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Vapourware Clockwork Empires, now in Earliest Access.
- Thread starter Hellraiser
- Start date
Hellraiser
Arcane
Still no conduits or communists implemented AFAIK.
Then again they have been known to keep features underwraps and out of the alpha/beta builds for months before suddenly implementing them. Biomes being one of them. We shall see.
I will post my impressions after they release 1.0.
Then again they have been known to keep features underwraps and out of the alpha/beta builds for months before suddenly implementing them. Biomes being one of them. We shall see.
I will post my impressions after they release 1.0.
Burning Bridges
Enviado de meu SM-G3502T usando Tapatalk
Most likely shit
Hobo Elf
Arcane
Good thing I avoided this game early on. It was pretty apparent early on that this was a development disaster.
Interesting thread here: http://steamcommunity.com/app/224740/discussions/0/350544117177823153/
Lots of dev-answers and such. Looks like the game is pushed out buggy and unfinished.
Real shame. I was looking forward to it, and it was one of the first EA games I bought. I bought it with the premise of co-op, which now is a cut feature.
Lots of dev-answers and such. Looks like the game is pushed out buggy and unfinished.
Real shame. I was looking forward to it, and it was one of the first EA games I bought. I bought it with the premise of co-op, which now is a cut feature.
Genma:TheDestroyer
Arcane
I really looked forward to it after some magazine previews, forgot when nothing else came out, then remembered a couple months ago and tracked it down. Once I saw the Early Access tag I shrugged it off again.
I'll see what players and reviewers alike say before a purchase.
I'll see what players and reviewers alike say before a purchase.
Trash
Pointing and laughing.
Game seemed awesome from the early previews. Loved the ideas shown. The incredibly slow progress however shows something somewhere went amiss. And what I did see was severely underwhelming. Will await to see what people say after 1.0 is released.
They say they supported Dredmore for over a year after release. If they do it with this one then perhaps by then this will be worthy of purchase.
They say they supported Dredmore for over a year after release. If they do it with this one then perhaps by then this will be worthy of purchase.
almondblight
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2004
- Messages
- 2,549
Not sure why companies keep shooting themselves in the foot like this. If they need more revenue, they need to explore pretty much any other option; slapping 1.0 on an unfinished product and pushing it out almost always backfires. Right now their reviews are at 70%, with recent reviews are at 40%. If they try to sell an EA title as a release title (with the explanation that it's cool because they'll keep working on it), it's probably going to drop and reviews will be poor. Then if/when they ever finish the game, everyone's going to have already written it off.
GrainWetski
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2012
- Messages
- 5,094
Guess there's no point trying it if the devs didn't pay IGN.
Hellraiser
Arcane
Ok, I played the 1.0 hotfix something build quite a bit, here's my 5 potato gold. Overall it is pretty solid, but does need some more features that were promised, and maybe a bit more polishing in some events. A year at most and it will be worth to be called a completed and fleshed out game. Unless they shift some promised feature into DLC. Hopefully they will not.
Still it has a very good economical/industrial layer and interesting choices via events and mechanics, something Rimworld for instance does not really have. Rimworld is harder, more challenging and less forgiving (you can lose a lot of colonists in CE, in Rimworld sometime one death spirals into game over, and this is not just due to the scale of the game), has better combat and has deeper simulation in quite a few places though. CE also throws different kinds of problems and solutions at the player in some cases. In Rimworld a siege boils down to tactics and the equipment of your pawns and maybe support from some settlement if you are lucky. In CE you can use diplomacy to avoid using your own military assets (or avoid the need to invest in such assets) to win a battle with foreign invaders, in more than one way. You can not just kill bandits, you can intimidate them to leave you alone or give you tribute. You can have the Empire bomb the bandits from an airship, you can spread propaganda to make bandits defect and become your new proles.
Some features of Clockwork Empires that were mentioned by the devs are still missing, most notably vehicles, roads (supposedly they will be added in the next update), communism (ok, a cult can have communism as an object of worship, but strikes, acts of sabotage and related events are just too good not to include), bureaucrat career mode (currently stuff gets unlocked by reaching milestones, for example I unlocked cold biome starting locations by reaching a population milestone, but not much else, diplomacy does not carry over I think, nor does tech) and conduits for moving goods/resources between stockpiles or workshops.
