Not sure about player loss conditions

I think that would be ok… a couple of things I might also look at…

All the current bosses are all or none, i.e. you either kill it or you don’t. One thing to consider might be creating zombie bosses that can be ‘damaged’ and starts off more powerful; his ability might even scale with how damaged he is. So he might start off as a 100(X)x50(Y) (5,000 strength boss) who makes a strength attack (X) every 12 hours to all mortals in a 1 league radius.

A lot of inspiration here could probably be drawn from D&D; I love some of the abilities the creatures in that RPG can have. One of my personal favorites that could be very applicable to this game is the Corpse Gatherer (Undead (Dungeons & Dragons) - Wikipedia)

I’d like to point out that it would be nice to see zombie bosses as a single facet of building strategic depth.

slightly conflicts with what was said here

I was meaning to run some statistical analysis to see what is really happening, this has just encouraged me to - I’ve never really felt the rate of zombies rising has been increasing (on normal difficulty), I need to investigate it more

The current ideal version of a strategy I have at the moment (ie if i didn’t need to sleep and could be in front of the pc all the time) is

  1. look up when the spawn time for a graveyard is (ie look for when it was destroyed in the event log)
  2. move a unit so that it in the graveyard about 3 hours after that
  3. stop a 5% move away from the graveyard in a direction that is not the one the zombies will move in
  4. do the last bit of movement as soon as the zombies move out

to be clear this doesn’t feel like something the game should be encouraging

I think there are multiple ways to weaken it - off the top of my head
make it so spawn timers are random
always keep some zombies on the graveyard
make it so sometimes the zombies will chase units not cities

also stopping between 2 hexes is extremely powerful for ranged units - is it an intended feature?

Penny was just quoting the starting spaw chances. She may not have looked at the actual code for the resurrection.

    chance = universe.resurection_roll + (universe.resurection_roll * grave.resurrections)

am I correct then in saying its (on normal where there is apparently a 5% chance base %)
1st spawn 5%
2nd spawn 10%
3rd spawn 15%
etc, if so I will be interested to do some maths on that

yep

I see that its changed both from in game & the bug reporter, this seems
a) harder to get perfect scores (probably a good thing)
b) harder to sneak into a graveyard

first reactions I like it

only down side I see is the possibility the it encourages camping outside and logging on often to catch the small window when the zombies are gone, think its a good step in the right direction.

This is a problem statement since many wells are designed to fall to the Blight; you have no way to save them. Or, the map starts with a boss or few already on the map.

I remember a few weeks like this and being happy and upset. It made the roving bands larger, making it harder to mount a last minute resistance, but it made my Tinker, Cyclops Priest and Shaman obsolete (because the graves were in the single digits or fully risen when I reached them, even if I just charged for them).

I do like a lot of suggestions and support their inclusion into the game, despite my many arguments of caution to the change (everything has pros and cons), but I have to strongly disagree with Eshal that the new mechanics add depth and strategy. It just handcuffs you so that your actions are more limited and even easier to decide. Or it often means that I now have a formula to playing. E.g he played rock so I know I need to play paper. Sure it takes me some time to do that, and I had started playing scissors instead, but it still doesn’t require much extra thought to figure out how to beat it, it is just a matter of execution. And, in many games, the next time he is going to play rock again, so I know I am going to play paper again. I don’t even worry about scissors now. Maybe there are a couple of choices instead of one. Maybe there are 100 choices, but I still know exactly what to do once the mechanic appears. I know that is an exaggeration; there are some nuances that can change things, like I have less mana this time so I play wet paper instead, but those mostly come from the existing basics rather than the new mechanics. I also understand that to some extent, that is what happens in the game already, but that doesn’t mean the mechanics add depth, just a bit more time to wait and see which route I am pushed down, but the route is clear. (Again, this is not saying they shouldn’t happen, just that it isn’t depth.)

I think it partly depends what you want out of a game, I feel there are at least 2 types that blight could be made into and I don’t know which one it wants to become.

The first is a kind of puzzle game - given a setup potentially even the beginning of a game you could theoretically figure out the best course of actions and plan a long way ahead (possibly to the end of the game) - to make it more along those lines you want the most minimal randomness possible, though it is possible to have some. The enjoyment for me from them is that you can sit down and plan wildly ahead with a high degree of accuracy and any losses are largely as you haven’t planned enough.

The second is I don’t know what to call it - a more simulationist type of game, with a higher degree of randomness - a much larger part is dealing with the accidents as they happen and while there would be planning to try to make the accidents happen less often - its more lets sort out this problem so we can get onto the next one and hopefully win in the end feel.

Honestly I don’t know what would be more fun for blight. But I think both are viable paths.

I think the fun of Blight (and most games I think), is working out what the scissor solution is to the paper problem. But I think for that to be fun it has to be not obvious.

I’m not sure exactly how to make that happen, but lets work it out together.

I guess a clearer way of putting myself would be should blight (if you are a good player) be about logging in after a day and going
a) everything has worked exactly as I planned or
b) I see x y and z has happened how do I now effectively counter that and continue to move forward

A mix of the two I think.