My most recent bug findings
Weedlepickles
Member
in Bug Reports
Hi, I got really excited with the new patch 1.1.1, and it made me start up Castle Story again. I have been a bit frustrated with the 2 block building height and the new rule allowing for placement 3 blocks up really made me want to build a new castle and try beat 60 waves invasion on normal! Getting that elusive achievement.
So with my latest build I decided I'd write down the bugs and issues I found so that the developers at Sauropod can actually do something about them. I work as a software developer myself and getting feedback from users can be really hard to come by I've found. So I wanted to give some positive feedback myself, as well as that's possible reporting on issues
Trying to get to 60 waves takes some time to do, a bit over 10 hours of playing. When you play that long you get very emotionally invested in the castle that you are building. When bugs appear after 20-30 waves, and you can't do anything about them, that may make a player stop playing. Or a player might not recommend the game to his friends, though he really loves it, if not for what it is at all times, but for the raw potential of the game idea. My belief is that the investment is somewhat mutual, between player and developer, keep the core users playing and others will follow.
That brings me to my first and by far most pressing issue.
1**. Lag spikes. You can't play to wave 60 with the lag spikes. You can't build. You can't defend your castle. You can't move the camera. Micro-management is out the window. Dragging a line of blocks can't be done accurately. It kills the game. Please, you have put so much work into the game. I want to play it.
But you can get to wave 30, and I did. My castle was formidable. Four towers of stone, each without access by foot and crowned glimmering red jewels. Ever watching the plain underneath for enemies within range. And they came to fall by the hundreds.
2. I'm well prepared for the enemy. I know where my troops should rendezvous. But there is no rally point. I can't mark archer positions. I have to do it over and over again. Every wave.
3. Calling the troops is done with call-to-arms. But I have time, there is no rush. No need to throw all resources on the ground around the weapon racks. A muster-the-forces should be without delay, but in an orderly fashion. Perhaps there could be such an option.
With a wave completed, my loyal bricktrons would go back to work. But they don't seem to be able to do so very well. This business of keeping order might not be their thing.
4. Racks for archers are on the parapets. So why would they stack the swords there? Allow designating weapon type on a rack.
5. Stockpiles close to the mines should be filled with stone to reduce the walking distance. But the interface for designating a group of stockpiles to only hold stone needs some love. It doesn't really show you enough, and the pie chart is impractical for the task. I can't put my finger on it. Test it out a bit, I think you'll get what I mean.
6. A stockpile filled with a good that isn't allowed anymore isn't emptied. Unless it just happens to be the last of that resource (Murphy's law). If you turn it around, and take those resources first, then the pile would empty quickly, without needing a certain task for "Moving stuff about".
7. Allow me to decide that all those 20 stockpiles within the wall should only hold valuable stuff. Not wood, not stone, not leafs, but metal ingots, crystals and yellow bling. And that the ones outside should hold everything except valuables.
Getting resources can be a little tricky too.
8. No need for the cleanup task to be limited to one area. I want one guy to clean it all, let it take some time. But I can't have these task markers all over the place.
9*. Task markers are seen at the bottom of the screen. After you have 12+ tasks the bar at the bottom is full. And when it's full you can't set priorities, or do other stuff. Like remove the task without finding it on the map.
10. Allow the player to go to a task's marker by clicking the task in the bottom task bar.
11*. The tasks suddenly stopped appearing in the bottom of the screen, though I removed all by 2-4. This meant that I couldn't tell them things like "don't chop down the trees". So the trees were chopped down, and the stockpiles behind the walls were filled with lumber...
Designating task areas. I'm restarting the count since I think nobody likes to read more than 11 bugs in a row.
1*. For some reason I can't make my landscape task bigger than AxB. I want to make it bigger, this restriction doesn't seem to make any sense. It's important to remember that more is more, sometimes less is more, but this is not such a case I believe. It's the same for repair tasks and clean-up tasks etc. Why all these restrictions.
2. Stretching the border of a rectangular-area-task (like a quarry), doesn't update the size of the task before you release the mouse button. So I have to guess how big it will be when I let go, and I think I'm bad at guessing because it hardly ever turns out right.
3*. Landscape tasks should automatically fall down a level once completed, so that you can press "go down a level" directly without having to resize it first and then press the button.