However they polished everything they already had implemented and the result is some very solid systems, despite all the initial design problems they had, although the interface could use some more work. For example having to click on the naturalist office and click again on a button in the office window to order a particular giant beetle to be hunted down is a bit cubersome, although of course you can set naturalist office's focus to hunting.
The office maintenance system is a good example of a polished system that wasn't very good initially. Initially they wanted that there would be upkeep to have modules working, otherwise they would break down. Sounds good in theory, but tracking down all the components needed not end up with a steaming pile of broken production modules and an unwinnable scenario due to not being able to build anything was a hassle for the player. It was an exercise in micromanagement that only an utterly sperging mind could enjoy. They got rid of upkeep on modules, but now offices require a stream of supplies to function. Want to have the foreign office produce diplomacy points for diplomatic missions? Supply it with paper. Want the miners to mine? Supply the mine with support structures so that new excavation corridors can be created. Want your soldiers to kill hostiles with something better than bare hands? Supply them with the right ammo for the weapons they use. The same applies to barbers (they act as doctors, don't ask), vicars, scientists. That way the system does not force you to absolutely have to produce supplies or face losing the game due to a snowball effect, it gives you a choice to allocate your resources as needed, with trade-offs.
Immigration got a decent remodelling. It is a bit simplistic, because it is basically build enough beds to support new proles or overseers or aristocrats. However there is a cap per building on how many people it will attract, based on the buildings quality. However for overseers if you increase a houses quality via decor you can increase the overseer immigration cap the house gives slightly. Then again considering how much of a bottleneck not having enough overseers was, this makes the system more transparent, and easier for the player to choose and execute an expansion strategy rather than be at the mercy of the RNG and obfuscated mechanics. I think they should make the system less deterministic and binary with regards to reputation though. Add some random variance in received overseers and not just give you whatever is the difference between the current total of overseers you have and the cap. For instance low reputation with the Empire should result in lower overseer immigration on average, the current overseer immigration cut-off point is a bit too high (you either get full overseer immigration or nothing). I rather they limit it to 1 per immigration wave if the rep is low, because otherwise the colony faces a death-spiral too fast. Maybe even have it sometimes go over the cap and make the new arrivals unhappy that there's no room for them if your prestige/rep with the Empire is too high (that's what you get for having a team of 5 bureaucrats produce a blatantly false picture of the greatness and wealth of your colonial endeavour in the Home Country, freeloaders seeking free housing and stuff).
New cult mechanics are decent although the event chain is a bit too predictable. If colonists go sad or mad, they will end up as prime candidates for cult recruitment. Cults have three characteristics that can be discovered by investigation. You can of course ignore a cult, but that is generally a bad idea. Sending someone competent, either a skilled NCO (who will interrogate everyone in the colony until he learns the truth, pissing them off) or a skilled Vicar (not sure how he does it, meditation?), possibly a skilled Scientist (not sure if they can be picked for leading the investigation), will let you discover the key features of a cult, possibly fast enough to stop it. Sending whoever is available will most likely result in failing to figure out anything before it is too late. The 3 traits are the cult's leader, the location of the altar and the object of worship. Once all 3 are known, you get a choice how to stop the cult. Then you face a choice, depending on the (manned) offices you have in your colony. The NCO will allow you to either destroy the altar or to kill the cult leader. A scientists can work on means to prevent an occult ritual from working, as can a vicar. But there is a catch, if the overseer in charge of the counter-measure is a cultist himself, he will sabotage your attempt. That cure the scientist was making will turn out to be occult poison increasing the effect of the ritual. The NCO will not kill the leader or destroy the altar.
