Other Suggestions

[Bicio]

Since continuing with the game I find other suggestions, so it is worth opening a unique topic XD
I reach level 8 and I find quite frustrating that the servants do everything but money. Mining gold is the last of their thoughts over the rest with the result that I never have a money to spend.

Even more, it makes me strange that there are no improvement enhancements for the production rooms, as in Dungeons 2, that made production of "tool boxes" or beer much faster.

Those poor servants have to hit the button with the hammer 6 times before starting to build a tool box :( is a huge waste of time..

In addition to this, when you have a prison and good heroes die, all the servants run to collect the bodies to take them (too slowly) to prison, ceasing to do the rest.

It would be good to have a priority selector to assign the various servants to the various tasks. Because they have to do too many things and they are too few and slow.

Something like assign 4 servant to mining gold, 2 to do tool boxes, 2 to brew, 2 to collect the corpses of heroes, and so on..

At the same time, it would be very useful to set a filling limit for the working rooms.

Fill the toolbox room up to 50%, then do other things, by dropping his working priority. If you have nothing else to do (like mining gold) then you can go back to work in the room and continue to produce more than 50%.

Surely my problem is that I like to make large rooms with different workstations. Like 6 workstation for creation of "tool boxes" with a storage of 100/150. 3/4 beer stations with a warehouse of 50-100. 4 blacksmith's workstations. With the result that as long as they are not full, the servants will continue working.

The impression I have is that servants need to do too many things and they are both slow and few. Even the teleport does not help as I often see them running around doing things instead of teleporting where they have to go and I do not know why. Bringing the boxes, just like bringing corpses, slows them enormously

Summing:
- assigning job priorities, perhaps with a number of workers, would be useful
- adding research to dramatically improve production rooms (as in the second chapter) would be helpful
- adding research to dramatically improve servant speed when carrying something would be useful
- add a fill selector to the production rooms that, when reached, drops the work priority of the room would be useful

All these improvements would make the game a bit more managerial but if you have decided to make the servants do so many works/things, with a small workforce, it seems to me right that the player decides what they should do as leave themselves alone make the game experience quite frustrating.

thanks for the attention :) please excuse me with my interventions but i like the game and i would like to see it improve to make it more enjoyable to everyone ^__^

[Shadow PCG]

Thank you so much for this detailed write up. Its really interesting! I thought we had improvements for production rooms and servant speed? Maybe patchnotes can answer it.

Keep the good ideas coming. And we hope you enjoy the game!

[tdb]

I'm not opposed to your suggestions, but there are some things you can do to keep things in hand.

Build smaller rooms. What you described sounds like a massive overkill. I usually have 2-3 creat-o-mats and 2 tinkerer's machinariums.

Don't build the big rooms all at once. If you really like building huge rooms, start small and expand them over time. That way you get more control over how long your little snots will work on production.

Use magic workstations. The magic creat-o-mat doesn't break down so production is faster. The magic version of the brew kettle doesn't require an operator.

Use the magic room spell. It doubles the productivity of the room for two minutes.

Build related rooms close together. The shorter the distance your little snots have to carry or drag stuff, the less time they'll spend on it.

Make sure all rooms are completely enclosed by walls and doors. You're probably already doing this, but I'm just including it for completeness sake.

I think teleportation has a cooldown, so if the little snot has recently teleported he'll have to run to the next place.

[tdb]

Originally posted by shadowkaly:

Thank you so much for this detailed write up. Its really interesting! I thought we had improvements for production rooms and servant speed? Maybe patchnotes can answer it.

I don't think any of the production rooms have a productivity research. Workshop, laboratory and arcanium only have storage increase IIRC. Brewery has rack storage and healing beer. Tinkerer's cave has trap damage boosts. Gobbler farm does have a productivity boost but then again it doesn't require an operator. I think all the needs-fulfillment rooms have productivity boosts as well.

[Imi]

As you guys already figured out, the reason we don't have "researches" to improve production efficiency is, that we have magic versions of the production gimmicks instead.

Trying to operate any very large dungeon with just the basic gimmicks is supposed to be almost impossible (as would be to try to manage without ever researching anything in the lecture hall - it might be possible, but very unlikely going to be pretty..)

In Dungeons 1, we had two UI's dealing with job restrictions to configure your worker (called "Goblins", back then). Everyone we asked either hated it or didn't use it.

So our Idea with "snots management" was from D2 onwards, that they are supposed to work automatically, but the player can pick them up and drop them on certain jobs to prioritize this working place/job type for a short time. Currently, this "short time" is really quite short (one minute) as we put more emphasis on the "everything goes automatically" part. We'll think about increasing this time to a "very long time" (and maybe visualize it somehow better to the player), to give the player direct influence about job assignments. How does this sound?

(No promises yet, though! there are still lots of questions about the specifics and what jobs are assignable at all, just gathering feedback here ;) )

[tdb]

Originally posted by Imi:

So our Idea with "snots management" was from D2 onwards, that they are supposed to work automatically, but the player can pick them up and drop them on certain jobs to prioritize this working place/job type for a short time. Currently, this "short time" is really quite short (one minute) as we put more emphasis on the "everything goes automatically" part. We'll think about increasing this time to a "very long time" (and maybe visualize it somehow better to the player), to give the player direct influence about job assignments. How does this sound?

That soulds cool.

