Feature ideas including QoL

[Lost Pilgrims]

Hey Folks, we are getting completely lost in the separate discussions started on improvement ideas.
Disclaimer: we have a single coder so do not start to dream up revamping full features, please. We are quite open and happy to hear about ideas on a more manageable scale.
We might merge some previous topics into this. Or feel free to delete your previous thread and repost it here.
Thanks for helping us to keep them in one place, cheers,
The Lost Pilgrims Team

[BestJamie]

Ive had a couple of QOL Ideas, but its possible these things arent implemented for a reason, so if thats the case feel free to ignore them.

1) Once you know about a location of interest there should be a map marker for the location similar to the ones in quests in addition to the description in your journal. Its a pain to know the name of the place youre looking for, but to need to zoom all the way in so that all the names appear while you scan through the map looking for it.

2) Locally produced/speciality products for a region should be marked in the same way that in demand and not in demand products are. You can typically figure it out by comparing local prices with another regions prices and seeing that the price of one product is super low, or reading the description of the settlement and seeing something there, or even just seeing that the settlement is near a bunch of crystals or something, but having that be clearly tabled would just save a bunch of time without reducing the difficulty, since youll still need to compare the local prices for the speciality with other regions materials, you just save a little time figuring out which items you even need to pay attention for. (My favourite method for figuring it out is taking delivery quests then just buying extra of whatever they want delivered.)

3) You should be able to re enter a city without paying taxes if you dont move or rest after leaving it. This way if you accidently leave without thinking but dont actually go anywhere you wont need to pay over again. I ended up needing to pay the tax 3 times at one city because I kept right clicking outside of the city to exit out of sub menus and it kept making me instantly leave the entire city.

4) Roads should be clearly marked in the travel view by making the lines and nodes a different color or something. This wouldnt do much, but it would be a little easier to figure out where the road is without needing to actually think about it.

5) You should have the option for "Light foraging" and "Light hunting" which has lower chance of success and lower output even on a success, but which only costs 1 movement point. Either that or make it so that you only have a 50% chance of losing one vigour when you have 1 movement point left over. 1 leftover movement comes up a lot more often than 2 in my experience and it basically just gets completely wasted. On the same point you should be able to expend movement points to prevent vigour loss when working in a city.

6) Finally you should be able to recover vigour by ending the day with a lot of movement points (I like the idea of being 1 vigour per 3 movement points not spent walking or on tasks) This would make it so that you dont need to camp on the spot without guards for 3 days to recover all vigour or just go around with reduced vigour after combat, but you still need to actually weigh up your choice about trying to recover vigour by repeatedly camping before moving on or pushing through to the next town.

[GuudBooi]

Can in a future patch be added different system that make you see what enemies will be damaged or which enemy you decide to damage with your spell, and also what allies you decide to buff and where you decide to move your character,without the excistence of these big red and blue square with the trasparency effect above the said square ?

I feel like a more clean and polished system to look at and less visually intrusive system would be good to have since those big red and blue square kinda ruin the overall visual style of the game and the" being inside the game" feeling at least for me.

Maybe even an option to remove the transparency effect above said red and blue square would already be a good improvement for me, i really don't like those squares :/ .

P.s. More visual effects for non-melee weapons attacks and ally buffs would be good also to have to feel like having more impact, for example Javek when he uses mind blast, he just put his hand on his forehead, same for when he buff allies, ( taking for example the heal effect on Darkest Dungeon that when done creates a green aura on the character that you heal during the animation ), also during melee attacks animation it would be cool to leave,during the animation, a tray that rappresents the swing animation of the melee weapon to make the animation more impactful, for example if i swing an axe during the animation the swing leaves a tray that rappresents the motion ( i also know that these are vfx effects and animation stuff so they may require more work so i don't expect them to be added any time soon, but just saying it would be cool to have ).

This is a repost from the other thread, i deleted my comment

[Cisco2950]

As stated in another Chat, Cloud Save in the future would be nice.

[aquaricorn]

I'll just defer to my other posts, primarily though the one started "50+ hours" since that had quite the long list for ideas

[claiminglight]

A map feature that allowed you to place a pin you could measure estimated distance from would be a nice feature to help plan for a multi-stop journey. Some might call for a full waypoint planner, but I think that'd be taking it a step too far, delving into 'GPS on parchment' territory.

[claiminglight]

A bit of text in the crew overview tab that told me the lowest morale/vigor/discipline (m/v/d) my workforce could still fully function at, or the workforce contribution they'd provide as a m/v/d of 5 each would be fantastic.

As it stands, high m/v/d scores are deceptive and can lead to poor planning. When you're still new at the game, you may not notice (or know about) the increased carrying capacity- leading you to leave with fewer workers than you actually need. Later, even when you know about those bonuses, you still end up having to try and guess what the *real* number of workers you want is.

Of course, from a design angle, I totally respect the balancing act you're having to consider about your level of hidden information. But I suppose I'd offer that the way things currently stand, the hidden information is actually introducing a major downside into having a happy, healthy, effective workforce, as a sedate one would be easier to plan around. This makes happiness worse than apathy, as saving a few bross on a journey isn't worth the risk of slowing to a crawl. Better to overhire than to even risk underhiring.

Apart from acting as a buffer against losing, the principle mechanical benefit to excess m/v/d is the ability to keep your crew numbers down. As things stand now, I wish it didn't give me that benefit at all-- my plans would be much more precise at stable levels and I'd rather have access to that information, than to have workers who are going to stop carrying some stuff two days into our trek.

[claiminglight]

It'd also be nice to be able to highlight a quest area for view on the travel map, to cut down on continually reopening and closing the map. The "am I in the circle or one step out of the circle" business can be a little exhausting. An actual colored circle on the travel map would, imo, detract aesthetically and might require more pain than it's worth. But color-coding the node circles might fit perfectly.

