Feedback & Suggestions (3)

[Ood]

Hello again, this is my third such post, to view the previous two click below:
Feedback & Suggestions (2)
Feedback & Suggestions

The previous two posts followed the same format, today I'm posting a bit differently, hopefully a bit more to the point.

First and foremost, the game as it stands today (Build 74) for most players (myself mostly included) is boring. The playerbase has shrunk so that its now rare for there to be more than 4 people online (as opposed to 10+ being not uncommon 10-15 builds ago). The flow of items has slowed to what might as well be a halt for high level players. Even win condition progress has become exceptionally slow, to the point that the map is manually reset, not 'won'.

What's changed from ~build 60 to build 74? Increased focus on 'map-based explicitly-rewarded minigames'. I think that most people agree these minigames are cool, they give purpose to clearing, and they help spread out rewards to all players (instead of previously only rewarding convoy killing). All of those are definitely good, however there's one thing that hasn't changed. It's still clearing the same old structures over, and over, and over again.

The basis of this game is currently boring.
To kill convoys, you need to clear boring structures.
To kill subcommanders, you need to clear boring structures.
To connect/level towns, you need to clear boring structures.
To get minerals, you need to clear boring structures.
To kill commanders, you need to clear boring structures.

Just about the only bit of the game that escapes the 'boring structures', is scouting, which arguably is near useless since you're wasting time that could be used clearing boring structures to get to better content.

How can this, quite massive, problem be solved? Improvements to the basic grid need to happen, and happen quickly. Increasing the variety of structures, letting some structures affect other structures, and either let some structures take up more than 1 grid or provide for a way any structure can be increased in size.

Currently, we have the 12 different structures in the 'main game'. 12. Everyone knows how much I dislike bringing up Realm of the Mad God here, but imagine a Realm with only 12 different enemies, 5 'lowland' enemies, 4 'midland' enemies, and 3 'highland/godland' enemies. Now don't let any of them move aside from their minions (if they even have any). Would Realm still be fun to play? Sure, there still might be an occasional event, but instead of being pointed towards these events, you have to grind out endless amounts of the few enemies, then find them, then finally kill them.

To alleviate some of the boredom of a static 'grid' structured main game, please consider adding in the very near future:
Structures that affect other structures such as:

• Healing tower that heals the 8 structures adjacent to it
• 'Buff' tower, that buffs all structures within X distance of structure/
• Laser fences, structures that make impenetrable or high damage 'fences' between each instance of the structure within a certain distance.
• Sniper towers
• AoE DoT Towers that affect large areas

Structures that take up more than one gridspace.
'Enlarged' normal structures that are the same as 'normal' structures, but increased in power, and size.

Other ways to reduce the boredom of clearing the same structures over and over seem to be in the works. Adding more 'patrols', and other randomly activated events is also a good start, but in my opinion should be put on hold, while the very base of the game is worked on.

I don't think I'm alone in thinking that the 'clearing boring structures' status quo for getting to more interesting content needs to change, and quickly.

[Ood]

To put the whole above post more simply (and vaguely):

Make the core of the game challenging and interesting for 10+ people, yet doable alone.

[Justin]

Completely agree.

The game as of now is repetitive. Every experience is exactly the same. There's a 'most effecient' way of completing everything.

The patrol seems like a step in the right direction, as Ood said, because more random occurrences will make the unexplored areas feel more dangerous and exciting.
This is why fortress - fortress interaction is necessary to add more randomness. Imagine a structure that acts like the center of a nova healing 8 drills surrounding it. (Yeah, that's a ridiculous example because the likelihood of that is close to none). It would make it nearly impossible to do alone (if it heals the surrounding walls as well as the center of the drill), and forces larger groups to focus on specific walls together in order to get to the nova-like structure in the center (of the 8 drills, not the drill center) to prevent it from healing all the other fortresses within range.



The 8 oddly shaped squares are drills, and the circle in the center is the healing tower.

Blue = where you would enter from
Red = Walls you'd have to destroy to safely get to green
Green = Healing structure in center.

You wouldn't have to repeat that for every drill once you destroy the center, but getting to the center would probably be very difficult. Especially if the other types described in OP would also be in range of the drills (like the buff tower, which sounds like the opposite of facilities that used to be in towns).

[gingerbear]

Please allow me to rephrase again an idea that has been thrown in some time ago:

Different kinds of weapons / shields. Something like this has been on the half-baked ideas for a while, then got removed, now the nearest point is "enemy families and regions as biomes".

Actually, that one could (should) work. As Ood said, the landscape now is kind of bland. Yes, this regularity fits perfectly "the grid feeling", but - seen from outside - that gets boring after a while. Now, we already have a little mixup with the six type of regions, so adding biomes can be a natural progression.

Question that occurs to me:

• Should biomes fit in a region, keeping the grid-regularity?
• Should biomes have an irregular shape, resulting in something that resembles a "natural" map?

And while we are at the biomes, some ideas what would make a biome unique.

Weapons / Shields
Let's say we have 4-6 different weapons and a lot more different shields that can be affected by said weapons to a different degree. This would make tanks with different setups favorable in different regions, which would also allow a lot of different tank setups and thus tank unlocks to get. Moreover, it would fit the theme if certain unlocks would be available in certain biomes.

Colors
Biomes could (should) be distincted by colors too. If these color schemes are tightly bound with certain properties (e.g. red always means that minion is hard to kill with laser weapons), that would even help the players "learning" new things. Of course, this would somewhat limit the extensibility of the related features, but at start I think it would still give an ample space for new content.

Another question to decide whether biome colors should translate to the zoomed-out map too, or shall it keep its red tone for uniform looks.

Positioning
Right now we have ground towers with ground and air units.