And while we're talking about managing little snots: I'd like the ability to set up transport routes for gold. I like to keep a treasury in the middle of my dungeon within easy reach for my creatures. But the diamond veins are invariably at the edges of the map. If I build treasuries around the diamonds, all the gold will end up there and my creatures have to walk a long distance to collect their pay. If I don't build local treasuries, the little snots will take forever to transport the gold to my central treasury a little bit at a time. But if you drop a pile of gold on the floor, it's obvious that the snots are able to carry quite a bit of it at once. So I'd like to set up a small local treasury at each diamond vein, and when it fills up, one or two snots would carry the big piles of gold to the central treasury while the others would continue mining. Even better, I'd like to have a larger reserve treasury somewhere that the gold would go when both the local mining treasuries and the central treasury are full. Is it possible to get anything like this or is it intended that I'll have to manually move the gold to the central treasury?

[Bicio]

I'm still at mission 8 so I do not know all the different researches available. Maybe the situation improves with the following missions. For now I'm seeing the servants have so much to do where their last thought is to make money. And without money you do nothing. Making them go faster when they carry something would be useful.

For curiosity, if I make a room around a golden vein and lock with a door some servant in it, are they forced to mine without leaving?

[tdb]

I'd imagine so, as long as you don't have the teleport ability researched.

[Bicio]

I feared this answer XD it would be a good way to stem the money problem..

[Imi]

Originally posted by Bicio:

For curiosity, if I make a room around a golden vein and lock with a door some servant in it, are they forced to mine without leaving?

Yes, they will dig gold until the end of days (or the vain is exhausted).

Unfortunately, your minions would not be able to retrieve their salary from this place either.

Originally posted by tdb:

I'd imagine so, as long as you don't have the teleport ability researched.

Contrary to inuition, snots can not teleport through closed doors. ;) (They can only teleport where they could also walk to.

[Ydyp]

Originally posted by Imi:

Originally posted by Bicio:

For curiosity, if I make a room around a golden vein and lock with a door some servant in it, are they forced to mine without leaving?

Yes, they will dig gold until the end of days (or the vain is exhausted).

Unfortunately, your minions would not be able to retrieve their salary from this place either.

Originally posted by tdb:

I'd imagine so, as long as you don't have the teleport ability researched.

Contrary to inuition, snots can not teleport through closed doors. ;) (They can only teleport where they could also walk to.

The minions not getting to their pay is easily solved by picking up the gold and dropping it in another treasure room. Now I found a way to keep tho maximum snots on that diamon veign thanks :D

[tdb]

Or you could lock the little snots out of other distractions like the workshop and the prison. Best to keep the brewery open so your horde creatures can get their drinks though. Later on you'll get the magic brew kettle which works autonomously.

[BlueKando]

Originally posted by Imi:

As you guys already figured out, the reason we don't have "researches" to improve production efficiency is, that we have magic versions of the production gimmicks instead.

Trying to operate any very large dungeon with just the basic gimmicks is supposed to be almost impossible (as would be to try to manage without ever researching anything in the lecture hall - it might be possible, but very unlikely going to be pretty..)

In Dungeons 1, we had two UI's dealing with job restrictions to configure your worker (called "Goblins", back then). Everyone we asked either hated it or didn't use it.

So our Idea with "snots management" was from D2 onwards, that they are supposed to work automatically, but the player can pick them up and drop them on certain jobs to prioritize this working place/job type for a short time. Currently, this "short time" is really quite short (one minute) as we put more emphasis on the "everything goes automatically" part. We'll think about increasing this time to a "very long time" (and maybe visualize it somehow better to the player), to give the player direct influence about job assignments. How does this sound?

(No promises yet, though! there are still lots of questions about the specifics and what jobs are assignable at all, just gathering feedback here ;) )

Indefinitly assigning/restricting a snot/worker to something should NEVER be nessesary.

The problem is in the campaign if you dont have optimal room placement (i tryed and its not feasable in all missions) AND lategame research/rooms as you pointed out they are not able to keep up.

And you made it hard on yourself, for example someone pointed out that the rich gold vain placement in skirmish was bad to substain a dungeon (2+ vains diggable from 2 sides) now in the campain we have often 1 maybe if we are lucky 2, diggable from 1 side, sorry to say it but thats crap.

There are a few ways to approch this problem so i am making a few suggestions, i would seriously like to a few of these.:

- Replace rich gold vains in campaign (at least 2, diggable from all sides)
- Standard "carry" speed slighly higher (seriously they feel like dungeon 2 tier 0 (zero upgrades) workers)
- An adrenaline reseach that buffs digging, working, movement speed(everything!).
- reduce the cooldown on the teleport
- up the max of workers to 20
- reduce the slap buff from 100% (double) to 50% or something like that to compensate. Yea slaping a snot is nice and funny but it should never be absolutly nessesary.

I realy hope you dont resort to making assigning work the solution.....

[Zhardoz]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1172085271

[Bicio]

In mission 9 i built a treasury around the diamond vein and closed 2 servants in, since the vein had only two minimg place. So at least I had a constant though low cash flow.

Even so I took two hours and 15 minutes to complete it (and there is also the goal that requires completing the mission in less than 40 minutes XD).

All this time to build the dungeon and research everything except the improvements of the various races.

The responsibility for taking all this time is because of the low flow of money and evilness.

There would be a drastic increase in the resources that can be obtained, perhaps through research, because a game can not last so long because of the few available resources, which is an artificial way to lengthen gameplay..

:(

[shde2e]

How about giving player the ability to force-prioritize a single resource? By clicking on the icon for example.

When the player does this, all workers would immediately drop whatever they're doing and put this resource and associated tasks at the top of their priority. So if it's gold, they all start mining/transporting and excavating (to maybe find more gold). If it's beer, they start brewing stuff, and if everything is occupied they start building outstanding brewery spaces/workstations and claming the relevant walls.

This could be on a timer to fix emergency shortages, or on a toggle for whenever player feel like it.
Of course, it would not be the default mode of operation, since nothing else would get done.