Some suggestions after playing the Hive Keeper 20-30 times.

[TheBlueMoon]

The Game is excellent overall, and I enjoyed it.

Things I like:

1. There are many starting options to choose from, (1 vs ai, 2 vs ai, 2 vs 2, free for all). The tutorial is especially well designed and does help alot for new players.

2. I wasn't a previous dungeon keeper 2 player but I could see how this special gaming interface could be very fun to play with. The idea of digging your underground hive empire is fun and creative, as it allows you to ponder what is a good layout of your rooms to maximize efficiency, and to wonder how could you set up the traps and dig out a maze to fit your traps so the incoming waves can be easily defeated.

3. The creature emotion/desire system is a genius implementation (not sure whether it is a copy from dungeon keeper but that doesn't matter). I especially like those 'hungry' (big mouth sharp teeth) 'angry' (red sad face) 'unhappy' (yellow mild face) 'dizzy' (sleepy Zzz) and 'to battle' (crossing swords) symbols that really make the game shine. This system allows the player to easily understand what is happening (if you see big mouth sharp teeth you better feed it) and also entertains the player with a group of useful creatures with rich emotions.

4. The fact that drones will automatically do a set of very complicated jobs given only some simple player instructions is amazing. The creative life bar design of all units tells me that the author has put some serious work into the design of this game.

5. I laughed sooo hard when I see a drone quickly dragged an abberation corpse away from the battle ground.

Now some suggestions for improvement or things I don't enjoy as much:

1. The game is unbearably laggy. It starts off alright and quite smoothly, but as the number of drones and creatures rise, it will quickly escalate into a very unenjoyable laggy game. When you have 20+ drones with 20 max creatures from a nydus, issuing a dig command takes 15 seconds.

2. The automatic nature of drone jobs is great but need a better priority setting. For example, drones will always try to dig out all the selected ground before laying creep, also they will prioritize delivering minerals to the base even if the base is very far away and there could be some tasks nearby. You could argue for the opposite that the player needs minerals more at certain times but it always depends on the situation. Therefore, it would be a good idea to allow the player to set the drone priority.

3. Drone again. When enemy waves come in, there is a high chance that many drones will run in to them and get demolished. Therefore it would be good if there is a hotkey (or an ability) to allow the player to summon all drones to a set location (like a pheromone ability on the drones only). Or more creatively, (like in age of empires) drones can get into the hive and arm it so the hive become an attacking structure only when garrisoned by drones. The damage scales with the number of drones inside the hive.

4. I find sometimes the number of creatures EXCEED 20 when the max number of creatures you can get from a nydus is 20.

5. Once the nydus is activated it automatically spawns units, therefore you need to quickly make training rooms, libraries, and furnace before all of your supplys are occupied by creatures like zergling and mutaling. Once you reach 20 creatures and you still don't have pygalisks, fatty or abberation, then you will never get to research trap points even if you do have furnace built(but possibly too late). As a result, my suggestion is that you can disband your creatures without having to spam right click them with keeper's hand to make them unhappy and leave. Or even better, allow the player to set a maximum number of a certain type of unit that they want.

6. For multiplayer such as in 2 vs ai, you cannot build traps or rooms on your ally's creep, I think it could be better if you can.

7. In the current tutorial mode, if you researched the level 2 furnace before building the spore cannon, you will not complete the mission.

8. Traps. Right now, when you set up traps, sometimes their icon become invisible (possibly because of interference from the background creep) eventhough you know you set it up there. This is troublesome to keep track of where you have set up the trap.
*Edit: This turns out not to be a problem at all if the player is playing at high graphics setting. However, the richness of the colouring and complex environment details can be quite distracting for newer players.

9. If you have a trap set up behind a wall, enemy marauders cannot damage it even if they are shooting at it. However your spore cannons can still shoot and damage the marauders.

10. After researching all abilities/traps to +2 the creatures still keep generating more research points and wasting minerals and only stop at 20000 points. This is very undesirable. Player should be able to control whether they want their creature to keep researching or not.

11. It could be better if there is a hotkey so you could have all creatures selected and stored on the keeper's hand without having to spam click all creatures from the army's tab. (ie. shift left click to select all mutaling from inside the army tab).

