Re: Bugs, Suggestions, and Questions

From: Bryan Thexton <bethexton_at_...>
Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 10:58:33 -0700 (PDT)

2&3 I would have no interest in. I don't mind the given names, and since I'm acting as, more or less, the guiding spirit of the clan, I really don't feel the need for a ring member to represent me. Besides, what would you do when he/she dies?

> 4. The food supply. Cant we get the game to
> automatically clear enough land for
> the food we need?
>

But then what do you do when the foxes ask you not to clear land for 5 years? Or if you are trying to keep a good base of hunters employed? Or if you want all of your farmers busy on other tasks, not chopping down trees, pulling out stumps, and gathering up stones. If anything, I think the game makes clearing land a bit too easy--I think it should be somewhat like recruiting weaponthanes, you can only do so much in a season, and doing it during sea or earth season could hurt your crops. Clearing land with bronze axes, some shovels, and the help of ox teams is major, back-breaking, labor me-thinks. I'd guess they didn't want to load the game down too much with this sort of non-heroic detail, so they kept it simple, but I wouldn't want this aspect to go away completely, personally.  

> 5. As a similiar request, can we get the
> weaponthanes that have been on missions
> to automatically return to patrol duty?

For the most part I don't have too much trouble with this, but there are those occasions where bad luck and bad timing suddenly takes you down to about 5 healthy weaponthanes. You may suddenly get a bunch back (back from missions, healed, newly recruited) but be unable to adjust your patrols before the next event happens and hammers you.

I can understand that for the most part weaponthanes would rather sit around drinking beer and harrassing the Uralda worshippers than riding patrol, but it seems to me that their sense of safety and duty would overcome their inate laziness at some point. Perhaps, depending on your peace/balanced/war clan type the game could try and keep up some minimum patrol levels?  Probably this would take a serious new sub-routine, with calls all over the place elsewhere in the game, so it is a non-trivial change that is probably too hard to implement now, but its a thought to keep in mind for future products, perhaps....

> 6. The Curing/Healing blessings dont seem to be very
> effective (when gained
> from a shrine/temple, I mean). Can we get an option
> "sacrifice yearly X goods
> to heal our people"?

They aren't? I find they work pretty well most of the time. You do assign healing magic during sacred time, right?
>
> 7. Make it so that people will spread tales of our
> battle luck. For example, if we
> keep defeating all attackers without any losses,
> that should certainly scare
> off any other possible attackers.

To an extent, I think this is modelled in your clan reputation. Whether it scares off attackers, I don't know, but I think its safe to assume that other clans are constantly gaining information about your clan from traders, from their emissaries, from divinations, and so on. However, if you and another clan don't get along, and you are getting strong, maybe they feel they should attack now while they still have a chance, rather than letting you build your strength until you can crush them? Frankly I do this with neighboring clans sometimes (skirmish/kill as many as possible seems to be a good way to win the war of attrition).
>

All this is not to say your suggestions aren't valid, just to point out that not everyone feels the same way.

--Bryan



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