Hibernation save modus

[barbet]

Hi,

I already read it is too hard to save campaign missions because of too many variable to be saved. I have a suggestion.

Allow in-between saves by having fixed points in time during the campaign where the colony goes into hibernation. Let the game come to an equilibrium. Give the player 20 seconds to bring all ants into the nest. Any ant outside the nest dies. You only need to save the tiles/layout, amount of food, and upgrade state of ants.

As a challenge you can require the user to store food during hibernation or have a % of the colony die during hibernation, for which new brood must be generated after. Leaving the game after hibernation should be possible.

It is basically turning a long mission into multiple smaller missions. You want to save missions, because the missions are really long and also failure of the mission in the last stage due to a small error can be very frustrating. You don't want to replay the full mission if only the last stage was unexpected.

Regards,

Barbet

 

[Serafine]

This could work for Freeplay but I wouldn't say the missions are too long to complete without a break (or to replay if failing).

You need more than 20 seconds though, in 3.1. ants need around two minutes to clear the beach (the flooding warning for the individual beach sections is 30 seconds and I had ants drowning because they were physically incapable of retreating in time) and some of the Freeplay maps are HUGE.

 

[pakitane16]

If you know the strat, most levels never go past 1 hour on hard, and 2X have predetermined time of about 50 min. The compensate for losing is the problem though, losing at beginning or near the end give the same small reward. I think we just need to make losing reward scale with playtime, with maximum like 50-75% of winning reward

 

[MikeSlugDisco]

There's a technical reason we haven't done saving in the campaign. We totally would, but we're talking weeks of development per map, and we're already pretty slow with our updates.

Saves work for freeplay because it's a known game state designed to be map-agnostic, without things like scripted events and special level-specific things happening outside of simple stuff like the rising water in Towhead. It still took John several months to get right.

I don't think the solution proposed here would add much apart from the frustration of having to do things in 20 seconds, and it'd seriously affect the flow of the level / wouldn't really work thematically.