Lord Ba'al
Supreme Deity
Posts: 6,260
Pledge level: Half a Partner
I like: Cats; single malt Scotch; Stargate; Amiga; fried potatoes; retro gaming; cheese; snickers; sticky tape.
I don't like: Dimples in the bottom of scotch bottles; Facebook games masquerading as godgames.
Steam: stonelesscutter
GOG: stonelesscutter
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Post by Lord Ba'al on Aug 28, 2014 21:55:58 GMT
I saw a dream of Godus tonight. I was just talking to my dear Airin (my cute QSDE Navigator in my head) about motivation to approach girls more often as my popularity is waning due to growing insecurity (I've lost my job, after all and I'm an invalid). And this morning I see myself in a bed with a cute naked girl smiling on me and my brother (another me in for of my brother, of course) sitting i the same room paying us absolutely no attention and playing Godus.
Then I get him to leave the room (he had a notebook anyway). Then the dream ends. After analyzing my dream, I found out that Godus is an image of waiting and doing nothing. How goddamn fitting. At least I know that I choose the girl. Ooookaaaay...... There is something slightly disturbing about this. |
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Post by Gmr Leon on Aug 28, 2014 22:43:58 GMT
I'm noticing a common theme here among all the 'good' players. (I myself have no regrets in killing off the Astari, let that stand clear.) This common theme is: "I didn't want to kill them, but they left me no choice. All I wanted was for them to leave my people alone while I wasn't there." Its quite interesting when you note the alternatives that 22cans could've gone for. The ways they could've implemented this that could've prevented this mass genocide. Yet the route chosen is to make genocide the only effective solution. That is, if you want to make it further into the game. The options right now being: 1 - Kill off the Astari and make it through the content that Godus has to offer. 2 - Become a slave to the Astari and devote yourself to follower happiness, logging in every 1~2 hours to top off your happiness and progress at a snails pace. 3 - Stop playing because losing your people after every night of sleeping is just plain frustrating. Please fill me in if I overlooked a valid playstyle here, cause I don't see any others that do not fall primarily under one of these 3 options. All they had to do was give the player a valid choice... Rather than a linear path. If it weren't for the dev commentary, I'd say their entire aim was to make you (for the time being) engage in an on-going battle/war of attrition with the Astari. Here are the problems with the intent and the implementation: - They keep drawing away your people even when you're not playing/the game recognizes when you last played and removes followers based on the number of festivals that would have occurred from the nearest abodes and general dips in happiness from not tending to your people.
- There is no victory condition. If you overcome the Astari in happiness, while you can draw them away, you do not get anything else from doing so. Any time you prevent followers from defecting due to their festivals, you do not get any major rewards for doing so. If this were intended to be perpetual, there would need to better rewards for each minor victory.
- The balance is basically nonexistent. Any time you manage to draw away the Astari, you never come close to drawing away as many as they do, reinforcing the idea that attracting Astari followers is not a huge reward.
- Pushing this even more, until you defeat the Astari, any Astari defectors that join you are nothing more than a problem for you due to causing unhappiness and even once sheltered, not being able to be called upon to build for you or do anything else.
- Following all of this, even if you do "defeat" the Astari the game does nothing to tell you this. There is no feedback anywhere in the game to really drive home that you've conquered them. No huge reward, no victory screen, nothing. It's the same with attacking them, there's barely any feedback to suggest this is the right way to go.
