Build 97

[rob]

Hello Brave Testers!

Tim and I just pushed build 97, which includes these changes:

* Fix ugly tank pictures in stats menu
* Show description for items being crafted
* Draw region icons in the shapes of the panes
* Randomize region buffs
* Make potion bonuses line wrap nicely
* Remove tooltips for vehicles and buildings
* Separate trigger duration and cooldown
* Show duration on trigger buttons
* Reduce cooldown bonuses on power cells

The biggest gameplay change this week was a change to the way trigger cooldown works. Previously, cooldown started as soon as you pressed the button. Now it starts after the duration (if any) of the trigger is done. This makes cooldown buffs easier to work with because there is no danger of "perma trigger". It also lets us graphically indicate the duration of a buff in the trigger button itself. We subtracted the duration from the cooldown, so there should be no change in overall unbuffed trigger fire rate. Cooldown mods and power cells will be less effective, but in my opinion they were too effective before.

I'm out of the office for the rest of the week, and Tim is planning to work on some engine internals. I'm not sure we'll have that much user-visible stuff for you next week but we'll see what we can come up with.

Thanks for your help testing -- the game is SO MUCH BETTER than it would be without you.

Rob & Tim
Jetbolt Games

PS Would someone take a nice screen shot for me?

[tarbomb]

I'm not really fond of the idea of separating trigger durations and cooldowns. The problem with that (as I see it) is that it makes reducing cooldowns something that is no longer universally desirable.

For instance, in a trailblazer, the main use of the cloak is to give me a brief time of invincibility and to fully recharge the shields. Extending the cloak time now enhances the first (longer invincibility) but reduces the effectiveness of the second (since even a base, unmodded cloak will fully recharge the shields, this now means that a fully modded trailblazer can fully regen less often than a base one).

The same applies for any of the invuln tanks (if your primary use of invuln is to zip in and grab loot, longer invuln is in fact just plain bad, since it extends the recharge necessary to pick up loot).

A better solution, IMO, to the issue would be to make modules only affect the time between effect and and fully recharged. In other words, if a module has an effect lasting Te and a recharge of Tr, a module giving a cooldown buff of n percent would now have a new recharge time of Te + (Tr - Te) / (1 + n/100). This makes perma-boosting impossible (you can get a buffed regeneration time asymptotically close to Te, but you can never get the difference to 0, and in practice even getting close would require an high number of mods, and you'd still be vulnerable - even 0.1 seconds of vulnerability is enough to be instakilled by zeta bombs).

I'm hoping to see the new region colors match prism colors as well.

[Justin]

Great cooldown mods paired with masstek powercells were definitely too effective. Nobody can argue against that.

I'm hoping to present the corsair-shield bug that happens with my modded corsair easier with this new feature (or simply get better at avoiding it myself). I'm not sure if the aesthetic for my shield lasts too long, or if the shield buff does not last as long as it's supposed to and this'll definitely help me figure it out by recording.

I love the way regions look on the map now.

Edit: Just noticed that you changed the cooldown region to match the prism/augment counterpart. Why only change this one and not the others? Was it because it looked too similar to the speed region?

edit2: Oh, all the colors slightly changed it seems, unless I'm imagining things.

[Ood]

Minor peeve:
Why are region colors not consistent with prism/augment colors for respective stats?

Range augment - Blue
Range prism - Blue
Range region - Green?

Why?

Edit: oh, I didn't read Tuberculosis' wall of text and got ninja'd... darn
This has been bothersome for a while now.

[Jufda]

I agree with Tarbomb and Ood about the colours. Augment, prism, and region should all be the same colour for each type of buff.

Zooming hides the enemy indicators / symbols. IMO they should show in at least both of these zoom levels:
i.imgur.com/q9LLdBE.png
i.imgur.com/zDnyJTV.png

[Justin]

Edit: Wow the quality really ruins it. Thought I had it at 720p.



What you should notice:

The blue box is nearly empty, but not competely empty, when I begin to take damage.
My shield is still bright green, and my light gray shield is untouched.
When I origin I have nearly lost all HP (if I had stayed a second longer I would've died, which is what happens to me at every voy if I don't prepare to back up knowing this would happen).
After sitting in origin for a few seconds, you can see my green shield disappear and regenerate.

I've finally stopped being lazy and recorded this bug.

[Will]

May 9, 2014 21:00:22 GMT -5 Justin said:

Edit: Wow the quality really ruins it. Thought I had it at 720p.



What you should notice:

The blue box is nearly empty, but not competely empty, when I begin to take damage.
My shield is still bright green, and my light gray shield is untouched.
When I origin I have nearly lost all HP (if I had stayed a second longer I would've died, which is what happens to me at every voy if I don't prepare to back up knowing this would happen).
After sitting in origin for a few seconds, you can see my green shield disappear and regenerate.

I've finally stopped being lazy and recorded this bug.

Justin, your equation for exp on tanks is wrong.

It's ((n(n+1))/2 and then multiplied by 100

You had ((n(n+2))

[Will]

Okay Rob, I have some serious ideas to throw down here, please read.