Cult rituals, once performed, may not kill the colony outright. They can be a nuisance, like summoning beetles to eat your crops. A pain, like summoning a fishpeople raiding party. And Fun like things that man was not meant to know, pestering your colony. Although oddly enough I did manage to survive the absolutely worse Fun a cult can throw at you AFAIK, it only cost me 40-50% of my colonies population, out of ~100 colonists. However if you survive a ritual and the cult is still around, it will work on a second more powerful version. Although I think the ultimate cult Fun does not have a second version as it kind of "re-purposes" the cultists when it happens, so there's no cult left to do a second ritual. It needed more fire and explosions I guess. It helped that I had a good standing with the Homeland, so they dropped two guys clad in steampunk power armor to my aid due to an occult emergency. Also worked as a nice purge, as I had a ton of cultists overseers, most of whom I shifted from important functions to overseeing corn growing, while putting fresh cult-free newbies in their place (a loyal crappy NCO is better than a Cultist NCO with good stats).
I think a foreign invasion when novorussians attacked equipped with two grenade launchers was worse, they gibbed my two whole squads of redcoats and demolished one building before being overwhelmed by an angry mob of proles with shovels and other working class tools. Also had a zeppelin crash right on top of one of my farming fields, burning all my crops, giving some non-lethal (or almost lethal, or lethal, I forgot which) wounds to my labourers.
Regarding events and offices. When you pick an overseer to tackle a problem, like NCO to interrogate random colonists to get to the bottom of a cult problem or a Vicar to exorcise some spirits haunting your colony, their office become involved in working on the project so they do not do their regular jobs. Regular service production is halted and all that.
The pace is a bit sluggish in the beginning I would say, all the good stuff happens after you get 30-50 colonists. Until then it is pretty uneventful. Still, it has the right scale for a DF clone, the systems are pretty good, including science, diplomacy, events (nice fluff and mostly meaningful choices, both entirely random world events and based on your colonists) and biomes that do matter (growing anything besides cabbage in cold climate requires research). Military is decent, but it lack trenches and some more options for static defences like turrets or gun nests. It lacks the shit hits the fan factor DF and Rimworld have, even the worst negative events can be survivable, the game is not as punishing.
It still has some performance issues, but it seems the devs finally caught wind of the bug that makes the game slowdown at 100+ colonists, and fixed it for the next build.
I might post some screenshots later, but my colony besides running slow is working rather clockwork and is at ~130 inhabitants. There's some slight bandit/fishpeople problem near my Gold mine, but I just built a barracks there, where my 3rd squad stations. I need to import some more proles and it will all be ok, although the slowdown issue makes colonists react too slowly compared to bandits so they are easy prey. I managed to eradicate cult activity after ITZ, as I had a big problem with it* (hence ITZ happened), by means of sedating the masses with booze at the pub, vicars seem to do little good for fighting cults I guess, although they do make some events easier**, well that and ITZ killed off nearly all cultists. It was a bloodbath full of proles with shovels slamming followers of the occult, steam knights firing grenades and Fun murdering shit.
My main exports are Gold and Dormant Spores (dropped by Fun that happens too often, could use some events other than the meteor shower which spawns the spores). I trade it mostly for paintings (they increase the efficiency of middle class housing, workshop happiness and some other things but cost 10k which is about 8 bars of gold, so a lot), lacquer, raw resources like logs or stone or clay or sand, ammo sometime, recently steel (I have not yet researched the tech for smelting it).
*I had an occult inspector visit me. The visit was only a mild nuisance, he only fired his flame gun against one fishperson and did not burn any colonists or burn down any dens of heresy. Probably because I had my diplomats work on getting rid of him ASAP. Also one of the cultists offers to get rid off the inspector by means of occult murder. I am curious as to what consequences that would have. Maybe the cult would get more juice for their ritual due to sacrificing the inspector.
**one time a new colonist came oddly attached to a fishy idol. I had the Vicar talk some sense into him, so the colonist convinced of his heresy smashed the idol. Later a group of fishpeople came looking for the idol, I could deny them, triggering them or let them search. They searched and found nothing so they just buggered off without making a fuss.
Still it has a very good economical/industrial layer and interesting choices via events and mechanics, something Rimworld for instance does not really have. Rimworld is harder, more challenging and less forgiving (you can lose a lot of colonists in CE, in Rimworld sometime one death spirals into game over, and this is not just due to the scale of the game), has better combat and has deeper simulation in quite a few places though. CE also throws different kinds of problems and solutions at the player in some cases. In Rimworld a siege boils down to tactics and the equipment of your pawns and maybe support from some settlement if you are lucky. In CE you can use diplomacy to avoid using your own military assets (or avoid the need to invest in such assets) to win a battle with foreign invaders, in more than one way. You can not just kill bandits, you can intimidate them to leave you alone or give you tribute. You can have the Empire bomb the bandits from an airship, you can spread propaganda to make bandits defect and become your new proles.