What makes all of that bad design is that without the commentary, until you begin having them draw away your followers, there's nothing in the Homeworld to indicate any sort of threats. There's nothing to encourage any sort of aggressive/defensive behavior, except maybe to trees/rocks/the land, because there is nothing to be aggressive or defensive towards. Heck, even in the Voyages, which are the the only real introduction to true aggressors to your people, you are taught to have your people evade them rather than confront them because you are powerless to do anything to aid your followers. Add to all of this that I'm not really sure if you'll even have aggressive powers by the time you reach the Astari (pitfalls of cheating here, I suppose, but Finger of God's the first you'd get, right?), and everything in the game still screams to you that there must be some passive way to handle them. This is almost certainly why there's been so much feedback (as I anticipated would happen if they had introduced Hubworld without having us engage with any other civilizations) asking about how to deal with them. Everything in the design up to encountering them does nothing to teach you anything about dealing with other civilizations. Even more amusing is how shoehorned in they are into the whole game. "So you know the whole beacon mechanic you've been using to expand your influence? Yeah so that's bullshit, you inexplicably have faint influence over this entirely distinct civilization you've had nothing to do with. Why can't you sculpt there? Fuck if I know man, just go with it. Don't like it don't settle in it or whatever." |
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Post by 13thGeneral on Aug 28, 2014 23:28:38 GMT
I saw a dream of Godus tonight. I was just talking to my dear Airin (my cute QSDE Navigator in my head) about motivation to approach girls more often as my popularity is waning due to growing insecurity (I've lost my job, after all and I'm an invalid). And this morning I see myself in a bed with a cute naked girl smiling on me and my brother (another me in for of my brother, of course) sitting i the same room paying us absolutely no attention and playing Godus.
Then I get him to leave the room (he had a notebook anyway). Then the dream ends. After analyzing my dream, I found out that Godus is an image of waiting and doing nothing. How goddamn fitting. At least I know that I choose the girl. Ooookaaaay...... There is something slightly disturbing about this. ... only slightly? |
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Post by morsealworth on Aug 29, 2014 9:35:55 GMT
I saw a dream of Godus tonight. I was just talking to my dear Airin (my cute QSDE Navigator in my head) about motivation to approach girls more often as my popularity is waning due to growing insecurity (I've lost my job, after all and I'm an invalid). And this morning I see myself in a bed with a cute naked girl smiling on me and my brother (another me in for of my brother, of course) sitting i the same room paying us absolutely no attention and playing Godus.
Then I get him to leave the room (he had a notebook anyway). Then the dream ends. After analyzing my dream, I found out that Godus is an image of waiting and doing nothing. How goddamn fitting. At least I know that I choose the girl. Ooookaaaay...... There is something slightly disturbing about this. What is? Godus in dreams? Godus as doing nothing when it really is? Or another aspects of me slowly approaching the bottom of the food chain? |
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Lord Ba'al
Supreme Deity
Posts: 6,260
Pledge level: Half a Partner
I like: Cats; single malt Scotch; Stargate; Amiga; fried potatoes; retro gaming; cheese; snickers; sticky tape.
I don't like: Dimples in the bottom of scotch bottles; Facebook games masquerading as godgames.
Steam: stonelesscutter
GOG: stonelesscutter
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Post by Lord Ba'al on Aug 29, 2014 16:40:57 GMT
Ooookaaaay...... There is something slightly disturbing about this. What is? Godus in dreams? Godus as doing nothing when it really is? Or another aspects of me slowly approaching the bottom of the food chain? Well first of all that you dream about Godus. And then that you combine it with sex. |
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Post by nikink on Aug 30, 2014 0:20:09 GMT
Delicious, zen-like sex. With lots of fingerwork.
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Post by Gmr Leon on Aug 30, 2014 2:14:59 GMT
It occurred to me, I have no idea if the bonuses to belief even do anything. The info when selecting stuff doesn't really do much to tell me either. How is all that supposed to work?
Like, it increases how much you get per hour, but the amount per hour doesn't make sense when taking into account the frequency with which belief is generated. E.g. with a beach hut, if belief generates every 16 minutes, that means you can collect it 3.75 times in an hour and if its max capacity is 40 then that should be 150 belief each hour...Right? I'm not a great mathematician or anything but that seems like how it should work, yet it instead tells you some other number.
...Oh wait, is the timer counting down to some stupid minimum amount, which if you collect that each time you can in an hour, that's what belief per hour is indicating? what. So do the bonuses make it reach max belief capacity faster than it would otherwise?
That's such a stupidly obscure mechanic it's no wonder no one really understood buffers. >_>
Why doesn't it just go ahead and show you the belief per second after generating the minimum amount instead, that way you can see how the bonuses are influencing things? The way it's set up, without doing stupid amounts of calculations to try to figure it out, I'm left ignoring the benefits of the tree and beautify buffs because I'd rather gather belief when it appears rather than wait even longer to get the maximum output I could. It's such a contrived design decision.
