Single player mode

I agree that there is a lot in the way something is worded.

Is there a way to display a permanent dove on my domain or have a dove crest to display to other players that my playing preference is single player? I believe that my neighbors would respect my preferences if they knew what they were ....

I was referring to adults but more casual ones and you are definitely more hardcore player. Most TT1 players, and a big part of early testers are people spent more time playing match-3 or hidden object games from BFG, than RPG or MMORRG.
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Also your concern about pay2win is a bit overstated, because you are not taking into account game genre. It's a major issue where you can only compete 1x1 with other play which does not have cash. In this game, you are not forced to compete 1x1, several free players can team up and oppose 1 paying player even if he is super-packed with paid stuff. Therefore I don't think a person with a lot of cash can break the game. It will be more convenience purchases as personal strength can be easily compensated with collaboration of other people.

I would like to know if casual like the "browser game" genre really? If you progress very slowly.. forced to be online every 30 mins / 60 mins, because if you are not you have that strange feeling "i miss so much time". TT1 was really for casual ones, but this game ... mhh. It's not so easy to say "yes" or "no", but i still think most player who played TT1 (and are adult casual player) will be first disappointed after one or two days, if they see: Now i must wait 9h for a building. Then there come the decision phase.. if the player has only time on weekends (i know much of that kind of players) they probably will not like that game, because he will progess so slowly that they will be on the hidout after 2 weeks. Many other player will be say "i'll try it, as i love TT that game must be nice, too" - and they will not be disappointed if they play it, so much feelings like TT are come here, too. But as i mentioned with the "time factors".. there will come the point, where everyone (even I will) say: Thats really to much waiting time, nothing happen here

One fact (as a question) before: All of your towns can be destroyed / captured right? If you choose the high-defense-mode your first town cannot be destroyed/captured.

So that means, if you don't have so much time, your 2nd (or 3rd......) town will be attacked at 4am and or so, and you lose it. Then you CAN attack the one, you attacked (even with a big team), but in fact you lose your town. Revenge is nice.. but your town is gone. So much time you set into it, that will be frustating. If you take revenge, the player may destroy your next 2nd town, too. If you take no revenge.. probably they will do it as often as he wants to.

At the moment there are some players in the game which will never have 3rd town, as they cannot get any cells at a specified point. If you have 3 or 4 neighbours around you, which all plays more than you, than you will probably not even get your 2nd town.

And both things: Think about it, if they both uses much money to do this x-time faster than other player.. i don't think the pay2win will be not so important here. There are so much games where pay2win is okay, because you don't bother other players, but here it is something to think about it.

(As an example i think about "vivi", which is east of me; if the players to the left would player much more, she don't have the possibility to get the 3rd town, as they need sooo much settlers.. even if she can manage that, the 4th is impossible. Now it will be cost so much money to make her 3rd town anyway.)

@buckwheat: You're right with take it into an other thread, that's so much off-topic, i'm sorry about it. That all should be in a seperate thread. And then not such a big text, small pieces are read-friendly - fact by fact. There are plenty of points that i doesn't have mentioned yet, that was only the thing that fits to the "gaming experience" (singleplayer / multiplayer).

''(As an example i think about "vivi", which is east of me; if the players to the left would player much more, she don't have the possibility to get the 3rd town, as they need sooo much settlers.. even if she can manage that, the 4th is impossible. Now it will be cost so much money to make her 3rd town anyway.)''

 Dear Suncheck, I think you used much more money than me to do your second town, although you started earlier, you have been online longer and you had a better position, meaning space and week neighbors. So are you jealous or threaten already? 

Yes, I am competitive, obviously, you are too and we both know the advantages of speedups at the beginning of the game especially on a map like this. This was a ''bellow the belt'' punch which I suppose I partially deserved since I made the same accusations about your development couple of days ago when you were the first to make the second town.

But I think we are both more grown up than this, or we should be. 

I wanted to write much more yesterday in my first reply but I was too tired to do it, not because of too much gaming but because I am actually at work and I have been at work since this alpha2 version has been launched. 

I am not happy either about TT becoming a browser game, what I hate most about it is the time that you loose on it when you could do so much more interesting and useful things with the already very reduced amount of free time. I also don't like the fact that I have to interact with total strangers in some kind of falsely created competition. 

Why am I here than? Because TT was one of my favourite games ever, TTG was even better so I guess I am hoping that they are going to surpass themselves and create something amazing. I was thinking a lot what makes TT that different. It was the originality in the way that put so many things together, the intelligence in creating so many layers and parallel quests. It is like a Harry Potter of games. Not original in itself, but original in combining.

I am going to edit this post later, buckwheat is going to kill me anyway....sorry buckweath, offtopic, I know.

