The Conquest of Go - A Videogame featuring Go Gameplay

3rd Party Apps for OGS
290

Great release. Great game. Can only recommand this.

Still after opening this game again after a while I do have some subjective feedback I’d like to add here. Not sure if you have a Trello or something like that but it’s easier to just post here.

I. Board Themes
The available campaign themes are: forest, farm, snow, desert. Great. But the game has been in development since 2019 and I think the good and fun themes are one of the USPs of this product. So why not add: dark forest, space, under water, clouds, on the water, mountain, etc. you name it. I think there could be way more interesting themes by now.

II. Animations / Stones
I mean I get it the initial concept was having stone wall like stones that then create a group and crumble when attacked. Good idea and good implementation. But why not add more fun here. How about: exploding stones, stones falling through the ground, stones getting sucked into another dimension, stones cracking like eggs, etc.
I would pay huge moneys for a DLC that gives me StarCraft Broodwar or HighFleet like explosions when detroying a stone.

III. The new Online Mode Campaign
In general I like the idea and that was one of the reasons for me to open the game again after quite some time. I think the Campaign Mode is the second USP this game has. BUT I do not really think the concept (referring to the online mode, playing against bots works great) works quite well in its current implementation. As is listed in the release notes:

The automatic campaign difficulty adjustments after playing matches and reviewing matches will not take place for online campaign matches since online ranks are separate from AI difficulty and handicaps.

This is kind of an issue. I think the game’s campaign works great when playing against bots, there are resources that can be used, the difficulty is adjusted in a way that is meaningful to the campaign and going through reviews gets me stone advantages. This is all great. But it does not work well with humans. When I just go through standard matchmaking I will always just get an opponent that fits my rating. There are no stone advantages through reviews, there are no resources and the strength of my opponents continuously adjusts to my strength instead of integrating with the campaign. The experience lacks the continuity you would expect from a campaign.

IV. Small point: The impact text when doing reviews
This has bothered me for a while. When I’m doing reviews and jumping to a move recommendation, just tell me what the impact is and maybe show the paragraph on hover. The way it is now I always get the same paragraph of text having to find the one number I’m interested in somewhere in there.

Conclusion
Still a great game that every Go fan should buy. These are just a few things I came accross after spending many hours with it.

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291

Thanks for the feedback. New themes/animations may be a possibility in the future though they’d likely fit in with the existing aesthetic (no space, scifi etc.)

On online campaign mode matches, yes, the difficulty adjustments are disabled because OGS already handles difficulty adjustment with your online ranking. Although it depends on the player, many players are usually seeking mostly even matchups (adjusting to the player’s strength), even against the existing AI opponents. Obviously all of the assistance features are disabled for online play to keep matches fair for online opponents, there’s nothing that can be done to avoid that. The way I see it is that the online matches are just another optional type of match in the campaign, like AI matches, ally matches, and invasions, and also even similar to how its optional to increase your advantage after completing a review. The online matches aren’t required and are there for people who wish to use them, even if that’s not everybody, such as yourself. For those that are seeking even matchups, the standard online ranked matches will likely work well for them. Even if that’s not what you’re seeking, you may still find use in the online matches such as playing online bots of any rank, unranked matches, and playing against your OGS friends.

For the reviews, I assume the number you’re most interested in is the score loss value from the paragraph? This can likely be streamlined a bit.

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Version 29 of The Conquest of Go was just published which features new custom campaign stories. Players can create, share, download, and play different stories that take place in the campaign mode. A story is a series of chapters featuring dialogue and battles (Go matches) between characters. These stories can vary in length and content, and can be a simple one chapter quest or a detailed story consisting of dozens of chapters. Each story battle can be a standard battle that would normally take place in the campaign against the AI or an OGS opponent, an invasion, which is a match that starts from a predetermined board state, or a scripted battle, which acts more like a match review where the player also reads through different dialogue as each move is reviewed. Stories are compatible with existing campaigns, and multiple stories can be played throughout the duration of a campaign.

In addition to downloading stories from the Steam Workshop, players can also create their own using the in-game story editor and share them with others through the Steam Workshop. The editor supports creating stories for multiple languages. For lengthy stories or stories that support a lot of languages, a .CSV export and import function is available for bulk editing story dialogue. In addition to creating full stories with characters and dialogue, the story editor can also be used to simply create and play a series of custom invasion battles. A Story Editing Guide has been created to help players create their own stories.

There’s a lot that changed with this update, so feel free to look at the full release notes below for more detail on campaign stories and other non-story related changes to the game.

