Hey Everyone, Alpha 17 will be winding up soon! This week, as the rest of us continue to fix building issues, Linda, Allie and Malley are working hard on polishing up this iteration of our first end-game class, The Engineer. The engineer enhances A17’s citybuilding theme by enabling your towns to protect your hearthlings, reducing, should you choose to play defensively, the need for a standing army. Let’s take a closer look!
The Engineer
Recap from video:
- To get an engineer, have a 4th level blacksmith forge a wrench.
- Promote a new, 2nd level blacksmith to engineer. (You probably don’t want to promote your existing blacksmith; you’ll still need them!)
- Goggles. Thanks Allie!
- As some of you may remember from Kickstarter concept art, the Engineer is an end-game class that moves the technology of Stonehearth noticeably forward–into steam, or clockwork. Thematically, they’re someone who tinkers with dangerous stuff, someone who may be more curious, than wise.
- Linda’s challenge when she inherited the class’s implementation was to narrow the scope of the engineer’s focus. Specifically, how was the engineer going to be useful? Linda decided to focus the engineer on city defense: making turrets, traps, lockable doors.
- Gameplay implications: if a player wants to focus on crafting and citybuilding, rather than making a strong military, that your city itself can defend your hearthlings, rather than needing to diversify workers and crafters into military units.
- Engineers make traps: lay them down outside your town and watch as monsters come to investigate them. If a monster gets too near, they snap, doing damage to the monster.
- Traps have hitpoints, and can be damaged by monsters in turn. If they take enough damage, they are eventually destroyed.
- Engineers also make turrets! Place turnip turrets around your town and watch them fire projectiles at distant monsters. Unlike traps, turrets have ammo, and so can only fire a certain number of times before the engineer must come back with an ammo pack to refill them.
- Turrets and Traps that are broken by monsters are auto-replaced: the engineer queues a new version of the broken object, and a worker will automatically place it at the designated location. If a turret, a trap, or a door is partially injured, the enginer will come along and fix them.
- To prevent the engineer from covering the world with turrets and traps, the number that are in the world is limited by the engineer’s level. You get a message when you’re placing them if you’re at the maximum allowed number.
- The engineer can also make lockable doors. All doors right now lock enemies out, but lockable doors lock hearthlings IN! Useful for keeping hearhlings in certain zones, or within city walls.
Linda is not yet done with the engineer: she has plans for more decorative objects, more machines, and more ways to use the engineer to bring your cities to life. These may be saved for future Alphas! In the meantime, you can see her current progress in Alpha 17 on Steam Unstable. We’d love to know how their balance is working for you: are they OP? Is the placement limitation currently too high, or too low? How do they rate, as defensive units, compared to a standing army of knights and footmen?
Other Announcements:
This week, streams will happen as per the usual schedule.
July, however, is going to be a crazy month for the whole team–we have a couple company holidays and lot of team travel coming up. Next week, we have company holidays on both Monday 7/4 and Tuesday 7/5. As the office will be closed, there will be no Desktop Tuesday and no stream on Tuesday, 7/5.
Streams will pick up next week at the usual times on Wednesday, 7/6, and Thursday, 7/7.
Expect more turbulence in the schedule the week of the 11th, due to EVO, and the week of the 24th, due to Riot’s worldwide global conference.
On the plus side, Stream 200 is coming up! Look for it sometime in the week of July 20th!