Build 25

[rob]

Hello all,

Build 25 is live! Changes include:

* Color/width changes on Wolverine lasers
* Edit several player tank descriptions
* Ground Fortress revamped and renamed to Watchtower
* Hurricane lightning gun limited to 3 closest targets; damage buffed
* Tooltips added to buildings
* Pane fade in/out
* Nerf minion drops; buff fortress drops
* Add Valkyrie class
* Remove range buff from projectile blasts
* Add control scheme, sound, music, starfield to cookie prefs
* Increase nospawn zone around towns a bit

We hear the complaints about accounts (and now names) being lost to cookie deletion. We are in the planning stages for a login scheme, but we want to take our time due to the complexity of this project and the extreme consequences of getting it wrong. Hopefully we can get this done within a build or two. We'll probably wipe the accounts at that point.

We were mostly pleased with the transition to local resonator buffs. In fact we'd like to have enemy debuffs made local as well (local debuff buildings would replace labs & extractors). One unintended consequence of the switch to local is that it incents the players to build up a single supertown and farm the area around it with high efficiency, which gets boring fast and is also lame. One idea we're kicking around is to have the respawn rate of enemies decay over time based on the killcount. For example, each enemy fortress might respawn in 10 minutes multiplied by the number of times it's been killed. The idea is that the area around a built-up town eventually gets "mined out" of enemies to farm, slowly shifting the fighting to the expanding perimeter.

We are considering craftable consumables, somewhat along the lines of randomg's suggestion. But not in the next build.

Player tank range buffs are kind of breaking the game. We are considering eliminating them. Maybe cooldown buffs too. Maybe speed as well. Also building/town decay is not adding much, so we are thinking of getting rid of that as well.

We are also getting fed up with the "deposit" mechanism for leveling buildings. We are considering a menu -- click the building to get a list of the levels you are rich enough to bring the building to.

As always, thank you very much for helping us by playing the game. You folks are awesome! Please post comments, gripes, reactions, bug reports, etc, below.

Rob & the Grid 12 team

[linkshot]

Loving the new tile animations, Watchtower revamp, and Valkyrie, though it could really use much less range on the sneeze.

Always up for experimenting with new systems. The "farm one town for a while, then move to the next" is a dynamic I'd be interested in trying out.

[sven]

Experiencing intense lag when explore deeper into the wilderness.
i.imgur.com/7UNKM.png

The farther I can get to was Beyer without fps manipulation.
i.imgur.com/N8xFA.png

I did enjoy the new additions to the build along with fixes/ nerf here and there. There's a few matters that bothers me bit.

• When starting the game, hp appears to be missing it's portion thus require regenerating instead of full health.
  
• While teleporting to towns it may take a second or 2 just to get there, slowdown occur depending on amount sockets reclaimed.
  

[tarbomb]

Okay, some impresions:

New tile animation: slick, elegant, and polished, and perfectly solves my complaint about the jarring effect of loading new tiles. Unfortunately, loading buildings and enemies is still jarring (the whole building loads at once), and the animation causes some lag, especially when I teleport and all the tiles need to get loaded at once.

Nerfed hurricane: IMHO, the hurricane was nerfed a bit too much, and in a way that removes the uniqueness of the class. In the last couple builds, the draw of the hurricane was its ability to engage an unlimited number of targets, as long as they were in range. By increasing the damage and limiting the number of targetable enemies, the hurricane feels very much like a standard tank with a finite number of cannons, and worse yet is outmatched by the phantom in almost every respect - the Phantom has 6 cannons, seemingly better range, and better shields, and due to its ability to focus two cannons on one target is on an equal footing with the hurricane in terms of single-target DPS. I think the hurricane's range should be significantly decreased, and the unlimited-target feature restored, along with a possible shield buff to make it more of a melee tank.

Hercules still needs a buff: Hercules is still a crummy tank. Despite its mighty single shield, its offensive power is severely lacking and it's pooper cluster-bomb dispenser is useless for mob control, due to its inability to shoot at anything that isn't directly behind and close to it. Cluster-bomb should be a short-ranged grenade type weapon - it would fire at enemies at any angle within a square or so of the tank, and the resulting bomb would have piercing shots.