4. Landscape tasks should only go down one level if you press that button. I get the feeling that it usually jumps down 2 steps. And when I press go up a level, then it doesn't seem to start at the current level, but at the ground level.
Other things I found.
5. Grass doesn't regrow. Neither does trees or leaves from what I can tell. I think that could be changed a little, right? Grass is nice. It looks nice.
So, I realize there are many things here. But maybe writing it down will help Sauropod a bit. I truly want Castle Story to live up to it's full potential. And I also want to play to wave 60...
You guys rock (no stone related puns intended), be awesome!
-- A fan
P.S. I marked the points that matters most to me with a *, or two...
So with my latest build I decided I'd write down the bugs and issues I found so that the developers at Sauropod can actually do something about them. I work as a software developer myself and getting feedback from users can be really hard to come by I've found. So I wanted to give some positive feedback myself, as well as that's possible reporting on issues
Trying to get to 60 waves takes some time to do, a bit over 10 hours of playing. When you play that long you get very emotionally invested in the castle that you are building. When bugs appear after 20-30 waves, and you can't do anything about them, that may make a player stop playing. Or a player might not recommend the game to his friends, though he really loves it, if not for what it is at all times, but for the raw potential of the game idea. My belief is that the investment is somewhat mutual, between player and developer, keep the core users playing and others will follow.
That brings me to my first and by far most pressing issue.
1**. Lag spikes. You can't play to wave 60 with the lag spikes. You can't build. You can't defend your castle. You can't move the camera. Micro-management is out the window. Dragging a line of blocks can't be done accurately. It kills the game. Please, you have put so much work into the game. I want to play it.
But you can get to wave 30, and I did. My castle was formidable. Four towers of stone, each without access by foot and crowned glimmering red jewels. Ever watching the plain underneath for enemies within range. And they came to fall by the hundreds.
2. I'm well prepared for the enemy. I know where my troops should rendezvous. But there is no rally point. I can't mark archer positions. I have to do it over and over again. Every wave.
3. Calling the troops is done with call-to-arms. But I have time, there is no rush. No need to throw all resources on the ground around the weapon racks. A muster-the-forces should be without delay, but in an orderly fashion. Perhaps there could be such an option.
With a wave completed, my loyal bricktrons would go back to work. But they don't seem to be able to do so very well. This business of keeping order might not be their thing.
4. Racks for archers are on the parapets. So why would they stack the swords there? Allow designating weapon type on a rack.
5. Stockpiles close to the mines should be filled with stone to reduce the walking distance. But the interface for designating a group of stockpiles to only hold stone needs some love. It doesn't really show you enough, and the pie chart is impractical for the task. I can't put my finger on it. Test it out a bit, I think you'll get what I mean.
6. A stockpile filled with a good that isn't allowed anymore isn't emptied. Unless it just happens to be the last of that resource (Murphy's law). If you turn it around, and take those resources first, then the pile would empty quickly, without needing a certain task for "Moving stuff about".
7. Allow me to decide that all those 20 stockpiles within the wall should only hold valuable stuff. Not wood, not stone, not leafs, but metal ingots, crystals and yellow bling. And that the ones outside should hold everything except valuables.
Getting resources can be a little tricky too.
8. No need for the cleanup task to be limited to one area. I want one guy to clean it all, let it take some time. But I can't have these task markers all over the place.
9*. Task markers are seen at the bottom of the screen. After you have 12+ tasks the bar at the bottom is full. And when it's full you can't set priorities, or do other stuff. Like remove the task without finding it on the map.
10. Allow the player to go to a task's marker by clicking the task in the bottom task bar.
11*. The tasks suddenly stopped appearing in the bottom of the screen, though I removed all by 2-4. This meant that I couldn't tell them things like "don't chop down the trees". So the trees were chopped down, and the stockpiles behind the walls were filled with lumber...
Designating task areas. I'm restarting the count since I think nobody likes to read more than 11 bugs in a row.
1*. For some reason I can't make my landscape task bigger than AxB. I want to make it bigger, this restriction doesn't seem to make any sense. It's important to remember that more is more, sometimes less is more, but this is not such a case I believe. It's the same for repair tasks and clean-up tasks etc. Why all these restrictions.