[claiminglight]

The Movement Boost Command has the bizarre (but useful!) added benefit of revealing more map nodes in unmapped lands than you would be able to see without it. Simply toggling it on-and-off tends to reveal 1-2 more unmapped legs of the journey than you'd have seen without it.

The reason this works is that the map reveal process seems to be based primarily on your potential white move from after an update, instead of your potential full move after an update. Though, of course, total move capacity is unchanged by toggling or using boost.

There's little doubt in my mind that this is an unintended use for the ability, as I spend nothing to do it. But an interesting gameplay mechanic has emerged as a result. Since using the actual movement from the Boost disables my visibility augmentation move for a few days, there's a fun risk trade-off to consider before committing to the move bonus. For my money, this isn't something I would squash, but would instead lean into. But I can see a few possible ways of squaring the problem:

• Just squash or
• Embrace the not-a-bug-but-a-feature and update the tooltip so other players know what they're missing out on or
• Remove the ability to toggle the boost off

[claiminglight]

The market reshuffle command has two uses: one that costs four grape juice and one that costs five.

When I first got the command, I only had four maximum grape juice. And, beside that, I didn't know there were two distinct uses until after I had the ability and happened to notice a button on a page somewhere.

I don't know if there's a warning or some other element that would keep you from buying a command you can't use, but either 'you can't afford to use this' warning and/or more complete tooltips (including ability costs) would be useful for the commands.

[Ra Archon]

90+ hours in the game, almost completed the campaign, here are some notes:

1) There should be real variability and diversity in the gameplay mechanics. Once you play enough you realise there is no much of a choice, there are just better (more efficient) builds, skills, units, characters and so on. I would like to see something like:
a) Fully BoB gives you extra slots for cargo, in order to compete with fully mounted which is way better now;
b) There should be buff/gears/skills/houses rewards that let you build only scouts or only warroirs army, currently mounted are way better option than others. Or something like house Darrius reward that make your slaves fight much better (they are slavermasters, aren't they) or house Verani reward that makes your pure warriors aka knights (fight better).
c) Different types of mounts should provide different gameplay style, something like hourses move faster on good terrain (aka roads, 2 points segment), lizards move with the same speed everywhere, yrg move better on 4+ segments (Off-roads). Better - for example, it costs 1 less. Currently there is no balance in cost-afficientcy in mounts and hourses generally are better option.

2) Combat should be more rewarding/intesting, companions combat pre-war option looks useless to me. I am at the stage where I beat anything - but I usually skip (save-load) combat encounters anyway because its just boring and takes time for nothing. Add something like a chance to get insight or a gear.

3) Never (!) used flee option, generally either you skip or fight. I consider all related buffs as useless. Scouts are the similar, never used scouts for actual scouting (!), just for hunting. It has to be change one way or another.

4) Story-wise (mostlikely it can not be changed at this point) - quests have 0 impact on the world, the events and the world do not feel alive... Your actions prodive no feeling that you really achieved something... Companions are like children and walking nuisance with little to give you back, no real relationship, same behavior all the time (boring and unrealistic).

5) Performance should be much better, the game loads too long, games freezes a lot on the map and during combat (I have a good computer).

I do realise this is an indie game and most like nothing changes at this point, but since you asked ))

Let me know if you need more detailed feedback, i have a lot of experience in tactical/logical games.

[claiminglight]

It took around 30 hours of gameplay before I realized that Evade and Accuracy were tracked separately. I'm far more used to attack accuracy reflecting the full picture, as you might see in, say, XCOM.

This method is fine- but it might need some in-your-face explanation.

While we're at it, what does Block do? Halve incoming damage?

[fogandsteel]

Originally posted by Ra Archon:

never used scouts for actual scouting (!), just for hunting. It has to be change one way or another.

(I'm new to the game.) I think scouts work fine. Scouts can be quite useful as scouts when you have only an approximate location of a bounty/somebody you are looking for. Maybe just add more quests where that is the case.

Also if you don't save-scum, they can boost your success chances of hunting/foraging.

[Shiro]

I have many suggestions, but here's my main one:

- Once the game is in a state where no new major content will be released, consider releasing modding tools so people can let their creativity flow and possibly, fix things that don't work or expand upon ideas. This seems like a setting that is built for modding.

The other two suggestions I have are:

- Allow companion skill respeccs if not already in game. In this day and age, it's weird to not have that ability AND have limited skill points.

- I know you don't want to from the first post, and this is a huge undertaking. But strongly consider revamping crew combat (that's the big battles, I think). It's a really bad sign on a mechanic when the majority of your playerbase would rather reload an earlier save than go through with it. And this mechanic is NOT optional, it's essential for certain quests. The key problems are, in as quick a way I can explain:

* The rewards are underwhelming (I get not wanting to incentivize murderhoboing though)
* Fleeing eats up MORE of your supplies than if you just kicked their ass. And even if you win, you could still lose so much that you have to reload anyways.
* There's no skill or strategy involved, it's just a straight RNG roll and bringing more guys.
* I might be wrong about this, but... the points you put skills into don't actually impact crew combat aside from allowing you to do some extra maneuvers but that only moves the needle a little bit and costs resourcefulness. Doesn't seem worth putting insight points into something that makes very little, if any, difference.

That second part in particular I want to highlight since the game is essentially punishing the player for engaging in a mechanic they can't skip and that they already didn't like.

[Ra Archon]

Agree, modding tools would be really nice!

And you can respect any compaion any time, it is already in the game.

[Ra Archon]

One more thing - factions rewards should be reconsidered, all imperial houses' rewards are weak and have no impact, On the other hand - both churches and ratharnak alliances provide really good bonus. As I said before - not much of a choice.