Why are the ships virtually the same color?

[TITOMOSQUITO187]

You can barely tell the difference between the red and blue ships. The blue ships have a bunch of borwnish-red tree veins or something on them and the red ones barely look much different.

Could have a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ maual of some sort for this game at least too. Flying the ships are brutal and they never go where you have it set to, and it never even tells you anything about flying the ships anywhere in the game. Controls don't explain it and they don't show you ♥♥♥♥ in the tutorial...if you can call it a tutorial. Who the ♥♥♥♥ makes a tutorial where you are in the middle of an actual multiplayer game and not just with bots anyways?

[Kissamies]

Not only are the ships coloured different but they have different shapes as well. Buccaneers are more lumpy and spiky, Vikings are smooth. It's probably the bots that are throwing you off. They add the veins and that orange glowing thing that always seems to confuse newbies. Maybe the old squid was harder to see, but at least it was clear it was a some sort of monster controlling the ship. At least they should have color coded the glowy thing.

As for manual/tutorial, yes the ingame tutorial is a joke, but check out my guide:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=130568362

The links section at the end has links to the manual and the official video tutorials.

[Necroscourge]

As far as methods to include bots go, Airbuc's use of a monster controlled ship is pretty lame. Squid ships are too predictable and cannot be interacted with as much as a player ship. What the game actually needed is AI crewmen.

[Kissamies]

Yeah, but they were cheaper to implement. At the time, I was OK with Ludocraft cutting that corner, but in the hindsight, considering how much we have to play against the bots with these player counts, they probably should have focused on the bots more.

The original UT2k4 mod did have AI crewmen and while they were stupid and annoying crewmates, they did have more interaction. Could board and fight them with swords.

[Necroscourge]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Kissamies:

Yeah, but they were cheaper to implement. At the time, I was OK with Ludocraft cutting that corner, but in the hindsight, considering how much we have to play against the bots with these player counts, they probably should have focused on the bots more.

The original UT2k4 mod did have AI crewmen and while they were stupid and annoying crewmates, they did have more interaction. Could board and fight them with swords.

There is no "Cheaper to implement" when it comes to the existence of AI. Anybody that suggests otherwise is trying to sell something. You either have bots or you don't, and unfortunatly everybody is so worried about budget that they overlook things that are free.

[Kissamies]

"Cheaper" in this case means less work directly, which of course means less money indirectly. Ship bots are simpler because less functions are demanded of them. I'd say that both the squid bots in this game and the crew bots in the mod are about equally stupid, but the squids manage a little better because their job is much simpler.

[🚁 Artos 🚁]

You do get used to recognising ships over time. It just takes a little practice. Mostly you end up relying on shape: Bucc ships are lumpy baloons, Vike ships are Zeppelins.

As for the bots... they work, just about, but they're a bit crap alright. This game is nothing without live players and there's so few of those left it's pretty dead.

[TITOMOSQUITO187]

It doesn't list the bots on the scoreboard does it? I think we had 8 players with 4 on each team, but it seemed like everything I fought was the same color as me, and must have been bots. The names were like viking2076 for all teh players on the scoreboard. I actually couldn't even tell who I was half the time because I never gave myself a name either.

The dudes I was playing with the first time were playing well where they all jumped on the same ship with me and we could just steer it around and take out 3-4 of the other team's ships before they killed our one due to just the driver not getting us out of the line of fire for some reason.

After that 2 guys just stood in the respawn and the other guy kept running away and not joinging my ship. It's hard as ♥♥♥♥ to play this if you ahve to drive the ships yourself and shoot.

Also, the lack of support for this gmae makes no sense. I rarely play online MP games, but this game is pretty awesome even in this state. Especially if your team cooperates a bit and you try to use more of the actions avaialbe than just a free for all with everyone flying their own ships and trying to shoot cannons.

Too bad. This could ahve been a really good game. It relaly shoudl be Free to Play at this point.

[Kissamies]

Bots show on scoreboard. They are always named Iku-Something, referencing Iku-Turso, a sea monster in Kalevala. They should also have color coded the bot names or outright stated that they were bots because it's not clear to many players.

I think the dudes just standing in the spawn is a bug. I suspect that if you leave the game without disconnecting from the server first, the idle player will stay on the server for quite some time. Another issue that probably won't ever get fixed.

I think the player situation has actually been pretty good last few days because of the Bundle Stars. No 18 player games or anything, but at least there has been occasionally enough players for 2 full battleship crews to fight each other. Really the best time to try to look for a game is during sales.

[Necroscourge]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Kissamies:

"Cheaper" in this case means less work directly, which of course means less money indirectly. Ship bots are simpler because less functions are demanded of them. I'd say that both the squid bots in this game and the crew bots in the mod are about equally stupid, but the squids manage a little better because their job is much simpler.

