and their reputation is already ruined? Why haven't they said early on that they intend to focus on PC at a later stage of development? (reviews by players and especially the press had been more forgiving if they had said so.) Probably because they never intended to.

Do you remember when peter said that we can see the design documents, he just needs a week to remove all the cuss words? Do you think that the design documents were truly filled with a lot of cuss words? Or were he supposedly choose a "random" page of his documents? (it just took him 5 minutes to find the right "random" page...). Or where he hold them up in the camera and said "you want them? You can have them!". Afaik we still don't have them. We just have a rather incomplete road map so far. Something that should be standard is a huge improvement for 22cans standards even if its done poorly.

Or claiming that they entirely focused on the PC version so far and just recently started to focus on the mobile version. Claiming that after almost every online magazine titled godus as mobile game beside all the user reviews is so pathetic and dishonest.

22cans isn't the type of company that will invest months to drastically change and improve the PC version for a small userbase, their actions so far show clearly that they don't care much about customer retention or reputation or keeping up their words.

I could also see that as you use belief, belief generation increases and as you do nothing, when you are not playing the game, it decreases. So when you first start playing the game you have little belief and must use it carefully, but the longer you play the more your belief rate increases and the more you can do. That could lead to having statues that"remind" your followers that you are there even if you are not actively doing things to keep your belief generation at a set level when you are logged off.