Post by tarbomb on Mar 25, 2013 0:01:38 GMT -5
None of the following has been fully thought out, and a good number of them are likely crap. I'm just putting them out because a) I don't have the time to flesh out all my thoughts and come up with suggestions on how to fix what I see as problems and b) some ideas that I might reject might actually turn out to be of use for other community members to build on.
So, without further ado, here we go.
Tank balancing
The first three 10-VP tanks (the ones that a newb would be buying) are mediocre at best and ineffective at worst. Trailblazer is the only one of them that I would use for effectiveness (i.e. not for fun) after I've unlocked avenger, and a newbie is unlikely to be able to utilize it properly, especially without prisms. Silver is decent but too defensive to be efficient at farming, corsair is completely useless except for the gamma burst trigger (which is dangerous to use on big enemies due to crummy shields, and useless on weak enemies), and mustang is too fragile to take into battle comfortably.
Avenger is the first great tank, and does an order of magnitude more damage than a silver. At 100VP it takes forever to unlock it using only the first three tanks unless you're leeching, especially due to the VP-is-not-made-available thing. That tank, and wolverine, completely unbalance the game. I can knock over a drill in under a minute with two avengers.
Essentially: either the first three tanks have to be buffed, or the order of tanks needs to be shuffled around so that newbies don't have such a hard time getting off the ground.
Phantom is crap.
At 500 VP hurricane is overpriced, considering that a player who's unlocking 500VP tanks likely has the resources to get avenger, with which he can get a vastly superior wildfire in just a few hours. It should be a 100, or better yet a 10VP tank.
Valkyrie needs a buff.
Tank unlocking
Rob mentioned trials for tanks and LoL-style weekly tank unlocks
I've never played LoL, so take this with a grain of salt: I think it's going to make the game boring.
Part of progressing is a player is discovering "new stuff". Right now the only way you do that is by discovering new enemies (over in a day) or by unlocking new tanks.
Giving newbies tanks free takes away the newness when you unlock it, and makes the final goal seem less fulfilling.
Just rebalance the tanks. Don't add trials.
Facilities
A lot of regions are mostly have one type of enemy. I was clearing a region today, and 90% of the enemies were square. 70% of the facilities in the towns in that region were for round enemies. Cue Tarbomb rage.
The most obvious solution: make facilities in a region dependent on the types of enemies in that region.
The problem with that obvious solution: nobody would want to clear regions with a variety of enemies anymore. Everyone wants to go into the square-only or circle-only or triangle-only regions, since they have more facilities nerfing those enemies.
How would this be fixed? I dunno. Ideas?
Immobilize
Immobilize is the least useful trigger around right now.
On all tanks that have it, the duration is too short to, say, freeze a bunch of turret-distracting GCT fighters from getting close enough to annoy you while you run in to attack the GCT itself. Even on a boosted avenger you can't lower the GCT past 50% HP before the fighters come back.
Solution 1 (cheap): buff the duration.
Solution 2 (better): have immobilize freeze turrets too, so they can't turn. In effect, you're paralyzing enemy weapons in addition to enemies. If this turns out to be too OP and disarm-replacing, nerf the duration or limit the effect to either minions only or buildings only.
Augments
Augments don't affect gameplay at all.
Comparing two tanks side by side (via altboxing), one with augments (3% all stats, which is pretty reasonable) and one without, I can't tell the difference.
Augments right now are just a place for people who've unlocked everything to toss their spare VP. They need a buff (each step is 1%?) or better yet to provide modifications (lateral game progression, e.g. swap a shield for a gun) instead of improvements (vertical game progression).
City levels
City leveling feels contrived and unnatural, especially due to the VP thing.
Since people want to get spendable VP they'll just level cities like mad. Since the new build facilities have been built much less than cities. Besides, building cities is less work than building facilities: you just park on the closest socket to the TP-point, and that's it. No need to move around, or worry about prerequisites, or check if there are available sockets.
