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I'm losing my farmers everytime! they used to go back to my fortress after night, but now they just stay there and get killed.
I don't know what i have to do, I can't figure out how to upgrade my stuffs, I can't advance anything, there is no tutorial what so ever!
In regards to this, just don't upgrade your farms to level 2, level 2 farms are what cause them to not go into the fortress. This can have it's benefits because when the next day starts they are already at their farms so they immediately get back to work, having a much faster coin production than normal. The downside is that during attacks they are not protected inside the main fortress.
Unfortunately this is an irreversible process, so only upgrade if you intend to commit to it. Such as having the level 2 farm protected by a maxxed out wall.
Then it explain everything! i upgrade to level 2 farm and since them nothing is working! ty
But how do I upgrade my walls to rocks? I only made them to wood :(
If you go into the forest there's a wooden temple like structure, when you spend 7 coins on it, it will instantly become a stone version of itself. This lets you upgrade your keep, towers, and walls to stone.
It's location is randomly chosen each game.
Such a mechanic is actually required in order for the Greed to ultimately be able to reach units, structures and rulers that are on the opposite side of the map. If the Greed attacks did not come earlier and earlier each day, players could simply hide their King/Queen on the opposite side of the map forever and be totally safe.
Since the motto for Kingdom was originally "Nothing Lasts" one can safely assume that, in the original version of the game, defeat was inevitable (as it is in all classic, tower-defence-style games). If players are not supposed to be able to last forever, then it makes sense to gradually (as opposed to abruptly) grind them into the dust. Earlier waves of Greed catching your hunting archers may be an outcome that is actually desired by the devs.
Put another way, the situation you have described may be the game working as intended.
If it is working as intended, then there is actually no problem (from a development point of view), and thus there is no need for a solution like the one you proposed:
If there is an actual problem then a solution is warranted. The idea of a town bell is suggested on a regular basis. It is historically accurate and would give players a way to address the issue.
Another way, which does not require manual activation, and could potentially solve a different problem at the same time, is watchtowers.
The 3-archer tower is currently the tallest tower in the game. In certain stages it is very useful. In other stages it becomes a liability (due to flying squid attacks constantly draining your supply of archers). What if the game introduced an upgrade to the 3-person archer tower that:
- was a little bit taller than the top tier of the current 3-archer tower
- only required 1 archer to man (a "watchman")
- had a bell that could be rung when the enemy approached
- had a secure place for the watchman to hide from flying squid
When 3-archer towers were no longer needed, players could upgrade them to 1-archer watchtowers. Doing so would immediately free up two archers for the front line. Since the watchman would just be looking out for Greed, ringing the bell, then hiding, he wouldn't be firing his bow, so that tower would no longer function in an offensive role — it would become purely defensive. When any watchtower rings its bell it triggers the normal 'return to base' behaviour that currently occurs at nightfall. Because the watchtower has a secure space, you wouldn't constantly be losing archers to flying squid and need to replace them. Watchtowers could be constructed a long way from base and still be useful.One building upgrade. Two 'problems' solved.
That seems good.
Though I think the bigger issue is the Recruitment. Initially, you'd have 2 camps very close by, enabling you to easily grab 2-4 Peasants per day and they'd arrive within ~a quarter day. However as you must expand, destroying camps, you have to go further and further out to continue recruiting Peasants. This basically translates to a "diminishing returns" situation where the player spends 50% of the day just travelling to a camp location to recruit 1-4 Peasants. These same Peasants can take anywhere from half to a day and a quarter just to arrive.
That's why I proposed a Recruitment Office building where the Player could dump coins into it, causing a "Recruiting Officer" to travel to the nearest camp and recruit the camp's Vagrants. This would allow the Player to do other actions or even manually recruit in the opposite direction. IMO, this would mitigate the issue where you literally spend 1+ day(s) just to get 1-4 people. As opposed to getting 4+ people in a day, provided you have the Coin.
