I believe there are a few options here:
1. The cannon will not require gunpowder
-or-
2. Gunpowder will be an abundant resource (ie: 1 sulfur + 1 coal makes lots of blackpowder pouches)
What do you think?
>because it makes the player micromanage producing the required gunpowder just to shoot it.
But the Clonk economy is about managing stuff like that, or not?
If you just don't like that the player has to carry a lot of single objects (i.e. one object for one shot), make it a gunpowder barrel and not a lump of gunpowder as it currently is.
The cannon is different compared to a catapult. To justify that it is (or should be) a lot stronger, it has to be harder to handle (the catapult on the other hand can be used for free). And I want to blow up stuff with gunpowder barrels.
I think the limit needs to be put rather low because in scenarios where you need weapons and where you need to produce the weapons by yourself (mostly settlement melees), you need them fast. It may not be tenacious to produce (at least) the basic weapons, and, most importantly, having to produce materials that are to be consumed by your warmachines like the cannon (or e.g. your train, blimp,...) is like the concept that clonks have hunger, can get tired or freeze. It is tedious and not fun.
So, on a general note, I plead to require as few materials that are consumed constantly (by weapons) as possible. Just because of this, the coal plant was practically never used in Clonk before and the catapult was almost always favoured over the cannon (if several gunpowders were not just placed in every cannon by script). And that's why ~every munition is bought and produced in packs (Arrow pack, lead shots,...). Consuming weapons mean that you need to keep your economy running all the time which you don't want and can't if you are inmidst battle (unlike in e.g. The Settlers, where it all works automatically).
Looking back on the cannon as we know it since Clonk3, it just has been too tedious to use it to be of value in a fast-paced melee as we want to have it in OC.
I do not think it is a bad idea to balance the game with consumable ammunition where it seems appropriate. (One gunpowder barrel could last for about ten shots or so)
The catapult and the cannon are just two different weapons which have both different strengths and applications - the one weapon is not an "upgrade" to the other - at least it shouldn't be.
So with your cannon the players would start almost immediately to shoot stuff at each other, to randomly hit some poor Clonks walking around the base, because they don't even need something to load the cannon (producing or buying gunpowder). This leads to a totally super-deadly-imbalanced weapon for everyone who has a stone in his hand. With a weapon like that I would just randomly shoot stones or eartchunks into the direction of the enemy machine-gun-style, in any scenario. Also the cannon is ultra fast and a Clonk can hardly dodge it.
So my point is, a weapon like that needs some more effort than the catapult or is just plain imbalanced.
- ControlUse: Aim. On ControlUseStop, show ring menu with clonk's contents to select which item to shoot (close menu for none)
- Clonk has a gunpowder barrel in its contents which has different graphics for a different count of possible cannon shots possible with it. (Number should be something between 10 and 30) On start of usage, the cannon checks like the bow if it has a gunpowder barrel as Contents(0). If not, he searches the clonk for it and transfers the barrel automatically. Otherwise, if the cannon doesn't have a gunpowder barrel and the clonk doesn't have a gunpowder barrel, the cannon cannot be used. The rest is the same as 1, only that the gunpowder barrel is showed in the ExtraSlot of the cannon in the action bar.
Actually, I could very well live with both options as long as we move away from one material = one shot. Both options are comfortable to use.
Also, some other fun things: when ignited, the keg will have a stronger explosion based on the amount of powder currently inside it. When the keg is emptied out, it becomes a normal barrel (used to construct powder kegs -- now with 3D graphics!). This is another point I would like to ask about: I was thinking the powder keg should require only one sulphur and one coal (besides a barrel to put it in). Is this a reasonable amount? This will make gunpowder very abundant and require much less micromanaging of constantly digging up resources to continue battle.
> I was thinking the powder keg should require only one sulphur and one coal (besides a barrel to put it in). Is this a reasonable amount?
I think it should not be more than that. But in the end fine-tuning like how many powder the keg should hold and what it should need to be produced also requires some test playing.
> Musket ammo should probably not be produced one by one ... production directly just takes a certain amount out of the keg.
Or there is more than 1 pack of ammo produced at a time...
I mean: Even in Metal and Magic you can split up ammunition if you don't want to carry 10 bullets around which you most likely won't need anyway
You could make a calculation to determine how much leadshot is made based on the amount of black-powder left in the barrel, but because you cannot make a fraction of a lead shot, this would lead to wasting blackpowder (unless you got 12 lead-shot from one powder keg...).
"Yes, but the keg is ammunition itself - for the cannon!"
That is correct. But we do not need objects for the gunpowder there. The powder is either in a keg or in the cannon. The player does not need to have a lump of gunpowder in his hand at any time (which was weird anyway)
If the keg has only half the powder, only half the musket ammo will be produced. Making the keg stackable would have annoying side effect since it turns into an empty barrel after use. One would have to think of something to make sure barrels do not magically appear or disappear somewhere
I think the best solution would be to simply have the workshop which creates lead-shots search the powder keg for ingredients. We don't actually need the player to be able to grab/put gunpowder from/into the keg.
