Build 34

[rob]

Surprise! It's a special Friday build!

Jetbolt will be taking it easy for the next 10 days or so; this build will be the last until 2013. Changes include:

* Add WASD controls as synonyms for arrow keys
* Add QE for zoom control
* Move power crystals to X, C, V; make K be key for changing 'kontrol' scheme
* Take prisms into account when capping max keyboard move speed
* Buff Trailblazer's shields, speed, hitpoints (this may be too much)
* Award 50k gridshards for discovering a town (this may be too much)
* Award 1K gridshards for clearing a blue dot
* Award 5K gridshards for connecting a town
* Make Alpha Proc aux gun more visible

The game should now be mostly playable with left hand on keyboard only. You'll still need the mouse to teleport or switch tanks, unless you like to type "/tele" a lot.

I want to encourage exploration. Perhaps there should be an award for putting red dots on the map?

Thanks very much for playing. Your help is invaluable.

Rob

[frogboffin]

Excellent, wasd movement is so much more comfortable!

What do people think of a button which snaps between two zoom levels, instead of having to scroll/wait for the zoom to get to a certain level? The main idea is to speed up teleporting to people in the game, currently, I find having to zoom out, teleport, then zoom in quite long for just a teleport. Maybe its just me.

Rewarding exploration is great, perhaps a reward for uncovering 50 or something red dots might be suitable.

[hypevosa]

As for what you did with the trailblazer, it certainly made it much more useful for exploration, however, the thing can tank like a mofo now which is what I thought you wanted to avoid?

I would strongly suggest if you want to avoid all combat uses for the trailblazer tank that you give it a camouflage function:

When the tank takes health damage it becomes invisible for 3 seconds. This ability has a cooldown timer of 15 seconds. This means that you don't have a super damage soaking tank like now with that beastly undershield, but it can still go on long expeditions if the pilot makes use of watch towers to let their shields go back up after they've fallen.

I think 50k for each city found is actually quite acceptable since it gives very good incentive to actually find towns, something very helpful to other players early on. Finding towns is only really terribly common early on in the game anyways.

[sven]

With every death I make, I couldn't help but to exploit the minions behavior... (Another unhealthy farming habit.) To lure them out and prey them with the Phantom. Just so I can proceed with the needed amount of Prisms upgrades.

Amazingly, Phantom are great minion (speaking of spawning enemies) disposers in a matter of couple of seconds depending on shield's level. Whether it's the same league with the previous Hurricane functions or Hornets. I can't possibly get by without them.

[hypevosa]

I think it's natural when you're playing alone most of the time to exploit stupid minion behavior.

I myself use the scorpion for everything - no works as well as it does for me.

[remm]

Funny, I switch between the Spectre, Viking and Avenger.
The Spectre is a safe tank for me, and I can count the number of shots that I need to get in to kill things. Thanks to the restricted aim on it, I can orient myself to aim at a building that might not necessarily be the closest thing to me.
The Viking is just strong and fast.
The Avenger is the best tank for getting rid of the starry building that's annoying as fuck. Because the minions of it don't hang around the building itself, you can just drive around next to it, and the slow rotation of your main cannon means that you'll be firing at the building there. You can go straight in solo, destroy it easily, and not have to wait for a shield regen.

I'd also like to say that I had fun clearing to one of the recently explored towns. My path does a dogleg around a Drill, I gained lots of shards, and had a unique situation to remove a super tank from the town spot. I had to destroy some of the surrounding enemy things because they were interfering with me destroying the Cross Building, and with everything distracting my fire, I couldn't get enough damage to overcome its healing.
Good work.

[hypevosa]

I've added wildfire and pathfinder to my repetroir - if it's close range, nothing kills and defends as well as the wildfire, and if it's long range nothing can whittle away like the scorpion. The hornet due to its lack of forward shielding is entirely useless by comparison to even the spectre, I'd suggest having the laser blast in straight lines and hit every target on the line to make it worth the effort.

