List of suggestions for improving Castle Story (Accidentally deleted my last post.)
sickecho
Member
in Suggestions
Allow me preface this by saying I have a love/hate relationship with castle story. I love the idea of building a castle and defending it from enemies, I even funded the kickstarter, and have been playing the game off an on since it started. However, it’s a real shame the execution of the idea is a bit lacking. Even after years of development, the game lacks the polish it should have by now. So I hope this helps, even in some small way, to make Castle story a better game.
[1] Allow the cancellation of individual tasks/jobs within a workshop, as oppose to having to stop all work at said workshop.
[2] More time, or an option to adjust time between waves in survival mode.
[3] Control groups. ie. allow the creation of groups numbered 1 through 0 on the keyboard to select different groups of bricktons, or perhaps workshops or even your crystal. This could be done by pressing ctrl and then the number you want to assign the group to ( ctrl + 1) then pressing 1 would focus camera and selection on the group or item.
[4] Redesign the UI, we need less menus, and more intuitive controls. Less time clicking, and more time executing commands. A less obstructive UI, currently you can toggle the map and bricktons count, mode info off. I think the whole UI should be togglable, and more streamlined. See my attached example, doesn’t necessarily have to look like this, but it looks cleaner, and takes up less of the screen.
[5] Increase the frequency/rate iron and brimstone are found in quarry, currently stone is found more often and you end up with a massive stockpile of stone. The increase doesn’t need to be much, just a little more frequent.
[6] Allow the option to create two sets of stair cases in a quarry, that way bricktons aren’t stuck waiting on the top or bottoms of stairs waiting to ascend/descends stairs, or to pass off their items to the bricktron that’s ahead of them.
[7] Ability to set priority for jobs/tasks within a workshop. i.e. Set high priority for building a knight kit, or sentinel ward, etc.
[8] Better tutorial or more obvious tutorial (it’s buried in the menus), or preferably an interactive tutorial, or short campaign that teaches the player the basic and advance ways of playing.
[9] Better optimization, if possible. Not a programmer, but perhaps allow the gpu to take the load off the cpu for some tasks?
[10] Ability to toggle the opacity of building blue prints, building can be difficult when you have objects/blueprints overlapping (a sea of blue, as I like to call it. Makes building a pain with complex structures.)
[11] Real arches or keystones!
[12] A rounded door like the original castle story trailer had, as oppose to the current square one.
[13] Ability to build portcullis or large gates to defend against larger enemies and increasing waves of enemies. To balance it you could make the requirement to build rather extensive.
[14] Ability to build while paused would be nice.
[15] Option to tell recently recruited bricktons to return weapons and get back to work. Right now it involves a lot of clicking. Perhaps you could have the option to create a standby force, a group bricktons that are pre-selected to fight when enemies arrived, and then go back to work when they’re defeated.
[16] Add temporary scaffolding to make building larger/taller, structures easier.
[17] Better AI. While the bricktons seem to be much improved, they still sometimes stand around and do nothing, thinking of the next task they can perform.
[18] Fabric is currently only found in patches on the surface. Perhaps add ability to obtain fabric by building a farm, or herd sheep for wool?
[19] More visible health bars for your bricktons, it's often hard to tell what their level of HP is at with the current interface. Perhaps a good old fashion healthbar, or a numeric value. Some thing like '30/50' over their heads to let the player know how low their health is.
[1] Allow the cancellation of individual tasks/jobs within a workshop, as oppose to having to stop all work at said workshop.
[2] More time, or an option to adjust time between waves in survival mode.
[3] Control groups. ie. allow the creation of groups numbered 1 through 0 on the keyboard to select different groups of bricktons, or perhaps workshops or even your crystal. This could be done by pressing ctrl and then the number you want to assign the group to ( ctrl + 1) then pressing 1 would focus camera and selection on the group or item.
[4] Redesign the UI, we need less menus, and more intuitive controls. Less time clicking, and more time executing commands. A less obstructive UI, currently you can toggle the map and bricktons count, mode info off. I think the whole UI should be togglable, and more streamlined. See my attached example, doesn’t necessarily have to look like this, but it looks cleaner, and takes up less of the screen.