12. I don't know if this could help but giving more information about a unit will be more interesting and useful. For example, when I click on a hydralisk, I can view it's health, attack damage and etc. In this way, I can see how good it is vs a same level fatty. Or I could compare between the same creature but at different levels.

13. Feedlings should also be included in the army tab so players can quickly select them and feed them to hungry creatures.

14. The crafting speed of traps is dependent on the number of abberation/pygalisks/fatty you have but the player has no idea how quickly the next traps will be built. Maybe there could be a status tab for trap creation.

15. When the player's ally is defeated, the ally's minerals should be given to the player or at least become collectible by anyone.

16. Drones will lay creep to the first layer of wall beside dug space. This 'creepified' wall is considered a friendly structure and the player will be warned when enemy is attacking it. This is all great design but an inconvenience is that when you order drones to dig for more space, you cannot tell whether you have selected the 'creepified' wall too to be destroyed. As for normal wall, you would see them highlighted in green when you select them to be dug.
*Edit: This turns out not to be a problem at all if the player is playing at high graphics setting. However, the richness of the colouring and complex environment details can be quite distracting for newer players.

Can't think of more to say but I will post more if I find anything worthy of mentioning.
Thank you for the game, you made today a fulfilling one for me.

 

[Bibendus]

Wow, thanks for the huge feedback, really appreciated

So let's see...

1) Do you lag even on single player? It usually causes problems in multiplayer with a lot of players.
The big problem here is the huge amount of complex triggers running at the same time. In the past I spent a lot of time to optimize all unefficient triggers I found, now it seems I have to find more things to optimize but it won't be easy.

2) Drones AI is beeing optimized again with the next patch and should be a lot better. They already have a behavior that forces them to do the closest task when dropped by your hand, that means if you want to spread some creep while digging is active you can drop a drone close to the spot and it will do what you need. However ATM drones tend to change task if some other drone decide to "steal" their job.

3) Drones are now lacking the scared behavior that should let them flee when they see an enemy.

4) Noticed the same but still I did not figure out how
Could be something that happens when creatures are unconscious or grabbed.

5) There is a hidden feature that dungeon keeper players know, you can dismiss a creature dropping it by hand in the middle of your nydus worm

6) It's better to keep this behavior as it is or you could troll your ally by occupying his terrain with traps

7) Thanks, I'll look into that! Level 2 upgrades where added after the tutorial was complete and I didn't check that!

8) Can you explain this better? Don't you see the green trap placeholder on low details?

9) I forgot to add the line of sight check on traps too

10) I have to find a way to count when research is unnecessary, for now the only stop to research comes when you reach that 20k cap

11) Shift click may be a great idea to grab all creatures of the same type, I may think to implement it

12) Didn't you use the info tool on creatures to see their stats? You can even see attack speed by hovering the weapon damage number

13) That would be too cpu expensive for a marginal use, anyway I find it more appealing to grab feederlings directly from the hatchery

14) Someday I'll add some progress bar for that

15) I'm going to convert all defeated player terrains to neutral so you can conquer it back (with minerals too)

16) Can you explain that better?

 

[TheBlueMoon]

Wow, thanks for the huge feedback, really appreciated

So let's see...

1) Do you lag even on single player? It usually causes problems in multiplayer with a lot of players.
The big problem here is the huge amount of complex triggers running at the same time. In the past I spent a lot of time to optimize all unefficient triggers I found, now it seems I have to find more things to optimize but it won't be easy.

2) Drones AI is beeing optimized again with the next patch and should be a lot better. They already have a behavior that forces them to do the closest task when dropped by your hand, that means if you want to spread some creep while digging is active you can drop a drone close to the spot and it will do what you need. However ATM drones tend to change task if some other drone decide to "steal" their job.

3) Drones are now lacking the scared behavior that should let them flee when they see an enemy.

4) Noticed the same but still I did not figure out how
Could be something that happens when creatures are unconscious or grabbed.

5) There is a hidden feature that dungeon keeper players know, you can dismiss a creature dropping it by hand in the middle of your nydus worm

6) It's better to keep this behavior as it is or you could troll your ally by occupying his terrain with traps

7) Thanks, I'll look into that! Level 2 upgrades where added after the tutorial was complete and I didn't check that!

8) Can you explain this better? Don't you see the green trap placeholder on low details?

