Some Suggestions I Have

[YourMaster]

This is exactly the reason why I said I didn't care if I get lair enemies back or not, but felt it important to mention it is not a micro-mechanic but a mechanic that causes (a tiny bit) of dungeon construction complexity. I'm perfectly happy with alternatives.

And yes, dungeon keeper has quite a few mechanics that are not obvious to players. Some of them are mentioned in one of the millions of messages that show up, but that hardly helps of course. Such mechanics are always nice if they can be discovered by the player, and angry researchers and lair-enemies to some extend are. If fights break out they can follow the creatures and easily find out why. First they learn they should have separate lairs and should not send in bad researchers along with their warlocks, and after that if you notice you still have some but fewer issues you can observe your rooms to see what happens and you'll find out that traffic through the room causes those issues. The player can now think for himself to decide that another dungeon layout will help with these issues, or using different creatures, and he does not need to get the solution spoiled.

Having alternatives for traffic is difficult, as you want to make it obvious there is a problem and how to quantify it. You don't want something like the DK room efficiency, where I believe over 90% of players have no idea what their room effectiveness is, why it is not 100%, and that a 50% efficient room really slows down training/work/storage by 50%. When you look at the tiny room flag, those 3 little bars communicate very little unless you really know what to look for. This went so far as that even the WftO developers did not now it existed or that why such a system is crucial to have and they released their game in a state where the optimal dungeon had no walls at all and all rooms build right up against each other.
So if traffic has a detrimental effect, think of a way for the player to discover this. Say what you want, but in DK the creatures starting fights or shooting at each other is at least a very clear tell that something's up.

[DBlac]

Oh yeah, it will be hinted at by the Overseer to begin with and there will be messages if things are getting upset, as well as animations for some things probably. Im actually heavily amused by the idea of a warlock turning from his giant tome in an annoyed fashion and zapping an annoying creature with his lightning. That could actually work well haha. But yeah, theyre interesting mechanics and i will make sure to create and balance as much as possible as well as make it clear to players why things are happening hopefullu without any handholding

[YourMaster]

That's exactly why they did that in the original games 2 decades ago.

And when at all possible, when you can find ways to make stuff obvious without requiring messages that would always be better of course.

[mishko]

Another thing I want to mention is that I found the voice acting and writing in wfto hard to listen to. I feel bad for saying it since they hired Richard Ridings and all but I just did not like it it was annoying. Do you plan to have voice acting? Also the creature noises and same quotes the creatures would say was way too frequent and annoying. The creatures should have more subtle noises they make when they are idle. I personally think it would be cool to have little speech bubbles for conversing creatures and thought bubbles when they are roaming your dungeon. Like you hear a little "pop" and your werewolf has a little thought bubble that reads "Need Flesh..." or a succubus thinking "These men are boring...". I know you don't have a succubus I'm just using it as an example.

[Metal Gear Rex]

Another thing I want to mention is that I found the voice acting and writing in wfto hard to listen to. I feel bad for saying it since they hired Richard Ridings and all but I just did not like it it was annoying. Do you plan to have voice acting? Also the creature noises and same quotes the creatures would say was way too frequent and annoying. The creatures should have more subtle noises they make when they are idle.

Well the thing about WftO is that it's just straight up bad about aspects like this. There's a sheer lack of creativity in all of WftO, so any characterization is done via really bad one-liners and part of the reason why there's so much frequency in use is to make it feel like there's more substance / life to the game than there actually is. It was actually a lot worse with the frequent voice clips when it came out, but it's still much more frequent than DK2.

I wouldn't worry about it at all. WftO is just really bad in so many ways, and that's why there's many things like this that are wrong with it. Like even DK2 got this stuff right.

I personally think it would be cool to have little speech bubbles for conversing creatures and thought bubbles when they are roaming your dungeon. Like you hear a little "pop" and your werewolf has a little thought bubble that reads "Need Flesh..." or a succubus thinking "These men are boring...". I know you don't have a succubus I'm just using it as an example.