Note: The Fast Travelling System does indeed help, when you only expand in one direction; leaving 2 camps close by. However as the system is a one way trip you are still heavily losing time just to get much needed Peasants, to cope with expansion. IMO, I'm fine with losing a game because I made mistakes or missused resources. I'm not okay with losing because the game makes it impossible to adequately spend my resources. Even if we take Peasants off the table, there is no suitable "Coin Sink" which causes you to have mountains of Coins but nothing to spend them on. You end up being forced to throw them at the enemy which, IMO, lame design. Let's bribe the enemy instead of getting more soldiers because it's more effective to bribe than recruit...
Yeah I agree farms are quite useless. With mass Archers and a few builders it's easy to always be overflowing in coins already. Could be more done to incentivize having farms imo.
Great feedback and suggestions over all OP.
I really enjoyed my brief time playing this game. It had me excited like I was back in the day playing Warcraft 3 custom maps or playing games with a 'Survive the Onslaught' mission.
I immediately clued into the fact there seems to be a limited amount of depth and options to play and win though, which for a single-player game I reckon hurts the replayability somewhat - at least for myself that is.
The thing is though, nothing lasts could also simply be a means to taunt the player, indicating that there will be a struggle to succeed. But putting players into a situation where they cannot win despite still letting them play for several hours as if they could isn't good game design. It just makes the player feel stupid, thinking that when they get to that situation again maybe if they did things a little different it would have worked.
But leaving the player in a situation where they scramble back and forth doing everything they could possibly do every day while still getting overwhelmed by a force that you have zero answers for is just insulting to the player. Usually when a player loses they can learn something from the loss to improve themselves for the next time they play, especially when they get stuck in that situation again. Unfortunately most of what kingdom teaches you with losses is "You should have restarted sooner, now we're just going to waste your time."
And Dark souls 2: Prepare to Die! edition can be played entirely without dying, it's just the clause that surviving is very unlikely unless you've played the game before and know of every trick and trap. Making the "Prepare to Die" in the title merely a taunt to the player.
The "grinding the empire down" would be fine if you were able to play the game better and keep up or surpass the rate the game offers, unfortunately you have preset limits, the camps can only ever have a cap of 2 vagrants to recruit at any given time, and you have to reach them before the next respawn or you'll miss one. This cap should increase as the enemy numbers increase as well, requiring you to recruit more members to handle the ever increasing threat. Or you know just give us an answer to the flyers, we can bribe greeds and distract giants but the flyers just come and steal our people and we can't do a damn thing about it.
It also would have been better if the map was just simply larger, and you had to travel further in order to get things done, this would have made the portals more useful than they are right now. There could be more enemy portals as well, though I'm sure if anything extension of the land would probably be more appropriate to expansion DLC at best, while including new things to do and build.
But I just feel that if the players had more things they could do to combat the ever increasing number, we would have more players trying to see how long they could keep surviving for.
While I do like your watchtower suggestion, I would still prefer the ability to demolish/cancel structures as well. It would especially help the new player who didn't know undefended level 2 farms bleed farmers, resulting in an entire restart of an otherwise successful game.
Since you never returned to reinforce that point, the rest of your post — which can be summarised bluntly (forgive me) as "the design is broken because I can't beat it" — doesn't really rest on defensible ground. You're not supposed to win. You are supposed to die. All of your suggestions for 'correcting' perceived 'problems' just prolong the inevitable. Prolonging the inevitable doesn't automatically make the game better. One of your suggestions even undermines the fundamental design of the game entirely. It's as if you think the game should be a completely different type of game... Obviously, arguments in the format "Kingdom sucks because it isn't Call of Duty" are not worth having, so let's not do that.
Based on the above, I suspect that the core of your discontent actually rests on those four words — as if they could.
Kingdom is suffering from a split personality (which I first discussed here). Basically, it started as an unwinnable tower defence-style game, but then became winnable. Structurally, it's still a tower defence game, but you can win by destroying Greed portals. Tower defence games aren't meant to be beaten — you just try to survive as long as possible. But you can't properly beat Kingdom — win — unless you destroy the portals (and that is best done sooner rather than later). So the game tries to pull players in two opposing directions at the same time — win quickly or don't win slowly. Since most players mentally equate 'don't win' with 'lose' they find fault in the long game.
