Build 29

[tim]

Hi all,

We've just pushed Build 29 of grid12. Here are the changes:

* Fixed turret pointing bug.
* Increase range of Drill Stockade and Annex
* Fixed drift away bug (hopefully, feedback is appreciated)
* Removed Enemy Wilderness Buff
* Removed Enemy Fortress Respawning
* Removed Player Buildings
* Removed now unused HUD elements
* Change Enemy Building laser color
* Removed Resource Strength Indicators from Ground
* Fixed Lenses going to wrong place on pickup
* On Town Levelup, every player on server is awarded 10% of their current earned (but not awarded) Victory Points.
* Reduce player levelup requirements by a factor of 10 (Temporary for testing)
* Added the Hornet, a new class.
* Buffed loot drops from Watchtower, Grid Control Tower, and Super Tank

This is the first build taking steps in a new direction for Grid12, so there may be some seemingly drastic changes. One of the most noticeable is that we've wiped the state from our database, so it's a fresh start, even for your accounts. We understand that you've put work into these, but to test this new direction, we want to start over from scratch to get the most useful feedback. Over the next few weeks we'll be further working on the overall flow of gameplay, and adding back in some more complex features. Also, we will not be releasing a new build next week, due to the Thanksgiving holidays, but we will have something new the week after that, likely containing Login. Please feel free to post feedback on this build and on these changes.

Thanks,
Tim

[tarbomb]

Somehow this build doesn't like Flash 11.4 (the version I have standalone) - it sucks up 95+% CPU and locks up my machine. It works fine with Chrome on 11.5.

I'll report back with more findings when I have the 11.5 projector downloaded.

Also: with tons of minions and no resonator buffs, the silver really, really sucks. IMHO all tanks should get a slight buff to compensate for the new lack of resonators.

[rob]

Hey Tarbomb,

It's not really fun to play solo with no prisms at the moment. I've noticed that getting the first few levels of prism really helps. As does playing in a group.

Thanks for bearing with us as we try some new things.

Rob

[linkshot]

Resource Strength still pops up on the socket. Will post more feedback once I rally the other testers.

[sven]

I didn't know that leveling up has any meaningful achievement but random particle bursts when I first tested G12, with the interface of unlocking tanks has made my day. ;D Same with the redesigned Scorpion! Quite zesty, no need to sit back and relax just charge when needed.

During the times of starting out from scratch, soloing minions can be rough around the edge at least I managed to revisit the strategy aspect once again.

When using Silver, I remember the key to surviving is to rotate shields diligently. If one is broken switch to an active one, while auto-fire will take it's time killing minions one by one. Like a puzzle with full of twist and turns. i.imgur.com/MznsQ.png

Corsair shield are a bit durable away from it's main feature, still more than enough to be stable in battle. It may be require for the user to keep it's distance from the enemy and have the front shield targeted. Strongest shield can be the offense support to auto-fire defense as long no serious damage is taken. i.imgur.com/irmtc.png

Mustang have a unique pattern that's different from the tanks I normally used. Dual separate shields of both sides did somewhat make the battle a bit interesting. While circling with a broken shield I can turn the opposite direction where it can regenerate. That way, my hp won't go unscathed till the rest of the tank's defense is down.
i.imgur.com/zUQAF.png i.imgur.com/CBa5g.png

It takes about a few hours to unlock several tanks.

As for minor bugs...

[amitp]

Woah. Drastic changes, woot!

The game sort of froze for me. I died, but didn't get sent back to Origin. The game is running and getting 60fps instead of the 19 I was getting before (which btw is much lower than it used to be, but I don't know if it's because I got Flash 11.5, or if it's the game). I reloaded the page and was back at Origin. [Edit: it was my computer. bluetooth driver was misbehaving, even though I wasn't using bluetooth, and when I turned on bluetooth audio, the game ran much faster.]

I'm not sure what to do with gridshards now. The towns look so empty!

[randomg]

New build is almost impossible to solo with the first couple tanks and no upgrades. I consider this excellent. Teamwork with even one partner is ever so helpful.

The (watchtowers?) are hellishly hard now with the lower tanks - they were pretty excited to go up against with just a silver or the other two early tanks. Lots of trying to high tail it out of there.

Suggested Tank or Usable item: A flying tank that has No-Clip, at the cost of lower defense maybe? Or a consumable for 5-10 seconds of 'oh shit' no-clip. Found myself getting hung up on tanks that I wasn't actually touching.

Pooper tank is a whole lot of fun - I used it for a solid 30 minutes today, and watching solid bomb hits never got old. I don't know how it performs against anything of worth, just the weakest buildings.

Balance issue: I don't know if it was just because I had a ton of shards and I was nervous, but I found myself picking a path through the weakest buildings. Everythign else terrified me. Maybe I'm just a wimp?

More coming later, but this build looks good. I'm excited to see what direction towns take from here on out.

Also, I didn't see it anywhere - what are victory points for at this point, if anything?

[linkshot]

Frog, ulo, and I found a couple drill tanks. The first was double herc and hurri, but then the second we used Herc/Valk/Pega and decimated it.

Game is definitely taking a step in an engaging and exciting direction. Solo is bleh but when this hits the masses, I doubt that's going to matter.

Herc is the best so far, IMO. Maybe Frog has some thoughts about Scorp!

[rob]

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

We are hoping to get logins implemented in build 30 (Dec 5 or so). No promises! Every time I promise something, it never, ever happens. Like loot sharing in RotMG and the Crusader class.

I was working today on a prototype for showing the conquered frontier on the zoomed-out map. I am extremely excited about this, but we'll have to see if others find it cool as well. To me there is something very compelling about expanding the zone of control.

