You can download it here.
What’s new?
* The following god powers have new functionality (but may be missing graphical effects): Healing Rain, Lightning Storm, Meteor, Golem.
* I have changed to the new animated sprites for all the walkers. Tell me what you think.
* You can now only add units to your army when your general is near one of your own villages. This fixes the problem of the AI sitting inside your village pumping out units in a continuous stream.
* Speaking of the AI, it has not been upgraded to deal with the new god powers yet, so beating it is now trivially easy.
* And finally new terrain manipulation system! This is what I’m really wanting feedback on, you guys.
Here’s how it works. The “Flatten” button is now gone from the UI. That’s because the cursor is now always in “Manipulate Terrain” mode unless you specifically choose another spell. You can tell when you’re in Terrain mode because the cursor will be white.
While in Terrain mode, you can left-click and hold to raise the terrain. You can right-click and hold to lower the terrain. And you can click both buttons at once to flatten the terrain. The terrain will be flattened to the height of the tile you originally clicked in.
What I’m looking for is feedback on how easy it is to use the new system and whether or not these expanded controls actually add anything to the game.
Please download, play and leave feedback! Thanks.
Here are a couple of quick comments. I like the new units, but if you look at your post about trying them out, I liked them then as well.
The enemy never built a military unit, so when I marched my army to his towns, they just stood there.
The golem should probably go away after a while. Otherwise he sits there the entire game kicking people off the island.
I like how the villagers change color depending on their health. The AI likes the lightning bolt and I could use the healing rain option to heal my people and watch them change color back to full health.
The volcano should probably kill a town. Otherwise all the villagers just huddle in the center of the volcano until the AI moves it flat again.
Speaking of the volcano option, the AI begins flattning the land again before the volcano is even finished growing. You may want to add a “cool down” period during which no terrain changes will take effect.
I think the auto terrain tool needs a bit of tweaking. If I change my cursor to a curse, like lightning bolt, and go back to my home base, I can’t get the terrain tool back. I fried quite a few of my own villagers before I figured out that I needed to click on the military tab to get back to terrain mode. Also, left clicking on your general now does NOT select him. Hit raises hit terrain up. You have to go to the military tab and select the general unit icon.
There are some interesting possibilites in the game. Since the AI did not build a military I decided to see how well I could grow my towns before they stopped growing. I then converted all available villagers to archers. There were 89 available archers by games end. You could make an option of the game to win by non-military methods. Earn mana slowly and try to nuke the enemy town while building your own up.
I like the sound effects so far. I am interested in hearing more. Maybe the next “Name the game” post winner can submit a few. Unfortunately that rules me out as I have not won any so far.
This was my first go at Planitia, and thus, a report from someone who was playing the very first time. My first run through the game, I didn’t know what any of the spells were, outside of the obvious ones like lightning, and earthquake. Thus, my first attempt was a failure due to not knowing what spell was the healing rain one (for some reason, there were two ‘lightning storm’ icons). It might be good to have some sort of auto-help rollover text so you can know what spells do what, without having to refer to the readme file. For now, even updating the readme file with the ‘full’ list of spells and their icons would help.
Otherwise, WonderMellon makes some valid points about the new control scheme for raising/lowering land. Again, selecting the general, and moving him around, will change the land, and there’s no way to change from casting a spell mode to the normal default land changing cursor, except for clicking in the UI. Best advice would be to use Escape to go back to a normal cursor, and shift+q or something to exit the game.Or maybe caps lock could turn on/off the terrain editing mode.
It’s a neat game so far, and has a lot of potential. The control scheme works, but making it a bit more context sensitive, and it’ll be easier to pick up and learn.
I had download and play through this last night. A lot of comments I had have already been mentioned, so I’ll not repeat them. The commander control was the most important issue and I found it a bit hard to select him occasionally and just used the UI button instead.
I really like the interaction of the terrain editing, feels quite responsive, though I wonder if the middle-mouse button might be better than both buttons at the same time. Otherwise it feels like a bit of a mouse-mashing session.
PS: Nice water effect, by the way.