Hacked highscores?

[SoftMonster]

Hi,

Greylien has five identical 9 figure highscores. ZealousGamer has ten identical 9 figure highscores. They were all killed by bandits etc. And yet the rest of the world achieved world domination, never exeeding a score ten thousand times smaller.

Are these hacked highscores?

[Michal Brzozowski]

There's a bug that produces these bogus scores. I wish these guys would contact me and say how they happened.

[Piffy]

It's really weird that Greylin consistently has scores in the 676,479,600-something range, but ZealousGamer consistently has scores that are "only" 388,550,000-something. That almost sounds like two different bugs they've stumbled on.

[Emmote]

Considering it's possible to use CheatEngine on this game and then post a high score, it might well not be a bug.

[SoftMonster]

You should be able to tell from the retired dungeon that gets uploaded.

[SoftMonster]

I think Michal probably has better things to do than policing the highscore sheet. I'd rather have a difficulty setting that nerfs all my minions. I am thinking strength, dexterity and speed penalties.

[Avarice]

Originally posted by IronMonster:

I think Michal probably has better things to do than policing the highscore sheet. I'd rather have a difficulty setting that nerfs all my minions. I am thinking strength, dexterity and speed penalties.

I wouldn't bother with balancing the game until it's finished, you can get stuck going in circles doing that before all the content is done.

As for the highscores, every leaderboard I've seen has nothing but cheaters at the top.

Makes leaderboards pretty pointless these days.

[SoftMonster]

A difficulty setting [easy,standard,hard,impossible] is exactly what a lot of other players are looking for. I am just looking for a new challenge to extend the game-life and carry on with the adventure.

[Michal Brzozowski]

There's definitely a bug, though there might be cheaters too :)

I guess extracting the highscore on the server from retired games would prevent some cheating.

[5 Bears On Patrol]

Originally posted by IronMonster:

A difficulty setting [easy,standard,hard,impossible] is exactly what a lot of other players are looking for. I am just looking for a new challenge to extend the game-life and carry on with the adventure.

I think that's a real lazy way of adding different difficulties to the game. There is the possibility for other kinds of difficulty, like different goals, embarking to hostile territory, to playing a certain kind of dungeon, or a different terrain (I could imagine different dungeon biomes being good for different sets of creatures) or even different styles of keepers, having choices to make that limit other decisions (for example in research)

[SoftMonster]

I'd like all those things too, but I'd be delighted with just a "lazy" difficulty setting for the next release.

Bogus scores aren't really as important, although scores not ending in victory could be excluded from the scoresheet if it isn't to much work.

[Piffy]

Originally posted by IronMonster:

I'd like all those things too, but I'd be delighted with just a "lazy" difficulty setting for the next release.

Bogus scores aren't really as important, although scores not ending in victory could be excluded from the scoresheet if it isn't to much work.

Agreed on all points.

[winddbourne]

It seems to me from limited play that conquering the world would be a pretty poor way to get a high score. My biggest difficulty is gold, and the best way to continue getting score and looting gold is to somehow manage to NEVER destroy any of your opponents. Raid them endlessly for ever more loot while not letting them actually harm you and the score should go up, especially if you could find some way to minimize expenses.

I haven't pulled it off yet. I got annoyed that I couldn't (yet) claim outside areas, unclaim areas I'd dug out, or build walls to make the dugeon I WANT after digging out all the different ore veins. To me having to have the dungeon underground and thus pretty much forcing you to live in your "mine" is a huge bug that needs to be fixed.

[SoftMonster]

In the classic game Dungeon Keeper, some enemy creatures could dig through walls. Without that you could just wall yourself in forever from the outside world. Or else there would have to be some pretty clever code to prevent that.

[winddbourne]

The classic game dungeon keeper was all right, but it didn't hold my attention long. The finite amount of mined gold combined with the need to kill things to help generate mana, and the desire of your more powerful minions to get paid all lead to the inescable conclusion that simply walling yourself away forever would be a losing strategy at best.

That said seiges and battles would be epic, as would creatures that can dig and burrow. :)

[Piffy]

Originally posted by IronMonster:

In the classic game Dungeon Keeper, some enemy creatures could dig through walls. Without that you could just wall yourself in forever from the outside world. Or else there would have to be some pretty clever code to prevent that.

Well, there's the "make sure there is land access to all (non-surprise) walkable tiles" code already there in worldgen, and there's "has sunlight" flags in place already.

"Are you sure you want to cut off air to your Keep? Y/N"

Then again, depending on how the mess hall mechanics work, walling yourself in might be pretty stupid?