OK guys, in this post we're going to discuss WoM's pacing (especially in the early game). What do I mean by “pacing”? Well, “pacing” is the speed at which the game seems to move. At the moment WoM has a very slow early game and a number of people want us to speed it up. There are a number of ways to do this and a number of things we have to consider before we decide to change anything.
We're going to start with the first major consideration: Why does the early game seem slow?
Now, some of you may feel that it's the build times on the low tier buildings. I disagree. I think it's simply a matter of there being nothing to do in the early game. That is to say there is very little you CAN DO with your starting army.
I don't feel this is so much a problem with the army itself as it is with the world features. At the moment the early game goes something like this:
Start building buildings.
Send your starting armies out to explore.
Find that your armies can't conquer any of the world features.
Run your starting armies back to your starting city to fend off the hoards of incoming enemies.
Turtle for maybe a hundred turns while you start to build a real army.
Let's face it, that's pretty dull. Dull as dishwater... A few games of that will getting you turning on the TV to watch the “paint dry” channel, lol.
The early game should go more like this:
Start building buildings.
Send your starting armies out to explore.
Focus on finding and taking out the weakest world features.
Use the loot you get from that to speed up production in your starting city.
Add a unit or two to your army (you'll have the resources to do that because of the gold you've found).
As your units gain more experience you'll be able to take out more difficult world features.
And as you find more mana crystals you'll be able to bring more magic to the battlefield.
You might even invest in persistent buffs to make you high-level low-tier units truly dangerous.
By the time you've knocked out all the world features within close reach you'll have built up enough to have a dedicated scout. You'll be searching around for those few remaining freebies and gearing up to take up some of the harder stuff. Your starting city will have had time to grow while you were clicking off exciting (rather than empty) turns and you'll be able to found your second city fairly easily.
The problem at the moment is that there's no reason to explore and every reason to hide. And there's no point in starting a battle because you're going to loose. The reason for this is simple: the world features are just too difficult.
The solution is also simple (from a conceptual point of view). The world feature generator has to ensure that there are a number of “conquerable” features near every starting city. This is actually trickier than it sounds, but we're working on it.
I feel that once we get the new generator in place the pacing issue may disappear. In any event, I feel we need to wait until it's in place to make changes.
That having been said, we're very open to suggestions.
Do you guys agree with my assessment? Do you have anything to add? Do you have any suggestions concerning early game pacing?
Speak up guys. You know we're listening
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Originally Posted by Miradus
