Voters 3
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Make Impatience Bad
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Anonymous |
Impatience should be a bad thing. Nowadays, people deliberately jack up impatience to at least 50% in order to get hostility reduction and various other bonuses which scale with hostility. Instantly calling the trader and robbing traders have the side-effect of making the Queen impatient and this is supposed to be a bad thing, not a good thing. They also hold off on completing orders because they want impatience kept high. I want a return to the old ways where players were actually incentivized to keep the Queen's impatience low.
Currently, the only downside to high impatience is a small point penalty at the end of the game which doesn't bother anyone.
So here's the new system. Like storm hostility, the Queen's impatience exceeding certain levels will have negative effects. For example. @1: The colony is no longer a fledgling colony and the Queen withdraws her protection. She will no longer hold back the forest. (Lose a buff which reduces hostility and increases resolve by 1). @6: The colonists sense the Queen's ire. They worry she will abandon them. (-3 global resolve) @8: No more support. If you must succeed, do it with what you've already been given. No more cornerstones or colonist caravans during drizzle. @9: They sense desperation. Trader prices increase by 100%.
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Speed112
This is an interesting suggestion that I think should be given more consideration.
I agree that impatience, for skilled players at least, is not a threat but an asset. You want to routinely invest in RAISING impatience (by calling traders or sacrificing excess villagers, especially at higher prestige and later years) as opposed to lowering it in order to facilitate faster exploration and reduce hostility.
This is simply because there is literally no drawback to impatience until you reach the final moment when you lose the game.
Humans as a result, are by far the weakest hearthkeeper because in the early-game at least they actively harm you by delaying your exploration or restricting your woodcutting enterprise.
Their only use is when you have made a mistake, lost villagers, or picked up a situational impatience modifier that you need to compensate for temporarily. They are never permanent hearthkeepers, unlike Harpies or Lizards.
I think the correct way to design this mechanic is to have it be a give and take dynamic with thresholds, as suggested, where you manage your gain to perhaps delay a bad proc, or accelerate it if you can afford it. There should be both benefits and downsides to being at low or high impatience and the player should judge and decide where they want to be positioned depending on the assets at their disposal and the conditions of the map.
The new system suggestion I think is definitely an improvement over what we have now. Specifically because it would mirror the positive side where you unlock cornerstones after exceeding thresholds. You should unlock negative orders when you exceed Impatience thresholds.
It would also allow for an additional set of choices, which is one of the most fun aspects of the game.
Here are a few examples of impatience orders:
1. Various taxes that you choose! — The Citadel is lacking in resources and the time has come for you to pay your dues. Deliver a set amount of goods to the Queen or you shall face her ire.
People complain about Vassal Tax because it's forced upon them and if they have no good amber production it can get out of hand. It can also feel restrictive and unfun.
If vassal tax is an option that you can choose to avoid, among other options such as a basic fuel/food tax, a complex fuel/food tax, a copper tax or stone/clay or whatever the queen may desire to prove you're building a productive settlement...
That would be a great improvement in my opinion.
In the event that you don't pay that particular tax, then you get the mechanics in play like the current unavoidable Vassal Tax where you get a stack of impatience increasing, at various rates depending on the tier, with higher levels of impatience requiring more resources and accelerating impatience even further.
Payments can happen once each season, or just during the storm, or whatever. There could even be a cornerstone (if they're every season) such as "Only pay the Queen's tax during Clearance." so you're not caught with your pants down right after the storm when you've exhausted your resources or while you're running a glade event that eats them up. Also would help if you're relying on farm production.
2. Manpower drafting — You've clearly failed to prove that you're an adequate manager of the Queen's resources, so she'd rather distribute them to another colony. Please provide X villagers for the Queen's ambition... they then leave the settlement. Self-explanatory.
3. One-time resource dumps — The Queen demands resources, and she demands them NOW!
Like timed orders or trade routes, except instead of getting amber in return, you get impatience reduction.