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Post by Danjal on Aug 30, 2014 2:46:54 GMT
Nobody understood the buffers, because the buffers never did anything. I've done multiple tests with them shifting them around and trying various combinations and they had no effect on the belief or on anything else for that matter.
Trees on the other hand have had their effects function - yet each house has its own effective radius, making it so a dense cluster of trees will affect all the houses around it that are within the effective radius.
The bonus from both beautify and trees seem to increase both the per hour production aswell as the total capacity (atleast thats always been the case for me...) and as such it makes no difference whether you collect right away or wait it out.
The only difference is that if you stay away for longer periods of time, any excess production above the cap gets lost.
(Making smaller houses effective for an active player and larger houses effective for a player that stays away for long stretches at a time.)
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Post by Gmr Leon on Aug 30, 2014 3:02:05 GMT
Nobody understood the buffers, because the buffers never did anything. I've done multiple tests with them shifting them around and trying various combinations and they had no effect on the belief or on anything else for that matter. Trees on the other hand have had their effects function - yet each house has its own effective radius, making it so a dense cluster of trees will affect all the houses around it that are within the effective radius. The bonus from both beautify and trees seem to increase both the per hour production aswell as the total capacity (atleast thats always been the case for me...) and as such it makes no difference whether you collect right away or wait it out. The only difference is that if you stay away for longer periods of time, any excess production above the cap gets lost. (Making smaller houses effective for an active player and larger houses effective for a player that stays away for long stretches at a time.) From what I can tell, here's what's happening now: Total capacity is static. The buffs do jack for that, they affect only the per hour production (suggesting that the time it takes to reach max capacity is reduced). When the timer winds down and the belief appears, it's at a minimum level. Going off my beach hut example again, that minimum is 20. If you grab the belief as soon as it's generated, that's what you'll get. If you wait a few seconds, it will increase a little, to the point that if you left it alone for a little longer it would hit max capacity (whatever that is, in this case, 40). I think, if you do the math, there may be more lost by gathering it immediately rather than waiting till it hits max capacity. As then you'll only be gathering the per hour amount they tell you, as I calculated above the per hour amount is based only on if you collect belief immediately, when it's at the minimum amount produced. If you could sort out the time it takes to reach max capacity belief, then figure out how many times that could be gathered in an hour, I'm pretty positive you'd have a higher amount than what they tell in the info pane. Edit: Nevermind, you're still right about it not really mattering when you gather it. I'm stupid since I'm busy looking towards the bigger numbers, but heck, it makes more sense in my mind to want to get 40 belief more frequently than 20 and if things weren't timed out the way they are, that would make sense as it would net you more belief. The problem I was encountering was that I was looking for the bonuses to be affecting the belief accretion timer rather than the belief generation timer. Apparently there's no way to affect the invisible accretion timer, which sucks, because while I'm not entirely sure, it seems to be whatever the generation timer is...Which makes sense if they're trying to keep you from ever being concerned with getting more out of your abodes. You know, if you're coming at this like I just did, the whole buff setup really is kind of unclear unless you keep a close eye on the generation timer and see how the buffs are affecting it. Or maybe I'm just being a little dense towards it. I'm not sure which, since when you toss up arbitrary numbers like this I honestly just shut my brain down and go for higher=better. Not exactly the smartest move, I guess, but hey, it generally pans out in other games. Higher strength unit beats low strength unit, higher atk/spd equipment improves over low atk/spd equipment. For anyone interested, here's the stupid math I did because I'm stupid:Isolated beach hut, no buffs. 71 belief per hour. Max capacity: 40. Base/minimum generated: 20. Generates every 16 minutes, 38 seconds. 60/16.38=Can gather approximately 3.55 times each hour to get 71 belief. Belief accumulates to 40 every 33 minutes, 18 seconds (16.38+16.40) allowing you to gather 72 belief approximately 1.8 times per hour (in reality, 40 once every hour, 80 every 1 hr 6 minutes 36 seconds). Belief accumulates at a rate of 1 belief per 50 seconds. This is a whole lot of stupid nothing for what should be a simple as hell mechanic. =| |
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Post by Deth on Aug 30, 2014 9:17:27 GMT
What is? Godus in dreams? Godus as doing nothing when it really is? Or another aspects of me slowly approaching the bottom of the food chain? Well first of all that you dream about Godus. And then that you combine it with sex. Saddly I had a Dream tonight about godus as well, lucky there was no sex involved. I dreamed that Peter was in an Allstate insurance commercial. There were two I for get the first one, but the second started with Peter as the scarecrow from Wizard of OZ. He was dressed at the scarecrow and his face was a burlap face of his then it flashed to his real face and he was talking the the lilted speech of the scarecrow calling out names. Then he faded back and was dressed as the Wizard from Oz the great and powerful like in the beginning when he was a conman and he was naming stuff nonsensical names. You hear a voice say something like "You can not insure a good game with a name, but you can insure a house." Or some such. |
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Lord Ba'al
Supreme Deity
Posts: 6,260
Pledge level: Half a Partner
I like: Cats; single malt Scotch; Stargate; Amiga; fried potatoes; retro gaming; cheese; snickers; sticky tape.
