There should be some rewards for completing different sections of achievements system (general, economy etc or even more specifis), or/and by achiving specific number ot achievement points (like 5000, 6000 etc) or just for completing all there is to complete.
No mentioning of the bug where old books are not counted. I'll keep consider that a bug then. Because if it's not a bug someone has failed to think properly. From the point where I am currently at, it will take 337.8 days of effective book production time to complete those three achievements. That is the shortest theoretical time it takes. In practise it will be much longer since you cannot sit and wait and start the next book at the very instant the last one finishes if you have an actual life. A more realistic value based on my gaming schedule would be 500 days. The science system needs a revamp pretty badly since it's unrealistically slow. The new achievements is further proof that the developers do not understand the game they are making. The annoying part is that I have made enough manuscripts and tomes to complete those achievements and I should only have about 10 codices left. So either properly count all books made or reset the science system. It makes no sense that an achievement gets exponentially more difficult to finish the longer you have played. A lot of newer players will finish this long before I have even a theoretical chance of doing so. Will this game even still be running in two years time? There's already an acheivment for playing for a year. Having another one that takes years seems rather redundant.
Then there's the geologist skills achievements. Here the developers have completely missed the point of an achievement system. You are supposed to reward things that are hard to do or things that take a decent time to do. The adventure related achievements are good. Some are a challenge, some are a bit expensive but they are all reasonable. Forcing someone to chose the hands down worst skills for a geologist is plain bad design. There is no challenge in there. It's just plain stupid. So you have locked a bunch of achievements behind something that costs almost 2000 gems and take 6 months to complete. The gem cost is one additional geologist plus the cost to reset the skill tree afterwards because he will be useless. I would actually consider doing it if the reward was those 2000 gems. Then it would have been an investment in time. Now it's just an exercise in stupidity. The developers really don't know what kind of game they are doing. This is an economy simulator. The basic game is optimisation of production, popularly called min maxing in game terms. The achievements do not reflect that.
Achievements - I don't give rat ass about them anyway LOL
The educational system is failing. I've got a couple of nicely upgraded schools, 3 piles of all kind of paper and lots of free settlers. Still none of my settlers can leave me a simple note with achievement I recently finished. I noticed the points went up a few times, but no clue what I actually did.
I'm not sure if the settler-schools are malfunctioning or if it's the german schoolsystem that fails to produce developers who can actually think. Ah well, I dont care a bit for the achievements anyway. Not knowing what you actually just achieved sure isn't helping, but I'll randomly cheer for my settlers because they did 'something'. *yay go weebles!*
You actually get a message when you complete an achievement. It requires your attention though because it's similar to the message (a pop-up) you get when your geologist and explorers return from searches, adding settlers to the mayor's, troops finished training barracks, buffs finished in provision house, etc.
It's a box that says something like "XXX achievement has been completed". It even has a logo on it (the one you see on the corresponding achievement). I don't have a screenshot for an example though, sorry.
Being 'forced' to do it is the challenge. Let's just say they challenge us to use books on "useless" skills. It's also similar to the regular quests that 'forces' you to build Wheelmaker, Damascene Swordsmith, Powderhuts and Crossbowsmith. Would you build them for the insignificant rewards you could get? I'm sure there are players who would just complete it to 'get rid' of the quest and not for the rewards. Same concept here. There would be players who would want to have the achievement done purely because they want to get it done. Not because of the reward.
Of course, you're free not to do it because you don't like the rewards. However, I disagree with your notion that the developers really don't know what kind of game they are doing. Production optimisation is just ONE of the basic game features. They already have achievements for this under Economy tab. Other features are Military (again, has achievement) and Adventure (yup, got that). Skills is just another feature. So in my opinion, they do know what they're doing.
Last edited by Developer; 08.06.14 at 04:36.
thanks for the info bb_Ravel =)
There's a couple of order of magnitudes difference in uselessness and cost. The wheelmaker and wagon maker are actually kind of useful if you are in a guild since you are sometimes told to pay wagons for guild quests. It-s not a year of all production from the only building that can produce books. You also lock up all other possibility to upgrade any other specialist for that full year. Guess it might have been a nice little end game challenge if the science system was at all reasonable. As it stands, most of us already have a whole bunch of specialists we want to put books into, you know on actual useful things. It will take years, yes years, before I have my specialists where I want them so I could reasonably have books to spare on some silly achievements. The developers grossly missed the time actually needed for the science system which is badly designed from the start. It would maybe have been reasonable if the geologist's skill trees would have been the same size as the explorers and if everybody was only using the three of each available from the tavern. As it stands now, a bunch of those achievements is a blatant cash grab because you will need to spend a couple of thousand gems to get them.
Production optimisation IS THE game mechanic. That's what this and every other settlers game is. It's an economy simulator with a bit of very basic warefare in it. It's not a feature, it's be core mechanic. You really do completely miss the point and you seem to have chosen your username poorly.
Question: We know that there is a counter on the Manuscripts, Tomes and Codexes produces, so that their price is increasing over time... Can't this counter be added to the achievements Librarian, Archivist and Collector? So our old progress in taken in consideration for these too.
As far as the explorer skill achievements go, the fact that we have opportunities during the year to acquire more explorers due to events. Makes any argument against having one with the skills for an achievement to be nothing more than self justification for not doing so. Do you think I'm so gullible as to believe that those of you have have max skills on the max number of explorers wont be obtaining 2 more explorers on Thursday. Do you think I'm going to believe that you already don't have the books ready to give them max skills as soon as you get them.
As far as geologist skills go well that's a different matter. The only problem here is people have chosen to fast track and max out their geo's and ignore the simple fact that this game is one which is having new features added all the time, which means having to undo what you have done to accommodate the new features.
Those of us on a slower track have no problems of this sort. However I'm not happy that I have NPC's who do have the requirements to fulfil the achievements and are not counted because they got their skills before the system was brought in.
Last edited by Dorotheus; 08.06.14 at 10:05.
When it comes to Gene pools and shallow ends they can be found at the bar drinking pina colada's