EVERGLADES: bugs and suggestions

News, discussions and gossip around WOK SPECIES.

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Dameon
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Post by Dameon » Tue Mar 30, 2004 3:28 am

The problem is I went for BS2 too early. Combined with the bug in this beta of there being not enough BS2 food squares, I haven't found a single one. So, to keep myself fed along with my instinct up, I am basically using over 80% of my turns doing that. If I had known about the increase, I would have definetely made SURE I knew were BS2 plants were before attempting to go for it. Really the fact that I have no arms or legs isn't what is causing the huge amount of time devoted to feeding here, it's my inability to find the proper plants. I have gained a grand total of 40 SP over the last three full cycles; and yeah, I do think that is too slow.

Incidentally, the bug seems to be gone, for whatever reason. Thanks to whomever fixed it, if it was somebody, but if it fixed itself then the dev team needs to look at things and figure out what made it appear to begin with. It was there for a few hours and if I was going to hunt during those hours, I would have been starving, with much more dire consequences. And no matter how you look at things, the average instinct is hovering around 60%, and yes, I do firmly believe that is too low of an average, and the problem should be addressed, both in the Buy phase and with Spying. This is beta after all, we are playing in order to give suggestions on how to improve the game and make it more fun for players. If you think folks on the mobile market want to wait 3 days for their first mutation, well, I doubt it.
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Post by korexus » Tue Mar 30, 2004 3:29 am

Ok, I'm slightly drunk. My internet connection keeps failing and every time I try to add an order for my species, I get some irritating error message. Howver, I'm going to try to shelve my irritation and innebriation in order to answer your various points...

Working backwards, the better instinct gain is on my list of things to pester Al with. Unfortunately, that can be a very long list at times. Some form of bonus will probably emerge though :)

Also on the the subject of instinct. If I recall my calculation, the "magic number" for instinct when hunting plants is 66. So although instinct is comparible to EFF it's not exactly the same thing. I can see a large group of people being not surprised by that. The average instinct is then not too far below the minimum. Hopefully players will be able to keep things in place, only more testing will tell for sure though.

BS 2 plants rare. Yes. What did you expect? you can still eat BS 1 after all, you just need to spend twice as many turns doing so. Also BS 2 plants should hopefully be more available in later games, for various reasons...

Spying. As far as I am aware, the penalty for spying an empty province has been removed. At which point any instinct penalty suffered is due to a failed spy attempt. Just like in WoK 4 or 5.

Colour restriction on mutation. It would be fairer to have this constant instead of random. I'll add it to my list.

People coming into chat and not being able to talk to Dev people. We can see anyone in the default room at any time that we are logged into our private room. Normally if someone logs in we change rooms to see if they want to talk. You'd be pretty unlucky to log in 2 or 3 times while we were online and not talk to at leasts one of us...

Think that covers most points. Oh yeah, Rune, I can;t add any new orders!!! :evil:


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Post by Donut » Tue Mar 30, 2004 3:38 am

I understand your dilemna perfectly Dameon, but I don't think the solution is to mess with the feeding/movement/instinct. I know and you know(now) that going BS2 before you are able to sustain yourself was a bad idea. I think the answer is more in strategy than playing with the engine. If I were to change anything with the feeding it would be to simply add more plants to the map... maybe more than 1 type of plant per square? As far as I know theres only 1 type per square. It does suck that the "refresh bug" (I'm still confused, only heard it mentioned in the chat recently) had to occur, that did mess quite a bit up.

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Post by Donut » Tue Mar 30, 2004 3:43 am

Note: G4 has 2000+ BS 2 plants... Enjoy

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Post by Dameon » Tue Mar 30, 2004 4:31 am

Heh that's all the way across the map from me, but I'll start moving in that general direction. If anybody has anything for me in the D10 area though I'm listening! :-) Anyway, this also brings me back to the point of not having a manual, because if I had known that this would have happened I would have never done the BS2 mutation early and then found out I was doomed to a lot of repetition and boredom. Also, with instinct, it factors into your attack and defense as well. I'd rather not lose 1/3 of my attack rolls in particular, because that WILL make it even harder to hunt. I don't know about the "magic number", but with instinct affecting attack which effects your ability to hunt, I think it is quite important to keep high. With just a 9% increase in instinct, my average yield per hunt went up about 25 units (with all factors considered), which is a big deal, yeah. I'd also wager spy attempts are tied in with instinct too, and with such a steep penalty for a failed attempt, I'd not want it at 66% for that reason too.