4. Hostility reduction — Your overzealous exploitation of the forests has brought negative effects upon other settlements. The Queen demands that you cease your activity temporarily to ease their burden. Lower hostility beyond a certain point for Y period of time in exchange for impatience reduction.
5. Improve resolve — The people are complaining about your inadequate leadership. The Queen demands you improve their conditions.
Exceed Z resolve for A (or all) race(s) for a period of time or you get hit with another impatience point.
And I'm sure you can come up with a whole bunch of good ones yourselves...
The perks should only trigger once even if you fall back below the threshold and visually the gem on the bar can become hollow to indicate that.
Satisfying an impatience order may lower impatience gain (permanently or temporarily) or in some cases even drop you back a full impatience point. Also, the act of picking an order itself should temporarily reduce impatience gain. This way you get to weigh whether or not you want to even pick an order now, and perhaps stack up multiple at once to get and stay at a particular hostility level. Sometimes you might want to delay picking at the expense of some extra gain in order to maintain increased production or dodge one storm's worth of procs. Lots of things to consider.
The dynamic I think should feel like a ticking time bomb, since as people get more and more impatient, they get more and more demanding. Each additional perk and inability to manage it effectively would accelerate impatience accumulation and your inevitable doom.
Eventually, perhaps 1 point away from defeat, you'd have the Queen lose all hope in you and you reach the point of no return where you have to either rush for victory or lose. She demands your head. Maybe there could be a permanent resolve hit or she withdraws all of her hostility reduction (so now you can start burning all of that wood you've been stocking up on ^^ )
This genuinely opens up a whole new area of gameplay and design possibilities and I find it very odd that it would get dismissed like this because "it's not fun." ... it shows a lack of faith in these great devs and their ability to design fun mechanics. I think the current state of the game proves that they can handle this.
Please make impatience bad.
PotatoMcWhiskey
The game clock making the game easier as it ticks up is the correct way it should work. Running out of time shouldn't make the game harder, you want a soft landing.
HOWEVER, there should be a benefit to having high and low impatience, scaling at both ends so that players aren't just choosing to jack it up early game.
balistafreak
Vehemently disagree with this suggestion. Impatience serves as the game clock and having it make the game harder as it ticks up creates "unstable equilibrium"-style difficulty where the moment things start to get even a little bad, they get REALLY bad REALLY fast.
Unstable equilibrium style difficulty is extremely well documented in game design as disincentivizing risk taking and encouraging metagame tactics where a single mistake is worth reloading a save or even scrubbing and restarting an entire run. Some people consider restarting a roguelike run 20 times before settling on a "solid start" to be part of the charm of the genre; I call it tedious at best and cancerous at worst.
I feel like most of the people supposedly "abusing" the impatience-stacking are already playing on a lower prestige level that they can clear consistently and their idea of an "easier" run is completing it more quickly so they have less opportunity to hang themselves on their own petard and can start the next run more quickly. The later prestige multipliers (trader prices being higher, reputation only restoring 50% impatience) go a long way in crippling this strategy and I can say from experience that giving yourself less "final time" and making it impossible to call traders when you actually have amber to spend are sufficient downsides at higher prestiges.
That being said, impatience times into hostility which ties into the negative Storm modifiers you will face, which creates some humorous "lore" implications. Reassigning woodcutters to lower hostility and avoid the forest's wrath feels sensible. Flipping some distant monarch the middle finger and the forest mysteriously ceasing to throw lightning bolts at you has a weird gap in logic. Why does sending a sternly worded letter to coerce a trader to your colony stop your colonists from falling over dead to lurking spirits? Who knows.
Is it lore-friendly to be denied nice things and have thumbscrews turned when the going gets tough? Sure, but I don't think it'd be very much fun.
The game being more lenient as you approach the Game Over mark is a good thing, but the method by which it does so is a bit suspect.