On range buffs: I don't think they need to be removed. Enemies out in the bufflands have a much higher range than enemies close to origin, and it should be the case that you get more range fighting stuff out there by building range resonators in outlying towns.

On scouting: In general, the new builds (since 24) are making it harder to scout, especially far from origin. This is due to two factors: a) the nerf in global buffs, making tanks less powerful as they head into outlying regions with tough enemies, and b) the new design of watchtowers/buildings, which now start at 10 enemies (personally, to make it more interesting, I'd like to see watchtowers start with a random number of enemies from 0-10, and spawn more as people fight them). A trick I often used in the previous builds would be to lean towards one side of the grid (i.e. edge really close to a building) on the side where my shields were strong, thereby lessening the damage that weakened shields would have to take. Unfortunately, now that there are ten tanks per watchtower blocking the way, that's not a feasible strategy anymore (*the* deadliest situation in the game is getting blocked in by tanks on all sides), and I have to drive down the middle, which is pretty harrowing when there's a rangebuffed supertank or two sitting closeby. I'm not saying that making scouting harder is necessarily a bad thing, but it's something that you should keep in mind.

Town names: How do you generate the names? Some of them are downright odd ("Post CrAO", "Yakhontovia") and extremely annoying to type when you're trying to teleport to one quickly.

Chat, commands, etc: First, I think the functions of /goto and /teleport need to be switched. It makes sense to go to a town, not to a player - you teleport to a player (admittedly, my mental idea of this is strongly influenced by Realm). Also, I'd like to see /gt and /tp shortcuts, as well as a /tell functionality. Furthermore, a "nexus" key would be nice - right now I have /teleport origin typed into the chat, so I can instantly go to origin with a tap of the enter key. Having that hard-coded into the game would be nice.

Shield depiction: This is an issue that's been around for a while, but with the new Valkyrie it's become much more apparent. Let me quote the tooltip: "A trio of edgelinked shields provide all-around coverage, with extra resistance at the front and sides." This isn't apparent at all from the shield circle - all three arcs are the same thickness, leading to the illusion that the tank is equally resistant on all sides to fire. There are several ways to fix this: Either weaker shields would have thinner arcs, or all shields would have the same thickness (which would decrease as they ate up fire), with color indicating their resistance to damage and bright white lines delineating line dividing the shields into segments. Or, you could add a status screen (perhaps moving this info, and all the info that's currently scattered on all sides of the screen, to a Realm-style right-hand panel), which would hold numeric shield data. Here's a mockup, demonstrating my godlike Photoshop skills:



Upper-right shields would flash red due to being weak.

And a mockup of the proposed new game window:



Bugs: I'll keep a list of bugs I encounter here.

• Tank drives away from under me: I zoomed out, teleported to a town, and zoomed in. I clicked close by my tank to move a bit, but instead of my screen moving my tank drove out from under me, with the shield bubble and view staying where they were. I could take damage (presumably from enemies I was driving into) but couldn't see anything.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The ghost gridshards: I had around 3k gridshards. I deposited them into the town socket, but 60 gridshards remained, and despite parking on the socket for a minute, they wouldn't drop. They won't drop into lab, resonator, or extractor sockets either. I went out and picked up a 50 gridshard lootbag and a 100 gridshard bag, and my total gridshard count became 150 - indicating that despite my client showing that I had 60 shards left, I in fact had 0, and it was phantom (pun intended) loot.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Invisi-tank is still around. Got this one by teleporting to a town at around 2% health.
  
  
  
  

[linkshot]

Wait we got kalle and Hypevosa now? That's the best part of this build!

[remm]

I like the new Watchtower. The pace of the battle, that always keeps you moving, is great. It's the sudden thrill when the tile you're on turns red and you scramble to get off it.

Whenever a player enters a zone with a higher HP buff than what they are currently in, their maximum HP increases, but not their actual HP. This is what causes the apparent loss in HP when you spawn. It also causes your HP to jump around quite a lot when you are fighting at the edge of a town's influence. It looks like you're always losing HP, despite having shields up and whatnot.

I feel like the rate of HP regen is also too high, or happens too soon. When I am fighting a Drill Station with a Cobra (minimal shields), I will drive around inside the walls as a way of regenerating my health. It's a safe enough place there to regen health. I don't think that's quite right.