I think the saturation reduction for BS2 was completely necessary when you consider how hard it is to find BS2 plants. As for the movement reduction, I have no strong opinion on that being removed IF spying empty squares isn't going to case me to automatically lose instinct. I think food is fine right now (after the refresh bug is fixed, of course) but instinct is still a little bit too expensive.
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Post by Lowebb » Tue Mar 30, 2004 8:09 am

But moving to BS2 itself is a 'random' act, if you have 70SP it could still take you 7 mutations before you are guaranteed to get it. I think the dev team is going to keep the randomness of the mutations but I personally think a little more control is required, ie, careful planning of how many SP you have at the end of a cycle for a 50% of getting what you want

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Post by Underdog » Tue Mar 30, 2004 9:40 am

Well at least I can put in orders now but I lost quite a few specimens and my fertility went to crap overnight since I couldn't put in the order to hunt.

Now I guess I will get to spend most of today trying to get back to where I was.

Well thats part of what Beta testing is for so I will deal with it. I was trying to deal with it in the other games but they were stopped. It is kinda a good practice since a few hours away from your connection is always possible and it would be nice to figure out the best way to come back from something like this
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Post by gm_al » Tue Mar 30, 2004 9:41 am

Thanks Donut, after all SOMEONE that doesnt whine & rant but realizes that YOU CANT HAVE IT ALL.

I assure you that we have several topics on our list to look after, mainly spying and new skillz, as well as make the engine faster and better to use.

However we will not make the game a "walk in the park". We can improve interaction and enrich it with new abilities, but a choice has always to be made. If you say "hey I have to use 1/3 of my turns to feed and keep instinct up" I dont see it as a valid claim. We will keep improving the balance, but WOK SP is not a collect-only-skillpoints-and-go-for-it game. Different strategies should be viable, even if it could mean things like dropping a value to the minimum to go max another one.

Give us some time - we are making good progress I think.

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Post by Underdog » Tue Mar 30, 2004 10:04 am

I agree with you Al,

I think there should be some challenges in the game. but I also think that my idea of making BS just a little higher than BP would put some strategy into the game. with them being equal in skill points it is IMO just too risky to have 70 skill points too early and taking the chance of gaining BS with a BP of 1. Now I could be wrong and it could be easier if you have 4 limbs before you get BS2 but I didn't notice a huge difference with 2 limbs and I am hoping that I can regain some semblance of where I was last night so I can get those second arms and legs before I go for the next level BS or BP.
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Post by Underdog » Tue Mar 30, 2004 10:13 am

And DAMEON,
The map is round so you can go off one edge to get to G-4 if it is quicker.
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Post by Underdog » Tue Mar 30, 2004 11:08 am

As for the BS2 plants squares.

When you think about it the numbers CAN't get much better than they are in this game anyway. Everyone starts with BS 1 in their starting square. that takes up HALF the board at least, and that is if they don't have ANY extra squares with BS 1 for people to move to later when they deplete thier starting square due to bad LUCK in their starting plant color.

Now you figure they will add say another 15-25 extras for that reason and that will only leave you with 25 to MAYBE 35 squares that are for bigger plants to grow.and that has to be split between the other 3 sizes so 8 - possibly 10 squares for BS 2 plants. Now they might be able to weight those remaining squares so there are more Blue plants out there but then people will just complain once they hit BS3 and have to find the even fewer squares with Grey plants in them.

My personal theory would have a set number for each size and it would look something like this:

75 squares for BS1
15 squares for BS2
7 squares for BS3
3 squares for BS4

Now that is just a guess as to what it might look like.
Al, just out of curiosity, how close am I to actuality?
I suspect it isn't too far off but I have probably weighted it too much toward BS2 and not enough for BS3 and 4. Maybe with the refresh bug there are even too many BS1's out there which would change that but if the numbers were set with maybe a +/- 2% to them, that would fix that refresh bug I think.

