Houses and King's favours feedback

[Jimmy V.]

Hello all,

Houses are now available on your world map.
You get a house with every new account.
Then you get a 2nd house after your first meeple.
Then you get a 3rd house after your 2nd meeple.
Then you get one house every 4 meeples, so 8, 12, 16, 20... meeples

Houses can be customized with King's favours.
King's favours are earned in 3 ways:

• new meeples
• new winning streaks records
• bot challenge (beating 3, 6, 9, 12 bots in a game)

See details here: http://www.happymeeple.com/en/help/rewards/

Please give us feedback on these new features in this thread!
Bug reports are also welcome if there is any issue!
Don't hesitate to ask questions if something is unclear!

[Mike A.]

I don't see anything that talks about the purpose of houses. That being the case, I'm guessing they are purely for looks and don't actually do anything. If that's correct, well, it seems like a lot of work for naught. Oh well.

[Jimmy V.]

Indeed houses are not like granaries or roads, they do not have a purpose for the game other than look nice and reward players for their achievements.

As you are an experienced player here, Mike, you got a lot of houses at the same time. So you probably cannot feel the joy of getting one more house when you have only one or two.

Hopefully, other players will find it more interesting that you Mike.

[Mike M.]

I guess my suggestion is to have more ways to earn Kings Favors.  I mostly play Lost Cities and have already earned most of the possible Favors.  I suppose I could learn a new game, but I enjoy Lost Cities a lot and use it to fill downtime at work.  I like the idea of customizing the map, but I feel like the current way to earn points is at a ceiling for me.

[Jimmy V.]

Hi Mike,

There will be more ways to earn King's favours.

The main one will be Daily Quests.

I am afraid that all Daily Quests will not be your cup of tea as a good number of them will only be accessible by playing several games or if not several another one than Lost Cities. We are aware though that not everyone wants to play all games so we will make sure that it is possible to earn some King's favours by playing only one game.

Thanks for taking the time to give feedback!

[Geraldine M.]

I'm not really sure how to use the King's favours to customise my houses. I tried both clicking on the house once it was built and clicking on the favour icon, but nothing happened. Then I thought the castle might have a way to 'build' an improvement, but no.

Not sure what else to try.

[Jimmy V.]

That's weird. Clicking on the house (or any other building/improvement for that matter) should pop up the building menu.

The house menu has "Move" and "Customize" options.

What system are you on Geraldine? Maybe you need to click on the house twice? Or click at the exact spot?

[Geraldine M.]

I'm using IE.

If I hover over any of my other buildings, a darker circle appears and I get the option to select, move them, etc. But nothing happens with the new houses.

[Jimmy V.]

Hi Geraldine,

I have just tried emulating IE10 (which I think you use) on my machine. Unfortunately, I have been unable to replicate the issue.

Just for the sake of accuracy, you don't need to hover on the buildings but to click on them to get access to the options.

I don't know how to help you. Has anyone else seen the issue? Any IE user around?

Thanks!

[Mike M.]

I don't know what is in the works... or how hard this would be to implement, but I'd like to one day see more 'customization' options for your village.  I found it exciting at first, but it has lost its luster.  Maybe seasonal items to add with points (Halloween, Christmas)?  Or other trivial buildings that you 'unlock' by hitting certain game achievements. Say the Black 6 meeple for each game earns you a pond, park, pub, etc.  (One per game) 

[Jimmy V.]

Thanks for your input Mike!

The only thing definitely planned is to be able to add rows of trees (at the same place as roads) in the world in exchange for king's favors. Not much, but that is not time-consuming so we could do that easily.

Showing achievements on the map (like black 6 meeple) is a great idea. We have had it in the back of our mind since the early days. But you know how it is : there were so many things to build (and still quite a few) that this part of the meta-game has always been left behind.

Also, this implies making decisions about what achievements should be rewarded and how. So far, flags on the castle were the main idea. But having extra landmark buildings can also work. Keep the ideas coming! You never know when one will strike the right cord. We certainly need your help to make Happy Meeple better.

One last word, we hope to be able to concentrate on adding more games in the coming months. We know that the number of games is of the utmost importance. Because we have added most of the features that the platform needed, we can now spend more time on new games. To speed things up, we might stop adding Artificial Intelligence toi all new games. AI takes about 50% of development time so it is definitely massive. Of course, this would raise new questions : it would be a huge change of vision for the platform. But probably nothing unsolvable.

Keep the feedback coming!

Nicolas.

[Jamie A.]

When I go in to Customize houses I am required to select "unlock this group" in order to try most of the options.

When I say Yes "unlock this group" to see what an option does or how it looks, I still have to either Save Changes or Cancel to finish the customization.

When I select Cancel, it doesn't seem to return the 'money' (kings favours) that was charged to unlock the group. Yet it doesn't leave the group unlocked either, or apply the customization, it's just canceled and the favours are still gone. If I want to look at the option again later, I have to pay favours again to "unlock this group."

If it's supposed to work that way, I'm surprised.


(Searching the site for the word 'unlock' doesn't find anything helpful. Actually most of the messages and options here are either unexplained or explained in fragments in multiple posts and on multiple pages. But I think you know that from your comments elsewhere. I agree it's better to keep developing AI if that's the choice.)

Thank you for assistance.

[Jimmy V.]

If you cancel your changes after unlocking a group, the unlocking is not cancelled. But any other change is.

On my dev machine, I have just tried what you said: unlock a group, click on cancel and then come back (either directly of after reloading). In both cases, the unlocking was still there.

Maybe you unlocked something but are now looking at another group or another group of houses?

[Jamie A.]

Okay for the moment things are kind of odd. Maybe you should take back some of that gold, lol.   

Found some unlocked items today, and wondered if it was as you said - after getting an unexpected result of some sort, I had searched and read all the text with the word 'unlock' and maybe afterwards checked the wrong house or something.  Because I do see a couple of unlocked items today that last night I thought weren't there.

So I decided to redo the test.

Today I've tried unlocking various items on a couple of houses and can't get anything to unlock. I'd rebooted and cleared everything before loading the site today, so not sure what's going on.

I'll try it all again later I guess. 

[Jamie A.]

Have tried a few more times since, still unable to unlock anything. I don't recall it being difficult to do before. Now the thread has gone off topic - sorry!