Some features of Clockwork Empires that were mentioned by the devs are still missing, most notably vehicles, roads (supposedly they will be added in the next update), communism (ok, a cult can have communism as an object of worship, but strikes, acts of sabotage and related events are just too good not to include), bureaucrat career mode (currently stuff gets unlocked by reaching milestones, for example I unlocked cold biome starting locations by reaching a population milestone, but not much else, diplomacy does not carry over I think, nor does tech) and conduits for moving goods/resources between stockpiles or workshops.
However they polished everything they already had implemented and the result is some very solid systems, despite all the initial design problems they had, although the interface could use some more work. For example having to click on the naturalist office and click again on a button in the office window to order a particular giant beetle to be hunted down is a bit cubersome, although of course you can set naturalist office's focus to hunting.
The office maintenance system is a good example of a polished system that wasn't very good initially. Initially they wanted that there would be upkeep to have modules working, otherwise they would break down. Sounds good in theory, but tracking down all the components needed not end up with a steaming pile of broken production modules and an unwinnable scenario due to not being able to build anything was a hassle for the player. It was an exercise in micromanagement that only an utterly sperging mind could enjoy. They got rid of upkeep on modules, but now offices require a stream of supplies to function. Want to have the foreign office produce diplomacy points for diplomatic missions? Supply it with paper. Want the miners to mine? Supply the mine with support structures so that new excavation corridors can be created. Want your soldiers to kill hostiles with something better than bare hands? Supply them with the right ammo for the weapons they use. The same applies to barbers (they act as doctors, don't ask), vicars, scientists. That way the system does not force you to absolutely have to produce supplies or face losing the game due to a snowball effect, it gives you a choice to allocate your resources as needed, with trade-offs.
Immigration got a decent remodelling. It is a bit simplistic, because it is basically build enough beds to support new proles or overseers or aristocrats. However there is a cap per building on how many people it will attract, based on the buildings quality. However for overseers if you increase a houses quality via decor you can increase the overseer immigration cap the house gives slightly. Then again considering how much of a bottleneck not having enough overseers was, this makes the system more transparent, and easier for the player to choose and execute an expansion strategy rather than be at the mercy of the RNG and obfuscated mechanics. I think they should make the system less deterministic and binary with regards to reputation though. Add some random variance in received overseers and not just give you whatever is the difference between the current total of overseers you have and the cap. For instance low reputation with the Empire should result in lower overseer immigration on average, the current overseer immigration cut-off point is a bit too high (you either get full overseer immigration or nothing). I rather they limit it to 1 per immigration wave if the rep is low, because otherwise the colony faces a death-spiral too fast. Maybe even have it sometimes go over the cap and make the new arrivals unhappy that there's no room for them if your prestige/rep with the Empire is too high (that's what you get for having a team of 5 bureaucrats produce a blatantly false picture of the greatness and wealth of your colonial endeavour in the Home Country, freeloaders seeking free housing and stuff).
New cult mechanics are decent although the event chain is a bit too predictable. If colonists go sad or mad, they will end up as prime candidates for cult recruitment. Cults have three characteristics that can be discovered by investigation. You can of course ignore a cult, but that is generally a bad idea. Sending someone competent, either a skilled NCO (who will interrogate everyone in the colony until he learns the truth, pissing them off) or a skilled Vicar (not sure how he does it, meditation?), possibly a skilled Scientist (not sure if they can be picked for leading the investigation), will let you discover the key features of a cult, possibly fast enough to stop it. Sending whoever is available will most likely result in failing to figure out anything before it is too late. The 3 traits are the cult's leader, the location of the altar and the object of worship. Once all 3 are known, you get a choice how to stop the cult. Then you face a choice, depending on the (manned) offices you have in your colony. The NCO will allow you to either destroy the altar or to kill the cult leader. A scientists can work on means to prevent an occult ritual from working, as can a vicar. But there is a catch, if the overseer in charge of the counter-measure is a cultist himself, he will sabotage your attempt. That cure the scientist was making will turn out to be occult poison increasing the effect of the ritual. The NCO will not kill the leader or destroy the altar.