Now I wish to AGAIN thank our illustrious creator in making this game and all the work that has gone into it from Rune and Korexus, and anyone else that might be on the Dev team that I don't realize.
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Post by Dameon » Tue Mar 30, 2004 3:19 pm

If I only had to use 1/3 of my turns to hunt and keep instinct up, I'd be fine with that. It's when I am using over 2/3 of my turns to do that when it gets annoying. If I had BS2 plants though, it wouldn't be a problem, and that's the core of the issue I think. I know the map is round, but G4 is still a very long way from me.

UD has posted some reasonable numbers there, and with that in mind, what I would suggest is limited BS to 3 then, instead of 4. That way you can have a reasonable number of both BS2 and BS3 squares, so that when people DO mutate they have a chance to keep themselves fed without having to hunt too frequently. Even with the reduced saturation costs, I personally still see it as a disadvantage when I get a BS mutation, which is not the case with the others.

Yes, the game is cool, and yes, we are making progress, but the point of beta testing is to get a feel for balance. I feel the BS mutation is out of balance with the others, in that it has some serious downsides where the others don't. Maybe it should be made more expensive, then, so people have a chance to get the totally benefician BP mutation without risking the BS one.

The new instinct and spying options are definetely good things; I believe that the game is getting better and better every day.
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Post by Dameon » Tue Mar 30, 2004 7:51 pm

Quick minor issue. When I buy instinct, it still says I am buying only 4% instinct back. It is ADDING the full 5%, but in the event log it is still listing it as 4%. Just a little nitpick. :lol:
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Post by Egbert » Tue Mar 30, 2004 9:52 pm

I am now getting that dumb error message again, whenever I try and enter orders. :computer: I know you guys are doing your best, and that this is only beta, but it has ruined the game since many people starved before, and now will again.

So..............how about a restart once the problem is fixed?
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Post by Saladin » Tue Mar 30, 2004 10:15 pm

Neah, no restart...people should just have kept enough saturation handy for just such a thing...just like in real life you never know what's going to happen. :P
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Post by Dameon » Wed Mar 31, 2004 12:45 am

The problem should be fixed now, for good, according to Rune. While I personally finally manage to have a good handle on things and have only starved once due to the bug, it could easily have been more times, so I sympathize with Egbert. I can go either way with either keeping this beta running or starting another one.
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Post by Underdog » Wed Mar 31, 2004 2:34 am

Ok I'm not sure how or when it happened but somehow we are about 30 minutes behind. The cycle was happening at 10 minutes before the hour and now it is scheduled for 20 minutes after the hour. Not a big deal but we seem to have missed 3 turns somewhere. I don't believe we lost it when Rune fixed the OQ but maybe it was during that short time the WHOLE kaomaris.com was down? that was shortly after Rune fixed the OQ and maybe we just had too many people trying to enter orders at the same time and overloaded the server.
I suspect it will not make any difference in the grand scheme of things and I am NOT complaining it just had me confused for a few minutes when I checked when the cycle was supposed to run.
Thought I would point it out since it IS possible something isn't right but I doubt it. I just think somewhere 30 minutes was lost.
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Post by Mullog » Wed Mar 31, 2004 7:35 am

Underdog wrote:Thought I would point it out since it IS possible something isn't right but I doubt it. I just think somewhere 30 minutes was lost.
This sounds like something taken out of some sci-fi movie. We have lost 30 minutes, but de don't know when or how!

The kaomaris server has been somewhat unstable lately, and if the server is down then turns will not be run. I guess that is why we have lost those turns.


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Post by Saladin » Wed Mar 31, 2004 7:57 am

Has anybody tried the skill 'indifference' yet?
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Post by Strider » Wed Mar 31, 2004 8:49 am

If I was a betting man (and I am...), I would bet that indifference has something to do with the color of food you can eat (gets rid of that pesky color limitation).
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