Here’s a video preview of the campaign stories:
https://www.reddit.com/r/baduk/comments/1fmxia3/the_conquest_of_go_update_29_campaign_stories/

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Sounds like a really nice update. Will need to check it out when I have some free time :slight_smile:

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I’ve finished the first version of the Story One - the last day of Oda Nobunaga, for my “Sunset of Warring States & Rise of Great Go Houses” series

You can find the story here.

(I’ve worked my best to work around not being able to make a tsumego-like multiple choices story-lines, and just waves of hypothetical solving the tsumego as examples, and the experience might help to deal with the next “real battle/tsumego” against AI. By default, if the AI is set to high enough, you shouldn’t be able to “win” the tsumego, but the history will continue, just a different path)

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There are a few bug reports/improvement suggestions for the current story editor and story progression.

  1. the chapters can be drag and drop to rearrange, but the dialogs inside cannot, it is still a bit of a hassle to add or modify dialogs when you just want to insert new characters in between

  2. when in script mode, the default players don’t follow the story editor’s setting to set who is first to play, but follow the parameters in the sgf, (PL[B] or PL[W])

  3. during the script event, when the dialog are on the bottom right side of the screen (instead of a pop-up), the next button close the whole dialog instead of moving forward.

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  4. there is no way to pause for both sides, the other side will automatically responses, which should be an option to pause. It makes telling a whole story from both sides impossible. (and in review mode, stories as comments should account for both sides)

  5. when loading a smaller board size and reusing the same map region (like the first one was 19x19, the next chapter also used it as a script but was 9x9), the next move indicators will mess up and expand beyond the background, instead of the 9x9 grids.

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Thanks for participating and for the feedback. There are several enhancements already in the works since the release earlier this week.

For your specific feedback:

  1. I agree. This will likely be improved in the future.

  2. If your battle is set to “Scripted” the “Start Color” field will be hidden as it is only used for the “Invasion” type battle. Are you instead referring to the invasion battle or is that setting somehow being displayed for you, even when set to scripted? The start color is not needed for a scripted battle because all of the moves are already in the .SGF files.

  3. I’ll give this one some thought. The last “next” will close the panel if there isn’t anymore dialogue available to be displayed, and then will reappear when a new dialogue is reached that needs to be displayed. This is mostly in place for standard battles, especially online battles, where you can read the dialogue at your leisure (you could be halfway through the match and then catch up and read through the dialogue for each move up to that point) and gets it out of the way if you want to make space for other panels. That panel controls the dialogue specifically, not advancing forward or backwards between moves. Scripted battles behave a bit differently than standard matches (when new moves are reached that have dialogue, the dialogue is automatically advanced), so I’ll give it some thought if there are improvements that could be made.

  4. To make sure I understand, the gripe here is that once you play a move (by placing the stone on the board), the default behavior is for the system to automatically play the next move (to simulate a player’s response), right? One of the enhancements that is in the works right now is allowing for different content types of the scripted battles (similar to the non-story workshop items), one of which is the Tutorial type. These types control which panels are displayed and some behavior about how interaction works with the player. For the tutorial type, the auto response is turned off, so maybe that will work better for your case. Also as a side note, the auto respond is only if you place the stone on the board yourself. If you use the scroll wheel, keyboard shortcuts, the move forward/backwards buttons in the navigation controls panel, or the tree view, it will only play the selected move(s).
    EDIT: Perhaps the default behavior could also be modified so that it only auto responds to moves if there isn’t an active dialogue that needs to be read.

  5. This will definitely need to be fixed. I tried setting up a story with two scripted battles for the same region, the first with 19x19, and the second with 9x9, but when progressing through the story, I’m not running into this same issue that is in your screenshot. If you have a test story where this behavior is repeatable, please send the story folder over to Support@WolfeyStudios.com as a .zip file so I can investigate what is causing the issue. Thanks.

    The stories files can be found at the path below where the bold parts are replaced with the appropriate names for your PC.
    C:\Users\WindowsUserName\AppData\LocalLow\Wolfey Studios\The Conquest of Go\64BitSteamID\Stories

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In the scripted battle

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There is a field below - “Player Color”. And as far as I can tell, it does nothing, but switch the pictures around. But if you set a PL[color], it will mess up the starting move color. Say the first move indication should be black, but with PL[W] in the sgf, the stone the user placed will be white, and create a branch off-script.
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About the scripted battle, since there is no disruption and you cannot play against a live opponent, that essentially functioned as a dialog box. closing it making no sense, unlike online battle. We either need a dedicated dialog box, or just keep them open with it is scripted. And if the user clicks the autoplay button next to the “next > arrow”, it gets even worse. The dialog would just quickly open up, and then disappear. If the user miss-clicks it, it would get hella confusing.

