Speeding up the early game

[Krom]

We've got this idea from our mailbox.
What do you think about speeding up the game a little bit by unlocking 2 houses at once instead of linear? Houses in question are School+Inn and Stonemasons+Woodcutters.

[kocsis1david]

Would you allow stonemasons, woodcutters after both of school and inn are built?
If someone spend too much stone with building woodcutters in the same time as stonemasons, he can run out of stone before a stonemason is finished, and players loose more time with rehosting. I think the best would be if school and inn would be available, and after both of them are finished, the other houses would be unlocked linearly. More serfs and labourers at startup would also help.

[caykroyd]

Also something was mentioned about speeding the game up 2x during peace time, or something like that.
I still hang onto this idea.

[Plaguesworn]

I think this is a terrible idea, not to mention higly abusive. I think the game is very balanced as it is and nothing should
be changed nor added, only the bugs that is.

[Lewin]

I think unlocking two buildings at once is okay (inn+school and woodcutter+stonemason) But I think a better solution might be to have an option to start maps with storehouse, school and inn since those buildings take 5-10 minutes to get built.
Of course the map makers would need to have both modes in the mission script. Eventually we could extend this to allow the map maker to add custom modes to the mission, e.g. high resources, starting troops, etc. But then this overlaps with the "game modes" idea (e.g. no iron, no towers, high starting resources, etc.) which can be applied to any map regardless of what the map maker did... this needs careful designing.

I don't like the idea of using 2x speedup during peacetime, that makes the economy part of the game seem somehow trivial and needing to be skipped, when in my opinion it is what makes KaM great. Sometimes I just love to sit there watching my village run and planning where to build to next.
But I do think some optional way to speed up games would be good, because sometimes you want a faster game.

[kocsis1david]

I have another idea: Why not let the player to place some of his buildings at startup without labour's work?

[Krom]

I don't like the idea of custom modes for missions premade by mapmaker - that will make it much complicated and prone to compatibility errors in future . So far I've seen only one map in Remake that has different versions: Cross. Does not looks like much anticipated feature.

Let's keep it simple and allow engine to automatically place School/Inn/Stonemason if they are not placed by mapmaker yet.

As for unlocking houses - we'll do it, as there seems to be no drawbacks or votes against here nor at kamclub.ru. Right now anyone can waste all his stones on building 10 schools, yet it's not being done

[Siegfried]

I'm undecided about the original idea.

Yes, there are some good reasons to unlock both, but there are some reasons to not do this.

I think, unlocking schoolhouse+inn is the more favourable idea than unlocking woodcutter+stonemason. Stone is much more important to build the needed roads, so helping people to avoid running out of stone is a good thing.

[Thomas]

Let's keep it simple and allow engine to automatically place School/Inn/Stonemason if they are not placed by mapmaker yet.

I also think this would be the best solution to speed up the game. Sometimes I wish a had this option, as I'm always running out of stone - but as Lewin said, you should have an option to start maps with or without that feature.

[dicsoupcan]

hmz i don't know about the unlock woodcutter and stonecutter thing. i think people might actually succeed in avoiding the whole stone production since stone is quite cheap in the market and thus winning valuable time to use for other resources (i'm talking about weapons offcourse).

[Krom]

The idea is that both houses are needed to unlock next house (e.g. Inn and School to unlock Quary+Woodcutters)

[Jeronimo]

The idea is that both houses are needed to unlock next house (e.g. Inn and School to unlock Quary+Woodcutters)

I agree with the idea. Because think how after Sawmill, you get unlocked like 6 houses at once.
Doing your School+Inn and then Quarry+Woodcutter is ok.
Quarry->Towers, Woodcutter->Sawmill

I would like being able to set resources balance from game start. So i do it once, and then I forget about it.
It's better as it was in original KaM I think.

[themyth]

you can add game speed fast option. kam have bad framerate and not smooth if you set speed to %80 speedpace game will be nice smooth and not take much time. in some games you play hour for nothing because someone leave the game. game speed fast option would be a good option

[GreatWhiteBear]

yeah right, screw logic, set it to 80% will be faster!

[batoonike]

Unlocking 2 buildings at start and adding more serves-laborers at start seem great.

Making game faster during economy period sounds bad. Once the inn is done, I already have too little time to micromanage everything, even though I used to play some other RTSs with ~150 actions per minute. Theres always more stuff to do than there is time.