Black And White Sequel Previewed

An anonymous reader points out that TotalVideoGames has a first look preview of Black And White 2, the sequel to Lionhead's creature-poking 'god' game from a couple of years back. The preview comes complete with 16 rather attractive screenshots, and mentions that "the world now is much more chaotic and destructive" - in other words, there's lots more stopping and creating wars with your giant pet creature. Black And White 2 is due to ship for PC close to Xmas 2003.

Comments

Patience & Moderation

[Kwil]

It seems most people who have trouble with Black & White do so because they're hell-bent on "playing the game". The blame for this does fall squarely on Lionhead rather than any of the players though, as they marketed the thing as a game instead of what it more accurately is, a God-Sim.

Once you take it as a sim instead of a game, you may find you enjoy it more. The key to it though is patience and moderation.

For example try playing without micromanaging at all. The less you do for your peons, the more they do for themselves. If every time you bitched some godly force cooked you a pizza, would you get off your ass and work when you got hungry, or would you just bitch more? The little peons learn over time too. You really just have to help them through crises. Basically, do the minimum for them that you have to, and they'll figure it out and keep themselves going. If their food storage runs empty, for example, don't use a miracle. Instead use scaffolds to plant another field close to the food storage area. Some of your folk will probably die, but what do you care, they're only puny peons after all. Never create a disciple unless its an emergency. If you leave your peons alone, they'll gravitate to what they're good at and they'll even get better at it over time. Once they figure out that, God or no God, they have to provide for themselves, about the only thing you need to do for them then is make scaffolds and place buildings.

Most of the time you only need 1 or 2 people dancing, as there's generally nothing terribly urgent going on. Let them build up the energy slowly, and take your time. If you have your percentage set low enough (and for far away villages it might have to be awfully low) your little dancers will take shifts and keep themselves fed and happy.

Of course, sometimes you need too much energy for them to have the time to go off-shift. So for those cases, have your creature trained to bring or create food for the dancing folk when you have him leashed to the temple.

Oh, on training the creature, a couple of very basic tips:
1. Reward or punish the creature for its actions, not the consequence of its actions. Creatures don't understand consequences. So if a creature tosses a rock over his shoulder and ends up killing someone or something, don't smack the bejeezus out of him, as he won't connect his tossing the rock with someone dying. All he'll figure out is you *really* didn't like him putting something down. Which means that next time he picks something up, he'll probably be afraid to drop it.

2. Basically never use 100% punishment or reward. It's too much. It's like trying to play golf with a sledge-hammer. Oh you'll get results, alright, but control goes right out the window. The only thing I use 100% for is punishment if my creature eats a person and I dont want him to be eating any people at all. It seems to get better effects if you only reward between 10-40% or so each time, but make sure that you reward every occurence of the behavior a number of times.