What enemies need a buff or nerf?

[hypevosa]

EDIT: Updating thread, old post is in code tags to reduce size, giving up on some requests.

Watchtower (AKA Lag's a bitch)

The watchtower has on numerous occasions eaten me and other players who lagged for a moment because of the incredible damage stacked squares can do. If at all possible, I'd like it so being hit by the squares was considered one hit instead of multiple hits to prevent lag being such a massive factor in death with these enemies. Watchtower squares appearing beneath the tower itself is also quite cheap. I'm leaving this one because it's still incredibly unbalanced how fast one can be killed by squares they literally cannot see.

Deltas:

Laughably weak now and quickly dispatched as quicklite pointed out. I'd rather not increase minions to keep lag factors down - I would maybe like to see minions have a smarter ambushing behavior where they fly at you from 3 separate sides (triangles) to take out shields. Giving the Delta itself a giant lazer on all 3 corners and making it invulnerable until the outer facilities are destroyed would also make it more formidable. (I like

Drills:

As quicklite pointed out, these are very trivial now too. Suggested fixes from me would be a large laser on each corner of the drill building to give it better angles for shooting people that are literally right in front of it to take out more shields. Giving the wall lasers the ability to rotate all the way, necessitating their removal would help as well. and also, why is it called a drill when there's no drill? I feel we couild add a square driller that damages players hugging the drill when it touches them. It could be set to drill a square under the drill platform that is the same size but has its corners 45 degrees rotated from those of the platform (so it makes an 8 point star essentially)

For those curious here is what a square driller is shaped like and how it moves

I thought a sister thread was in order for enemies after discussing how super tanks are deadlier than grid control towers when operating at full capacity now.

What enemies need a buff?  Which need a nerf?  This includes drops, stats, etc.

Grid control towers:

As everyone else is saying, GCT are very OP now and not fun to play against. The bombs have a short fuse, a massive hit radius, and are ridiculously powerful. Why on earth does it need a bomb throwing behavior? We can be more creative than copying the medusa fix from ROTMG :\

How about the spinning turret intermittently (and gradually) speeds up its rotation, eh? Having it delivering more firepower to people just sitting around, being a threat to the whole group, while still giving it the soul that made it the GCT to begin with? The enemy wasn't about bombs and explosive radius before, that's the watchtower - the GCT's big feature is its rotating multilaser. We should be capitalizing on that.

Antimatter Tanker:

A slight damage nerf is in order as the sheer number of guns makes it so any player can be eaten alive in under 5 seconds.  It also needs slightly better drops (at least one guaranteed pulch would be nice) given its difficulty, especially once corsairs are no longer making its steep HP an easy problem to deal with anymore.

Triangulums:

A gentle nerf - longer turret rotation for each corner's gun or something.  Triangulums + minions kill my tank almost at the same exact speed as delta refineries - this doesn't seem quite right.

Watchtower (AKA Lag's a bitch)

The watchtower has on numerous occasions eaten me and other players who lagged for a moment because of the incredible damage stacked squares can do.  If at all possible, I'd like it so being hit by the squares was considered one hit instead of multiple hits to prevent lag being such a massive factor in death with these enemies.  Watchtower squares appearing beneath the tower itself is also quite cheap.

[Ood]

--Nerf--
Watchtowers:
When traps switch places, make them have a delay before AoEing again?

Antimatter Tank:
Read what hype said.

++Buff++
Grid Control Towers
Not the tower, buff the minions. MOAR bombas! Make us circle it or be destroyed by the bombers.
Edit: on second thought, due to facility bonuses, making the rotate-o-gun do more damage is probably better. Can't just build a bunch of stuff in cities to make the GCT a pushover.

??Questionable??

Super Tanks:
As I think Tarbomb (correct me if I'm wrong) said somewhere, Super tanks were nice before because they could be killed with a different tactic. Circling. Now that isn't possible. I like the new super tank, so perhaps just a new structure altogether would solve the issue better than a nerf.

Overall
I think combined structures would give a lot more variety and solve some of the irregularities in difficulty/tactics... but for now, that's it.

[hypevosa]

Thanks for reminding me ood, I'm adding watchtowers to my list.

[tarbomb]

Antimatter tanker should stay the way it is, with a loot buff to make fighting it rewarding and some modification to ensure it doesn't gobble up players AFKing in towns.

Triangulums are frustratingly dangerous, but they're also very fast to kill. As with the tanker, I feel they're more in need of a loot buff (they should match supertanks/watchtowers) than a power nerf, although a power nerf could work.

