Tag Archives: gameplay

Stray boulders made a mountain range of the forest floor

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I shall be releasing an update to both The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge toward the end of June. This is the “Summer Solstice” update.

There are currently three fixes.

  • Problem with Android rotation.
  • Cowardly lords can still enter a battle.
  • Characters are no longer correctly tinted by the time of day on the landscape.

Along with these fixes there will be a couple of new features. These features will be driven by the new gameplay rule system. The idea being that you can additionally enable certain features that will have an affect on how the game plays.

Menu showing gameplay options

I have been planning this for a while and intended to introduce it with the c# rebuild that I am working on (slowly), but after requesting features for possible inclusion in regular updates I have decided to bring it forward. It gives an easy way to extend gameplay options.

Neil Swanson contacted me with a few ideas for new features and they have been rolled in to the gameplay rules.

I’ve also always intended to have a game difficulty mode: easy, medium, hard. So the intention is to use this in conjunction with the gameplay rules to leverage different types of play.

The following rules have been slated for development and have issues created for them on my GitHub repos. There are likely a few things to consider for them, so details may change.

  • DDR – Original terrain travel times
  • DDR – Armies attack when near an enemy
  • DDR – Armies will continue a battle without just randomly leaving
  • LOM – Cup of Dreams can replenish overnight
  • LOM – Varied initial start positions
  • LOM – Utarg of Utarg can become disloyal
  • LOM – Doomdark will go after Morkin heavily if the Ice Crown is picked up
  • LOM – Doomdark will guard the Ice Crown more heavily
  • LOM – Change quest completion rules to align with Mike’s original intention
  • LOM – Fey are not recruitable
  • DDR – Fast Tunnels
  • LOM/DDR – Impassable mountains
  • LOM/DDR – AI Impassable mountains

The plan is to have the last 4 in the Solstice update, and the work on Impassable Mountains already almost complete.

It’s interesting that when you think of a simple one line description of a feature, how complex it can become when you start to develop it. For example, impassable mountains are just that. LoM and DDR already have a concept of impassable terrain with the Frozen and Icy Wastes, so dropping in Mountains seems simple enough until….

What happens if the friend/enemy is in a mountain? You need to disable approach and battle. Out of that comes the concept of AI Impassable mountains to stop the AI characters from freely moving around the map. But that has its own issues.

What happens when a lord loses a fight and runs away. Well in LoM they only leave on location and there is already a check that it’s not Frozen Wastes, so that becomes straight forward. But in DDR they move up to 3 locations away. It checks that the target location is not Icy Wastes but not if the locations to get there are. Which is why you can currently be bounced in to the Plains of Anvoril if you enter battle up against the Icy Wastes surrounding it.

In DDR special objects are randomly placed on the map. So they can’t be placed on a mountain, but technically they can’t be placed anywhere that can’t be accessed. There are a handful of locations that would be problematic. So either the map needs to be edited to make those locations accessible, or they need to be marked as un-accessible, or we need to allow particular lords or races to not be affected by Impassable Mountains – like say Giants and Dwarves. The later make sense as there are a few Dwarven fortresses that are locked away in the mountains.

Version 1.05 and game play changes

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c_doomguardh

With the release of version 1.05, there are a number of game play changes that will have a major affect on the outcome of the game, so I wanted to discuss them in a little detail.

If you have already completed the game, then firstly, well done, but secondly, you might want to play the game through again to see how the changes affect the outcome.

Android users can start playing this version now, Amazon, iOS and Blackberry will need to wait until next weekend when they make it out of review.

Lords are now displaced correctly after losing a battle.

This is really about escaping. When a lord finally loses a battle and all his armies have been destroyed, if he is still alive he should have been displaced randomly to an adjoining location. This is important because that movement is free. Which means when you decide to retreat you have a one location head start from the enemy.

The affect of the Ice Fear on courage – not reducing it correctly.

Low courage characters like Lord Lothoril were gaining a massive courage boost when they were in the same location as Morkin. It means that they would have had a better outcome in battle or even the ability to attack when they shouldn’t have been able to so. This was caused by a negative courage being turned into positve.

Armies no longer recovery too quickly

Armies were regenerating their energy too quickly. Which means movement around the map without the need to rest, could be over a longer period, and more importantly, the armies were not suffering so much during long battles. The knock on affect during a battle would be that your armies would fair much better than they should have.

Doomdark’s armies no longer ignore lords on plains in front of their very eyes

There is code in the original Lords of Midnight that is used to look up to 3 locations in front for something of importance. This is just looking for something that is not plains. It is used when you are looking across plains to a location, so even though that keep in the distance is not directly in front of you, your view will be described as look toward the keep. This code is also used in the decision making process for the Doomguard wandering around the map. However, the bit I missed is that the original code didn’t actually use this function to check up to 3 locations in front; it was only using it to work out the location directly in front for the direction looking. So the Doomguard would scan a full 360 around themselves, and had they found a lord in one of those locations they would move into it. However, my implementation had two problems, the Doomguard would look a full 360 around themselves, and if they found a none plain terrain up to 3 locations away, they would start to move in that direction. Not only that, they would get there in one move. It means they could be distracted easily, and move too quickly.

Alteration to what you are allowed to do when Doomguard are at the same location

The options available to you when at the same location as the Doomguard have been brought in-line with the original. I made a mistake when interpreting these. Importantly, it means you can now exploit a quirk of the original which means you can attack the Doomguard at night with a single lone lord, and then immediately hide. This means that you affectively can get a free move at the end of the day. I will address this as a “quirk/bug” in a later version in that I will remove it as a difficulty option.

Now allowed to fight critters at night, as long as no Doomguard there

You should have been able to fight critters even though it is night. This is important just in case you get attacked during the night. Had you not killed the critters while you had an army could cause you a problem if you lose your army overnight.

Daytime game completion scenarios being triggered by Ice Crown destruction

This is purely an issue of the Ice Crown bring destroyed when Morkin is at the same location as one of the characters that can destroy it. The completion was being triggered on returning from the THINK screen. All this means is that it would have been difficult to achieve a complete victory without keeping Morkin away from those characters. And even then you would have to have brought the characters together and press NIGHT without having pressed THINK.

Removed left over AI difficulty code that would have Doomdark generating new armies that track down Morkin, Luxor, or head to Xajorkith

This was changed in the previous version. This was a problem that made the game a little more difficult because new armies were being re-generated when old armies were destroyed and these armies would often go after Luxor or Morkin. A version of this will be added back under difficulty levels at a later date.