Cult rituals, once performed, may not kill the colony outright. They can be a nuisance, like summoning beetles to eat your crops. A pain, like summoning a fishpeople raiding party. And Fun like things that man was not meant to know, pestering your colony. Although oddly enough I did manage to survive the absolutely worse Fun a cult can throw at you AFAIK, it only cost me 40-50% of my colonies population, out of ~100 colonists. However if you survive a ritual and the cult is still around, it will work on a second more powerful version. Although I think the ultimate cult Fun does not have a second version as it kind of "re-purposes" the cultists when it happens, so there's no cult left to do a second ritual. It needed more fire and explosions I guess. It helped that I had a good standing with the Homeland, so they dropped two guys clad in steampunk power armor to my aid due to an occult emergency. Also worked as a nice purge, as I had a ton of cultists overseers, most of whom I shifted from important functions to overseeing corn growing, while putting fresh cult-free newbies in their place (a loyal crappy NCO is better than a Cultist NCO with good stats).
I think a foreign invasion when novorussians attacked equipped with two grenade launchers was worse, they gibbed my two whole squads of redcoats and demolished one building before being overwhelmed by an angry mob of proles with shovels and other working class tools. Also had a zeppelin crash right on top of one of my farming fields, burning all my crops, giving some non-lethal (or almost lethal, or lethal, I forgot which) wounds to my labourers.
Regarding events and offices. When you pick an overseer to tackle a problem, like NCO to interrogate random colonists to get to the bottom of a cult problem or a Vicar to exorcise some spirits haunting your colony, their office become involved in working on the project so they do not do their regular jobs. Regular service production is halted and all that.
The pace is a bit sluggish in the beginning I would say, all the good stuff happens after you get 30-50 colonists. Until then it is pretty uneventful. Still, it has the right scale for a DF clone, the systems are pretty good, including science, diplomacy, events (nice fluff and mostly meaningful choices, both entirely random world events and based on your colonists) and biomes that do matter (growing anything besides cabbage in cold climate requires research). Military is decent, but it lack trenches and some more options for static defences like turrets or gun nests. It lacks the shit hits the fan factor DF and Rimworld have, even the worst negative events can be survivable, the game is not as punishing.
It still has some performance issues, but it seems the devs finally caught wind of the bug that makes the game slowdown at 100+ colonists, and fixed it for the next build.
I might post some screenshots later, but my colony besides running slow is working rather clockwork and is at ~130 inhabitants. There's some slight bandit/fishpeople problem near my Gold mine, but I just built a barracks there, where my 3rd squad stations. I need to import some more proles and it will all be ok, although the slowdown issue makes colonists react too slowly compared to bandits so they are easy prey. I managed to eradicate cult activity after ITZ, as I had a big problem with it* (hence ITZ happened), by means of sedating the masses with booze at the pub, vicars seem to do little good for fighting cults I guess, although they do make some events easier**, well that and ITZ killed off nearly all cultists. It was a bloodbath full of proles with shovels slamming followers of the occult, steam knights firing grenades and Fun murdering shit.
My main exports are Gold and Dormant Spores (dropped by Fun that happens too often, could use some events other than the meteor shower which spawns the spores). I trade it mostly for paintings (they increase the efficiency of middle class housing, workshop happiness and some other things but cost 10k which is about 8 bars of gold, so a lot), lacquer, raw resources like logs or stone or clay or sand, ammo sometime, recently steel (I have not yet researched the tech for smelting it).
*I had an occult inspector visit me. The visit was only a mild nuisance, he only fired his flame gun against one fishperson and did not burn any colonists or burn down any dens of heresy. Probably because I had my diplomats work on getting rid of him ASAP. Also one of the cultists offers to get rid off the inspector by means of occult murder. I am curious as to what consequences that would have. Maybe the cult would get more juice for their ritual due to sacrificing the inspector.
