Feature request thread

An idea I played with, and will probably use myself at some point, is not to have individuals in the game so much. Maybe the original people could be a couple, but they'd have to breed into a family before sending out their children to start a new abode.

The odd thing is, if you clump people into groups doing jobs, they actually become easier to render or do AI for, so having 10x the population wouldn't be a technically difficult thing, and might make things easier for making any of the resource gathering mechanics that we're all suggesting. Groups of people going out hunting / gathering, or having an Amish barn raising.

This would also be a good first step towards sending your people to fight. If we had crowds, groups, etc, then formations are the next step, and after that it's just one small step to conquering the world.

It's the design at present. That's all I know. I think the reasoning is that the designers want the player to have a relationship with the followers, but my opinion is that no matter how many times you try to make a game concentrate on individuals, as soon as you get around the 10-20 people mark, you're not actually going to feel at all like you know anyone unless they are the heads or leaders. Dunbars number is so much lower for games when it comes to entities you can care about. The upper limit is going to be much less than Russian literature, and probably not much higher than a superhero group unless you have slots for characters ('Character name' the 'job title' of 'that place')

Totally agree. In any game, there's only 7 give or take 1, things that you should ask the player to care about.

Indeed, hierarchy is a good way to move from one level of care to another. Without a hierarchy, we go from grains of sand to a desert, and we are left with no distinguishing features to care for.


You're talking like a developer, do you code? But yes, you're right, it would positively affect performance. Realistically though, performance is minor concern compared to making this better to play, and grouping sounds like play optimisation, which is also a good thing. If we go this route of follower resource gathering, it makes a lot of sense to move to groups and jobs at locations. Like you're setting up a production run. The next thing to always think about when building one of these games though, is not how to make the game easier for the player to optimised production, but actually to make it that there is something for them to want to optimise production for. What's the goal? To expand faster? Why? To get more resources to expand more to get more resources cycle? That will only work once or twice. The game needs a goal of some sort otherwise what's being built is a way to finish the limited content quicker.

Maybe, just maybe, the point could be to build a very efficient homeworld that is your production house, and those resources are needed to fuel extra-terrestrial activities. What if there was no way to produce belief / ore / wheat outside of the safety of homeworld. That might work, but we then have to have an extra-terrestrial world... what might we call that? Saturn, Mercury, Mars, Uranus, Venus, Neptune... I really can't think of a good name...

Hah, yeah, Dimitri has been working on a fix for that. I told him pretty much what you said, and he complained that it would be too different from what we're already doing, and might break the path following for event maps. I'm pretty sure the fix he came up with works 90% of the time now, but it's  not as pretty as a real road and queue system.

Argh. Timezones! Here's a few other ideas to add to this conversation, taking into account that I do like the individual focus early on, and you may/may not have heard/seen them yet Fabs.

Totems or leashing? 
I need to rip out the ideas I've discussed here for their own independent suggestion, but I can sum them up very quickly here, as it follows with Danjal's thoughts on hierarchy.

Individual/small groups of follower control: leashing is fine. It scales terribly though both in terms of cost, and I suspect, performance.

Moderately sized groups of followers, let's say 10-20 maybe: leadership. This is an idea ripped from Darwinia, but it's extremely easy to learn from a gameplay perspective. With this, you could override individual follower processing by consolidating them into "hivemind" groups without giving players that impression.

Massive groups of followers exceeding 20-30: totem. The assets are already there, polish them up a bit, revise the code so that the followers drawn to them act similar to under leadership to curtail performance issues with so many on-screen, and you've got a win on the control front.

Divine Auras, Mass Influence of Followers.
This is one of my personal favorite ideas with regards to followers so far, since it aligns with previous god games. The basic idea is a switchboard for the follower AI, basically. Instead of having to simulate each individual follower's mind and all that, have them all operating according to manipulable layers/blocks of AI. You can retain the existing animations, but instead of it depending on the individual follower, it refers back to the active layer/block and generates a relevant behavior on-screen, creating the illusion of free will.