9) I forgot to add the line of sight check on traps too

10) I have to find a way to count when research is unnecessary, for now the only stop to research comes when you reach that 20k cap

11) Shift click may be a great idea to grab all creatures of the same type, I may think to implement it

12) Didn't you use the info tool on creatures to see their stats? You can even see attack speed by hovering the weapon damage number

13) That would be too cpu expensive for a marginal use, anyway I find it more appealing to grab feederlings directly from the hatchery

14) Someday I'll add some progress bar for that

15) I'm going to convert all defeated player terrains to neutral so you can conquer it back (with minerals too)

16) Can you explain that better?

Thanks for the swift reply.
Answering your reply:

1). On single player, it doesn't lag as much but it still lags when you have too many drones. From my experience of the game, the creatures don't cause lag as much as the drones and when you issue a dig command while having 30+ drones, it will be a lag disaster when all drones are triggered to stim and rush to the dig area. Maybe it could be that my computer just isn't good enough but I tend not to be the lagger when it comes to starcraft arcade games.

5) Oh that's how I can dismiss creatures, now I see how this works out. thanks

6) I don't see how traps can do more harm than good to your allies (with the exception of barricades). Attacking traps really help your ally out no matter where they are set up. Since player don't really get to build traps until late in game, usually AFTER your allies have already set up all his rooms, so player traps shouldn't be able to troll their ally room layout. Also, traps are very expensive, it would be very costly to troll block with traps. The only troll I can think of is barricade block. If you think it's too much of a trouble to change that I can understand, but if you want to allow trap set up on ally creep, I do suggest only attacking traps be allowed.

8) Basically I started playing the game in lowest graphics setting for all options (ie both texture and graphics are set to low). In this mode, all creep is in plain purple and all walls are orange-brownish. When I set up a trap on a pile of creep, sometimes the greep trap placeholder bug out and does not appear but I do see the transient -1200 minerals label float up. So I know a trap has been set up but the place holder tend to be invisible, possibly covered up by the purple creep background.

10) To stop research before the cap is reached, one could for the time being sell the furnace to stop trap research or the library for tech research. In this way, the player could also salvage some minerals from those rooms. The problem is, once I sell furnace, for example, I will no longer be able to attract fatty or abberations from the nydus worm. After checking the unit status, I see that fatty has the highest health (the best tank), and abberation has the highest dps. It would be quite a sacrifice if I could no longer replace less powerful creatures like zergling and mutaling with new fatties and abberations.

11) Shift clicking would be much easier because at later stages of the game, the player could easily have 20+ drones. It is just alot of clicking to select all of them. One other innovation is shift right-click to place/release all creatures currently on the keeper's hand.

12) Oh that's how you use that info tab. I noticed that it's there but never knew how to use it.

13) It is definitely appealing to grab feederling from hatchery directly as it's quite amusing, like feeding your cat with some delicious fish. If it's too cpu expensive to add feederling to the army tab, could it be better to add the functionality 'randomly grab a feederling' into one of the F1-F12 keys (ie the hotkey to dig is F1 and research is F4). If your creature is far from the hatchery (such as when it is in a battle), grabbing a feederling from the hatchery then get back to the creature is kind of inefficient.

16) Drones will lay creep not only to the ground that they have dug up but also the first layer of wall that is neighbouring any ground (I think you call it reinforced wall). An audio warning message is triggered when an enemy scv is attacking this reinforced wall. In low graphics setting as in 8), the reinforced wall appears bright purple, so when player selects this wall for digging, the green highlight that tells the player which sections of the walls have been selected is covered up by that purple creep back ground, so the player does not know whether the reinforced wall has been selected. On high graphics setting the creep isn't a simple purple but a complex mixture of many textures of purple, so the green highlight is quite visible on that creep.

 

[Dr Super Good]

It is too easy to be snowballed when fighting vs the AI, especially if you are new and do not rush up an efficient base. Once your levelled stuff goes down there is no way you are getting it back and without levels your doomed.

I advise adding a difficulty level which either increases the time between waves, or skews to incoming army level down a tad if your army is weak to give you a chance.