Sorry, I was too late to edit the previous post, when I tried to do it I lost everything I wrote and I'm too tired to do it again. 

Is there a way to display a permanent dove on my domain or have a dove crest to display to other players that my playing preference is single player? I believe that my neighbors would respect my preferences if they knew what they were ....

That is the way it works in Goblin Keeper, those who are into the whole fighting/raiding/plundering aspect had hammers over their dungeons to let others know that they were open to do battle and in the main they left those of us who weren't to do our own thing.  I thought it was a great set up and fairly easy to implement. 

''(As an example i think about "vivi", which is east of me; if the players to the left would player much more, she don't have the possibility to get the 3rd town, as they need sooo much settlers.. even if she can manage that, the 4th is impossible. Now it will be cost so much money to make her 3rd town anyway.)''

 Dear Suncheck, I think you used much more money than me to do your second town, although you started earlier, you have been online longer and you had a better position, meaning space and week neighbors. So are you jealous or threaten already? 

Yes, I am competitive, obviously, you are too and we both know the advantages of speedups at the beginning of the game especially on a map like this. This was a ''bellow the belt'' punch which I suppose I partially deserved since I made the same accusations about your development couple of days ago when you were the first to make the second town.

But I think we are both more grown up than this, or we should be.

If there was a private message function, i would do it there. But as i'm reading, i think there is some misunderstanding. We must see one fact: Everyone who plays at the moment has donated some money. The ones who played stage 1 already more than the ones which only plays since stage 2 (like me). I don't know the relation between our money, but i don't think that i have so much more than everyone else here, as i'm player which normaly only adds money to games (and so donates the ones behind the shop system), when i'm thinking i get "enough" for the money.

But that was not the point. I only used your position as an example, if you look on your map, your possible cells are much lower than most of others around you. Some have the chance to add cells over the see, and some has the chance for completly (unlimited) free space. You are surrouned by players, and in a few days they will be stop you from expansing. "You need 20 Expansion" - for one of the 6 endings. You never will get the 4th town, because you never will get more cells and that means you cannot build more expansions. It has nothing to do with you specially, you only have bad luck to start there.

I think berserker understand it correctly: There is a need of more balance. But i think that sooner or later the 'new town' system must be completly independent of "cell"-counting. Because if you make the gaps between player higher, then there will be a point (maybe 10 towns, or 15 towns) where the same fact will be plays a roll. Or you make it so high, that you need 100 fields to find someone else... But as i'm denoted i will maybe make some discussion threads about gaming balance later. But for now it's not the right time.

PS: A private message function would be really nice..

Suncheck you are getting it wrong. The system will be rebalanced, but not towards allowing more space and more towns. Instead the benefits of each new town will be limited the more towns you have. There will be "corruption" which will reduce all your country income and culture by 5% per each new town starting from 3 and further because when you have too many towns it becomes tiresome to manage - you are getting more of the same, just in larger amounts - that quickly becomes boring and tedious. The expansion victory is only one of the 6 possible types of victories, but you are not obligated to go for it when you are surrounded by neighbors - other victory types are not dependant on many towns that much.

I have a feeling that you are treating the expansion as absolute must you need to do in this game, while we are trying to balance the game in the opposite direction.

For example earlier in alpha we have changed tech system so it is more beneficial to upgrade Shrine of Knowledge in your first town instead of rushing and having a lot of towns instead so person who is focused on science won't have incentive to have next town without maxing out research in his main town first.

Another balance change was for warrior style of play - we have made default training time of troops in the barracks very long, reducing it per building level. Therefore it is highly beneficial to have maxed out barracks in one town instead of two half-developed barracks in two towns, because level 20 hut of the brave trains units 10 times faster than level 10 one!

All those design decisions are made to make expansion less universal tool against all odds. And there will be many more similar design changes while we test the game and find universal solutions that kill variety.

Sure, there are people who enjoy manage a lot of stuff and they have fun managing dozens or even hundreds of towns, but for those super-attentive people there will be other tasks. There will be alliance system where you can also manage other people, coordinate attacks and resource management, etc. Also there will be vice system where you can get access to other player's account to manage his account together - you will be able to help a friend not to be left behind in development when he is away for a few days - or to arrange non-stop production with your alliance colleague. There will be more quests, random locations, random activities that pop up on your town map and so on. Just adding more towns is a cheap way to keep player occupied by forcing him to do more of the same and I am really against it.

oO Sorry berserker i support and understand your decision about multiplayer genre but at your posting are some mistakes about expansion. First of all you really forget the simultaneously development ot towns. You said if you focused in research you could have less interessts in expanding. Thats not true because of the effect of longer buildingtime higher requirement of ressources, blueprints and storage and the exponential growth of  researchingtime so every new shrine of knowlege is important because to raise from level to level is just linear. 