The switchboard design in my mind would consist of three major categories (i.e. thematically, auras), with different AI layers/blocks in each:
Civil. This concerns existing behavior sets like Living Society, where followers passively walk about conversing and exploring the environment. Another set could be celebratory society, wherein followers activate gifts and begin partying to raise happiness whenever you feel like it.

Labor. This would also concern existing behavior, but there's no existing upgrade to associate with. Essentially you'd take the existing construction, farming, and mining behavior sets and flow them into one called Working Society, wherein followers act on their own to begin their own construction/farming/mining projects without the need for your intervention. An additional set would be Research Society, wherein followers generate stickers for you which are collected alongside belief or automatically added to your collection. This could also allow for follower exploration to expand your influence more granularly* as well as have followers find and open chests for you.

War. This one would relate to behaviors we've unfortunately not seen in awhile, relating to combat. Override individual follower processing to draw from a block controlled by activation of Aggressive Society, wherein followers are outright hostile to others. Added to this is a more subtle idea, Disruptive Society, where followers aren't outright aggressive to others, but they'll steal from them and make a mess of the place, blighting the land over time.

Adding to all of this, I've several much simpler ideas regarding the issue of performance overhead with increasing populations.

Consolidate. Instead of having each individual breeder come out to chat and so on, shift them into a representative model where one breeder represents two/three/four/etc. related to the abode from which they're emerging.
Adhoc consolidation. Retain the individual follower model, but disguise the dropping of individual AI processing when they begin to converse or sit around campfires, shifting that into group processing.
Increase follower group work. Instead of having individual builders/farmers/miners, as discussed above, instead have them work in groups to reduce performance issues. If you roll this in with the adhoc processing consolidation idea, it'd probably work even better.

*Yes, I probably have a suggestion for every element of the game at this point. Yes, I'd love to be hired.

So in line with some of our speculation then, eh? What I'm concerned with is, if this is the case, does this mean Hubworlds are a catchall for more single-player stuff, alongside the multiplayer? If so, sweet, this could prove very cool. If not, you need to go back to the drawing board (which it sounds like you may be, a tiny bit), and provide some more compelling stuff for the single-player end of things. Revise Voyages to have multiple game modes (and maybe actually colonize some other worlds), reintroduce AI battles, and make Homeworld a little more interesting than a production house alone. =P

It'd be great to "conquer" Homeworld, and as you go on some Voyages of Conquest (hinthint), you find yourself having to balance out gaining new land while risking reintroducing enemies in your Homeworld. Say an escalating victory campaign incidentally lets other undiscovered civilizations catch wind of you being away from home, meaning it's a wicked fun game of skill trying to improve your production house by gaining and keeping territory. Eventually, maybe, you mix in tinges of insurrection when you decide to go to peace and take a break from your wars as you try to maintain the Happiness of your people (hinthinthint).

I dig the whole Hubworld concept and all, for sure, but I find myself enjoying single-player much more, more often than not.

I half expect initiating a particularly long timer to start a "minigame" where it opens my steam app and starts a random game for me to play for a specified amount of time.  "While your workers are busy, take some time off to play [Batman:Arkham City].  We will notify you when the timer runs out."

How about if Godus became a Steam wrapper where popup screens and structures became a sort of interface for the store and library.  Maybe, clicking a shrine opens the library and allows running other games or you open the "marketplace" which opens up a modified store where you can purchase other games from Steam and then build a structure that you click in order to run it.  

Oh, boy, it could be like all those abominable Windows overlay UI experiences from the 90's.  

While I think that this inherently could improve the state of the game, it would directly step away from the persistant nature of homeworld.
From what I understood, Peter's intention was to have Homeworld be something that "sticks around", rather than being of a transient nature as you're going through levels.

This was also the argument for there being no save slots, as nobody would ever "need to restart" with the worlds being permanent.


However, that said. Would that subsequently mean that the "second world" of a higher age starting over at low population also means that the population based card unlocks start over?
It seems an odd progressional track if the initial advances for the "second world" would start over at a low population number.
Though thats mostly a "feel" thing, in essence it would most likely work.

Another question would be, what would you be able to take with you as you progress. What choices are you going to make along the way to make your game "yours" or would doing this mean that 22cans drops the entire persistent nature of Godus?
(Something that I don't necessarily perceive as a problem mind you...)