[5] Increase the frequency/rate iron and brimstone are found in quarry, currently stone is found more often and you end up with a massive stockpile of stone. The increase doesn’t need to be much, just a little more frequent.
[6] Allow the option to create two sets of stair cases in a quarry, that way bricktons aren’t stuck waiting on the top or bottoms of stairs waiting to ascend/descends stairs, or to pass off their items to the bricktron that’s ahead of them.
[7] Ability to set priority for jobs/tasks within a workshop. i.e. Set high priority for building a knight kit, or sentinel ward, etc.
[8] Better tutorial or more obvious tutorial (it’s buried in the menus), or preferably an interactive tutorial, or short campaign that teaches the player the basic and advance ways of playing.
[9] Better optimization, if possible. Not a programmer, but perhaps allow the gpu to take the load off the cpu for some tasks?
[10] Ability to toggle the opacity of building blue prints, building can be difficult when you have objects/blueprints overlapping (a sea of blue, as I like to call it. Makes building a pain with complex structures.)
[11] Real arches or keystones!
[12] A rounded door like the original castle story trailer had, as oppose to the current square one.
[13] Ability to build portcullis or large gates to defend against larger enemies and increasing waves of enemies. To balance it you could make the requirement to build rather extensive.
[14] Ability to build while paused would be nice.
[15] Option to tell recently recruited bricktons to return weapons and get back to work. Right now it involves a lot of clicking. Perhaps you could have the option to create a standby force, a group bricktons that are pre-selected to fight when enemies arrived, and then go back to work when they’re defeated.
[16] Add temporary scaffolding to make building larger/taller, structures easier.
[17] Better AI. While the bricktons seem to be much improved, they still sometimes stand around and do nothing, thinking of the next task they can perform.
[18] Fabric is currently only found in patches on the surface. Perhaps add ability to obtain fabric by building a farm, or herd sheep for wool?
[19] More visible health bars for your bricktons, it's often hard to tell what their level of HP is at with the current interface. Perhaps a good old fashion healthbar, or a numeric value. Some thing like '30/50' over their heads to let the player know how low their health is.
Comments
1) Kind of agree with this
2) While I myself am comfy with the current time limit it does seem rather silly that the only thing that seems changed between difficulty modes is the load out you're given at the start.
3) YESSSS! I'VE BEEN B**** about this for a while now, but this is such a USEFUL feature in many RTS out there. Civie and troop movement would be considerably improved with this!
Additionally I'd like to addendum this with the ability to tell military units which units to run away from, but most IMPORTANTLY have a firing mode toggle for Civillians. I'm tired of lone Civilians or Knights kamikazeing those bigass Curroptrons the moment I turn around and leave them unatended! Also I'd like to be able to set unit formations, as well as movement formations. With movement formations coming in in four basic flavors, tightly knit phalanx, pincer, staggered lines, and the current conga line.
4) That looks slightly less cluttered to be honest. The problem is that due to the game's auto task mechanic you need to be able to see the task menu at all time. However you are proposing for it to be toggable, so technically it's a non-issue.
5) I think the reason why they did this is because if brimstone and iron became too frequent multiplayer would be reduced to nothing but GIGANTIC turtling matches filled with players spamming wards or siege units.
6) Yeah quite a few of us have requested this and I honestly can't believe we made it into 1.0 without wider quarry stairs!
7) Agreed
8) I think tutorials should be handled via a campaign, with said tutorials teaching players about troop movement, special building and unit building as well as building techniques. However I think that a campaign at the moment right now despite highly requested right now is a FAIRLY ambitious goal. See a campaign requires there to be a scenario writer, a guy who writes scripts for the AI's behavior within the scenario, plus a bunch of other jobs and roles.
Plus a campaign clashes with one of Castle Story's most important design philosophies which probably makes it fun to work on for the team IMHO; This philosophy is that of "EMERGENT GAMEPLAY", this buzzword gets thrown around a lot, but Castle Story really is one of such games where each experience differs significantly. Simply put no one Castle or defense walls is the same. No one strategy at handling invasions or captures is the same.