I don't know the setting but somebody said with higher level the number of needed blueprints will grow too. I just bring an example with my own requirement because i don't know the real setting. So for example you can built level 1 to 10 just for res, for level 11 you need 1 blueprint, for level 12, you need 2blueprints and for level 20 you need 10 blueprints. At least you would need 55 blueprints to built a shrine up to level 20. Im really sure with same number of blueprints it would be better to built 5 shrine of level 14 instead of 1 shrine of level 20. Im not looking for ressources and buildingtime but this points would support the idea of expanding and small buildings too.

Same with the army sure a higher level of Hunters Novel or hut of braves will reduce the production time. But how long you need to built them? How long you need to built a level 20 building comparing 2 huts of level 10. And again don't forget the blueprints you need and the ressources.

I think at least everybody needs to expand to grow as fast as possible in the direction he wants to play, this could be researching, wargaming or trading.

Your argument is mathematically incorrect with the game settings from the linar growth of effects such as 10 meals per level with exponentially prices and building time. But this is offtopic so i don't know if we should start a new discussion about this things.

Its hard to tell because at moment we just have 2 age to research. But i still believe its better to have 2-3 towns with medium research instead of having just 1 with huge research. Because you need to upgrade the buildings in both towns. And as early as you start in your 2nd town as faster your researching grow there too. At least your shrine of knowleges will be at maximum level too maybe faster at all towns as the primary researching player.

Maybe we should start a competition later to try it out but for this we would need much more ages. Im with you to say you are faster finshed with avaible research be focus in just 1 town, but along 3-4 ages im disagree because of the mathematics.

You are right with the shrine of knowlege and level 10 but there was other buildings who need more blueprints bigger than level 10 but i can't remember what buildings, maybe sheds or gardens. It was just an example. Expanding also means you can built more buildings same time, you don't have just the 2nd town earlier, this town will be bigger and you will be able to have some other towns earlier too. Maybe a research focused player isn't able to expand anymore if he wait to long. Thats why i start the other thread of expanding issues too. But like i said its offtopic at this thread here.

< Start off topic (Thanking, Explaining, Telling about me, Telling about experience)

Knutisgut, i see you understand the problematic there is. And maybe sometimes berserker will understand what you and me are describing, too. It's hard to tell now, as i'm not having some real facts at the moment (and everytime there is a fact, berserker says "there is another option" - but it makes not the option i'm telling about better). Next age should bring some clarity, as i will see how the building are working with the actual ones. At the actual stage bugs must have higher priority, later on there could be some balancing. As berserker said, there was already much balancing, and i think there will be MUCH more.

I can only say, as i'm working for some software companies in the last year as an extern helper, i've got so much sheets and planning documents that i need one week full time to check what they trying to do. The game will be released at any time this year.. last year was like the alpha in TT2 for that game. Me was only for balancing issues.. i needed 4 weeks to make an round concept that will be nice to play. But i have working over 6 month only on planning documents. In my experience only 20% of companies have one for only such things. Most times the opinion of companies is like "soo hard it couldn't be" or "it will come over the years". Maybe it will, i've seen lot of games with problems on that... 20 patches after release and you think it's balanced? Nope. Because there is nobody who ONLY concentrate on the balancing.. the programmer work on bugs, the game designer plans new features, graphic designer and music artists do their job. If everyone say what it comes in mind, it's like a big salad of concepts. And in my opinion here is a salad of 6(!) different things to balance. I would guess that it will need about one year fulltime work only to look on 6 different targets, about 9 time-stages and sooooo much possibilites. Hundrets of building, hundrets of research possibilites, and so on. That's not an offense, it's only my experience.

In TT as an example the balancing is also broken. My first time finish the game i need 2 hours for the last level.. I build cavemans, towers everywhere, 3-4 times the building to get the big buffs, for all units 2-3 buildings.. sooo much huts to build faster... after i analyzed the game a bit (while i playing) i see: Use only shamans. I've build up 10-15 shaman tents and only some other buildings, and the boss was slain down soo fast. The whole level needs not more than 30-40 minutes time.

But STOP for now. We truly need a thread for so much discussion in this thread! As i said, i only will write here, if it's for the topic, so off topic close, on topic activated. The on topic text must be greater than the off topic ... otherwise i will be frustated.