I'd argue that's a downgrade. A pop up speech bubble requiring reading would be very distracting and get in the way, while also requiring the player to deviate focus away from whatever they're doing in order to read the text. As annoying as WftO speech is, you can hear it in the background while you do other things while for text you have to focus on it more to read it properly, and even if you don't want to read it, the pop up bubble would get in the way. In either case, creatures I presume would be fairly mobile, so reading the text / ignoring an actively moving speech bubble would become more difficult. This is all assuming that the speech bubbles don't appear excessively, even.

This went so far as that even the WftO developers did not now it existed or that why such a system is crucial to have and they released their game in a state where the optimal dungeon had no walls at all and all rooms build right up against each other.

Minor correction since it's totally and crucially important. WftO devs should have known about the efficiency system in DK1, but it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't. It was a topic of discussion, at least when I was on the team, but then so was the balance between offensive / defensive players and WftO sure screwed that up. For whatever reason, Josh referred to DK2's way of having room efficiency with wall furniture but it was too hard for him to balance so that's why they trashed it and walls are pointless.

[mishko]

I wasn't talking about the thought bubbles being the method of showing their needs I just meant as an occassional thing that pops up that shows you what is on their mind at the moment every once in awhile. I didnt mean it in a way where they are constantly popping up and in the way

[DBlac]

Ok soo, yes, we will have voice acting, but out of cinematics it will only be the Overseer saying things with messages and story related stuff, and sometimes other characters when the story/script calls for it, but no idle chatter from creatures. I actually have to say i found the WftO chatter very distracting and unpleasant, at least if it was some gibberish language you wouldnt hone in on it, but the fact that it is sometimes audiable english just completely breaks things for me and i have to force myself to ignore it. No our creatures will indeed just have some noise clips etc, far more subtle like you said. As for displaying their thoughts, if we do that at all, it will probably be the DK2 way where their level icon flashes between the level and their predominant thought at the point for a short time. This will obviously be food, sleep, training etc.

As for Wall efficiency, i do want to have that, but there will be varying degrees of how visible it is. First of all, if everything is encased by thick walls (those that have a solid tile behind them) and doors, the efficiency will be maxed, but the border walls as we call them, or the thin ones, they will slightly decrease efficiency. This -will- be a relatively slight change though, as it will be harder to see than the other bit (mostly through tooltips if you rest your mouse on the room. The other, more overt and more natural way room efficiency (not the stat but the REAL efficiency) will be affected by walls is that some rooms, like the treasury and library, require thick walls to spawn what i suppose you could call wall props, but not quite. Basically our treasury does not function like in DK where workers just dump gold on the floor. Rather they have to do so on designated "props" you place, such as the Hoard, or the Chest, but more importantly, if a treasury has thick walls it spawns Alcoves naturally, which you do not need to build and workers can deposit gold in without the pressing need for you to build hoards or chests. Things like that happen in a few other rooms as well.

[Endrix]

Don´t forget giant insects or/and arachnids

[DBlac]

Don´t forget giant insects or/and arachnids

That has been discussed previously in a different thread. In short, those types of things will be beasts you encounter and some of them may be tamable. Tamed beasts will serve more or less as a form of guard dog as you will be able to exert nearly no control over them.

[damedog]

I have a few suggestions maybe you can think over as you continue developing:

- 1st person possession. I know this would be a lot of work to implement, but imo it's one of the best features of the game. Possession runs where I try to fight most battles through grouping, exploring, and battling in 1st person rather than top down control of all units kept the game interesting and fresh for me for many years.

- How do the creatures interact with rooms/each other? It doesn't have to be anything major or affect gameplay, even small things can add a lot to a creatures personality.

- Keep the level system, learned abilities, and other pseudo RPG mechanics. But I doubt you would change that