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So.. more ways to get gems, but as a mechanic, you are OK with them?
It is my opinion that you should not need to use gems because you wouldn't finish your cards otherwise. In the same sense, you should not need to use gems because the only alternative is waiting for a long while before you can start playing again. As long as that is the case, gems have a F2P-esque feel to them. You need to use them to 'cheat' your way through progress and that just feels dirty. I should not need to either wait or cheat to advance further.
I don't say it shouldn't be possible to speed up with gems. But right now, I am sacrificing entire populations just to get my stickers. And a 46-gem sticker pack is still not enough to finish one single card. (I sacrificed about 100 people yesterday, just for some stickers and it didn't even get me that much further)
Looking for chests (which are really rare now, since I need to wait for storms) is simply too slow. It can take take several days to complete one card that way.
That being said. The above is mainly a balancing issue. IF 22Cans manages to balance that right, and if you don't NEED gems to advance. Then I do not have problems with gems. I kind of like them as a currency for Gifts. And there's no problem with using them to speed up your game, but it should not feel like a necessity.
So if 22Cans manages to get their balance just right, I see some added value in gems. And they can potentially make the game more flexibile. As long as I don't feel the need to sacrifice entire populations, just to advance ;)
EDIT:
Also, I think there should be more ways of getting gems. The current state is simply not ideal. The mines are too slow, and sacrificing people is not the ideal solution. Especially if you want to play as a nice god.
Perhaps the gem-mines should be faster, and an unlimited source would be nice too. (Eventually you'll run out of gems on the map).
In the future, maybe you could earn gems with PvP battles and such, just like the 1.3 version. I would be in favour of that too.
1) Save your gems at the beggining of the game.
2) Do the journy to get more gems and search chests for the gems
3) once yo have 20 gems immidiatly build a fountain and left click it
4) the fountain will give you happyness. once your happines is maxed out and you have a celebration going on, you can secrefice people to the pit without loosing any happiness. Very usefull since you probably have many tiny abods on the beach just next to the pit
I don't really want to sacrifice anyone, and I have a mortal hatred of "Lemmings without tools or logic" mini-game they force us to play. It just isn't fun at all, and if I cannot do it the first try, it won't get easier as I unlock abilities.
To topic: there is zero reason to have gems other than to make this a money machine. Period, end of discussion.
Someone pointed out there are 4 resources in the game plus gems: belief, wheat, ore, and happiness. Currently, happiness is highly contingent on the other three, so I am fine with that being where it is. Wheat and Ore generate from using your belief to create settlements, but belief is so finite that you almost HAVE to use gems to get enough belief to sculpt the world like you want.
I don't like that. I want to play a free (as in freedom) and open game that I paid for. If you aren't making money on the iOS, it's because you have failed to generate a game worth buying. MANY games sell well on iOS. It isn't impossible.
What I'd like to see is a complete game for about 7 bucks on iOS. The game should be a fork off of the PC version with features. If the game is the exact same on PC as iOS, why would I spend $20 on it?
So, we fork the iOS and eventually Android versions to be a robust experience itself that is similar but different. This is what Star Command has been attempting to do. Their end goal is to use the PC version as a platform for modding and testing new content before it goes to the mobile. I'd gladly pay for extra full packs of content than pay walls.
Thanks TheDreamKing, so in a nutshell you are opposed to gems.
So, would you just get rid of them, or replace them with something else?
How would you engage with those aspects of the game that are currently facilitated through the use of gems (i.e. gifts)?
Yeh you are right there. I also wanted to play as a benevolent god, but the gem mechanic forced me to make these secraficial grounds. What you say is true. gems dont add much to the game. I just though that perhaps you needed a solution for the current state of the game.
Sacrificing to get gems is nice idea, but the balancing is to pot. You can get gems but everyone is unhappy. But there is no real alternative at the moment.
So perhaps, one idea (which would then mean sacrificing is a route you can *choose* to take) is that you could be a meaner god. With that appraoch comes a different set of "powers" to a god who is all flowers and fluffy bunnies. Each has their strengths and weaknesses.
Note (before someone else jumps in with it): this is a suggestion that has been made many times before. The fact that it has come up so quickly again in this thread (assuming I' not putting words into people's mouths) suggest 22cans might want to rethink this aspect of the game.
and if you are a bad god the pit is your solution?
{Oh, that's me doing a single sacrifice run.}
That should NOT be how anyone plays this game. Repeatedly. Just as I did. Repeatedly. A really slow and tedious "I win" option.
Gems (or their equivalent) are merely the middle-man for tying in a cash transaction and games. It could be wood, belief, ore, essence, souls, etc., but 22can decided on Gems.
Gems (either bought with money or bodies) should only be tradeable for NON-gameplay affecting items. However, 22cans has gone down a different route with mobile. They've decided to let the games resources be purchasable with gems (e.g. money) and therein lies the issue.
