2012/1/26 Isaac Clerencia <[email protected]> > > Am 26.01.2012 08:10, schrieb Gabriel Morin: > >> Ultimately if you have campaigns you need to have a slippery slope, the > >> alternative being that your skill at getting lots of gold and powerful > >> units doesn't have much of an influence. I don't think that having to > >> restart a few scenarios is to be viewed as The Ultimate Evil(tm): > happened > >> to me, I was happy to find the way to play them better, and I'm still > alive > >> today! If you worry so much about poor newbs getting scared, why not > >> provide automatic loyal reinforcements or gold on easy difficulty, > whenever > >> you detect that the player is starting a scenario with insufficient > >> resources/army to win? The rest of us with minimal experience and/or a > >> brain will manage. > > I think this idea is the most reasonable approach, and it won't ruin > the game for anyone, but ideally it should be brought to the attention > of the player and be opt-in, so players who like the challenge don't > get automatically opted-in into some help didn't ask for. > Something like: > "Your current gold and army strength doesn't seem enough to beat this > scenario. Do you want to start with XX gold and get reinforcements?" > If we go this way, it'd also be good to actually count the times you > asked for help during a campaign, so at the end of the campaign, your > result is 'You have beaten the campaign XXX at difficulty YYY, using > help ZZZ times', and thus there is an extra achievement in not using > the help. >
While I can see your point about not forcing them on the player, I don't like much the artificial aspect of it, and was thinking more along the lines of what Ivanovic described: reinforcements that come with some excuse within the bounds of the scenario: wandering mercenaries, merchants and what not. I was thinking that at the lowest difficulty, we'd make clear that the game helps you - it'd be the safety net for the poorest players, so to speak -, so you'd opt-in when starting the campaign, or when reverting to that difficulty between scenarios if we develop that option. If we go with your proposal, though, I propose we try to word the messages about help coming as "in-game" as possible, stuff like "A powerful Lord took pity of the sorry state of your army, and is proposing in a haughty letter to send reinforcements. Do you step on your honor and accept his help?". Then we'd compute an honor score for the campaign based on how many times you accepted help. Lastly, I wanted to say I really like the idea proposed by beetlenaut of being able to change difficulty between scenarios. Even though I like a challenge and don't mind replaying scenarios most of the time, I'd definitely use it sometimes. What it *doesn't* solve, is the problem of beginner players who fail even at the easiest difficulty - see my safety net idea above. Dynamic difficulty as proposed by Michael Babich is interesting as well, but only as a suggestion I think. Otherwise I predict very surprised players who were happy to kick the AI's bum in one scenario, only to experience a perceived huge spike of difficulty in the next. In keeping with the abovementioned honor mechanic, you could gain honor by accepting the suggestion of moving up one difficulty level, maybe. Then in the iPhone version we can instead just sell help tokens at $1 > each (just kidding :P). <insert evil grin here> The worst thing is, if we were after money at all costs, it'd probably work with some people. Read about the *Cow Clicker* experiment ;) . Gabriel aka gabba
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