I propose adding another "level": liquid. We already see a chaotic material around towers which "dries up" after the turret gets killed, so why can't we extend this material to a whole biome? Liquid areas could have the property of slowing down tanks, which in turn would allow the implementation of a new kind of vehicles: amphibius tanks, that are unaffected in speed. Enemies could fly, swim/float, or submerge. fly and swim/float (counts as ground) is already covered, submerged units could be (partially) untargetable, except for specific weapons (torpedoes, sea mines).

Some towers could also be flying. For example towers that launch flying units only could also be flying (Floating Launch Pad), or could have a small AoE target attack (Disturbingly Low-Orbit Ion Cannon).

Behavior / Structural Patterns
There have been suggestions for different kinds of structures (buffers, interconnected, large, etc.). This could be also biome-bound, if a certain pattern is viable in many different biomes, then a slight change of looks and stats would result in a plethora of enjoyable enemies.

And of course the AI. It could be biome or subbiome specific if the minions are shy or aggressive, whether they target the weakest or strongest, etc.

Size
To be honest, I'm not a fan of towers that are more than 1 gridspace large. It disturbs the regularity and the grid would be no longer grid but "a map with oversized pixels". We can achive tower complexes by simply adding different kinds of towers at the single grid positions, so for example a 3x3 GigaTower could be achieved by 9 towers and symmetric layout. The current small-medium-large setup is perfectly fine, in my opinion.

As for biomes, certain size could be dominant, or certain patterns / tower complexes.

[tribow]

The patrol is a great little ambush, but unfortunately expected. it would be better if the patrol was already "patrolling" the region and if it comes close enough to "see" (which it would have ridiculously far eyesight that it would be off screen, maybe 3 zoom levels back) it would actually lock on you and chase you down. Even better there would be no red dot so it would be a true ambush. It would actually stay and fight instead of following its path. And if all of you escape to origin then it would continue it's patrol until next time.
That would be better for the patrol right?

[renenutet]

It seems like the very "grey goo" problem the team is trying to combat is just getting worse. It's currently a very very boring core game under all the bells and whistles and doodads and artificial gameplay lengtheners (COUGH TANKS OVER LEVEL 19 COUGH EXPERIENCE FARMING COUGH). Perhaps rather than destroying towers in a grid formation it could be actually a dynamic and procedurally generated world with laser fences and buff tower nodes and big events and such (of course with small towers and convoys and flotillas and commanders still filling up the space in between.

Clearing just becomes an extremely boring farming game solo, a "press w to win" game of instant gratification in groups of 4 or more, and uncoordinated and boring in groups of 2-3.

[rob]

We're hoping to get some more midlevel (16-19) tanks in soon. We're hoping this will ease up some of the feeling of grind.

[Ood]

Nov 14, 2013 8:39:03 GMT -5 rob said:

We're hoping to get some more midlevel (16-19) tanks in soon. We're hoping this will ease up some of the feeling of grind.

Rob,
Put more simply, it's not the number of tanks available, or the amount of 'additional' content there is (additional being convoys, patrols, floatillas, caches, minerals, commanders, etc). The base game is boring. Clearing grid is boring.

We like tanks, and we like content, don't get me wrong. It's only that getting said tanks is boring, and getting to such content is also boring. As I said, the foundation of the game is a boring, mindless grind, with no change or end.

Please consider updates to the base of the game before adding additional content.

-Ood

[Kelsoo]

Nov 14, 2013 8:39:03 GMT -5 rob said:

We're hoping to get some more midlevel (16-19) tanks in soon. We're hoping this will ease up some of the feeling of grind.

New tanks provide great refreshing experiences, but they end quickly with no enemy variety. And I don't just mean endgame, as Ood stated, the base game needs expansion. What I in particular and what (I) think many people have been craving for are more interesting new enemies, more things like drills and deltas, watchtowers and security towers, more base game, but also more base game that doesn't turn into a grind with infinitesimal danger.

Currently any player that has a relative grasp on the base game will have no danger in regular lands. It almost feels as I am just holding the W key and waiting for the interesting and dangerous or exciting things to come. And the issue is not only that there is no difficulty in lowlands, but also variety.

[BeastlyBro]

Nov 15, 2013 18:27:30 GMT -5 Kelsoo said:

Nov 14, 2013 8:39:03 GMT -5 rob said:

We're hoping to get some more midlevel (16-19) tanks in soon. We're hoping this will ease up some of the feeling of grind.

New tanks provide great refreshing experiences, but they end quickly with no enemy variety. And I don't just mean endgame, as Ood stated, the base game needs expansion. What I in particular and what (I) think many people have been craving for are more interesting new enemies, more things like drills and deltas, watchtowers and security towers, more base game, but also more base game that doesn't turn into a grind with infinitesimal danger.

Currently any player that has a relative grasp on the base game will have no danger in regular lands. It almost feels as I am just holding the W key and waiting for the interesting and dangerous or exciting things to come. And the issue is not only that there is no difficulty in lowlands, but also variety.

What do you mean in "base" game?

[Ood]

Nov 19, 2013 7:39:52 GMT -5 BeastlyBro said:

What do you mean in "base" game?

Killing structures is the base of this game.

[BeastlyBro]

I don't know specifically what should be added, but i think their should be more uses for splinters. With this said, do you guys have any specific ideas?

[Ood]

Nov 20, 2013 19:52:21 GMT -5 BeastlyBro said:

I don't know specifically what should be added, but i think their should be more uses for splinters. With this said, do you guys have any specific ideas?

Please don't hijack this thread into a discussion on crystal splinters.

After tomorrow's update, we'll get to see what a 'maze region' is. Hopefully that alleviates much of the current mindless boredom. I haven't heard anything about it, so we'll see tomorrow.

[rob]

Also, crystal splinters are going to disappear at some point, to be replaced by an item-based crafting system.