While I definitely think there is merit in this suggestion/mechanic. It'd need some serious working out to make it fit I think.
Moreover, it wouldn't directly solve the problem that the game runs into with larger population counts, it'd just reset the problem as you advance to a higher age/world.


Long story short - I would prefer a functional game with worked out mechanics over a fancy but ultimately unrealistic dream.
If splitting the game up into worlds means making the game more functional and cutting out the need to overcome certain massive problems then I'm all in favor.

As I listed out in my suggestion - making the problems modular, breaking them down in component parts.
That seems to be the best way to progress at this point for 22cans. Turning big obstacles into smaller ones that are bitesized and can be handled individually.

I'm fine with a single world, if it increases in size and/or I'm given compartmentalized territory (i.e. other worlds) alongside it to manage and work*. See my above suggestion about Voyages of Conquest. I think the basic idea of using your people as a resource to complete a certain goal, and if you fail losing them, is a solid idea. I think the problem is that the Voyages of Discovery are a single gameplay mode and are relatively easy to complete, making them tedious and boring, then alongside this, they're a very poor people-as-resource sink since they're generally so easy. Voyages of Conquest would demand more people, and in doing so, draw more away from each world as you go to conquer more.

There's also the aging mechanism as I believe Danjal has posited before to naturally reduce population numbers and then there's my follower insurrection or invasion idea for within each world to create a perpetual people-resource sink as you try to put down revolts or fend off invaders.

The problem I see with many worlds > one world or many worlds > interconnected worlds around one world*, is that while it may create some variety, it loses some of the persistence. I've been revisiting Black & White 2 recently, and it felt like such a waste of resources to have that neat starter island for so little, then zip through the Greek city under attack, then spend a little more time on some Norse island only to complete it and go off to some other place. There's nothing to encourage building impressive cities unless you can tell the world's going to last awhile because the enemy's tough or something.

I'd imagine similar problems arising with Godus taking this approach.

*I want to note, if this is a subtle way of asking about Hubworlds, that if the resources were transferred to the next tier and you found yourself where you were last, that I wouldn't mind shifting about many worlds. Preferably you'd eventually seize control of some stable ground between each tier to feel proud of until you moved along to the next, but losing that would feel more natural in a multiplayer environment.

I doubt it's possible, but adding a "transitional apocalypse" into the game would be really neat/interesting imo.

I see it happening something like this:

1. Your civilisation has a terrible catastrophe occur (plague/pestilence) something that doesn't exactly ruin your infrastructure.
2. A few of your population leave in a little cut/scene, just in the nick of time.
3. Multi-century/millenia-intermission/cut-scene (lore/flavor time! ) (heck, you could make their sojourn to and from your Homeworld years later into a little mini-game if you had the gusto).
4. Decendants of your people return to your Homeworld (within a few seconds of real-time) with increased tech knowledge (you could even play it like they lost a few tech upgrades and have to rediscover them), and begin uncovering your still existing yet ancient civilization.
5. Archaeology/artifacts/ancient relics are uncovered that, with their existing tech increases their productivity and rewards the player with their patience during the re-populating phase.

this approach:

Adds depth. (you not only become your very own precursor, but the explorer of your long lost civ, giving more thoughtful players an opportunity to rebuild the civ "better" and hand them a completely new level of expansion to chew on) What I mean by this is, there are still standing structures from your lost civ, give the player the choice to immediately inhabit them, upgrade them, or tear them down to completely re-sculpt/rebuild as they see fit. That would be incredible, I'm sure you can see why.
Allows for additional/exponential/varying resource introduction.
Gives the designers an opportunity to introduce a new, more involved/exciting form of "treasure hunting".
Gives you a chance to make some very interesting lore. (Imagine the descendants of a particular follower uncovering artifacts/relics/historical items from their ancestors ruins).
Is believable.
Doesn't feel like a massive setback because you haven't lost any sculpting/building progress, just pop reduction.

A complete pop wipe over and over would get stale, but non-structural setbacks (plagues/emp bombs/etc.) are much more desirable, imo, than repeated structural disasters (volcano, earthquakes, etc.)

Just day-dreaming.