I agree on watchtower trap stacking/appearing on top of the enemy itself. In addition to eliminating these, perhaps the duration between traps appearing and traps firing should be increased by half as second to make it a little less dependent on lag. At least it won't instakill you regardless of shields like the old watchtower would... (for the people who came here after the watchtower nerf: back in the old days, the traps had not only more damage but much more range - 2-3 squares, at least. Those things were nerve-wracking back then.)



I like GCTs the way they are. Not every enemy is supposed to be both dangerous and quick to kill. Having the equivalent of constructs in Grid, with really nice loot to boot, is nice.

Drill-station's prism drop being lowered from 2 to 1 is something I never saw the reason for. It's not an issue now due to the multiple-player multiple-drop bug, but once that bug is patched, drillstations won't have the same appeal anymore.

[quicklite]

Well, first-off, I think a nerf for super tank minions would be nice. 1) Because when a quad super tank spawns minions at all their max capacities, the total surrounding damage coupled with all the lag I get gives me a 50% chance to lag out and die :/. And as for the issue of circling, perhaps have all super tanks aim at the nearest player without firing (if not in range ofc), making circling still feasable as their guns will be pointed in your direction anyway? May not work, but hey, it's an idea.

Grid control towers should either a) switch circle 'rankings' on the minimap with the super tank, now that the super tank is decisively harder, or get something to make it deserve its big circle ranking. However, if a buff is planned, please still try to make the grid control tower circlable. They are a necessity for scouting

I'm not too keen on a triangulum nerf, but they're still possible now, and will more then possible when there's more players on grid, so imo they're okay.

Though given how triangles seem to be the 'super hard things', my suggestion is to give the rocket tower a little buff. At the moment, depsite being the hardest kind of enemy (triangle), it's nonetheless easier to fight two of them rather than one watchtower/super tank post-buff. I'd say seriously increase the rocket turrets' damage, increase the number of rocket turrets (but keep the laser turrets constant imo), and maybe fix the rocket turrets while ur at it ^^

[gingerbear]

- I don't think triangulums are that hard, tbh. They are a pain, yes, but nothing impossible.

- I like the new super tanks. Having 4 around an X is a bit hard, yeah, but nothing impossible. And as for the high number of minions: use AoE tanks too! Yesterday we made a Hercules train of 3 players, and dropped mines / bombs at triple and quadruple tanks. It wasn't a fast kill, but the constant explosions eliminated all the minions (actually I can't remember seeing them spawn. Do minions spawn on direct damage or what?), so we basically had to take out only 3-4 super tanks which wasn't scary at all.

- Watch Towers are cool as they are. Actually, trap "stacking" could probably be eliminated so it would be an obvious 1 trap / title. This would also mean that the spread of the traps would be always to the fullest, which wouldn't make things easier...

---> Actually, this gives me an idea. There could be different types of watch towers: Aside from the current random one, there could be one that spits them out in a spiral or in any geometric shape, there could be one that "pulsates" the traps, and there could be one that spits them out slowly, but those traps would chase the players...

[tarbomb]

@hype Why nerf the triangulums and buff the despoiler minions? I view despoiler as the easy enemy of the triangle family, triangulum as the hard one, and deltas as the boss. Size shouldn't necessarily correlate with strength.

gingerbear Watchtower variants would definitely be fun. Perhaps we could bring back the old long-range watchtower too (with a nerf of course).

[hypevosa]

I never said triangulums weren't possible, it's just strange that the delta refinery and the triangulum are near the same damage output to me - unless we don't want enemy size (in addition to shape) to actually indicate difficulty, I would nerf the triangulum very slightly.

The suggestion to buff GTC's is in that same vein. I like super tanks the way they are now (though I agree the sheer number of minions they spawn when you get any more than one to half HP now makes things sticky) and so I feel the GTC should be buffed to keep a complex getting larger meaning a more difficult fight consistent.

Instant lag death is something I've always been against, I don't feel people who go somewhere with full HP and shields should die before they can zoom back in and see what's going on. This is why I think a slight damage nerf for antimatter tanker would be good and a change to how damage is calculated for watchtower squares is also in order.

[hypevosa]

As everyone else is saying, GCT are very OP now and not fun to play against. The bombs have a short fuse, a massive hit radius, and are ridiculously powerful. Why on earth does it need a bomb throwing behavior? We can be more creative than copying the medusa fix from ROTMG :\

How about the spinning turret intermittently (and gradually) speeds up its rotation, eh? Having it delivering more firepower to people just sitting around, being a threat to the whole group, while still giving it the soul that made it the GCT to begin with? The enemy wasn't about bombs and explosive radius before, that's the watchtower - the GCT's big feature is its rotating multilaser. We should be capitalizing on that.