I don't like: Dimples in the bottom of scotch bottles; Facebook games masquerading as godgames.
Steam: stonelesscutter
GOG: stonelesscutter
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Post by Lord Ba'al on Aug 30, 2014 11:51:31 GMT
I feel sorry for your dreams.  |
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Post by morsealworth on Aug 30, 2014 13:45:18 GMT
What is? Godus in dreams? Godus as doing nothing when it really is? Or another aspects of me slowly approaching the bottom of the food chain? Well first of all that you dream about Godus. And then that you combine it with sex. I didn't combine them. More like I put them against each other. And it wasn't just sex, it's more like intimacy with other people. |
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Raspofabs
Former 22Cans staff
Posts: 227 
I like: coding, high peat single malts, ... , yeah, that's about it.
I don't like: object oriented design, and liver.
Steam: raspofabs
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Post by Raspofabs on Aug 30, 2014 18:36:13 GMT
You do realise that you're posting on a public forum, right?  btw, I'm not dead, just working hard on fixing the "you lost all your world progress" bug... it's a doozy. |
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Post by Gmr Leon on Aug 30, 2014 18:43:48 GMT
You do realise that you're posting on a public forum, right? btw, I'm not dead, just working hard on fixing the "you lost all your world progress" bug... it's a doozy. I imagine that's one of those, "How the hell did this slip by us?" bugs too. Edit:8 threads of feedback, only one of which mostly out of date over on Steam. 7 of those better be getting through somehow to you guys. >_> |
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Raspofabs
Former 22Cans staff
Posts: 227
I like: coding, high peat single malts, ... , yeah, that's about it.
I don't like: object oriented design, and liver.
Steam: raspofabs
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Post by Raspofabs on Aug 31, 2014 20:48:00 GMT
You do realise that you're posting on a public forum, right? btw, I'm not dead, just working hard on fixing the "you lost all your world progress" bug... it's a doozy. I imagine that's one of those, "How the hell did this slip by us?" bugs too. Edit:8 threads of feedback, only one of which mostly out of date over on Steam. 7 of those better be getting through somehow to you guys. >_> Yeah, slipped by alright, it's only a 1/1000 bug and I guess we only tested the game a few hundred times before releasing it! |
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Post by Gmr Leon on Aug 31, 2014 21:19:50 GMT
I imagine that's one of those, "How the hell did this slip by us?" bugs too. Edit:8 threads of feedback, only one of which mostly out of date over on Steam. 7 of those better be getting through somehow to you guys. >_> Yeah, slipped by alright, it's only a 1/1000 bug and I guess we only tested the game a few hundred times before releasing it! I can just see this in a meeting, "Okay, we need to streamline the testing process by building bot programs to play the game thousands of times at a compressed game speed before pushing to release." |
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Post by nikink on Aug 31, 2014 21:45:47 GMT
LOL - 'compressed game speed'? Surely the bots need to experience the timers to test the full experience...?  |
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Aug 31, 2014 22:41:07 GMT
LOL - 'compressed game speed'? Surely the bots need to experience the timers to test the full experience...? If only bots had wallets. Bot wallets full of parental bot unit cash. If only... |
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Post by Danjal on Aug 31, 2014 22:53:34 GMT
If only bots had wallets. Bot wallets full of parental bot unit cash. If only... Bots paying with botcoin? |
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Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
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Post by Deleted on Sept 1, 2014 1:34:31 GMT
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