Knights and Merchants.net Forum

What do you think about achievements in games an din KaM specifically?

Achievements represent the behavior we want to encourage in the game, they are to help player to explore the game and try out all its possibilities. E.g.:
- encourage beating the game (beat campaigns, play MP, use all troops, focus on different town specializations)
- should be player controlled (good: train 200 knights in one game. bad: have single archer kill 10 militia with 10 shots)
- something could be proud of (good: win without losses. bad: get defeated 10 times)
- special (meet some rare event and feeling good about it, e.g. ???)

Can be split into basic mechanic types:
A. during single mission
B. accumulating all the time
1. statistical (collect some stats, e.g. build 5 Inns)
2. conditional (have something combined with something else, e.g. repair a house with 5hp left)

Example of achievements:
Easy:
- Win with just starting troops
- Build one of each houses and train one of each units

Medium:
- Win MP game with only one type of warriors
- Beat the campaign
- Have certain amount of warfare made and equip soldiers with it till some time

Hard:
- Play against 100 opponents in MP

Achievements are awesome

Very good idea. Especcially for multiplayer. Might keep players to be more active

It's a good idea. Maybe also add some "lifetime" achievements for certain wares, for example make 1000 timber across all matches you play.

I hate to interrupt the approval spree, but I've never been a fan of achievements outside the actual gameplay.

@Siegfried: Achievements can be done in several ways, I want to keep them natural for the game.

Examples:
- Complete campaigns
- Fight with all warrior types
- Build all houses and train all citizen types
- Complete normal campaign mission with starting troops
- Win tactical TSK17 in under 12min
- Trade for horses

see, these kind of achievements encourage player to explore the whole gameplay of KaM, reveal it's details and tactic. They intend to be like a checklist of what player can do in KaM.

I want to keep obscure achievements at bay:
- kill 100 farmers
- train 1000 recruits in one game
etc.

I like this idea as well.

Some "Hard" achievement proposals:
-Beat TSK 2 in 20 minutes (definately with starting troops tho, my record was 0:17:43 )
-Train 70 quality troops (leather, iron) within 60 minutes peacetime.
-Get over 500 kills in a multiplayer game.
-Produce 60 leather armors on The Final Frontier in 60 minutes peacetime.
etc.

I think that training 200 knights or training 1000 recruits is too much (the first can be done on Strait of Sharks, but "ain't nobody got time for that" ). Also, there are missions which (imo) can't be won with starting troops. For example: TSK1, TSK5, TSK7, TSK8, TSK11 etc. I know these were only examples, but still :p

Yes achievement became a standard in games nowadays, so why not.

Maybe smome hard achievements can be:

In multiplayer, make only leather units and defeat at least 1 player (you can trade iron ore in the market) (hard achievement)

you could do the same with only iron units (very hard achievement)

in a no pt game, defeat one enemy within 30 minutes.

Be the victor of an FFA game.

defeat mission < insert mission here> within <insert time here>

I agree that achievements would be cool to have but then don't you need a sort of accountsystem then? So everybody has his achievementlist wich he can show off with. Or am I missing something an offline list would be possible? But then you maybe have problem with shared computers and "harder" to show to others etc.

A fundamental question: how do you store achievements?

I mean, if you store them on the local pc, then it's just a file that needs to be edited. Achievements lose their sense then. Knowing the source code makes it even easier to manipulate this. And manipulation devaluates the achievements.

That's why achievements did not become popular before steam, uplay, gfw etc. were introduced.

We can start of with achievements stored locally. Later, when/if we have an accounts system we can move them there.

I don't really agree Siegfried, if achievements are purely for your own satisfaction (not shown to other players online and etc.), then I really doubt anybody will edit the achievements file to unlock them all. There's no advantage given, and would anybody actually feel good about it if they'd just edited the file? I mean, you can win every mission in KaM (and other games) by using cheats, yet nobody does that.

I'm not against achievements - they mean something to people, thus it's nice to have them - if they are private. I vote for this.

I tried to find a sense if they were public. Achievements are like a big car or a pool or something. If you introduced multiplayer goals, it would become a status symbol. And people start cock comparisons with their achievements, the same way they use rankings for that purpose.

I like achievements. Xbox 360 has them, and that's the only thing I like about that console