Suggestions to improve the game Part 1

[Lagspikez]

Hello, my name is Daniel, I found Project Celeste less than 2 months ago and I'm very thankful to the team behind this project for bringing this game back to life. During the time I spent playing this game I noticed a few things that require a few tweaks in order to make the overall gaming experience better. With all due respect to the developing team of Project Celeste, I suggest the following things:


1. Enable visiting other players' Capital Cities.


2. Add "Trade Dock" (cosmetic building for capital city) to other civilizations other than celtics. The game files exist already, as the Trade Docks for norse, persian, greek and other civs are displayed in several cities, such as Argos, Tarsos or Vanity Island.


3. Add the option to remove/move trees in Capital Cities, since they make the process of designing the Capital City way harder by not letting building to be placed in the desired place.


4. Add an option to choose/change the map for the Capital City, since they are heavily unbalanced, some maps have way more space available for placing buildings than others (for example, half of my Capital City map(egyptian) is only water, compared to my friend's(also egyptian) map which is 80% land with very few trees, allowing him to design and build freely).



5. Allow the AI to build walls in skirmish mode. It makes the game more fun and challenging and as far as I'm informed, the AI's ability to build walls exists in all the Age of Empires games, but it wasn't enabled for some reason(I'm not 100% sure about Age of Empires Online)


6. Add an improved friends tab in-game, with features to add to friend, accept friend request, see online players etc, a good example of such a friends tab is World of Warcraft(I'm not sure if it already exists, I didn't see one yet)


7. Add Walls as decorations (can be added in Vanity Island or some other city).


8. Make boats cost less population and/or allow them to carry more units.


9. Make the Installation Process, easier and more user-friendly, and/or add the AOE setup to a torrent so it can download faster( I convinced 3 friends to play and I had to struggle to explain to them how to install it, therefore I had to do it myself through teamviewer; for example a friend of mine thought he had to install the game again when the "error" with game scan popped up, not knowing it updates the game)


10. Remove the steam installation, since it only works for the North America (or at least make a note there and let the players know)


11. Fix Champion Mode in Skirmish vs AI when playing with other players (right now it only works alone, or with bots in your team)


12. Create a way for the players to follow the Campaign better, continuing with the quests where they left off. There are many quests and people get confused and don't know what to do (especially those that come back after a long time and don't know where they should go). For example you can create a building in the Capital City called "Quest Panel" and there, players can follow their progress in-game.


13. Provide a better tutorial with more details and make sure players read it, since it's easily skippable and players end up not knowing what to do. For example, you can provide more information regarding gear, crafting, and more advanced stuff, you can also create one, long/very long, tutorial quest that explains everything about units, upgrades, market, caravans, economy etc. You have to understand that not all players are the same, some of them don't have the time or patience to play 100 quests to UNDERSTAND how the game works. They should know how to play in maximum 5 missions, otherwise they get bored and quit. And don't tell me something like "this game is not for everyone" or stuff like that, since the team's main priority is to bring players. Right now there's a huge lack of players.


14. Add the ability to move items in the Vault from a slot to another. It's frustrating when you have to move an item to the bag and put it back in order to reorganize the vault.


15. In Age of Empires 3 it was enough to select the villagers and right click on the Town Center to make them get inside. There are players with less experience regarding binds and it's pretty complicated for a new player to find out that he has to press alt in order to get his/her villies safe.

These are all the suggestions I have for now, if new ideas come to my mind I'll create another topic on the forums. Thanks again to the team behind this project for their work and effort put in this game and I'm looking forward to seeing at least some, if not all, of these suggestions implemented into the game.

 

[Ardeshir]

Hey man welcome to the community!

I like a lot of the suggestions, and I think in time many of them will be addressed and implemented, but with only a community development team, the devs are sort of backed into prioritizing things the way they have. Many of these things have already been addressed, are in progress, or are only delayed because of Romans and Events workloads. Most of the ui that is broken would be broken in any revival of the game without some serious time in fixing it, and the barebones of friends, parties for coop and pvp, and whatnot work, while things such as the global marketplace were never finished to begin with originally lol. Personally I think boats are fine balance wise (in pvp at least).

With a tutorial questline series - while the beginning quests for Greeks/Egypt/Celts kind of achieve this, it would be nice to see a little more. Thankfully, the recent event quests help achieve this somewhat, though predominantly for reaching objectives in pvp. All sorts of quests for player macro in pvp and pve are in the works or at least on the drawing board. There are plenty of folks, not in the development team alone necessarily, trying to make some repeatables and the like for preparing people to play RTS properly in both modes.

