Expansion and still no unit control?

[Jimbo]

I want to love this game so much. It has everything in it to be an enormous, enjoyable time sink, but literally every problem I have with it stems from having zero control over the units. Sometimes they flee from danger. Sometimes they run right towards it. Sometimes they build exactly what I need. Other times they let a wall I queued 10 game days ago just sit there with an X on it while 8 of them on the opposite side insist on building the same wall together.

It's absolutely infuriating and not fun at all having to twist around the severly limited unit behavior to get them to do what I need them to do when I need them to do it. It doesn't even need to be very specific. Just simple things like "Prioritize building this" or "more archers on this side than that side." Really, any kind of control, at all, even to the simplist degree, would DRASTICALLY improve the feel of the game, but in its current state, it's like pulling teeth trying to get your herd of blind, deaf, and snail-slow units to do anything meaningful. I hate it.

[beetlecat]

Think of it more like a puzzle game. It's jut not meant to be played like an RTS.

[Jimbo]

I can't really accept that logic. It's very, very far from a puzzle game and more of a "hope for the best" simulator. This game is very much an RTS, but one where you can do nothing but watch as they all do.... whatever it is they want to do.

[danburite]

Gotta agree with Jimbo on this one.
I genuinely love this game, but a bit more control over units would be great. Like, a big horn you or a unit can blow to call workers back.
Nothing worse than having farmers refusing to hide behind walls (because there's no nearby dirt mounds to build walls on, on either side of the map), or workers who start building a wall because the merchant decides to stand on a dirt mound, leaving all my soldiers exposed right when the sun sets. Or worse, having 10+ soldiers standing on the wrong side of the map during a Blood Moon and being unable to call them in as reinforcements.

[danneltheflannel]

I feel like this post is exaggerating a little, its not gamebreaking or anything, the game would be too easy if you had control over units

[Johnathan]

Originally posted by danburite:

Nothing worse than having farmers refusing to hide behind walls (because there's no nearby dirt mounds to build walls on, on either side of the map)

Fixable by leaving the farm at its first level

[lefiath]

Too bad Jimbo, there are plenty of classic RTS games out there for you to play, this is a problem with you and your head that can't accept something. Give the developers a break, it's not changing.

[arekasama]

Originally posted by Jimbo:

having to twist around the severly limited unit behavior to get them to do what I need them to do when I need them to do it.

In essence, it's that. It was in Classic, and this being an expansion, is more of the same. Discover how the game works and make it work for your victory. Not everybody's cup of tea but it doesn't make it bad.

That said, a potential sequel (NOT expansion) would be neat if it were to get away from so much minimalism. Many complains would be mitigated if players could have a manual or ingame explanation of stuff. People may still dislike how Knights behave but, most of them, would have read about them before using them and decide accordingly. But that kind of user experience is not part of Kingdom.

Originally posted by danburite:

Or worse, having 10+ soldiers standing on the wrong side of the map during a Blood Moon and being unable to call them in as reinforcements.

Game design. Love it or hate it. As it's designed, if you could recall troops in this game, it'd be cakewalk. Honestly, so far, the only truly hard map is the last one. The third and fourth can be hard due to RNG but their smaller size makes them more manageable. Even with troops stuck at one side.

[Darxim]

Understanding how the AI is going to respond to your assignments and planning accordingly is a large part of the game.

[Kaisha]

Originally posted by Darxim:

Understanding how the AI is going to respond to your assignments and planning accordingly is a large part of the game.

There are many situations you can get yourself in that there is no way, with the unit AI, to recover. Sure a 'verteran' player will know to avoid these situations; but this isn't SC2 or something were talking about here. This is a mobile-level clicker game for PC with pretty graphics. No one apart from a few masochists are gonna spend the time to learn in depth a game which they're only going to play for a few hours anyways.

To that end the AI really needs to be much better. Certainly you can work around it, but an unintuitive and stupid AI that requires micromanagement, in a game that makes micro near impossible, is just frustrating. There's nothing 'challenging' losing 4 hours of gameplay simply because you built a wall a little too far out. Sure, you won't do it again, because most likely you won't play the game again.

[Trien]

I just wish I had a option to move my catapults back to a certain wall, I got overran and decided to not build farther out and they refuse to move the catapualt back to the last created wall.

I don't consider this a feature, I would stay it s bug, On top of that, we should be able to tell our knights to hold the line when we are being attacked

[Trien]

or better yet, elevated positions to build so the catapault can shoot better

[Crusher Von Splattenheim]

You actually have plenty of control once you experiment enough and learn a bit of the mechanics of the game.

For example, some people complain about cowardly knights who retreat when a wall gets too smashed -- this is actually for the best. Because if the knights didn't retreat, no one would be left to defend the next wall and the Greeds would just smash through regardless. Now, of course this isn't always true, sometimes sunrise is right around the corner, or your knights are literally retreating from the 3 Greeds left they could easily take out, but in general, it's usually better for them to run if your wall is really getting that smashed.

A quick fix, strategically, is to build a close second wall behind your primary wall so that the knights don't retreat that far. A better quick strategic fix is to stop and really consider *why* your wall is getting taken down so low to begin with. Maybe you're too aggressively popping portals and need to accumulate more archers to better handle those heavy waves. Maybe you've too aggressively expanded and really ought to have waited until the day directly after a naturally occurring blood moon to capitalize on all that extra time you get to set up and have your troops walk to the next line of defense.

[Novi]

I see your frustration, but the way the game works is not changing. This isn't a game about micromanagement. That doesn't mean the issues shouldn't be addressed though. I can think of a few from the top of my head that should be changed (and I don't mean flat out bugs where, say, a builder just won't do what you told him to no matter what).

For example farms. Now I made a mistake on the last island and attacked a portal right after another one went down and wasn't able to hold. I got hit hard on one side and pushed back to my castle. Now I'm fine with that. I can rebuild my walls there and start building my army back, except now all my farms that now lie outside of the walls will make farmers go out and die one after another. There should be a way to either flat out destroy or at least downgrade the farms to level 1 for this situation.

Another is a simpler one, where your builders don't RUN behind walls during night. Makes jobs outside of your walls almost a guaranteed loss of builders.

Last one I can think of is that tasks should be cancellable. I defended against a blood moon, so I send out a builder to chop down some trees very far away from the walls (had to do it that way). However, the next wave of enemies came out of the portal during the next day (right after blood moon) and I lost the builders. Now they would just continuously go out and die. I still have no idea why the next wave came so soon (probably had to do with the distance, but again, the map layout made it so I'd have to destroy one of the two camps if I were to expand from the safer side) and I couldn't send the builders out any sooner.

[EverothE]

i agree with jimbo, a little control would go a long way.

[NouH]

I think the dumb ai is fine, i mean it's fun to play like that, you send your builders to construct a wall to expand your kingdom but they only stand there doing nothing and all your units move to the ''non build wall'' and wait for the direct attack of the enemies, i mean, it's fun when all your units die and start to run, givin their backs to the enemy and you trying to figure a way to survive that.

i'am not being sarcastic, what i mean is that is fun to challenge yourself sometimes.