It's got NOTHING to do with gems as an exchange medium, but only to do with what gems can get you in the game and how you can acquire gems in the PC game (sacrificing people - virtually endlessly)
As the PoD has no limits, it's only a matter of reasonable (or ridiculous) amount of keyboard face smashing simplicity to get you to the capability to pretty much buy your way to the end of the game.
Gems need to be non-gameplay affecting or Pit of Doom must be removed. The game also needs to be balanced appropriately for reasonable (albeit a bit slow) gameplay WITHOUT USE OF ANY GEMS. Period.
I have no issues with MT's and being able to buy novelty items for games, but when the option is available to buy something that affects the actual game (speed, power, options, abiltiies, etc.) then that's not appropriate.
Now. To turn that around I suggest we have a look at the other resources in the game and try and either work out a way to not use gems or to make them better fit in with the other resources frame work.
Belief: Belief is the generic godly workhorse. this should be the primary go to resource that's used to magic into existance other resources in my opinion. You generate it by having followers. Fair enough. It's a resource that grows as you do. I like that. it means you need to concentrate on your population and kingdom. If your followers suffer so will your belief. It's the kind of things that menas you still can be evil or good as long as you keep a few followers around. Perhaps we should discuss adding additional sources of belief production? I'd love being able to go to a foreign village for example and do some kind of miracle and have some of them start believing in me instead of their god. This would not just be a simple happyness stat thing it'd be an impression stat as well I suppose. That could be worked out later.
Wheat: Wheat seems to be a kind of energy boosting resource and population boost when we get it enabled. other than that I don't see it being used enough at the moment. I'd love to see somthing like a baker's hut that lets your followers get better food. perhaps you can show them how to make it or somthing and they then believe in you more and happyness is increased as a result? This at the moment is just used to restrict population growth in the late-early game till the early mid-game.
ore: Honestly I usually stop playing the game before I need this resource. Again though like wheat it seems to be around to slow progression down rather than creating any kind of benefit to your people. Perhaps we'll see a blacksmith later? That would be good as it'd then open up a real possibility for propper trade items to be created.
happyness: well.. this one's fairly obvious. if your dewds and dewdettes are unhappy then they leave.. I'm not a huge fan of the simplistic nature of this at the moment. I'd love it to be augmented with somthing else. perhaps some kind of "faith" stat which is kind of how blindly trusting your followers are or somthing?
Gems: Lets see. really they have been designed purely to excelerate your game. there is no real use for them other than that. I think having your followers instead make gifts from the black smith or bake tasty bread would be a better solution. Perhaps they find some gems on voyagers that let them unlock some things? but nothing you can't do wiht the other resources. or we could ditch gems and just use the other resources.
Honestly I'm suprised they didn't just make it all belief based and just get people to spend stupid amounts of belief to do things.
I'm not sure I've actually anwsered anything :P I need sleep. I'll come back to this tomorrow.
Interesting... so a "good" god gets a low volume yet steady stream, but a bad god can generate larger stockpiles in a short period of time, but then pays the price by having to regenerate his followers, which means no gems for a while. So a volume vs frequency trade-off? Neat idea.
In Starcraft, you play potentially thousands of times, learning how to play more efficiently from one game to the next. What you've learned you can use in the next game. But in Godus, there is no next game. A choice made in Godus represents much more if a time investment, and the player has far less prior knowledge with which to make a choice they feel happy about. The gems are the most extreme example perhaps of this, as they are so difficult to obtain, even more so than stickers.
But something else is amiss in the feature: Time.
The biggest gain to be had, theoretically, from proper strategy and choices in Godus is that it allows you to play the game more time-efficiently, but the ability to make those choices rests on gems, which, through sacrifices and mining alike, takes lots of time to acquire.
So we use time to gain time? That doesn't work.
So what's the fix?
Well, I can't be sure until I've tried, but I'd seek the fix in addressing what kind of cost there is to gems, rather than the height of the cost.
In Godus, there is active playtime, and passive playtime. Passive playtime represents the waiting for things to finish, and the active playtime represents working on your world to make it 'better'. If gems could be acquired through activity, without costing additional time apart from the time being spent actively, and could be spent to make the passive portion create more progress, then it could work. In other words, a mechanic where villagers are sacrificed that results in having to wait for more villagers to be born means the gain is cancelled out, but if the villager isn't sacrificed but rather changed in some other way, then the cost wouldn't be the same as the gain anymore.
Or if gems are created from sculpted land, then the amount we sculpt determines how many gems we have.
Gems being given from the lemmings game is an option, but I personally don't like the lemmings game, which would lead to me trying to find another way to get gems.
But the point remains: If time is what gems can give you (when spent wisely) then the cost of gems should not be time.