The Valkyrie is a good tank. When both the forward facing cannons are working, you pull some pretty crazy damage. It's very fun to use.

I don't mind the changes to the Hurricane, although I would like to be able to target a little more than 3 enemies at a time. As it is though, it does some decent damage.

I will not be keen to lose my account progress when you introduce logins, but I guess that sort of thing is to be expected with game testing. Good bye to my 39 levels then I guess.

In regards to the local resonator buffs. Yes, Origin was built up as a super town, together with nearby Aeolia. There was little incentive to farm shards anywhere else, so often I didn't. If you limit the respawn rate around the towns, you will have to keep in mind that when more players join the game, they will clear out the enemies faster too.

[fenrir]

Watchtower is nice, keeps the dodging minefield feeling, while making it be less annoying.

Hurricane balancing was done well, imo. No more hitting half the drill station at the same time, while being able to solo forts and the like in a decent amount of time. However, I agree with Tarbomb that the Phantom outclasses it most of the time. The only situation I can think of where hurricane is better is when there are 3 enemies grouped together in any one direction.

Might be just my playstyle, but I think the Valkyrie is fairly weak. The shotgun is nice, but it needs the front guns to compete with others, and while the front guns are fairly powerful, they don't turn much, meaning you have to charge straight at enemies to do any significant damage, even more so than Cobra. With unit collision for pretty much everything, this means a lot of running into and possibly getting stuck on enemies (I prefer mobile, evasive characters).

[linkshot]

I melted everything with the Valkyrie, and forgot to try out the Hurricane, though I'll agree with Tarbomb that it definitely feels more like "3 very easy cannons" with the limit.

It's hard to properly test balance when the Orilia Alliance is so alluring with its freaking 130+ bonuses to most stats.

[kalle]

resizeing the flash object doesn't work very well, everything scales properly except for the map.
i.imgur.com/4Rsdh.png

[remm]

There is a serious problem with the aiming system. If there is an enemy in front of your cannon that is not the enemy being targeted, you will not fire at it. Your cannon will swing right on by and ignore it.
To show how infuriating this can be, try and kill anything with the Avenger. Your main turret will turn slowly to fire at whatever is closest, but it will often not fire, because something else becomes closest, and so it turns to fire at that instead. And repeat.
Simply, the aiming system can only handle one target at a time, per gun. It needs to be aware of all the targets within range, to turn to face the closest one, and to fire whenever a target can be hit.

[kalle]

i was trying to convey just that to rob yesterday remm. it's very annoying when you want the turret to fire but it's just retargeting because something else came closer. having it shoot whenever it can hit something would make the cobra/valkyrie even more op in comparison but i'm sure that can be remedied somehow.

[sven]

Bug Spotted:

The game screen itself froze when the user teleport to someone who's at the town. (Near the center) Still playable but the screen doesn't update thus death can be insure except health and shield status remain visible of conditions.

i.imgur.com/lN2aj.png, i.imgur.com/5RZlO.png

Erk:

Drill Station enemies overlap with each other like ants crawling all other the hill. Where are the boundaries?
i.imgur.com/b3t9m.png

Fun:

Watchtower attack pattern are entertaining to see in action and battle, if only the loot worth valuable like the amount of gridshard drop from the Super Tank.

Another Bug:

After destroying annex of the Drill Station and head towards the core, I got zapped into one position where I'm immobile. I can't move but to rotate, I'm certain I didn't drag my cursor into the center of the tank. Drill Station lasers also stood there where I took damage from.

i.imgur.com/GZ8fF.png

[linkshot]

Whenever I killed something, I would move around the area a bit and my health would flicker between 75% and full.

I told Rob of the /tele yellow/green smear graphical glitch.

My laptop runs at 5 FPS in combat. I have it going on Roomba Mode as I type this.

[fenrir]

I should rename myself to Roomba, if we're going by FPS .

[tarbomb]

Putting a newline (U+000A) into the chat makes it go bonkers.





The word "chat" and the two periods are stuck on the screen and won't go away.

Closing G12 and reopening it again fixes the layout.

Also, client freeze sometimes happens when TP'ing to ally. We all know about this, but I'll post it here for reference.