 

[Bibendus]

Thanks for the swift reply.
Answering your reply:

1). On single player, it doesn't lag as much but it still lags when you have too many drones. From my experience of the game, the creatures don't cause lag as much as the drones and when you issue a dig command while having 30+ drones, it will be a lag disaster when all drones are triggered to stim and rush to the dig area. Maybe it could be that my computer just isn't good enough but I tend not to be the lagger when it comes to starcraft arcade games.

5) Oh that's how I can dismiss creatures, now I see how this works out. thanks

6) I don't see how traps can do more harm than good to your allies (with the exception of barricades). Attacking traps really help your ally out no matter where they are set up. Since player don't really get to build traps until late in game, usually AFTER your allies have already set up all his rooms, so player traps shouldn't be able to troll their ally room layout. Also, traps are very expensive, it would be very costly to troll block with traps. The only troll I can think of is barricade block. If you think it's too much of a trouble to change that I can understand, but if you want to allow trap set up on ally creep, I do suggest only attacking traps be allowed.

8) Basically I started playing the game in lowest graphics setting for all options (ie both texture and graphics are set to low). In this mode, all creep is in plain purple and all walls are orange-brownish. When I set up a trap on a pile of creep, sometimes the greep trap placeholder bug out and does not appear but I do see the transient -1200 minerals label float up. So I know a trap has been set up but the place holder tend to be invisible, possibly covered up by the purple creep background.

10) To stop research before the cap is reached, one could for the time being sell the furnace to stop trap research or the library for tech research. In this way, the player could also salvage some minerals from those rooms. The problem is, once I sell furnace, for example, I will no longer be able to attract fatty or abberations from the nydus worm. After checking the unit status, I see that fatty has the highest health (the best tank), and abberation has the highest dps. It would be quite a sacrifice if I could no longer replace less powerful creatures like zergling and mutaling with new fatties and abberations.

11) Shift clicking would be much easier because at later stages of the game, the player could easily have 20+ drones. It is just alot of clicking to select all of them. One other innovation is shift right-click to place/release all creatures currently on the keeper's hand.

12) Oh that's how you use that info tab. I noticed that it's there but never knew how to use it.

13) It is definitely appealing to grab feederling from hatchery directly as it's quite amusing, like feeding your cat with some delicious fish. If it's too cpu expensive to add feederling to the army tab, could it be better to add the functionality 'randomly grab a feederling' into one of the F1-F12 keys (ie the hotkey to dig is F1 and research is F4). If your creature is far from the hatchery (such as when it is in a battle), grabbing a feederling from the hatchery then get back to the creature is kind of inefficient.

16) Drones will lay creep not only to the ground that they have dug up but also the first layer of wall that is neighbouring any ground (I think you call it reinforced wall). An audio warning message is triggered when an enemy scv is attacking this reinforced wall. In low graphics setting as in 8), the reinforced wall appears bright purple, so when player selects this wall for digging, the green highlight that tells the player which sections of the walls have been selected is covered up by that purple creep back ground, so the player does not know whether the reinforced wall has been selected. On high graphics setting the creep isn't a simple purple but a complex mixture of many textures of purple, so the green highlight is quite visible on that creep.

1) Drones AI is really CPU intensive, I hope I'll be able to optimize it further in the future

6) You stil have your army to help your ally. In the future you'll be able to move minerals to your ally, that should be enough to let him build traps if he's in trouble.

8) Weird, I test the game on my laptop at low details and I never had this issue, I'll try to investigate

10) I should implement doors for that but ATM I lack the models for them :|

11) For now I prefer to keep the drop as it is to avoid any potential performance issue

13) A simple functionality like that could result in a lot of work that I could redirect on something more useful like improving performance or adding new rooms

16) I'll investigate on that too

 

[Bibendus]

It is too easy to be snowballed when fighting vs the AI, especially if you are new and do not rush up an efficient base. Once your levelled stuff goes down there is no way you are getting it back and without levels your doomed.

I advise adding a difficulty level which either increases the time between waves, or skews to incoming army level down a tad if your army is weak to give you a chance.

With the last patch I increased time between some bunch of waves to give players some breath.
If it's not enough I'll increase it further on future patches.

 

[Dr Super Good]

It should be fine now. I only had a problem because I was getting used to the interface but the result was I was bulldozed with my ally. The second time I played I did considerably better and was easily holding past that point until my ally left.

