Werte Siedlerinnen und Siedler,
Dev Blogs bieten einen Blick hinter die Kulissen. Dieser Dev Blog wurde von unserem Gamedesign-Team verfasst und in der Originalversion veröffentlicht, um keine Details zu verlieren oder unabsichtlich zu verfälschen. Eine sinngemäße deutsche Übersetzung findet ihr weiter unten. Dieses Mal, führt euch BB_Alex hinter die Bühne und erklärt die Entwicklungsprozesse zu den Inselweiten Förderungen.
Zone Buff - insights & prospect
The Dev Blog texts are provided by the development team in English.
To avoid loosing or falsifying information, a loose translation will be provided separately at a later time.
Greetings Settlers! Pleased to meet you. Let me introduce myself. My Name is BB_Alex and I am part of the Gamedesign team for The Settlers Online. First of all, thank you for your feedback, ideas und suggestions. Your contributon inspires us to new ideas and lets us rethink certain decisions and approaches.
I want to take the chance and provide some insights on one of those ideas and decisions.
What are Zone Buffs?
Zone Buffs are effects connected to your zone or island. It's a system providing global effects in addition to local effect like production buffs, which are connected to a building. Those Zone Buff include effects exchanging wildlife or applying a filter on the whole island.
Why changing the system?
Until now those Zone Buffs were connected to a building, the tavern. This leads to a limited amount of active Zone Buffs at the same time, since only one buff can be connected to a building. Besides that there was no proper display of information for active Zone Buffs. The amount of Zone Buff is growing and the newest one can exchange your wildlife with reindeers. Of course we won't stop there, so we needed a global system to handle several different buffs at the same time and provide a nice overview with detailed information of all active Zone Buffs.
I get it, but why the effort for just some small graphical gimmicks?
Each buff comes with a certain effect and once the foundation is established new effects can be created. Our goal was to give you a stable and informative foundation, which we can use to create new unique and interesting effects, which might go beyond beeing just a graphical change.
Can you give us some examples?
Sure, the first thing appearing in my mind, when I think about other possible effects, are production effects. Zone Buffs boosting all production buildings of a certain type or whole production chains. What about a Zone Buff shortening the travel time of all generals or the time your explorers need to find treasures? Those effects can be even more unique, like a Zone Buff increasing the hit chance of all ranged units. It does get more interesting, when I start to think about so called debuffs and the combination with other functions and features of The Settlers Online. Certain effects beeing active on adventures. Just imagine you can start an adventure with additional challenges and when you arrive there, you'll see a fog which isn't only a graphical change but also decreases the hit chance of your ranged units, while prodiving a bigger reward if you complete it.
Those effects are just ideas, but establishing a foundation will allow us to bring more diversion into other parts of The Settlers Online in the future. So feel free to go crazy on ideas and let us know, if you you have a cool one for Zone Buffs.
Thank you for your attention and feedback.
BB_Alex