Feedback and Suggestions

[Kymvir Raemiz]

Here's your chance! Tell us what you think so far of the game. All comments welcome! All suggestions welcome!

[Energetic Lemur]

To me this is the best Sim game out there. The moderators seem like they care about RP, and have the motivations to keep up a great, and ever improving Sim.

The only suggestion, If possible could you get a KT calculator? I spent 2 hours of blistering work and i still managed to get half of the kingdom turn wrong .

[ann]

I actually thought about such a thing - it would be really nifty and helpful. Might be a pain th the neck to code though.

[Mogwai]

I think a KT spreadsheet would be pretty easy, just lots of IF strings. If you'd like to try my hand at it, I would. I took a course on Excel and know a decent amount about it. If people don't have Excel, they can download spread32, a free shareware which serves the same purpose as Excel.

[SwissStopwatch]

This sim is pretty good; A lot better than most of the sims, partly because it focuses on a period of time I don't think any other sim covers. Most of the rules are good, and there are some concepts here that other sims should have done, or done better. There aren't any skills that can't be learned during the game, the inclusion of fame is good, and the battle system has a place for pretty much every character thanks to the inclusion of subcommanders and unskilled ploy use. Permanent quests are a nice touch, since every player that wants to go questing can do so without waiting for one to spring up. I also like the turn phase system; The overlap between KTs and battles makes things run more smoothly, although it doesn't totally eliminate delays (Which would admittedly be pretty hard to do).

A few things strike me as odd, like Pooled Stat Experience. I sort of understand that any action has the potential to use any number of a person's attributes. When developing agriculture, for example, one might persuade the farmers to work harder (Charisma), direct the efforts of the workers (Command), help plow the fields personally (Might), devise an innovative system of preventing wild animals from eating the crops (Intelligence), and observe which crops grow better in the fields being worked (Judgement). However, the use of one stat to determine development results hints that there's one method being used more than the others, and it would seem to make more sense for that stat to be the one that grows more than the rest.

Concerning household costs: I understand that some expenses like hiring guardsmen and such would be included in that... but just because some rulers lived extravagantly and wastefully, not every ruler necessarily would, regardless of title. The household costs aren't overly punitive, though.

Husbandry is a good idea, although decline to zero seems odd; However, I suppose that can just mean that there aren't too many spare animals to slaughter, rather than meaning that every animal in the region is dead.

Even with all of this, I still think that rulewise this is the best sim around currently. It also provides a good venue for RP (Which I should probably take advantage of more), which makes it very good overall.

[ann]

Thanks for all the feedback! Will comment more later but wanted to point out that Husbandry doesn't decline to zero - there is a reduction, depending on the season, of 100 or 200 which represents the loss of animals through slaughter.

[SwissStopwatch]

Husbandry doesn't decline to zero - there is a reduction, depending on the season, of 100 or 200 which represents the loss of animals through slaughter.

To clarify what I meant, Husbandry can go to zero if neglected, which seems likely in some cities, actually. And that would be odd.

[ann]

I don't find husbandry going to zero odd myself - you don't work on something why should it be going on without you? Especially animals - who once eaten are gone.

The pooled stat experience is a little weird - there isn't really a satisfying logical explanation for it IC. Really we like it for ease of use reasons. A lot of our focus in making the sim rules was to make the whole thing easy to use. I really like the easy battle tactics for example. There are some complaints about dueling being too restrictive and we're considering a modification to the rules which would let people have more individual control over the duels themselves.

But yeah - the pooled stat stuff is easy but the IC explanation is somewhat unsatisfying.

[Xiang Zhuang]

Without going into IC reasons for Husbandry, the idea behind it was that we wanted a stat that expired over time. The idea of having Commerce and Agriculture levels fall seasonally was something we really didn't want to do. With the system now, there is a stat you can rely upon all the time, and another stat that does dwindle some, but the output it gives can be crucial. I bounced around different ideas for this, then went back to it. One stat for gold taxes, one stat for food harvest, and another stat for both. There are IC reasons for it, but as for most things, there is a game-reason for it firstly.

Pooled stat experience was something we tossed around for a while and finally decided we'd try it and see how it'd go. The idea came from what RTK 9 does and from what Rise of the Phoenix (the only game made about this era that I know of so far, besides Prince of Qin or something) does. If there is a problem with the system at the moment it would be that, in my mind, it still doesn't give you enough XP. But I think it works for now. Whether we keep it or not in a later sim will be decided later. The main idea, though, was to allow people to do one thing all of the time (most people only have a few things which they are most useful for in a KT) but still be able to grow in other ways. If people are going to max out one stat to 100, I guess they can. That's not a big worry of mine. The ratios aren't perfect, though. I dunno, I have mixed feelings about it myself anymore, but that isn't something we are going to change anytime soon.

[KDS]

Seeing as I post in this game so often I should tell everyone what my feelings are in it. 8-)

To be honest, doing KT's aren't really as time consuming as others would think. All you'd have to do is make one and just edit as the months go by. Sure you add in cities and such when you gain them, but the overall structure has already been completed from the first time you wrote it.

I like the time period. A blessed change from the usual Later Han/Three Kingdoms period. The only problem with using this era is that perhaps some of the players might not know who some characters are. They know who the First Emperor, Xiang Yu, and Liu Bang are, but not men like the Tien's and such.

The fame thing strikes me as numerically fine. Understandable what does what.

The battles do make for interesting reading and I do like the fact that instead of using "units" like SimRTK, you actually know exactly from reading the numbers how many hundreds or thousands died from your attacks.

Well, that's it for now. Short I know, but the game has only been around for a short time. They'll be more to comment on later, I'm sure.