In the build 31 timeframe we are hoping to let you spend VPs to buy some passive per-tank-class buffs, which we are currently calling "augments". These will be very cheap for little ones, but the price will skyrocket as you get into more powerful ones.

Rob

[fenrir]

Nov 21, 2012 22:13:56 GMT -5 rob said:

Every time I promise something, it never, ever happens. Like loot sharing in RotMG and the Crusader class.

Rob

Those changes all sound pretty cool, will be waiting in anticipation.

[linkshot]

The Drill Annex spawns all its minions on a set location. All minions are bound to the ground. This causes them to overlap and get stuck on each other.

Also, Hercules is fundamentally broken. Having a better Stabilization makes its shotgun less potent. Either make Stabilization do nothing for laid mines, or make it set them at a further distance. To explain, having higher Stabilization means it will set the mine earlier, causing less shots to hit the stationary enemies.

Enemies are dying clientside but not serverside. Thankfully, all firing is serverside, so this isn't as bad as it is in Realm.


The destination point when idle.
Can also still purchase Minor Repair Crystals. Will see if they actually carry over. EDIT: Obviously not, good!

[tarbomb]

A few more impressions:

The game has gotten a lot harder. The first three tanks are hideously crippled, and the game isn't really playable until you get a hurricane and then a hercules. It takes ~3-4 minutes just to kill ONE building. Right now this isn't a problem, but when XP level-up rates are raised 10x it's going to be a real pain to get started (perhaps the problem will get lessened when more people play and teamwork becomes more feasible, but I still think tanks 1-3 need a slight buff.) After hercules and avenger though (with a few prisms), the game really starts to get fun and engaging, but there's still a lot of time spent just waiting for the shields to regen (much like a melee in RotMG before the vit buff).

Hornet is ridiculously powerful. It almost matches an old spectre on resonator buffs, despite the lack of the frontal shield. (Edit: after playing with it a bit more, I don't think it's quite as powerful as an old tank on resonator buffs, but the cannon does do quite a lot of damage. I'm not sure whether it needs a nerf or not, but it is pushing it.)

I've been playing the two suport tanks for a bit in teams. Unfortunately, their healing ability isn't that great (they heal at around the rate that a tank in safety can heal itself) and their relative fragility makes it a dangerous proposition to heal others during a fight. I propose two buffs: 1) make their heal affect shields as well, and 2) buff up the shield a bit (mostly for the peacekeeper, which is really, really fragile).

Also, bug: if you kill an enemy cross building and leave the area (when the supertank is still alive), the supertank will have disappeared when you come back.

[tarbomb]

Another bug: client sometimes freezes on death.

This one happened right after I zoomed in after using the big map to TP to another player. The client zoomed in a bit more than I wanted (as it always does with flash projector) and the controls locked up. I could see the tank dying but the client froze immediately after I died, leading to this rather dramatic screenshot.

[ulosen]

A few ideas:

I'd love to see enemies drop random stacking bonus upgrades that are limited in time. (hp/dmg/range/cd/shield/spd)
- It would give an incentive to keep playing, because you are most efficient when you are "loaded".
- Players would have an incentive to fight weaker enemies before being able to crush the harder ones.
- After a certain amount of time or when you die, you lose the bonus again.
- It would help to scale the difficulty for different amounts of players if you make them drop "public", meaning that only one player can pick up each upgrade that drops. That way small groups would gain power proportionally much faster then larger ones. Even a solo player could be able to attack harder enemies after fighting a fair amount of weaker enemies
- players should split them up depending on the roles the players have in a group (dmg/tank/support)

Tiles with abilities
I kinda like amits idea of certain tiles having an ability function.
Maybe speed tiles connecting towns (would only make sense if teleport gets removed or only made available for high level towns) or defensive tiles surrounding them depending on the town level.
I could also imagine them being placed randomly over the map.

gamespeed
I'd prefer increasing the game speed, so players need to have a good reaction and making the game more skill based

I also thought a bit about robs question:
"Another major open (3-part) question: why level up one town and not another? Why explore in one direction and not another? What makes the world nonuniform, and thus interesting?

In my opinion leveling up towns has to give all players permanently and globally more power.
Each town has a different way to increase the power (for exaple one of the 6 prism bonus stats or the ability to craft certain things)
That way leveling some towns will be prefered over others, but the cost scaling and map goal still gives an incentive to level "worse" towns as well.

The difficulty and rewards (gridshards) from enemies should increase proportionally, the further you travel from the starting point.
- increase in power of the enemies is proportional to the increase of power players can gain by leveling the inward towns
- Upgrade costs of the different towns are proportional to the gridshard rewards of the particular region
- players would have to work their way outwards, leveling towns in the easier region in order to survive and progress to towns in the harder ones
- To reach the mapgoal you have to get to towns of the "outer rings"
- helps to scale difficulty for different amounts of players. Large groups would be able to challenge more distant enemies, giving them higher rewards and helping all to progress from the low level areas much faster, because the inner towns would be relatively cheap to upgrade compared to the rewards in the more difficult region

General:

(Probably not the direction you want to go)
- For the game having a long time incentive to play, I think there is no way around making each player having a personal permanent gain in power/abilities, the more time he invests into the game.
- An efficient playstyle makes some players progress faster then others
- The harder the fight, the higher the personal reward/progress
- The personal progress/rewards have to follow a variable ratio schedule (gambling/rng).
Imo it's the basic way of making games addictive. Simple conditioning and the amplifier "rewards/personal gain" is driven by the competition of "getting better then the others" within the boundaries of a coop game

I wouldnt see a long time incentive to play just to "win" a map together, that gets reset in order to start all over again.

thanks for reading

[linkshot]

Very quick suggestion for making navigation and townbuilding matter outside of map resources:

Roads can be built between Towns that are at least Level 1.
You cannot teleport to a Town until it is Level 10 (Origin is the exception).