within a clan, is it better to do islands in the same area, work on the same blob, or spread out into different areas? also, is there a bonus for time spent / number of yellows exposed without a death? edit: this is the first time i've felt compelled to vote for GOTW, and it's for this game, so everyone else should vote for this game too!
I realised last night that I had introduced a last minute bug in the server 2 days ago, which messed up the rendering of clans in the client app. They're supposed to appear in medium blue, but it wouldn't work all the time. I fixed it this morning, which should make it much easier now to see what part of the map belongs to you clan. And I'm going to work on a way to display the list of clan members so that you can easily jump from one to another. This will require an update of the client though so it will take a bit longer though.
Well it's really up to you: some prefer to create a big island away from everybody and all work together, others try to spread themselves so that the clan has a presence everywhere. Now that clans are again properly displayed in the app, the last tactic can be interesting... Or you can mix both: spread out, but link them by using wipers to build a very big mesh. Only when you're going for the game center high score (the score displayed when you die). Otherwise the only bonuses you can get is if you finish an hour in the top 10 players. Then you get 1000 yellows if you're first, 800 if you're second, 600 if you're third, and 100 for the 7 others. Haha that would be awesome, if only to see if the server handle the resulting load
This gets my GOTW as well. I spent 5 hours playing last night, almost non-stop. Very exited for the update where you can see where your clan is building! Thank you for ruining my life, haha!!!
This game is fun and I like the idea of building out islands. But I've also had trouble with people just clearing out spaces like crazy. I enjoy building up islands/continents and it's annoying when someone comes through and clears paths through what I've just been working on. A few ideas I've had that might make this game more interesting/fun: - Limit how often a single player can use a wiper, maybe once every 2 minutes or something. This would prevent griefers from just clearing out spaces like crazy. - Have the ability to buy colors or something, so a player could have their own color on the board. This could also work well for clans, everyone in the clan could use the same color or something. -The ability to buy private spaces, separate from the world, but maybe viewable by everyone. Could possibly even have shared private spaces so a few people could work on artwork and whatnot and not worry about people messing with it. Private spaces could maybe remove the limit on using wipers since they are useful for artwork. Maybe with any of the above where you buy an IAP, it removes ads.
Yes as with any multiplayer game there's a fine balance to find between giving freedom and preventing annoying people to ruin the experience Well there are some legitimate uses for wipers, so maybe I should just make them more expensive and less easy to find on the board? I will tweak the settings next time I reboot the server, let's see how it goes! People from your clan already appear in a different color (at least since I fixed the server bug this morning ). I considered having one color per player, but then you need *lots* of colors, and it become quickly messy. Maybe if I ever add some sort of "friend" support, then I could display all friends in their colors? I was thinking of adding a way to "protect" an area so that only you can work on it. Basically you would say "those 64*64 tiles are mine", and other players would see it greyed out until it's unlocked again. Would that work for you? The tricky part would be to make it understandable immediately by everybody. The tutorial is already way too long in my opinion, so I don't want to add too many complex features. I would really like it to remain as simple as the original minesweeper. I'm not going to ad in-apps until I'm sure that the game works well enough to keep the server up and running, but yes removing ads will definitively be the first thing in the list!
Yeah I think all that makes sense. My thought on colors was more just choosing from a small set of colors (ROYGBIV, etc.). I just think it might be cool to see the map in game like a world map where different clans or groups of people have control over large sections and you can tell which: "There's that Touch Arcade continent in red, we're that small island over there in blue." The idea about protected spaces sounds like what I was getting at. The tutorial could still be pretty simple like it is, but maybe have an in game help section or a link to some more detailed help info that has more advanced info. But yeah I totally understand that it'd be good to just see how things work out for a while before making any big changes.
Most of the discussed changes will require a bigger update than the one I'm working on right now anyway, so that will leave us a bit of time to see how things go. I did change the Wiper settings on the server though, so that they don't appear that often. Things were really going out of hand in some parts of the map
New User Spawn Hey lif, I just recently started this game. I heard about it from a post on reddit.com/r/iosgaming. It has been a ton of fun so far. I started out in a sea of pale blue. There were some white areas that I felt compelled to fill in, in hopes to complete this huge puzzle that every user seems to be a part of. But as time went on, many "Anonymous"' seemed to be getting in my way. I scrolled out into the white, and felt quite comfortable building up my little "kingdom" as you so cleverly call them. I was enjoying my expansion, but I noticed that "Anonymous" appeared, ranked last of all players. So does the game just spawn new players near large, solved areas? For me, wanting to work alongside my girlfriend, or maybe my friends, clan, whathaveyou, the Anonymous' interrupting is quite annoying when here I was thinking I had moved far enough away to only need to deal with others once the mass had moved to me. Just some feedback. Other than that, this game is absolutely amazing and 100% perfect for those times when you're watching tv or killing time. 5 stars rebishaz
Thanks rebishaz! And yes, it's exactly how it works: when a totally new player comes in, he is dropped next to another active player. It's really the best thing for new players, as they're sure to land on the coast and they can see that the word is not just big and empty. However it is true that it can be a bit annoying when a new player arrives and starts "experimenting" right next to you . Maybe I could add an opt-out setting to prevent that from happening? Obviously the server will have a problem if everybody selects the option, but hopefully most people won't? Another problem with the current logic is that it makes the main land grow in a boring circle shape. Maybe I could influence the location, so that the big round island takes a more interesting shape? For example, if I only dropped new players on the right side of the main island, it would start growing to the east. (and people who want peace could just go west ). What do you think?
I don't think the griefers are using wipers. If you go right next to another player and deliberately make a wrong move, you wipe out many of his tiles (about half as many as a wipe) at no particular penalty to yourself. I mean, restarting, but these are griefers we're talking about. Repeat, and you can demolish a sizeable space really quickly.
Yep. This is unfortunately unavoidable in a multiplayer game. I just had an idea though: what if the in-app purchase which will remove the ads also protected the whole empire of the player from other players? It could also prevent new players from appearing right next to you as we discussed earlier. I kinda like this new idea as it's really easy to explain and doesn't complicate the game. However it creates some sort of caste inside the game between "premium" players and non premium ones, which I'm not really fond of. This is the kind of things that brings bad reviews, which I'd rather avoid What do you think? Any other ideas? (also, I'd have to see how feasible it is. I think it could be added to the server relatively easily, but there might be some performance issues to tackle down)
I don't like gameplay IAPs, though 'remove the ads' is fine. My problem at the moment is that I can buy wipers for hundreds of yellows, or I can use something that's almost as good as a wiper for nothing. So aggressive gameplay is to go and quickly bomb out a bit of someone's space by making 'wrong' moves and then build on it. So I think that wrong answers should never damage other peoples empires but wipers are fine. It would be cool if a wrong answer helped your neighbour in some way in fact, perhaps by giving them the area. Or locked you out but not them for a little while. Good players shouldn't be making mistakes so it's ok to have a penalty. I'd also like something go- like, so eg if you completely surrounded an opponents island, it automatically wiped that space. It's hard to surround big areas so that would encourage empire building. You could just make this work on small islands (<25 squares) as an alternative. Great game!
My wife just got an idea: what if the option to protect the empire could also be bought with Yellows? This would remove the caste aspect, and give a goal to new players. The option would have to be relatively expensive (like 50 000 Yellows), but looking at the database it seems to "only" take people from 15 to 20 hours to get there.