A lot of successful games (Space Invaders, Tetris, Dwarf Fortress, and thousands of tower defence games) cannot be beaten. At all. Their existence proves that a victory screen is not required. Their popularity proves that players can have fun struggling for hours in the face of inevitable defeat. It's not the ending that those players are after. It's incremental improvement over the previous game — it's the pursuit of mastery. The simplicity of the first two also prove that a game does not need to be complex to be enjoyable. Players do not need lots of units or options or tools or controls or data or... any of that. Elegantly simple games that allow mastery of a limited set of controls and mechanics have been proven to be perfectly viable.
I do not believe that a victory of any sort was ever promised to players that took on the long game. In fact, the "Nothing Lasts" motto clearly suggests the opposite. You seem to think that players have been tricked ("as if they could"). I think the real problem is the game's split personality. I do not think a single game can pull players in opposing directions without causing confusion, nor do I think it will 'work' in the long run. A winnable tower defence game does not make sense to me. Your reaction and position is understandable if viewed as a response to encountering a split personality. You expect consistency — as most players do. If the short game can be beaten then it is perfectly fair and reasonable that the long game can be beaten (albeit by using different strategies and tactics, but beaten nonetheless). You even admit as much:
It is my personal opinion that curing Kingdom's split personality disorder — by either completely eliminating the short game or completely eliminating the long game — is the only serious design decision that needs to be made by the developers. One personality needs to go, and it should go sooner rather than later. Then they can focus on the personality that is left and have a healthy game that is coherent and pulls the entire player base in the same direction. It should then be clear to all players what the game is all about, and no-one will end up feeling tricked.
It is advertised as a "2D sidescrolling strategy/resource management hybrid with a minimalist feel wrapped in a beautiful, modern pixel art aesthetic."
I intended to buy a kingdom building game that had resource management, which as it turns out this game is not quite that, however it still doesn't change the fact that the game has a certain charm that I wish to enjoy.
However against your arguement, in dwarf fortress, tetris, space invaders and certain tower defense games even though theres no win condition, the players have control over it. It's through the players lack of skill that they get defeated in the game, not from the mechanics in the game deciding that their game will end. Hell in dwarf fortress, you can make a fortress that can't lose, even though it's boring and will essentially do nothing forever it's still available to the player as a choice.
The problem here is kingdom decides when the player loses, instead of the other way around. That disempowers the player and makes them feel like their efforts never matter. The ever increasing difficulty of the opposition isn't the problem, but rather our incapability to do anything about it. Which hurts the depth of possible gameplay, I don't feel like I could find any other way to play this game, I feel that I've found all that the game has to offer. When in reality I feel there is so much missed potential as a result of how the game functions.
I get the arguement your trying to make though, that "You will inevitably lose" being a core concept for the design of this game. And even though that is true, players should still have a choice in it. I feel that the game should be grinding down the player themself, as opposed to grinding down the empire they are running. We should finish the games thinking "I just couldn't keep going" as opposed to "The game decided I lost" because the former makes us feel like we've reached our limits, and allows us to acknowledge that and potential try to push ourselves further the next time. Where as the latter makes us feel cheated from an otherwise good game.
I can appreciate how you could be under that impression if you only watched the videos on the store page, only read the short blurb, and only saw the first five tags.
Indeed.
That's a very interesting and nuanced point.
In the cases of Space Invaders and Tetris, since speed increases continuously the player is ultimately pushed to physical and/or cognitive limits. One could simply say that the mechanics decided they would lose, and I think that's true, but nonetheless that's not how the player thinks about it. They are too immersed in frenetic end-of-game activity and have no time to sit back and watch the game fall apart in front of them without being able to do anything about it.
Conversely, nearly all tower defence-style games are hands-off at the end, and players do watch the closing stages helplessly.
At the end of the day, your own words explain your root grievance clearly enough. From above:
...and from your review (which I only just became aware of):
A simple case, it seems, of reality not meeting expectations.
My current understanding is that the developers see the short game as the future of Kingdom. Future updates are thus likely to de-emphasise the long game. How that works out in practise is anybody's guess, but since tower defence is the long game, that facet of the game is likely to be subdued, downplayed, or even eliminated. Maybe, when that happens, it will line up with your original expectations better and you'll enjoy the game more?