[tarbomb]

Hypevosa has a great idea. Start with the old GCT, buff the laser damage by 1.5x (or make them shield-piercing, directly damaging the hull), have the lasers pierce through players, and make the turret's speed erratic so it's not so easy to solo.

[Ood]

As of Build 51:

Drills - Buffed
They're stupid easy.
Give them a regenerative/rotating shield that requires you to take down more than one side's shield or something. The only danger currently is if you lag too much and are solo.

Traingulum - Nerfed
Cut the range back just a touch...

Super Tank Minions - Nerfed
With 4 super tanks, the minion count is enough to make people disconnect. Is it possible to cut the number on the different kinds of super tanks separately? If 2, cut the number by 1/4, if 3, cut by 1/3, if 4 cut by 1/2?

Convoys - it's complicated
I realize that forcing them go through a cleared region basically renders them all killable, but at the moment, if they don't go through a large open space they are nearly impossible to kill. Perhaps instead of making them go through a cleared region, have them bounce between 2-4 towns. Start off the map like currently, then target one town (or very near it at least), then once at that town, have it change direction to town number 2, then the same to town 3, then turn again and go off map.
The path might look like:

Where the red path is the current one, and the white is the new possibility.
We wouldn't know when or where (or possibly if) the path changes, so people will have to stay alert. This would not only give more time to kill a convoy that doesn't go into open space, but it'd also give them a bit more randomness instead of either 'trollvoy' or 'hurray it's going through origin we get to kill it'.

Are more enemies in our near future?

[quicklite]

Bump!

Okay, I know this thread died a while ago, but I feel like it's still valid, and I'd rather post here instead of making a new thread entirely.

Anyways, I think there's 3 things that could really use a change.

1) Deltas. These used to be the most powerful, terrifying enemies in grid. Now, due to the new hercules and various other tank buffs, they're laughably weak, cherry picked and ran down for their pulches in a matter of seconds. I would rather not give this one bombs, as I feel like bomb upgrades are overdone, but there's still a few ways we could make this a fortress to be reckoned with again.

Firstly, the amount of flying minions should be doubled, maybe even tripled. The amount of flying minions that currently exist were enough to swarm one or two people in the earlier builds, but now there's more people, and better tanks, and these minions just sorta die off. This way, you'd have to battle through a sizeable swarm of delta squads before you even got to the main thing, which would not only provide an interesting challenge, but also give cutlasses a use that doesn't involve sitting on convoys.

Secondly, re-arm, and double in health all the outer segments, and give the main thing a few extra guns. Heck, perhaps even give the bigger outer segments the ability to de-buff tanks (or maybe even destroy bombs? :3). That would make approaching them a heck of a lot harder, which would help. Finally, make it so that the main fortress can't be damaged until all the outer segments have been destroyed. That would stop people from just ripping apart the delta from splash damage from bombs and AoEs, which has been happening a lot.

2) Cross buildings. These need a lot more health, and perhaps the ability to fight back or de-buff in some way. After all, they are a weak spot which is supposed to make things a lot easier upon destruction, but at this point, they will basically fall under one quick shotgun blast, and might as well be non-existent. Also, the cross minions could get a nice buff, and maybe try to protect the cross building. Okay, maybe buffing the minions isn't as necessary, but it'll help make the cutlass less useless when clearing.

3) Drills. At the moment, these are run down as fast, if not faster than deltas. A good solution here would be to give a few extra guns to the drill itself, buff the outer walls' turrets and hp, and maybe even add another outer wall, just to give more things to break through to reach the drill.

[Ood]

Cross buildings do not need a buff. It is difficult to solo a 3 and especially a 4 super tank. Cross buildings do their job, they don't need guns.

[Ood]

Drills could use another buff, something like Hype has in OP perhaps?

Delta need a buff also. I think something like a weak, but large AoE burst from the center would be a cool effect.

Watchtower patterns would still be cool.

The new security towers could have a bit more pizzaz if the non-turreted segments of the enemy exploded on death.

Other than that, more enemies, and multi-grid enemies are needed more than buffs/nerfs in my opinion.

[amitp]

quicklite, it seems like we'll end up in an endless escalation. More powerful enemies, more powerful buffs, round and round, until top players are so far ahead of new players that they can't play in the same areas anymore.