Solution 1: Get rid of spendable/non-spendable VP distinction. See next section.
Solution 2: No more city leveling. You build facilities in a city only, and once you've put enough total shards into a city by building facilities there, the city levels up automatically.
Solution 3: Do both.
VPs
The only distinction between spendable and nonspendable VP seems to be rewarding city level-ups and ending the game.
There's no reason to reward leveling up cities right now anymore, since they don't play a role in ending the game.
Endgame reward should be something that feels special. Locking up VP and not letting you access VPs until you end the game feels artificial and annoying. Holding a delayed reward in sight but not allowing you to use them only works you can get the reward fairly quickly and it's clear that the reward gives you a direct benefit (Inside a Star-Filled Sky does this right). Holding an indirect reward (currency) and making unlocking it a time-consuming process does not feel rewarding to a newbie whose character progression is stalled until someone levels a town.
Regions
Regions feel contrived. Ending the game should be more about total area cleared, rather than clearing a bunch of pre-designated locations. Regions don't really constrain people playing normally, which is why we have a gigantic map with way more than 5 regions and leveled towns all over the place. Only people actively trying to end the game are clearing entire regions.
Solution 1: Make the map finite like Amit suggested in an earlier thread.
Solution 2: Endgame is based on total area conquered (square is conquered if there are no enemies in a given radius, i.e. a square that ould have qualified for the blue dot a few builds back). Making long "tentacles" of conquered territory isn't going to be as efficient as clearing a compact area, but it will still contribute to endgames. If "tentacle territory" is still an issue, make facility debuffs work like resonator buffs worked a long time ago: dependent on how close you are to them, so people try to clear around towns, or allow enemies to slowly reconquer territory, cutting off towns whose link with Origin is too narrow.
Lenses
Get rid of them completely. It's just another way of getting gridshards (and not many of them either), adds unnecessary complexity to the game, and stopping to pick them up breaks the flow of moving and fighting.
So, without further ado, here we go.
Tank balancing
The first three 10-VP tanks (the ones that a newb would be buying) are mediocre at best and ineffective at worst. Trailblazer is the only one of them that I would use for effectiveness (i.e. not for fun) after I've unlocked avenger, and a newbie is unlikely to be able to utilize it properly, especially without prisms. Silver is decent but too defensive to be efficient at farming, corsair is completely useless except for the gamma burst trigger (which is dangerous to use on big enemies due to crummy shields, and useless on weak enemies), and mustang is too fragile to take into battle comfortably.
Avenger is the first great tank, and does an order of magnitude more damage than a silver. At 100VP it takes forever to unlock it using only the first three tanks unless you're leeching, especially due to the VP-is-not-made-available thing. That tank, and wolverine, completely unbalance the game. I can knock over a drill in under a minute with two avengers.
Essentially: either the first three tanks have to be buffed, or the order of tanks needs to be shuffled around so that newbies don't have such a hard time getting off the ground.
Phantom is crap.
At 500 VP hurricane is overpriced, considering that a player who's unlocking 500VP tanks likely has the resources to get avenger, with which he can get a vastly superior wildfire in just a few hours. It should be a 100, or better yet a 10VP tank.
Valkyrie needs a buff.
Tank unlocking
Rob mentioned trials for tanks and LoL-style weekly tank unlocks
I've never played LoL, so take this with a grain of salt: I think it's going to make the game boring.
Part of progressing is a player is discovering "new stuff". Right now the only way you do that is by discovering new enemies (over in a day) or by unlocking new tanks.
Giving newbies tanks free takes away the newness when you unlock it, and makes the final goal seem less fulfilling.
Just rebalance the tanks. Don't add trials.
Facilities
A lot of regions are mostly have one type of enemy. I was clearing a region today, and 90% of the enemies were square. 70% of the facilities in the towns in that region were for round enemies. Cue Tarbomb rage.
The most obvious solution: make facilities in a region dependent on the types of enemies in that region.