Though I was expecting alot more content than what I ended up getting, and overall a slightly different game. I was expecting this to be a game I would go back to occassionally to just mess around and try different things, but my efforts of doing that now just leave me frustrated as everytime I start up a game I end up doing practically the same thing with minor variations.
In other words, I was expecting a long term game, as opposed to a short term game.
But I'm not against the short game existing, as that favors to the actively alert players who can perform the necessary tasks in an efficient and well planned out manner. But that wasn't exactly the game I was looking for at the time, since I figured kingdom was more catered to the long term build up of a kingdom. Alot of what the game portrays is very misleading.
I mostly look to reviews to see if the game is a quality product, and I only ever watch videos of the game to get a grasp of how the game is played but not too much as to spoil the potential surprises the game has in store.
But personal gripes aside, I still feel like the game has some flaws in it's design. Your playing as a king/queen yet all you ever do is throw coins around, while this wouldn't seem so awkward as it could simply be a metaphor for royalty managing their wealth properly, it feels like your more playing an army general managing the income provided by royalty rather than the royalty itself. And I'm not saying the game needs to be more than just throwing coins around, the simplistic concept of managing your kingdom is a plus, but the options for those coins runs out very quickly
I had originally thought that both sides of the map would go on forever, with the closest portal being the spawn points for enemies. And that my game would be going far into the long-term, building up an ever growing empire and defending against an ever growing opposition, after all I was able to build farms, recruit farmers, upgrade farms, upgrade buildings. First time I came across the stone upgrade structure I thought that it represented ages and it would let me upgrade it again later advancing to a new age, unlocking new structures and upgrade tiers for my defenses and structures.
A name like kingdom made me feel the game would be built for the long term, especially considering you have so many options for building on the outer layers. Otherwise I feel like the descriptions and title should have better reflected the intended premise of the game. Kingdom is a nice name, but "Protect the crown" although not sounding as good as kingdom would have described exactly what your doing in the game much more accurately. and instead of titling it as a "Strategy/Resource Management Hybrid" I would have simply replaced strategy with tower defense, as Tower defense is already considered a strategy game, though this game intentionally limits your actual control over what you have.
However the game still feels broken. Mostly in the fact that farms feel time wasting, outer towers and walls just make you weaker, and you have no available answer(s) to flyers in the late game. Even though the intended design was to make you fall apart if you took too long, I don't feel like this helps the game the game, at least not in the way it's happening right now. I feel punishing the player for upgrading or expanding at the wrong time or in the wrong way would be better than punishing them for expanding period.
Though I guess at this point it can just be considered opinion, as I possibly ended up buying a game that follows a philosophy that caters to a crowd that I'm not a part of. I'm not going to deny that alot of people like this game as it is, though I'm mostly trying to convince that they might like it more if it offered another way to play. And it might even attract a crowd that would have otherwise been turned off by what this game was initially.
However I do feel like this game has great potential, and I would gladly purchase a DLC that turned this game into a more long term version that I was looking for. I more view this game as a canvas for future potential. Even though the core product left my experience feel lacking.
I've had to produce promo videos in the past, and cramming everything you want to say into 60s is really, really hard — so I don't consider them misleading. Recognising that no short promo can convey an accurate picture of what to expect is the reason why I watch 20+ minute gameplay videos. As you noted, it does spoil a bit of the surprise, but at least you get what you are expecting. I consider that an acceptable trade-off.
As for the descriptor, I would agree. As it currently stands, "tower defence" should be more prominent. That said, if the ultimate future of Kingdom is the short game, then the game will move closer to the descriptor anyway — so the gap between the two will narrow over time.
The publisher has already declared that future content will be free to existing owners of the game and there will never be paid DLC —
One thing they could do to Kingdom is split the game into two separate games. Make a short game that focuses on offence and conquest, and make a long game that does defence and expansion well. Share assets between the two and it shouldn't be too onerous to develop — most of the hard work has already been done. Bonus points if someone can work out an elegant way for the two to interact with each other.