Walls?

[Troublehalf]

Greetings, I purchased Hinterlands earlier today, and I have to say, I was surprised! Not that I doubted the game, oh no, but the screen shots don't give the game justice. You have to play it to enjoy it.

Anyways, back to topic, I completed it in an hour and a bit (Looking forward to Diablo III, so this was something to pass the time :D). However I never saw any option to build walls. I assume there was due to the 'rubble' surrounding your village. However I never got the option to do so. Have I done something wrong, or is this something I should suggest?

Lots of things can be done to make this game even more fun, but for £10, it was a bargain :D

Apologies if this has already been mentioned!

[Innovan]

Tilted Mill has a long, looooooong history of people using walls to exploit pathing algs. Caesar3's standard solution was to create The Corridors of Death --a long mazy pathway doubling back and forth over the map with ballistaes firing away the entire path.

A rational person wouldn't say, "Hey, there's a chink in the wall! Sure, it's five miles long and has overlapping weapon fire along its entire length, but let's go for it! The previous 2,000 AIs that died there? Ignore that." But AI pathing frankly isn't that smart and it falls for it every time.

I have a feeling Tilted Mill is happy to not have walls for a change. But build a couple watchtowers with ballistae and and you'll pretty much get the same effect.

I'm attempting an all bow party hiding behind all those random walls out in the Hinterland and seeing how well that works compared to the rush and bash. It's been a midling game so far, but does seem possible.

[corfe]

Tilted Mill has a long, looooooong history of people using walls to exploit pathing algs.

I sympathize with the wall pathing issues in some other Impressions / Tilted Mill games :)

However, a solution to this is that they could make the walls a purchasable upgrade, similar to the way you build an herb farm or an iron mine. Instead of being able to customize the way the walls run, it would just be a standard square wall around all the buildable spaces.

Patrician 3 for example does this, and even allows you to later upgrade the wall by building turrets (in only a few pre-allowed places), or expanding the wall's size (again, you don't get to customize where exactly the wall goes, it's just an "upgrade" that expands the wall to a larger, also pre-set size and shape).

[fleshtonegolem]

hmmmm This is an interesting idea.

Right now I put all my wimpy combat character in the bottom corner and fan up to the top with a row of towers around the top and to the left and right corners of the town map.

I like how the stone rubble is there to give you a sense of boundaries. The same about the regions through out the game.

For walls realistically you would need at least 5 craftsman working for a week solid to make some wooden walls, let alone stone.

It's not to realistic in a fast pace game, and I don't like the idea of just saying , "Whoomp there a wall around my town."

What would the cost be?

I say minimum 250 gold for wood and 30 man days (5 workers x 6 days = 30 man days) Something like that.

Stone 500 gold and 100 man days.



In the end...


I would have beaten the game in that amount of time more than likely.

It would be a good addition if they would extend the length of the game with additional maps or mods.

Which brings me to my next point....

We need crypts and mines and caves. :)

[ESatire]

Instead of being able to customize the way the walls run, it would just be a standard square wall around all the buildable spaces

I think this would be the best way to implement walls, if the developers will choose so.

I, personally, would love to see walls as an option, but considering that raids are composed of only a few attackers, I don't think they would fit the gameplay.

[Dawnhammer]

hmmmm This is an interesting idea.

Right now I put all my wimpy combat character in the bottom corner and fan up to the top with a row of towers around the top and to the left and right corners of the town map.

I like how the stone rubble is there to give you a sense of boundaries. The same about the regions through out the game.

For walls realistically you would need at least 5 craftsman working for a week solid to make some wooden walls, let alone stone.

It's not to realistic in a fast pace game, and I don't like the idea of just saying , "Whoomp there a wall around my town."

What would the cost be?

I say minimum 250 gold for wood and 30 man days (5 workers x 6 days = 30 man days) Something like that.

Stone 500 gold and 100 man days.



I'm sorry to resurrect this thread, but this no-walls issue surprised me quite a bit. As the OP mentioned already there's stone rubble around the Village, which I thought to be just logical to be the foundation of what might later become a wall. Those stones otherwise really only are useful for aesthetics, and taste in that area differs obviously.

Me, for example, I prefer either a real wall or no border at all, heh. Even if that wall only looks nice and there are holes in there instead of gates. (a closed wall would make raids obsolete or would require some character in a raiding party to be able to destroy them obviously - unnecessarily complicating things I guess.)

Your arguments don't really have a solid basis considering that the time given in the game to raise a village is also ridiculously low. I'm no architect, but i'm positively sure that a Farm or a Smithy don't just pop out of nowhere either.

The pathing issues are avoided pretty easily due to the entry-points always being the same.

[Jeff Fiske]

The pathing issues are avoided pretty easily due to the entry-points always being the same.

That doesn't help much because of the dynamic nature of the players parties and the dynamic nature of the raiding parties. Sure, you could make choke points that we knew could accommodate large creatures, but being able to kite your opponants to these choke points would reduce the challenge and also highlight some of the silly pathing behaviors that can occur with large parties.

Also, there are enough obstacles in town that followers still sometimes get trapped, to put some walls up would wind up killing, or in appropriately trapping followers once monsters were in the town.

We like walls too, it just was not worth the work, in terms of programming to make them function right in a game of this scale. Better to put our time into other areas of combat dynamics - which we did.

Just thought you might want an answer.

[Dawnhammer]

Thanks, that does indeed sound plausible.