Also, steam install works fine in most of the world actually through the database link, you can literally run a command with steam open and it'll start installing. Otherwise, having the alternative install listed along with it seems to do fine anyways.

Your vanity suggestions with trade docks, moveable/destroyable trees, and so on are really cool though, and some are relatively low workload so just stick by the game and you may get your wish!

 

[happysmurf]

Hey, i have voted against your suggestion. Not because i dont like them but because i know how hard some of them are to implement. A few of our team members are putting almost 100% of there free time in releasing the romans. Others are putting there time in making the events.
The hard coding guys at the same time are doing a great job on inproving the stability, loader and other technical aspects of the game.
We are with a small enthoustiastic team, and where we want a lot of these things in the game we cant work it all out and have to prioritise aspects above others.

Where some of these things sounds easy they are very hard to implement. For example the walls.
All buildings have a larger build radius due to the walking caravans and villagers. Walls need to break this rule so has a potential to screw the ai of the townman.

Ideas are always welcome, and feel free to post them but ask around on the discord first because most topics are mentioned earlier.

 

[WiriWout]

Nice suggestions. I like 12 and 13 the most.

 

[FinishedBlock21]

I agree that the amount of quests can be overwhelming for new players. Maybe there should be an option to have certain quest lines locked for new players or some in-game message stating that this content is not part of the main campaign and asking players if they wish to unlock it.

When it comes to things, like garrisoning villagers and such, you can always ask in discord and in-game; someone's always there to answer. I prefer to ask and get an answer if I don't know something rather than watching tutorials. Plus, you can't expect to just join a game and know everything in a couple of hours, otherwise it would be an over simplistic game and you would lose interest pretty fast. The good thing is you don't need to know everything to start playing the game; you can get by quite easily in the first starting quests.

The suggestions for improving capital decorations (maps, moving trees etc) are great as I love decorating my capital. However, I realize it would probably be very time consuming to implement those ideas, so I'd rather see more quest packs and new content, rather than having the devs spending their time on such improvements. For sure there are many game features that could be improved, but in the end you have to make a "cost-effectiveness" assessment, given the resources and time available to the devs.

 

[CWO]

Well, I didn't cast any vote but I'll try to answer what I can.

1. This is being worked on. It was implemented before in Celeste but a bug existed that could cause you to corrupt your own city by visiting another. Once the bug is addressed, I'm sure it will be added back.

8. A lot of things have been looked at with overall balance and this hasn't been touched. You'd have to run that suggestion through the balance teams to see if it's worth being changed.

9. If you were here over a year ago, you'd see that there was a TON of improvement in the installation process. In launcher version 1.0, there was no Game scan. You had to go to the Celeste website and download the entire archive of files that were changed between the MS version and the Celeste version every time they changed anything so it really handcuffed them when small changes or bugfixes had to be made.

10. Project Celeste has no control whatsoever on the Steam install. Only Microsoft can do anything about that. Technically it was removed from Steam by Microsoft but it can be installed through a small backdoor command. Celeste decided to add it as an option for those who wanted to keep their game on Steam.

15. You can always sound the bell which has existed since AOE2...

 

[aceloki]

As a city builder I can see where Lagspikez is coming from. We want to visit and share our capital city designs, but we understand we have to be patient on this. We have Rome coming. The trade dock is a Celtic anomaly, it would be nice to one day have other civ trade docks, maybe they could; one by one; eventually appear as event specials like the Temple of Apophis did as a unique Egyptian temple. [ An event favourite] . The ability to alter capital city landscape; I can sympathise with this because some capital maps have limited clear land and ill placed trees; rocky outcrops and swamps. It took me a long time to go with the flow on my Greek capital map but I think there is something inherently satisfying in working around and with the naturally generated topography and incorporating it in your city design. We actually have access to a massive range of decor for this on vanity island. For a long time I really wanted access to walls, towers, gates, farms, an armory and everything that quest locations have like Argos and Carthage. Who wouldn't want those Carthage priests who convert animals in their home cities; however; again the fun and challenge of city design is using what we have to create 'defensive, wall and road like features' using houses, forts, topiary; statues and the columns unique to each civilisation available on vanity island. All the best to all city builders out there and Lagspikez,I look forward to seeing your cities one day along with everyone else in the game. Down the track and here is my suggestion; wouldn't it be great to celebrate some months after Rome's release with a city decor competition. [Love the game. So pleased with the igloo limited release for city decor but only on my icy Norse map]

 

[Fanikazeu]

Great suggestions, I totally agree with all of them, hopefully they will be implemented sooner or later. At least half of them are mandatory in order to push the game closer to being "complete". The other half are Quality of Life changes that would greatly improve the overall experience in the game.