 

[Bibendus]

I may increase a bit the starting time that now is 5 minutes, to give new players time to read some infos

 

[TheBlueMoon]

In reply to Dr Super Good:

Even if the difficulty is kept as it was, or even harder, I believe the game is still very winnable. The problem that you mentioned about creature dying each wave and enemy continually getting stronger comes from that your abilities are not being used well.

Have you invested your tech points into abilities like frenzy, and especially transfuse. If you have lots of creep so you have a lot of gas income, you tend to have 99999 vespene gas by the time wave 10 comes in, and should have 99999 gas before each wave after that. This means you can spam alot of abilities before depleting your gas reserves.

So which abilities are the most useful, you might ask. My answer to that is definitely transfuse. (other than level 2 create drone).

It has NO cooldown, LOW gas cost, which means your army can be spam transfused and kept alive each wave.

Tip: If you have a fatty in your army, the enemies tend to focus him down. So when you spam transfuse, focus on him.

In this way, you should beat every wave without much creatures dying.

........................................................................................................

For Bibendus:

I played abit more with traps and abilities and feel that a couple things could be improved.

1. Traps are biological in nature (zerg buildings), but they cannot be transfused. I advise allowing them being valid targets for transfusion as they are quite fragile and very expensive. Right now there is no way to regenerate their health once damaged.

2. Enemies tend to focus the gas traps down before hitting the spore canons, this allows for some exploits. Not sure if this is intended but I have been exploiting this for my games.

3. Abilities are not balanced well. (ie. transfuse is much more cost efficient than the mind blast ability, especially cost wise)

 

[Dr Super Good]

It has NO cooldown, LOW gas cost, which means your army can be spam transfused and kept alive each wave.

Too bad your creatures die the instant they enter combat at Wave 12+ due to the focus fire from the enemies and their high levels. Yes healing would work but you cannot micro heal that well. Or maybe your fatty was a high level, you probably carefully used it each battle so that it could survive the end waves.

In this way, you should beat every wave without much creatures dying.

The problem is your creatures are not meant to die. They are meant to become semi-dead and have drones drag them to the lair where they are revived and reheal in time for the next wave. They will perform better on the next wave as they are generally a higher level than before. This can repeat indefinitely as long as your drones keep rescuing them and they are given enough time to recuperate.

What is currently happening is that they are dragged to the lair, revive and then explode randomly, probably as a result of a lack of food (since they were in combat for a while). This means that any deaths during combat lose you trained and experienced troops which you cannot replace. Unless you have high level troops by level 11+, it is gg since no amount of healing will stop them from dying in a few shots and dealing practically no damage to the attackers.

In Dungeon Keeper 2 it was very common to suffer losses, however you generally recovered them if you won the battle and only ever suffered major losses if you lost, in which case it is unlikely you will recover before dying. It appears a bug is preventing this mechanic from working properly that needs investigation.

1. Traps are biological in nature (zerg buildings), but they cannot be transfused. I advise allowing them being valid targets for transfusion as they are quite fragile and very expensive. Right now there is no way to regenerate their health once damaged.

This stems from Dungeon Keeper 1/2, the game this map is based off. In there you had a healing ability that could be used on troops but all buildings and walls were mechanical and as such could not be healed. Although this does not make sense in the case of Zerg, I think this is the author trying to stay true to the mechanics rather than sense.

That said, it might be a wise idea to allow drones to repair them when they are not in combat. After all they do generally construct rooms and things.

3. Abilities are not balanced well. (ie. transfuse is much more cost efficient than the mind blast ability, especially cost wise)

I think Mind Blast stuns the enemies for a moment where as transfusion does not. If this is not the case then I advise that it be made so to compensate for the cost difference.

My personal suggestion would be a hotkey/button to grab all and release all combat creatures. Currently it takes considerable time to gather and then release all your combat units which can make surprise attacks and strategic movement difficult.

Some kind of safety on the slap command would also be useful. I have inadvertently slapped many creatures when trying to do various actions. Come to think about it, I never truly understood why slap was even in dungeon keeper 1/2 next to for torturing prisoners and messing around.

 

[circuit13]

List of all the bugs & issues I found so far (8)

The overall concept & recreation of this GUI is done quite well- almost everything works exactly like the original in form & function. Well done.