And yes, turning off auto-response will help a great deal. Like in my story, the “opponent’s move” is actually Oda’s subordinate Mori yelling at Oda about the enemy’s action, so Oda can respond at his move/turn. It functions sort of like a tutorial giving players hints about the “method of the enemy attack” required appropriate “responses”. We need both sides to tell a full story (This is the best I can do without a functional tsumego exploration “event/battle type” exploring multiple branches, there really needs to be a tsumego type), and to squeeze useful interactive content in scripted battle. And I believe an additional “pause” checkbox/option in each “dialog design” can do the trick (by default not paused)

I’ve mailed the story folder and the script folder to the support email (in two emails). That bug is also a mystery to me. It doesn’t always trigger. It happens when the previous chapters end with blue and black dots like finishing evaluating the board position, and since it is scripted to continue the next story, and with no pause to go into the next chapter (and I notice it doesn’t seem to trigger if it is a new world, maybe it has something to do with existing battle records perhaps?) And I wasn’t able to reproduce the bug in the stories folder I send

298

The “Player Color” field in the editor just determines which stone color the character named in the “Player” field above will “play” as in the scripted battle. Like you said, it will swap the names and pictures around and doesn’t really have anything to do with the SGF.

The SGF optionally controls what is expected to be the next move color with PL[B] or PL[W] for each node, which is possible to have a different color than the next node in the tree/list while also still being a valid SGF. For instance if you load the same SGF from your example into Sabaki or any other SGF editor, it would create a new branch for the white move even if the next node in the list is black, because the PL field tells it to do that. If you just remove the PL field with the incorrect color or set it to the correct color, things should go as expected.

I do plan on making some changes to the scripted battle dialogue display.

I sent a reply to the email about the bug with what I think is likely causing the issue in the SGF contents. I’ll improve things in the future to make it more robust, but for now I think I have a quick fix to clean up the SGF.

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Ya, the player color and PL property might as well be a “feature” not a bug I suppose. Although I was able to figure it out since I edit sgf manually with other text editors (like notepad++), but someone who only knows how to use GUIs to edit might get confused (some GUI like Sabaki can automatically add the PL property on its own) and think the “player color” in the in-game editor means who to play next without digging into the sgf themselves. (In that sense, since the in-game editor is also a GUI, it might be better to have an override for which player to play first in the scripted battle as well. Just to prevent confusion?)

And I received the reply. I only use multi-go to help visualize the “erasing stones” with AE property, and I didn’t realize it would change the carry return. Or it might be an OS encoding issue when I use other text editors (since my OS is not English, and Chinese character encoding is very different). I might try to save sgf with UTF-8 encoding just to be sure.

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Version 30 of The Conquest of Go was just published which focuses on enhancing the new campaign stories functionality that was published last week. There are other enhancements to campaign stories in the works as well, but to improve the experience earlier, this batch is being released now. The highlights are more easily seeing what to do next while playing stories, better dialogue management in the editor, better dialogue displaying during matches, and making a few areas of the editor more robust. The full change notes are below.

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Yesterday Version 31 of The Conquest of Go was released. This enhanced the new custom stories functionality in several ways and updated the online menu to align with the new OGS matchmaking changes.

The custom campaign stories can now have scripted content (battles driven by .SGF) of tsumego, joseki, and tutorials, beyond the previous match content type. Additionally, scripted matches now allow for different dialogue to be displayed depending on the different branching paths taken through the moves. Lastly, different endings are available for scripted content to direct the player’s story to different chapters depending on which paths are taken through the moves.

The online menu now has the new Rapid game speed in the find match and custom challenge menus. The find match menu now allows for searching multiple board sizes, game speeds, and time controls at once. The default values and value ranges for all of the game speeds and time controls have been updated to align with the new OGS values and ranges.

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Version 32 of The Conquest of Go was just published which added the ability to create, use, download, and share custom color themes that will change the colors of various parts of the game, such as UI, stones, boards, and backgrounds. You can view some themes that were created for this release here.

The following elements can be customized with color: black and white stones (stone color, highlight color, border color, last played move), board, background, board markup (grid lines, star points, coordinates, move highlights, AI suggestions), and general UI (background, middle ground, foreground). These color themes can be uploaded to the Steam Workshop to share with others. Once a color theme has been created or downloaded, you can set that theme to be used on the main menu, campaign, and normal matches. Each of these can use a different theme if preferred.

In addition to the new color themes, the loading screen in the game has been replaced with a new screen which will show a Go term with a description and board representation to be viewed while waiting for the next screen to load. This same information can be found in the glossary within the game.

Full Release Notes:

Demo of Colors:
https://x.com/i/status/1893358257416130878

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