Fucking Minecraft

Everyone knows of my obsession with Minecraft and how much I love digging and building and crafting things. I also love city management/economy simulation games like Anno 2070 and Patrician IV. I dunno exactly what it is about those games, but they make me happy inside and I can spend lots and lots and lots of hours puttering with them.

So a several months ago I bought this game called Towns on Steam for cheap. It was still in like the alpha or beta stage, but preordering it allowed you to play it. They're still updating and patching and refining the gameplay and so on. The premise is a bunch of people found a town in the middle of a wilderness and you organize them and give them tasks and set up resource collection and production facilities and building houses and such for them. The game's graphics are pretty low end, kind of pixelated and you observe the various levels of the world in an isometric view and use like a mouse wheel to scroll up or down to the next level of the map. Periodically monsters invade from the borders of the map and if you dig too deep too quick, you can find progressively stronger monsters beneath your little town. I spent a lot of hours playing that game.

A few days ago I discovered a similar game called Gnomoria. Same concept as Towns, it's just gnomes instead of human villagers. There are also fairly hearty RPG elements to Gnomoria. There are heroes that gain levels in Towns, but in Gnomoria there are no levels, just skills and stats that improve through use. This includes stuff like healing wounded in the hospital, farming, dodging, wearing armor, and hauling stuff from point a to point b. Even your yaks have stats. There are no classes, but each gnome can be assigned a profession, which isn't really a class. It's more like a guide for the game to determine what the gnome does, as you have no direct control over your gnomes. Gnomes you designate as soldiers will attack a target if you direct them to, and you can assign different priorities to the various farm fields and pastures and workshops you build to determine which of them get more attention from the gnomes with professions that allow them to use them. Professions don't really matter, as you can make up your own or just click a bunch of boxes and have everyone doing everything. This is kind of counterproductive though, as it means no one will specialize and the higher a gnome's skill level, the quicker they perform a given task.

Every so often goblins and other nastiness wanders onto your map, along with wandering gnomes and merchants. This isn't exactly a strange or unique mechanic. What is interesting and unique is what drives the immigrants, traders, and enemy attacks. You have this stat called kingdom worth. It is based on the value of all your workshops and buildings and the resources you have collected. As the kingdom worth value goes up, you attract stronger and stronger enemies. It's kind of a neat concept. Of course, the easiest defense against enemies is to just put a wall around your little village without an entrance inside of it. The enemies will eventually starve to death outside of it, but so will immigrants, if the collected enemies don't get them. Additionally, all those enemies will drop all their weapons and armor on the ground when they die, which will add to your kingdom worth and draw progressively tougher types of invaders to your kingdom while your soldiers sit inside the walls not improving their combat skills on weak enemies.

Additionally, there is a tinkering mechanic to the game. If you build a tinker's bench, periodically a gnome will sit down and tinker and develop mechanisms. You can use those mechanisms to put together mechanical doors and walls and hatches and guns and stuff. I've seen some stuff online and there are some fancy mechanisms for defending your kingdom and such. Pit traps and collapsing walls and bridges that the bottom drops out of into a pit. It's all pretty nifty.

Anyway, I dunno, it is a fun little game that I have enjoyed spending stupid amounts of time on. Took me forever to get the hang of surviving the first few goblin attacks though. For some reason, it never occurred to me to put a dirt wall around the village to make a constricted access point and guard it with soldiers, rather then leave everything open and have the goblins kill my working gnomes before my soldiers could get there. I may have ragequit the game several times. I never stooped turning down the enemy stats and making metal deposits shallower though. That's one of the things you can do when you create a new game. There are a whole bunch of things you can tweak when you create a new map. You can determine the size of the map, how flat it is, how mountainous/hilly and how wide the bases of hills and mountains tend to be. You can also reduce the frequency and strength of invaders, along with determining what kinds of invaders can be on the map.

I think it is a neat game with some interesting mechanics and a bit of charm. It is also still in alpha or beta or whatever, so I'm very interested to see what the final product ends up looking like and what additional features they add. A bell to wake up sleeping soldiers would be really fucking handy, just saying.