I like that you opted for the choice of allowing us to follow our own build path, though I think some minor edits may need to be addressed. I like the upgradeable rooms though I think there should be more levels with their rewards (& RP cost) spaced out more. maybe 15 - 25% for earlier levels.

The best way to test is to be consistent.
Here are my grievances:

1) There might need to be some balancing done with the "Hero's". Depending what AI you pick

for the PC, & your allies, how easily "Hero's" can conquer you differs greatly.
For instance My ally was set to "Straight to air" with both of our enemies on Timed Attack, by Wave 4, I had
7 Mutalisks, 8 Zerglings, & 5 Queens as my attacking force. Their Lvl's were as follows:
Muti's: 3,4,5,6,6,6,7 Lings: 4,4,4,5,5,6,8, Queens: 6,7,7,8,8

All of them were R8ped by an attacking force of 9 units.
2 Panther's, 3 marines, 1 Firebat, 1 viking, 1 goliath, & 1 marauder.

2) There seems to be a massive difference in lag depending on graphical settings. When I replayed multiple games with the same settings (except graphics) 2v2 on Normal speed; If they are high, having 10 drones & 5-8 of a few other monsters introduces very noticeable lag. (not unplayable- but quite disliked)
If I turn them all down I get almost none. I'm not sure if that's a GUI/UI/AI issue or not, but it's not a SC2 issue in general. (it doesn't do it on SP or 4v4 MP games on this machine with the settings maxed. 8v8 is a bit bumpy, but still less than this.)

3) The next largest issue I seemed to have was creatures fighting & becoming invisible (it still showed their Lv & health bar above their head & then suddenly poof! gone.) <I have not been able to resolve why this happens or reproduce it as of yet- If I do I will ammend this post. For now it seems very random.>

4) Also when they do eventually die, the army tab doesn't update for a LONG time after they die.

5) Occasionally they get rescued & then spontaneously explode in bed LOL.

6) Occasionally they get stuck on a tile; & they eventually leave your dungeon because they are hungry or tired. (Then it lets them move & leave... This was quite reproduceable by selling other tiles around them when they are on the last tile of a room, even if you sell that tile they won't leave it & you can't pick them up.)

7) Fatty's & Abberations don't show up on the army tab. (I think maybe the Abberation shouldn't but the Fatty should.)

8) In the tutorial; if you build the Spore Colony out of order or upgrade it to Lv2, this prevents you from continuing. (I thought the Tut was simple & straight forward, & didn't leave you wondering what else you had to do to accomplish your task. <Unlike so very many steam games...>)

You mentioned in one post about the drone AI being CPU intensive. I would be willing to overlook it to see if there are any looping problems, untethered arrays etc, if you continue having problems with it.

Anyways, Thanx for even attempting this & I look forward to your further updates. I also posted

something here:
http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=2483969

 

[Bibendus]

Thanks for your in depth reply, really appreciated

1) Fighting still need balance, I suppose it's mostly caused by AOE units like firebats that can deal high damage to clustered creatures. The current SC2 pathing doesn't allow me to spread units as I would like, I still need to find a solution to this.

2) Lag is mostly caused by AI (drones + other creatures) and amount of units (including border walls) present on the map. A lot of improvements have been made in the past and now I don't know what else to improve.

3) I never saw creatures becoming invisible, are you sure they weren't just unconscious? You can see their health bar and they will die in 1 minute (or 1:30 I don't remember). If the creature doesn't have a bed it's instantly killed and the body will stay for few seconds (this timer will be used for the graveyard corpses decay time).

4) Creatures will stay in the army tab while unconscious, they should disappear on death.

5) They explode on bed when they are starving. I fixed this issue on the next version.

6) Sometimes I saw creatures stuck on place and I wasn't able to reproduce it. However grabbing and dropping them should fix the issue, wasn't that your case? BTW I'll try to reproduce it by selling rooms around them.

7) I have no issues with them, check this screen (5th and 7th portraits)


8) I fixed this bug in next release

 

[LOST TALE]

''5) They explode on bed when they are starving. I fixed this issue on the next version.''
Thats what I was atlaking about in my direct feedback.

Also I have no performance issues. Best CPU wins. mwahahahaha
Never losta single FFa game, hope it doesnt farm negative reviews.