The problem with that obvious solution: nobody would want to clear regions with a variety of enemies anymore. Everyone wants to go into the square-only or circle-only or triangle-only regions, since they have more facilities nerfing those enemies.
How would this be fixed? I dunno. Ideas?
Immobilize
Immobilize is the least useful trigger around right now.
On all tanks that have it, the duration is too short to, say, freeze a bunch of turret-distracting GCT fighters from getting close enough to annoy you while you run in to attack the GCT itself. Even on a boosted avenger you can't lower the GCT past 50% HP before the fighters come back.
Solution 1 (cheap): buff the duration.
Solution 2 (better): have immobilize freeze turrets too, so they can't turn. In effect, you're paralyzing enemy weapons in addition to enemies. If this turns out to be too OP and disarm-replacing, nerf the duration or limit the effect to either minions only or buildings only.
Augments
Augments don't affect gameplay at all.
Comparing two tanks side by side (via altboxing), one with augments (3% all stats, which is pretty reasonable) and one without, I can't tell the difference.
Augments right now are just a place for people who've unlocked everything to toss their spare VP. They need a buff (each step is 1%?) or better yet to provide modifications (lateral game progression, e.g. swap a shield for a gun) instead of improvements (vertical game progression).
City levels
City leveling feels contrived and unnatural, especially due to the VP thing.
Since people want to get spendable VP they'll just level cities like mad. Since the new build facilities have been built much less than cities. Besides, building cities is less work than building facilities: you just park on the closest socket to the TP-point, and that's it. No need to move around, or worry about prerequisites, or check if there are available sockets.
Solution 1: Get rid of spendable/non-spendable VP distinction. See next section.
Solution 2: No more city leveling. You build facilities in a city only, and once you've put enough total shards into a city by building facilities there, the city levels up automatically.
Solution 3: Do both.
VPs
The only distinction between spendable and nonspendable VP seems to be rewarding city level-ups and ending the game.
There's no reason to reward leveling up cities right now anymore, since they don't play a role in ending the game.
Endgame reward should be something that feels special. Locking up VP and not letting you access VPs until you end the game feels artificial and annoying. Holding a delayed reward in sight but not allowing you to use them only works you can get the reward fairly quickly and it's clear that the reward gives you a direct benefit (Inside a Star-Filled Sky does this right). Holding an indirect reward (currency) and making unlocking it a time-consuming process does not feel rewarding to a newbie whose character progression is stalled until someone levels a town.
Regions
Regions feel contrived. Ending the game should be more about total area cleared, rather than clearing a bunch of pre-designated locations. Regions don't really constrain people playing normally, which is why we have a gigantic map with way more than 5 regions and leveled towns all over the place. Only people actively trying to end the game are clearing entire regions.
Solution 1: Make the map finite like Amit suggested in an earlier thread.
Solution 2: Endgame is based on total area conquered (square is conquered if there are no enemies in a given radius, i.e. a square that ould have qualified for the blue dot a few builds back). Making long "tentacles" of conquered territory isn't going to be as efficient as clearing a compact area, but it will still contribute to endgames. If "tentacle territory" is still an issue, make facility debuffs work like resonator buffs worked a long time ago: dependent on how close you are to them, so people try to clear around towns, or allow enemies to slowly reconquer territory, cutting off towns whose link with Origin is too narrow.
Lenses
Get rid of them completely. It's just another way of getting gridshards (and not many of them either), adds unnecessary complexity to the game, and stopping to pick them up breaks the flow of moving and fighting.
. There could be facilities which every 5 minutes would deploy 3 minions that would follow and help the first player to 'recruit' them via touching them. These minions wouldn't be that powerful, and you couldn't have more than 3 at once with you, but it would be cool nonetheless. You could have facilities that quickly regenerate your health and shields (abilities would be too exploitable), acting as a sort of nexus fountain to heal you up when you escape a sticky situation *just* in time. You could have facilities that add certain extra, cooler buffs to players that fight in the sector that the city is located in. The possibilities are (almost) endless! ^^