2. Stretching the border of a rectangular-area-task (like a quarry), doesn't update the size of the task before you release the mouse button. So I have to guess how big it will be when I let go, and I think I'm bad at guessing because it hardly ever turns out right.
3*. Landscape tasks should automatically fall down a level once completed, so that you can press "go down a level" directly without having to resize it first and then press the button.
4. Landscape tasks should only go down one level if you press that button. I get the feeling that it usually jumps down 2 steps. And when I press go up a level, then it doesn't seem to start at the current level, but at the ground level.
Other things I found.
5. Grass doesn't regrow. Neither does trees or leaves from what I can tell. I think that could be changed a little, right? Grass is nice. It looks nice.
So, I realize there are many things here. But maybe writing it down will help Sauropod a bit. I truly want Castle Story to live up to it's full potential. And I also want to play to wave 60...
You guys rock (no stone related puns intended), be awesome!
-- A fan
P.S. I marked the points that matters most to me with a *, or two...
Comments
3. This is a design decision; we had the option to either make it so Bricktrons brought their things back to the stockpile, or urgently went to the rack and immediately got equipped. With our playtests, we realised that call to arms was usually used in urgent situations and that having the Bricktrons take the time to stockpile their inventory was very frustrating, so we made it the way it is. We assume that if the player has plenty of time to spare, they can micro manage a little more.
5. There are some tough design challenges to overcome when it comes to the algorithm that chooses where Bricktrons drop or take resources from. In this case, you may be limiting walking from the Bricktrons working on the mine, but increasing walking for Bricktrons trying to pick up the bricks that are all the way near the mine, to build the castle near your crystal, for example. What works in one situation doesn't in another, so we tend to favor supporting the most common situations, while giving the player the ability to micro manage a little more, e.g with stockpile exclusions.
7. I'm confused by this - you already can choose what goes or doesn't go in a stockpile, would this not achieve what you're suggesting?
For the bugs with the number of tasks at the bottom, we're releasing a patch very soon that will begin adding certain limits to the game we should have added a while ago but didn't, unfortunately. Notably, tasks will be capped to 15 (because they literally don't fit, otherwise) - you can delete tasks by clicking the red trashcan when opening a task to make room.
Thank you again for taking the time to post these!
Basically 7 is something of an addition to the limits I found on the stockpiles. I can explain it a bit further.
In the beginning of the game I usually don't care much about what stockpile can hold what. So many stockpiles are put down temporarily and filled with random resources. Most of those stockpiles eventually turn out to be permanent, as they hold resources.
Say I got 30 early game stockpiles filled with random resources. I want the valuable stuff moved to a secure location. It's pretty tricky currently to move them.
I could designate the stockpiles to hold some other resource, like wood. But it might be hours, if ever, the piles are emptied automatically. I think they would actually only ever be emptied if I used the resources in them (and that kind of defeats the purpose of having a stockpile, hehe, and the resources closest to the production unit would be used first). So that's not a very good way to get the resources moved.
The same holds for the option to not store anything in the stockpile. It's not actually moved elsewhere automatically, just not restocked. Even if I adopted this approach, and let it take the time it takes, I would still have a difficulty selecting the stockpiles that should be emptied. Shift or Ctrl-clicking the stockpiles doesn't seem to allow me to select multiple stockpiles, and click-drag wouldn't work as I'd select stockpiles I'd like unaffected, as the resources are spread randomly (not to mention that if bricktons are present, they be selected instead).
So I thought that maybe if I could select all the stockpiles in an area, and designate them to hold/not hold valuables. I wouldn't have to go through them one, by one, by one, by one, ... And they'd just not resupply the wrong goods. It's better than doing to manually.
As it is right now, I have to do it manually.
1. Put a stockpile to not hold resources (or some specific one like wood).
2. Try fetch a running brickton somewhere that isn't carrying anything (over 50% of bricktons hold resources, as moving with a resource is slower than when unburdened). It can be a little tricky, takes a few seconds usually (+lag spikes, don't forget those).
3. Pan the camera back to the stockpile, click it to make the brickton pick up a part of what's in the stockpile.
4. Goto point (2) 1-3 times more.
5. Repeat the whole process for 15 stockpiles.
It's such a hassle I usually just destroy the stockpiles, which is a sad waste