Also, I don't see much of a benefit gameplay-wise from creating as much lead-shot as possible from a keg. This removes control from the player; if the player wants to create some lead shot and then fire a cannon with the same keg, why would he have to make certain to use the cannon first, for fear of using up all his black-powder? Of course we can say the player can simply make more, but isn't this just adding more and more complication?
As for "gunpowder": you need some container to store it anyway (IIRC, currently small ammount of powder simply lies as a heap on a piece of paper). So why not making keg such a container?
Yes, it would be nice to require keg for ammo production and prohibit player from putting/withdrawing powder into/from the keg.
How I imaging this myself:
1) You need (say) 1 x sulphur and 1 x coal as well as 1 x (wooden) barrel to produce a powder keg in the respective workshop.
2) You can load a keg into the cannon to provide it with (again, say) 12 shots. The keg VANISHES when it is loaded into the cannon increasing some internal counter of the available shots.
3) Alternatively, you can store 1 x keg into an "ammo-production workshop" to receive (maybe with the need for some other ingredients) N x musket-shots. The barrel itself either vanishes or (more likely) remains empty.
4) Making the keg some kind of a "production resource" (the way it was described above) may allow us to imagine some other interesting ways of using it (for instance, it can be used for some super-explosives production).
5) And yeah, it would be nice if the keg left on the ground and shot by a musket provided a fancy explosion...
> How does the game handle creating x-amount of lead shot when the powder keg is missing some powder?
Hm, the naive solution is to leave the unused powder in the keg.
>How does the game handle creating x-amount of lead shot when the powder keg is missing some powder?
Require coal+sulphir+more for creating lead shots instead of requiring a powder keg+more. (Why do you need a barrel to produce lead shots? ^^)
P.S: Whew, so complicated solutions here! Why not just consider the gunpowder keg as a (stackable!) ammunition for the cannon (and other gunpowder-driven warmachines) instead of a material which is meant to be refined further? The gunpowder keg would then be the same as the lead shots or arrows - a munition type.
I'd like to have the stackable-system kept out of the production line. It'd get too complicated.
>Why not just consider the gunpowder keg as a (stackable!) ammunition for the cannon ... instead of a material which is meant to be refined further?
Well, the player shouldn't be able to create a single "Blackpowder" object. By creating the powder keg, he is basically producing a whole barrel of it (only 1 sulphur and 1 coal for 12 gunpowder). Therefore, for objects that need gunpowder for construction (ie: the Boompack or Leadshot) the player needs a way to be able to use that gunpowder.
Currently, the powder keg isn't a stackable object. It only is constructed with the contents of 12 blackpowder. When emptied, it turns back into a barrel. Therefore, all the cannon is doing is fetching blackpowder from the keg's contents. I was thinking it would be conceivable to allow production buildings to search the contents of the objects contained within themselves. This would allow the powder keg to work with any production that requires gunpowder and still work with the cannon.
>Well, the player shouldn't be able to create a single "Blackpowder" object. By creating the powder keg, he is basically producing a whole barrel of it (only 1 sulphur and 1 coal for 12 gunpowder). Therefore, for objects that need gunpowder for construction (ie: the Boompack or Leadshot) the player needs a way to be able to use that gunpowder.
His point is that while barrel+sulphur+coal=keg and therefore sulphur+coal=gunpowder, the player does not need this gunpowder at any point in the game since he can just use the ingredients used to create this gunpowder. (Producing ammo would then not be gunpowder+metal but sulphur+coal+metal)
(And thus keeping the keg away from any production - I don't know whether I like that or not. Has advantages and disadvantages.)
>requiring a whole keg for production seems OK
Well, 12 gunpowder units would be an incredible amount of gunpowder for only one musket ammo pouch.
Micromanagement is a large part of clonk's settlement aspect, however, I would agree we should avoid it for battle situations. It could be possible for the Building-That-produces-leadshots to search in the contents of objects inside itself for ingredients in construction, could it not? The cannon currently does something like this, where if there is a powder keg it automatically takes out one blackpowder unit before firing.
> It could be possible for the Building-That-produces-leadshots to search in the contents of objects inside itself for ingredients in construction, could it not?
Right, that's what I have meant with the rest of the sentence you did not quote.
>I was thinking the powder keg should require only one sulphur and one coal (besides a barrel to put it in). Is this a reasonable amount? This will make gunpowder very abundant and require much less micromanaging of constantly digging up resources to continue battle.
I think that is fine. One could argue that you get a strong explosive that is cheaper than a superflint - but the keg is destroyed when blown up, right? So you lose your barrel too?
And that balances it, imo
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