10)Hmmm I've never had a problem with this so it's never crossed my mind that some people struggle with the current system in place.
11) Could you elaborate?
12)Can we have both round and square doors?
13) Maybe some drawbridges too? Although I guess Drawbridges would be too OP in singleplayer. As is it's perfectly possible to carve out a giant ass ditch. Although with the current digging mechanics of Curroptrons this might cause the game to crash.
14) Maybe have that be part of tweakable difficulty settings?
15) "Perhaps you could have the option to create a standby force, a group bricktons that are pre-selected to fight when enemies arrived, and then go back to work when they’re defeated."
Honestly I'd prefer for control groups to be implemented more than this proposed system. But if control groups are impossible then this could be a nice alternative.
16) I disagree with this to be honest, I love having to build scaffolding made out of wood to build massive structures. Plus it's so euphoric watching my bricktrons demolish my scaffolding after I built a "massive" bridge overlooking a valley. Maybe have this be a feature present in easy/lower difficulty levels instead?
18) I think farming in general, whether it's plant material, wool, or wood should be a thing. With farming for trees being something that's carefully handled due to the possibility of people being jerks and building walls made out of farmed forests.
19) I think the current system is okay to be honest, it only pops up when your units are in combat, it keeps the game's look aesthetic and easily approachable for screencaps of buildings. Of course the UI's general bulkiness after the 1.0 update does in fact make this a null-point however.
2. This exists. Not with any UI however, you have to modify the presets or create a new preset in Castle Story > Info > Lua > Gamemodes > Invasion > Presets
3. Likely this is planned, but I haven't heard any word on it. I know a lot of people ask for it though.
4. The UI does need a second overhaul (back in the day there wasn't even a radial menu). However, It's a lot of work to redesign and it needs to be done correctly. After things slow down for Sauropod, perhpas a megadiscussion can be had on this.
5. They did increase the rate. I don't know exact values, but from the looks of it it's probably x3 to x4 v0.9's rate of iron/brimstone generation.
6. The issue with doing that is the stairs have no support. Technically even now they are kinda magically floating according to standard physics in Castle Story. It could potentially be added, but I think what they might do is add a second staircase on the opposite side. I think the better implementation is a double wide however.
7. Yeah, this is missing. You can currently grab anyone and manually assign them to the station to get around it though.
8. I do believe they are working on one currently.
9. Most of your performance issues are bottlenecks in the CPU that can't be or cannot be easily off loaded to the GPU. Additionally, this is made with Unity, which means they do not have full control over memory, graphics, CPU, etc. Optimizations have to come from better algorithms and better settings for graphics.
10. Someone else made a post on this before. I agree it can become an issue, but it never is for me. Camera angles when attempting to build inside of a tunnel/building is what becomes difficult for me. X-ray mode is useful, but not as much as I would hope.
11. I'm also confused on what you mean here.
12. I would like both.
13. Something like this would be nice. A drawbridge too would be nice. Unlikely for a long time I'd think though.
14. This is not allowed on purpose and will likely never be allowed. The reason given by the devs is because it ruins the RTS idea of the game. If you can just pause and react to every little thing, you remove all difficulty in your decisions. This is a highly controversial topic.
15. This is something that is highly requested and in the works. However, the current system doesn't allow for it, so it has to be refactored, which takes time.
16. I'm on the fence on this one, because on one hand, I hate building scaffolding to complete projects because of physics reasons or the Bricktrons can't reach, so I'm all for an easier method. On the other hand, unless it was a simplified process, you may as well just keep doing as you do right now.
17. In the works. AI is complex and there are always improvements to be made.
18. We don't need more AI in the game (animals), but having some sort of farming station would be kinda nice. Allows you to withstand sieges better too, you don't have to go so far for resources.
19. I enjoy this current system. The v0.9 system was the same, but the bars didn't flash when the Entity takes damage. The flashes really make all the difference. I can see issue telling who's HP bar is who's though when everyone is close together.
"The issue with doing that is the stairs have no support."
Why not have the bricktons dig out said support then? I've never tried to carve out elaborate structures with dirt however so correct me if it's currently impossible to do this.