FeedtheGentryii
Level: Goblin
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Spider invisibility should affect whether Stalwarts and Soldiers target them. It technically could make some hold impossible, but it's probably worth it to make spiders more than "water-wading roaches" (which, given the ability to press F3, really is all they are at the moment). Also, that would make it important for puzzle view/vision tokens to distinguish between a visibly invisible spider and a visibly visible spider.

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averagemoe
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I just checked the room search tool for places where spiders and stalwarts/soldiers can coexist, and it found nothing. I'm kind of incredulous, it might just be down at the moment.

But if that means we can implement this without it breaking anything, I'd also like to suggest that activating a vision token would remove their ability to be untargetable.

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Dragon Fogel
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I found 20 rooms with spiders and either soldiers, stalwarts, or soldier horns. Maybe it was down, or maybe you didn't input the search terms correctly?

That said, averagemoe's suggestion of revealing them to soldiers/stalwarts with a vision token would make it easy to update affected rooms. Just add a script that activates a vision token. (Oddly enough, only one of those 20 rooms already has a token in it.)

Xindaris
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Using the word "just" to describe spiders' ability to be roaches that can also exist on shallows mainly reveals to me that you haven't seen the rather amazing amount of puzzle potential that that has. I'm sure there are some people who'll think adding another thing that depends on/meddles with stalwart pathmapping is a general Bad Idea, and there's sort of a precedent for stepping on vision tokens definitely having no gameplay effect whatsoever.

I don't particularly object, I guess, but I thought I should lay what I see as the problems with this request on the table, at least.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 03-16-2021 03:52 AM]

Dragon Fogel
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Yeah, I'm a little skeptical of this but I think I wouldn't mind the change if it happened. Not exactly clamoring for it, though.

And I totally agree that spiders have plenty of puzzle potential as it is.

FeedtheGentryii
Level: Goblin
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Xindaris wrote:
Using the word "just" to describe spiders' ability to be roaches that can also exist on shallows mainly reveals to me that you haven't seen the rather amazing amount of puzzle potential that that has. I'm sure there are some people who'll think adding another thing that depends on/meddles with stalwart pathmapping is a general Bad Idea, and there's sort of a precedent for stepping on vision tokens definitely having no gameplay effect whatsoever.

I don't particularly object, I guess, but I thought I should lay what I see as the problems with this request on the table, at least.

Yeah, I don't think stepping on vision tokens should have a gameplay effect either. Spiders wading in shallow water is cool and all, but I don't feel like it does enough to really set them apart, and it'd be really cool if their main feature actually meant anything whatsoever.

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Dragon Fogel
Level: Smitemaster
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The "feature" was originally "they're hard to see on certain floor tiles" and it got translated into invisibility because it wouldn't make sense with more detailed graphics than what AE had.

I definitely would not be happy with making this change without also making the vision token change. It would offer an easy way to preserve old demos in the few rooms affected, and it makes sense if you consider the token's effect to be "make spiders visible" rather than "make Beethro able to see spiders".

The vision token would no longer have zero gameplay effect in all situations - however, this could be resolved by making it possible to place inactive time tokens, or at least to use scripts to set active ones to inactive. Then they could be used in any situation where you want secondary effects of a token but don't want it to do anything.

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[Last edited by Dragon Fogel at 03-16-2021 05:21 PM]

FeedtheGentryii
Level: Goblin
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Dragon Fogel wrote:
The "feature" was originally "they're hard to see on certain floor tiles" and it got translated into invisibility because it wouldn't make sense with more detailed graphics than what AE had.

I definitely would not be happy with making this change without also making the vision token change. It would offer an easy way to preserve old demos in the few rooms affected, and it makes sense if you consider the token's effect to be "make spiders visible" rather than "make Beethro able to see spiders".

The vision token would no longer have zero gameplay effect in all situations - however, this could be resolved by making it possible to place inactive time tokens, or at least to use scripts to set active ones to inactive. Then they could be used in any situation where you want secondary effects of a token but don't want it to do anything.

In order:
Wow, that sounds horrible. Glad it isn't like that anymore.
I guess so, I just always thought of the vision token as just a convenience token, and thought that it wouldn't make sense to change it to be more than such. But it does make sense when you put it that way...
I do believe temporal split points technically aren't actually tokens, but I think that distinction only matters because of mimics and stuff deciding not to activate it. I think that'd actually be way better than vision tokens, 'cause it's pretty annoying to have the vision effect repeatedly toggle on and off while you're trying to solve a puzzle.

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mauvebutterfly
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Regarding vision tokens not having gameplay effects, hasn't there been a room where you needed to use a vision token to block a roach queen or tar mother spawn? I vaguely remember something like this. Might have just been a theoretical discussion though.

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Xindaris
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That's why I specifically said "stepping on", not vision tokens in general. I mean, I used vision tokens to block tar growth in two different rooms of what the hey. Persistent movement tokens would've done the same job, of course, but that's kind of the point. If for some reason an architect wants citizens to move "normally" and to have in the same room a "do-nothing" token to do the things that all tokens do, vision is good for that.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 03-16-2021 10:58 PM]

FeedtheGentryii
Level: Goblin
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Xindaris wrote:
That's why I specifically said "stepping on", not vision tokens in general. I mean, I used vision tokens to block tar growth in two different rooms of what the hey. Persistent movement tokens would've done the same job, of course, but that's kind of the point. If for some reason an architect wants citizens to move "normally" and to have in the same room a "do-nothing" token to do the things that all tokens do, vision is good for that.

But they DO move "normally", don't they? Persistent movement is the default, I thought.

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mauvebutterfly
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No, persistent movement is a special property given by the persistent citizen movement token. Default behaviour is that citizens give up after a few turns if they can't get to their destination.

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FeedtheGentryii
Level: Goblin
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mauvebutterfly wrote:
No, persistent movement is a special property given by the persistent citizen movement token. Default behaviour is that citizens give up after a few turns if they can't get to their destination.

Ah... could've sworn the in-game help said otherwise, but it also never stated that "giving monster player roles the ability to hit orbs" also meant giving Beethro a new way to hit orbs, so eh.

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