Game Development: Theatrum Chemicum

[MagicManICT]

What I have to ask is: Why did you have them stockpiled vs using them already?

[Yourgrandmother]

I was more referring to humus/seeds stockpiled.

That was just one of my regular harvests which happened to pop today.

[Mereni]

What I have to ask is: Why did you have them stockpiled vs using them already?

I have a dozen I was saving. The reason is that it take so much regen food to study a point now that I haven't gotten around to collecting all the food I need yet.

And those who think that titans are still around are only half right. For one, damaging brazier fire IS draining their humors. I saw someone quote some major raids that happened recently, those guys lost stats in that. Stats they can't get back. Raiders won't save their titans, because they know that using them will be grounds for getting braziers and walls back to historic levels. People who want to raid should be happy about this situation. It means raiding will not continue to be the realm of only a few very strong factions. Carebears, I suppose, will be less happy as it means more people will be able to raid...

A second reason the 'titans' are not having such an easy time raiding now as they were before, and need defense strength to start coming down a bit, is because of regen food. A half dozen raiders can each two sheds of high purity colewort on a big raid. But high purity food is almost gone now. Raiders Want to hit large targets for the possible loot and the forum drama and the fun of it, but it gets silly when everyone is running around trying to find enough mushrooms to regen. And when the large, fun, target requires more of the diminishing store of good regen food that the loot is probably going to be worth, those raiders are going to turn their attention to poorly defended little newbies instead. No one wants that, not even the raiders, for the most part.


As for the alchemy, I left three test tubes running overnight (accidentally) and lost two of them, also lost one of the three things in the third tube. The improvement I got, along with a lot of instability, was pretty negligible too. Clearly, this will be something that only more advanced players do. I have no problem with that, though an ability to make glass, purity glass (assuming purity makes these things work faster), is definitely needed. A lot of people won't be able to let these things run for a couple hours for one tick during the time they get to play, and it can't be left unsupervised either.

Three cheers on the new proficiency system! Since it looks like cuttings don't actually ever regrow, I'll be grinding up my NP and such A LOT.

[forge]

A problem i see with alchemy, and i don't know if anyone else agrees with me but i think the effect it has on items is way too small or way too slow for someone wanting to take the effort to do it

It seems to me that the basic problem you, and some others, seem to hang up on is that it's hard to reach 100% purity, unlike previously. That's not a problem, however; that's a large part of the intention behind these updates. 100% pure goods are not supposed to be a norm, but something extraordinarily rare.

The discussions around alchemy would be much more meaningful if you instead started to assume that things will normally be far less pure than that, and instead tried to reason about what that means for other game mechanics. That was, for instance, our reason for lowering wall HP and soak -- that is, because we assume people will generally reach lower humour values than the previous (broken) ones which may only have been possible with 100% pure (broken) crops to back them.

Jorb/Loftar, How are you going to address the players which have stats like in the picture before this post. How will our lower hp walls protect us from the 600 bile players still around. These changes while "good" only add yet more disparity between new and old players. I believe I have read that it is stated that there will not be wipes? If this is true do you plan to open a new server? How are new players supposed to compete on any level?

[Mereni]

Jorb/Loftar, How are you going to address the players which have stats like in the picture before this post. How will our lower hp walls protect us from the 600 bile players still around. These changes while "good" only add yet more disparity between new and old players. I believe I have read that it is stated that there will not be wipes? If this is true do you plan to open a new server? How are new players supposed to compete on any level?

Forge, if you'll look at the post I made just prior to yours, you'll see that lowering defenses slightly actually makes newer, less defended players safer. Also, there are no 600 humor characters. Even 400 was always very, very difficult to achieve.

[pistolshrimp]

So coincidently last night was the first time I decided to use snuff. I had saved it from some prior update. I did not read the announcement...

I was like OMG SNUFF IS AWESOME!

[forge]

All that matters is that these players can kill any player in two hits with the new system. That will remain the ONLY thing that matters. Sooner or later no matter how big a fort you have. You will have to go outside.

Edit: Mereni, see I didn't even bother reading your post before posting the above myself. Behold how do you deal with 400 bile characters with snakes which hit for 100-130. They can and will sit there for days harassing you. This happened the first time our group played. Two players killed about 30 people over a two week camp of our town. It doesn't matter they can't come in. Because sooner or later you will have to go out if you want to "play" and I use that term loosely, this game.

So again, what will be done about the "400" bile characters who cannot die, if they choose to harass you. Obviously you'll assault a town with 200 biles and as soon as someone puts up a effort you log in the 400 bile character which will not have to deal with any braziers.

[martinuzz]

Even though I'd really hate it, for the months of work of building a nice base, I think a wipe is really needed.
From a few different perspectives:

For old players, with 300+ and even 600+ bile characters, there is no incentive to farm or craft anymore. There's just no progress to be had anymore, no goals. Farm trees? Gain 1% purity every 10 days, only to lose the progress because the new saplings fail to sprout, and they won't regrow in a month? Nah.
Toy with alchemy, spend hours making purity iron for pressure cookers, only to mostly lose them to explosion, with a very small chance to turn some stuff of completely worthless purity into some stuf with still completely worthless purity? Test it once or twice, to please the devs.
Only sensible thing left to do, is either go and raid bases for lolz (preferably noobs with no or little braziers, to not lose too many biles), or save their high bile chars for defense, check once a day for waste claims, and play H&H or some other game.

For new players, there's the issue of never being able to retaliate when raided by a bored group of 300+ bile characters, as has been adressed quite a few times now.

And for players in the middle, who might have been working for months, farming and feeding, to try and catch up with some of the higher humour groups that started a month or two earlier, and take revenge for the raids they did? Well, they were nearly there. Now, there's no chance for revenge anymore. No more goal to work for. In my village, since the purity nerf patch, average playing time per day per player went from 6 hours a day to less than 1 hour a day. There seems to be no goal to play for anymore, all progress that was gained through really hard work destroyed. Because it did take lots of work and effort with the old system to make enough high purity foods to feed alts, contrary to what some noobs might think.
I guess we could go raid noobs, like most (semi)old players on Roanoke are doing, for lolz. But, for me at least, there's not much fun in that, except when they are wearing nice clothes.

[Yourgrandmother]

I guess we could go raid noobs, like most (semi)old players on Roanoke are doing, for lolz. But, for me at least, there's not much fun in that, except when they are wearing nice clothes.

Then I find your scents and come kill you.

Like those guys from Witch Haven

[forge]

I guess we could go raid noobs, like most (semi)old players on Roanoke are doing, for lolz. But, for me at least, there's not much fun in that, except when they are wearing nice clothes.

Then I find your scents and come kill you.

Like those guys from Witch Haven

My lower hp walls will certainly keep you out. See what I did there..