I am so glad that AI design works nothing like you think it does.

[TITOMOSQUITO187]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Kissamies:

Bots show on scoreboard. They are always named Iku-Something, referencing Iku-Turso, a sea monster in Kalevala. They should also have color coded the bot names or outright stated that they were bots because it's not clear to many players.

I think the dudes just standing in the spawn is a bug. I suspect that if you leave the game without disconnecting from the server first, the idle player will stay on the server for quite some time. Another issue that probably won't ever get fixed.

I think the player situation has actually been pretty good last few days because of the Bundle Stars. No 18 player games or anything, but at least there has been occasionally enough players for 2 full battleship crews to fight each other. Really the best time to try to look for a game is during sales.

Now that you say it I did see a few of those Iku names on the scoreboard, but the rest were all generic names like that viking7813, whcih is like my game name. I should have tried to change mine. Nobody I played with had a personal name so it was all total n00bs playing together to get cards I am guessing.

At least some actually played instead of idling, which most people do. If they weren't doing that then I would have had 100% bots playing. All the servers showecd 0/32 so I jsut joined the one with the highest ping, which was California for me at that point. Since this game was in a cheap cundle inthat we all got it from and I only saw maybe 8 players total in the 2 hours I was playing it really made me feel like this game is dead.

Seems that people did quit before the end though even if we were winning. Like you said I started with 4 guys, but at least 2 of them just stood at the spawn after our first ship got destroed that had all 4 of us on it.

The game doesn't explain ♥♥♥♥ so nobody really knows to join as a crewman rather than jsut taking the glider to a new ship (or that you can change which ship you glide to and join a human player already out there).

Flying the ship isn't explained at all and I never relaly got the hang of it. Trying to keep it steady and move up/down with the mouse wheel to pick what command the ship did didn't seem to work all that well either. By the time I got in place to fight my ship started dropping like brick as I was on teh cannon so I had to keep running back and forth to stay up and not crash.

Got to a "sudden death" in a tie once and my whole team was gone and it was me vs. 3 other guys and I lost, but I had the highest score of anyone and destroyed as many ships alone as their whole team. Well - since they won sudden death of course.

Too bad. This game has good potential if it were marketed right and got support. After playing it for a few hours I can definitely agree with that thread that says it should be F2P. It would get a massive boost in players if it got marketed a bit. Just look at some of the game s like Loadout that just got released, Path of Exile, and many other newer F2P games on the front page now. A lot of people are playng those and those games get REAL support. Sadly, they start to become pay to win most of them , but ones like Path of Exile are able to keep it still a decent F2P without any P2W features.

I'd much rather play this game than something like TF2. It's not some random stupid shooter like those and has a different concept for once.

I'm almost inclined to ignore this developer completely in the future now too after they basically dropped support for this game and then had the gall to put it in a freakin' bundle to make some quick cash without offering anything to new players and potential customers. They haven't said ♥♥♥♥ on this board either since it got put in that bundle, which is flat out insulting to their community. Any decent developer would take that as a way to get peopel exicted to play it and be on here pumping up their game with news and support for all the people that got the game in the bundle. Instead they are absent, which tells me that they can jsut go ♥♥♥♥ themselves.

[🚁 Artos 🚁]

All the Iku names are bots, all the VikingXXXX names are newbies.

The lack of tutorial is another huge issue. Piloting the ship is usually one of the first things people try to do, but you don't really learn how to do it until you've crewed for awhile. The sudden drops occur when your ship reaches the height cieling for the level. Helming takes alot of practice and is one of the hardest things to learn. Even after you've learned how to put the ship where you want it, it still takes a while to learn the necessary battlefield awareness needed to allow your gun crews to do their job.

F2P would make an enormous amount of difference for this game. And I'd agree that I'd be fairly suspicious about ludocraft releases in future if they don't fix this one. From their website though they seem to be moving away from games, so it might not even hurt them that much.

[Kissamies]

They really never were in (entertainment) games that much anyways. Most of their stuff is serious games[en.wikipedia.org]. Looks like quite a lot is publicly funded as well. Both are sort of undestandable considering their university roots.

It seems to me that this game was partially their stab at making "game" games instead of serious ones and an attempt to return to the roots of sorts. Also a response to demands to make this game over the years. The mod IS a cult classic after all. Maybe they weren't so committed to it and seemed to struggle with funding before release. I can imagine them going "Eh, that didn't work. Let's go back to things that do make us money."

Too bad. With some TLC this could be one of the greats. It's still pretty good at times, but especially on those rare times you get more players playing, the problems start to pile up.

[🚁 Artos 🚁]

I wonder if they'd be willing to release the files to the community. I'd be perfectly happy to make a few more maps and things to see if it could draw some people back.