1. Potion boost time should only go down if you are online and the boost time should be 6 hours

2. Right now the only tank that is being used is Thunderbolt. I think you need to make a serious change to the Tbolt. Here are my ideas for nerfs:

• Perhaps lower range down to 2500
• Make the gun do 35 damage with a .5 second CD, this lessens the effects of mods and prisms
• Nerf the overdrive trigger on the Tbolt to 80% of what it is now
• You could just flat out nerf the gun damage to 65 a shot like I suggested a couple months back
• Make other tanks more useful, while the Tbolt is overpowered, other tanks aren't used at all because they are underpowered. I have never seen anyone who exclusively uses the Hercules, the Hurricane, or the Spectre. That case can still be made for the Kraken, regardless, there needs to be a change here.
• Make the mod that increases laser damage a mod that instead increases fire rate by 1.03 per mod, this makes the Tbolt have a higher DPS, but it eliminates the issue of insane clear times for regions because it will take longer to kill a beta processor than it once did before. If this particular change is made, decrease range to 2500 and nerf the overdrive trigger to 80% of what it was before. The overdrive trigger is what makes this tank so overpowered in my opinion and the range also makes it an easy choice over the likes of the Spectre. Also, the Spectre could have its damage mod buffed to 1.06 if you ask me. Dunno just throwing that out there

3. The Kraken, as mentioned in the above suggestion, is still useless. I haven't seen anyone use it for a while now, and really I don't think it's because of the base stats of the tank, but more likely because the mods for it are useless. Perhaps change the Alphasear to an Overdrive trigger that gives 1.5x more gun damage and fire rate for 5 seconds with a CD of 35. Make the Alphasear module a universal gun damage module (increases all of the guns' damage) that gives 1.04 per mod. With prisms and 16 damage augs the main gun would do 131 damage per shot with the Anti-Minion guns doing 66 damage per shot. This would surely make the Kraken a viable tank that can still serve the role it's meant to: A minion clearing tank that can heal. I've never found the shields to be any good for this tank, despite what GridViewer says. The 100 shield that covers the back half of the Kraken really cripples its production. I mean, wow. Please nerf the main front shield to 300 and make that back shield like 200 or something. Either way, the defenses for this tank are ineffective. 

4. I was thinking that since the Hercules is supposed to be a total tank, you should change the repair bot module to a hit points module. Keep the bonus for that module which is 1.0717, and the Herc can have (with prisms and level 16 hp aug) 2366 hp max w/ a 1450 or something shield. This would make it a fun tank to use and it would be really fun to run into a region boss to see how long you can live before death. 

5. The Spectre is a tank that really serves no purpose in this game. I honestly think you should just scrap this thing and start over with it. It's a Tbolt that you can't aim with and a Hornet you can't use overdrive with. There is no place for it in this game. No one uses it because of its poor durability and poor gun. If a tank is gonna have a 3000 range gun, it can't be rotating because it will shoot at EVERYTHING you don't want it to. Also, the shield regen rate is too slow. 8 secs to wait for your shields to start to come back up? I mean, what are we gonna use this thing for? Perhaps you could get rid of the range and leave the Hornet to being the sniper, (it could have 2500 range) and then make the shield regen rate be 750 w/ a regen delay of 4. This would make the Spectre viable. More durability, less range. Also, it's called the Spectre so why doesn't it have a cloak trigger? Take the Spatial Extarpolation trigger and make it a cloak trigger that lasts for 6 seconds with a CD of 35.


6. The Hurricane could use a shield regen boost. Lessen the delay to 6 seconds and the regen rate to 350. Maybe buff the lightning damage to 28 per shot. That's it.


Ya, my ideas might be bad, but they are things to perhaps help you focus on some of the issues in the game. I hope I helped

 

[zub]

Is it some kind of ploy to make people stop playing? There're enough things that dissuade from solo or short term gameplay, from limited storage to indirect rewards. The only joy I can find in solo 10 minute sessions is to casually kill few towers. Getting no reward of course. And I want godlands farming experience, not fresh level 20 trying to engage a cube god. Thunderbolt is sadly the only tank that provides such experience, because of in case of other tanks, I am not fighting towers, but the tank itself. Thick shields on wrong places, too many guns that can't shot one target or rotating turrets always shooting the wrong enemy, every other tank seems to have a downside that makes solo gameplay a struggle. And I am talking about debuffed towers in cooldown or damage region.

My impression is that whenever there's a new possible buff for players, related changes make it needed to retain our previous competitiveness against enemies. Before cells, it was clearly desirable to obtain trigger prolonging modules. Just as David stated, it's not the case anymore, especially if I am not willing to hunt for a mastek cell every day. Modules are the only thing worth hunting for after tank unlocks and hence they should come with positive effect. If there's problem with trigger prolonging modules being overpowered, which I didn't really notice, the problem should be addressed at source and the module bonus should be lowered with cooldown duration from initiating the trigger to the end of the cooldown being the same regardless of if modules were applied or not. Another possible way to mitigated the problem may be by removing trigger cooldown bonus from cells all together.

[aesc]

Mouseover tooltips are only placed accurately if your tank is facing north/in fixed camera mode



Also, cone triggers(spectre's first trigger) seem to not deal its damage all at once, which means that you are unable to kill the minions on nova even if the trigger would do over 200 damage to other non-healing enemies. Is this intentional? 

[Justin]

What if thunderbolt's sharpshooter mode is only able to fire from a distance? Right now that's sort of how it is (it can't sit on top of things to hit them), although it seems unintentional. Would that make it even more OP, or would it make it specialized/harder to use?

edit: going to stop posting my immediate thoughts now

[Kelsoo]

I would like to thank you for making a game with COLOR in it. The mini (or not so) mini map looks quite nice actually, even just to look at, while zooming out it was a pleasing, oh! This made me so happy on the inside I had to take a screenshot. The odd shapes and vibrant colors take away from the brown and gray, and more brown color that I see in many games today, they make the game stand out almost as lights in New York at night. Speaking of, I like dim flashing lights much like insects, maybe level 12 towns can have some more aesthetic changes that make them extra special and make you want to create nice safe havens from the mean enemies?

Off topic but those tank outlines on the mini map are somewhat distracting and large. As at least I see it the minimap without tank clutter looks quite clean and immaculate, I think the bright green is overdone a bit and doesn't quite "fit" with the rest of the map.