 

[Andy P XIII]

Hi Danny, thanks for your concerns. I did my best to address them as best as I could.

1. Enable visiting other players' Capital Cities: This is a great idea that everyone wants, but it will take an enormous amount of developer time, so we have not been able to get to it. To be clear, the developers with the skills to enable this are different human beings than the developers who work on the Romans.

2. Add "Trade Dock" (cosmetic building for capital city) to other civilizations other than Celtics: Sure. We have made some new models for existing civs, but presently we have not prioritized this project in place of existing ones, especially as the capital city buildings do not affect the substantive game too much (other than decorating capital cities, of course). I am sure soon enough we may.


3. Add the option to remove/move trees in Capital Cities: yes, but this would also take a surprising amount of work, so we have not prioritized it. It is also something the original developers obviously could have chosen to do, but did not, so we’d have to be certain we want to change it.


4. Add an option to choose/change the map for the Capital City. We’ve been looking into this.


5. Allow the AI to build walls in skirmish mode. This would take a phenomenal amount of development time. If we could easily improve AI, we certainly all agree we would.

6. Add an improved friends tab in-game: We are working on this.


7. Add Walls as decorations (can be added in Vanity Island or some other city). This has been raised plenty before, and I understand it would require a fair amount of coding to get capital cities to act like in game maps.


8. Make boats cost less population and/or allow them to carry more units. This is an issue of balancing, and we intentionally want to keep the balancing as determined by the original developers for PvE as close to original standards as possible. We frequently balance PvP, though. We have a group of expert players who decide those closest of calls.


9. Make the Installation Process: We’ve been improving things in this area constantly since we launched and will continue to do so.


10. Remove the steam installation, since it only works for the North America: I am not sure of the details here, but I understand that it works outside of North America.


11. Fix Champion Mode in Skirmish vs AI when playing with other players (right now it only works alone, or with bots in your team): We created and released Champion Mode in Skirmish v. AI and have taken it as far as it can easily go without a tremendous amount of additional effort. It is on our list, though. But we cannot presently justify the time required.


12. Create a way for the players to follow the Campaign better. I do not recall others mentioning this as a problem, but it is certainly something we can look at. However, a Quest Panel sounds like it could require a bunch of hours.


13. Provide a better tutorial with more details and make sure players read it. We haven’t heard a lot of concerns about learning the game. Anyone is able to create quests and submit them to us, too. We will look into it.

14. Add the ability to move items in the Vault from a slot to another. We all agree. This is unfortunately an artifact of the game and would be quite cumbersome for us to fix.


15. In Age of Empires 3 it was enough to select the villagers and right click on the Town Center to make them get inside. Isn’t there a hotkey to change this? I am not sure.

 

[...ReignOfRagnarok]

Many good suggestions (and replies). I would like to add one--redesign the quest map/list entirely, with these considerations:

1. Reduce the size of the map. Does anyone actually use the actual map feature? I may be alone, but I always select quests from the list, never the map.

2. Enlarge the space for the quest list to reduce scrolling to find quests (possibly include +/- button to open/close lists for each region, since some regions never get visited). The quest list window is entirely too small for a list of quests that is quite long (thank you, developers, for so many new quests!).

3. Add all the regions to the one-click option below the map. It is nice to go to regions quickly using this feature.

4. Improve the accepting/completing of quests, somehow. It would be wonderful not to have to select every new quest individually, especially when you reach a certain tier and a plethora of them unlock all at once. Likewise, being able to turn in multiple quests at once would be excellent.

Thank you for entertaining player suggestions!

 

[Andy P XIII]

There's so many regions (25 or 30 or so) that I am not sure a one-clicking icon would be viable.

 

[Aaron]

1. Reduce the size of the map. Does anyone actually use the actual map feature? I may be alone, but I always select quests from the list, never the map.

I use it for exactly 1 purpose. Glitch start co-op only maps solo.

 

[Andy P XIII]

I hear you, though changing the quest selection UI would be a very difficult undertaking.

 

[...ReignOfRagnarok]

There's so many regions (25 or 30 or so) that I am not sure a one-clicking icon would be viable.

Not really sure why not, especially if the map is reduced (or replaced).