**one time a new colonist came oddly attached to a fishy idol. I had the Vicar talk some sense into him, so the colonist convinced of his heresy smashed the idol. Later a group of fishpeople came looking for the idol, I could deny them, triggering them or let them search. They searched and found nothing so they just buggered off without making a fuss.
Last edited:
anus_pounder
Arcane
Looks like shit, sounds like shit, probably is shit. 
Been playing it for an hour or two now, and it's just painful to play. They restricted the game too much. Before it was open like Dwarf Fortress, you could place modules everywhere you wanted, but now it's restricted. Beds are only for bunk houses and so on. Everything feels restricted actually. You don't get any new colonist if you don't improve the housing. It feels artificial, compared to say Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, and that is one thing that completely ruins builders for me. Menus are convoluted to all hell. It is hard to find whatever you want, and funnily enough this makes it more tedious than Dwarf Fortress to find stuff and build it. It's a micro-managing hell, and I usually like to micro manage things. There is just too much wrong with it overall. Like barracks. You need pistol, rifle cabinets and so on for storing weapons. Nothing strange about that, but you can only equip one of those kind of weapons for the regiment that resides in that specific barrack. Just stuff like that, it's just too restrictive and unfun. It takes away all creativity and realism.
They also removed fun social stuff. I have a nice screenshot I took from the early stages of the game:
This was my kitchen. You can see it was busy as hell. People, eating, interacting with each other, some are cooking food. Those things just are not possible in the game now. It kills the simulation. Overall this game is a major disappointment and I was looking forward to it. Well, since I liked the dry British humor, setting and graphics. But they just dropped all their initial "Dwarf Fortress" gameplay principles and replaced it with this more "gamey" gameplay.
They also removed fun social stuff. I have a nice screenshot I took from the early stages of the game:
This was my kitchen. You can see it was busy as hell. People, eating, interacting with each other, some are cooking food. Those things just are not possible in the game now. It kills the simulation. Overall this game is a major disappointment and I was looking forward to it. Well, since I liked the dry British humor, setting and graphics. But they just dropped all their initial "Dwarf Fortress" gameplay principles and replaced it with this more "gamey" gameplay.
Last edited:
Hellraiser
Arcane
FYI it appears pretty much every developer (silently) quit the company except the head of the company and there has been radio silence since November. Former devs list their association with Gaslamp Games as ending with November.
Nobody knows what exactly happened, but my guess is the project was a money sink which lead to some decision or arguments that ended with the company imploding.
Nobody knows what exactly happened, but my guess is the project was a money sink which lead to some decision or arguments that ended with the company imploding.
The user Tikigod posted this on the Steam forums;
Seems like there was some heavy falling out the last couple of months. I mean - "I made games once, it was awful". Damn!
It's somewhat looking like key personnel involved at Gaslamp parted ways.
Nicholas has changed his twitter profile to remove mention of working at Gaslamp and replaced it with "I made games once, it was awful."
Dgbaumgart now has himself listed as a freelance artist and independent developer with no mention of Gaslamp, and has thrown up a few blog posts over on gamedev(dot)net mentioning work on developing his own projects running off of Unity and sneaking in a mention in a 'review of works' that he wasn't for the idea of Clockwork Empires to start with rather wanting to work on a 2D spiritual successor to the Masters of Magic genre of games but being outvoted at the time.
MooManibe who was an animator on CWE (at some point at least) is also confirmed as independent now and not working on the game.
And Daynab posted over on the official forums that as of last month they're also no longer part of Gaslamp.
So of the 3 listed 'founding Partners' of Gaslamp it would seem Daniel is the only one not clearly showing themselves as no longer associated with Gaslamp. And on top of that community staff and an animator have also confirmed as not involved any more.
Personally, I wouldn't hold up much hope for much to be in the pipeline for Clockwork Empires, nor for ever really hearing any real word on what exactly happened between the end of November and January.
Seems like there was some heavy falling out the last couple of months. I mean - "I made games once, it was awful". Damn!
almondblight
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2004
- Messages
- 2,549
I'm sure there is a lot of juicy things to dig up still.
Trash
Pointing and laughing.
Guess both this game and company are done for then. Shame.
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