Stop off topic (Singleplayer, the big BUT, Casual-vs-non-Casual, some gibberish >

Singleplayer.. do i really want a singleplayer? Maybe not.. every game I HAVE planned in the last years are online, too. Independent of settings, even games like "hidden object games". I think it's quite funny to share some tips / infos about your game with other. And if you are directly connected with players, it the easiest way. Whoever wants to play alone.. if you start to play with friends (even if it not together like MMORPG or like TT2, only alongside the other ones without much interaction) you will love it. Its nicer to have some friends to talk about the game (thats the reason, why i'm so disappointed of such a time-consumpting system, because my friends wouldn't love to play TT2.).

There is (one more) fact: Playing together is funnier to do alone.

Now the big BUT comes: TT was a singleplayer, TT2 is a complelty different game. It's a multi-singleplayer-browser-without-browser-but-standalone-realtime-time-progression-game. Maybe there are more words to add ;-). (It is surely not for casuals, as it has 6 different things... every casual see: I can expand, thats nice i will do. I can research: That's nice i will do. But you're thinking about: Mhhh i don't want to expand much, because i want to get the last research. Or: Maybe i only build two towns, and use fully upgraded buildings to build units sooo fast, that i can attack without time, and can add more and more units. -- as a sidenote)

If i come back from work and wants to play, in my mind there comes a picture.. uhh.. not it's not like TT2-like-games. It's more like TT1-like-games. I start, i play, i quit. In one week, two weeks, or maybe a month i finish the game and then there is the next one. But i guess TT2 would be sidejob to manage after an fulltime job..

I really had to love it as a singleplayer, as a multiplayer it can be much nicer, but at the moment, i'm not sure it really will. Let's find out, thats why we all are here.. why somebody reads my large posts and maybe thinks: That person only writes bullshit over and over again. So long as i'm alpha and beta tester, i will find bugs, confirm bugs, and so on. As long as no one from enkord say: We don't need your opinion, as it is 100% different to our sight, i will try my best to show you (later on, as there are more facts and the system will be much clearer) what can be bad, and what is nice. In this thread i have said so much negatives or things that could be better.. there is on the other hand so much positives in the game, but the thing is: To say whats nice, is really easy.. everyone at school will know it "Give some critic" and then no one knows what to tell, because the most people don't want to know whats wrong. But it's my job to look for things that are not correct. And here i'm a player.. with sooo much experience, maybe i should switch mode.

-- Wow. Again so big. Anyone an idea as i will be in a company and starts a presentation? My presentation about balancing sometimes cannot be done in 8h ... sometimes i've planned a full week of presentation only to make EVERYONE understand what the problem is. But not all five days with the same persons ;-) programmer, graphics and music artists and the game designer, everyone need other informations. And if i tell an music artists, that the network transfer is too high, because of sending plain text instead of packing or use only the bytes which are necessary... -- okay, okay, i'm finished now. :-) One last thing .... nope, i'm stopping right now. It's new year.. first thing i do (after fireworks and drinks) is to post a whole story here.. nice one :P

One last thing to add: It's really nice that the devs taking so much time to read all the postings on forum and not only the "Bug-Forum". I think that my posts make the work day so much shorter ;-).

i too want a single player mode. i do not want to interact with others, PERIOD. i am mostly here for the puzzles and other quests (like collecting items like the melons and fish) i am certainly NOT here to attack other players.
i don't care what facebook is doing. and you shouldn't base this game on what facebook is doing, either. 

i don't know where to put this comment so i'm putting it here: so far i am extremely disappointed. i have been "playing" - playing seems to consist of waiting around and wandering looking for things to do and finding none.- for a couple of days now. mostly waiting for building and research (and really THREE DAYS for research??!! THREE DAYS?? research went from minutes to DAYS. not fun. not fun at all. and the way to move from one place to another (like going from my town to "opposition hideout" is not intuitive at all and quite cumbersome; cant you think of a better way to do it?) blech.

i too want a single player mode. i do not want to interact with others, PERIOD. i am mostly here for the puzzles and other quests (like collecting items like the melons and fish) i am certainly NOT here to attack other players.
i don't care what facebook is doing. and you shouldn't base this game on what facebook is doing, either. 

i don't know where to put this comment so i'm putting it here: so far i am extremely disappointed. i have been "playing" - playing seems to consist of waiting around and wandering looking for things to do and finding none.- for a couple of days now. mostly waiting for building and research (and really THREE DAYS for research??!! THREE DAYS?? research went from minutes to DAYS. not fun. not fun at all. and the way to move from one place to another (like going from my town to "opposition hideout" is not intuitive at all and quite cumbersome; cant you think of a better way to do it?) blech.

I too was disappointed with how slowly things moved in beginning but then I remembered that this is only testing and not end result.  Things will get better as game progresses and I'm sure the end result will be everything we are all expecting.