No Saving in Missions?

[vanillapcstrategy]

First off, I am loving this game so far. I've only played for an hour or so but I am really impressed with how polished and smooth it is running. The challenge seems pretty good (I am terrible at RTS tho) and I am having a lot of fun.

However one thing I ran into while in the middle of the first mission is that I had to leave and couldn't find a way to save it. I assumed it would autosave and then just continue from where I left off, but it didn't. So now I have to start the whole thing over again.

Since the mission had taken me about 30 minutes, and looked like it would take at least another 30... it seems like a long time to expect people to play without being able to save.

I can understand not wanting people to savescum and all that, which is very sensible, but not being able to stop in the middle of a mission definitely seems to be a bit much.

Anyway I hope this is a result of the early access and isn't a planned feature. Loving the game so far, but if the later missions become more complex and still don't allow saving, the time commitment seems like more than most people would be able to allow...

 

[Liam]

Hi Vanilla,

Ha. I love that word "savescum", adding that to my dictionary now.

Actually this isn't a design choice, rather the result of time restrictions. Creating a save option is a lot of work and so implementing it became a trade-off between time and functionality. We decided that having it in the formicarium was the most important, and in missions was secondary.

I would like to have the option in missions too, but there is a lot of extra work to do for that. We would have to save the state of the AI for each individual creature, to perfectly pick up where they left off, then also to remember lots of scenario specific details like what time of day it is, how many waves of enemies have been sent, etc. With the formicarium, it was already quite hard getting things working, but at least with that there is no urgency in that that everything doesn't have to be a perfect snapshot of the last save (we just load the ant positions, create the ants, and let them re-initialize their AI).

I think it might be a while before we bring in full save/load functionality; the time investment for the return is not great when you consider we could be spending our time creating (for example) new levels, a skirmish/freeplay mode, a generic computer AI to play against etc.

You wont be the only person put out by this though, perhaps we need to make it clearer that you can't save during missions, for now anyway.

 

[vanillapcstrategy]

Hi Liam

Thanks for the response! I imagine it must be very difficult to get the save details set up, I've seen other games either delay the saving ability in development or bungle it with a clumsy implementation.

With the upcoming steam release, and a giant audience getting involved, this definitely seems like something you'll hear about from others. I'm always thinking of the initial wave of reviews ... but I don't really know well enough how widespread or intense the feelings will be on this matter. Personally after the surprise of learning it didn't save it doesn't affect me too much but like I said if the missions get to lasting 2 hours or something not being able to save would be a pretty big burden on people.

Anyway I won't go on about it any more, thanks for listening and of course I hope everything is going well! This game is really fun and I am very much looking forward to being able to show it off. If it means anything I received a key yesterday for Railroad Empires, I'm a big train fan, yet I can't stop playing Undergrowth. It's a really good game and feels further along in development than you'd expect from a game entering the first stages of EA.