Pathfinder is obviously good for finding cities, I think I've found 4 on the current map.

[sven]

I'm experiencing a slight lag when I weakened both Watchtowers who are close to each other by below 500 HP. Teleporting to nearest town may not be a guaranteed safe since with this sort of lag causes a delay between both sides to a point in the zone of hazardous. It looks like the tank did teleport safely but the portion where it's stuck on before teleport still being dealt with dmg in the war zone.

The Gridtowers isn't much fun as I thought out to be, since they discriminate tanks with limited projectiles due to being overly focused on flock gridfighters. The tanks that can do spread dmg will be much effective against the core. Hmm, the gridtowers have a bit more Hp than they should have since battling them take while either solo or duo. The rewards are sweet but battle methods are questionable.

Is there percentage of random spawn on minions or they all have a chance to appear random equally all together? Having certain enemies spawn side by side can be a hassle. (Watchtowers, Gridtowers, Drills?)
_________________________________________________________________________

While the project still remain at an early stage, I felt the impression of a unique method of grinding fun from the expected actions through the game-play. I apologize if this statement appears to be silly. In some form, I hope for a freebie space, not a town, but a pillar or a tree of the sort spawn at a low rate. If the path is connected, the player will gain more points than the conquered area also the structure itself lights up. It can serve the purpose of momentarily safe point, a substitute for a checkpoint. Anyways-

Happy New Year's!!!

[tarbomb]

First post in 2013!

After using the WASD keys for a while, I feel that they're usable but there's some room for improvement. My main gripe is that there's only one acceleration possible, and it doesn't seem to be as high as the acceleration you can reach using the mouse. Admittedly boosting the acceleration given to w/s might make the tank a little wild to control, so perhaps adding some speed/acceleration controls (number keys, perhaps) might add some versatility to the keyboard control scheme. Turning and backing up is greatly improved.

The new enemies seem pretty well balanced.

After playing with augments for a bit, and investing about half my VP into one tank (viking), I feel that the cost of augments spikes far too quickly. Above around 4% the cost of upgrading anything becomes prohibitive (I've accumulated around 600-700 gridshards in a few months of playing), and 4% is imperceptible, especially next to 20% prism boosts. Augment costs should increase at a lower rate, perhaps linearly, with cost being (b+nm for the nth upgrade of some stat, with b being base cost and m being multiplier - values that would probably be different for each stat.)

The gridshard rewards seem pretty well balanced, but interface-wise having a notification pop up right in front of my face every time I kill something is a distracting annoyance. Notifications should be shown at and accumulate (a la Android/iOS-style notification center).

Also on the interface: clicking on one of the control buttons (tanks, augments, or worst of all crystals in a combat situation) and missing is very easy to do, and can send the tank in a perilous direction. How about a small zone around the buttons where clicking does nothing, or better yet, moving all the interactive interface to a side pane distinct from the playing (and click-to-control) area?

[sven]

Death isn't permanent enough... Aside from the fair level loss of boost.

• Upon death, lenses should lost as well par with the Gridshards.
  
• Same with Power Crystals, consequences for not being used. (Splinters hold no purpose on next game.)
  

Well death isn't the attention I wanted to draw, is there choice on creating immediate gain of gridshard on the lenses roulette. Like if one were to be impatient of gaining 5 lenses but hold a few, they can press of a button to gain amount of gridshards instantly although it's not as effective. (Can be 1-4 of any kind.)

As for the blue dots, it will be great to take advantage by having them boost the players tank by x2 the speed of acceleration, while being on area of space. It would improve the action of heading towards wilderness.

The mouse controls are overly comfortable, ever since the panic button was added I only thought that I have to rely of the "z" key to safety. Until the current build, all the discomfort sort of went away when I shift to press the panic by mouse. I can accept death but not as it is in terms of sacrificial loss, but the loss of buff.

[tarbomb]

A few more thoughts, this time on death, since I just died for the first time since build 32.

Especially with the recent changes, death is a huge blow. High-level prisms (and particularly pulchs) are particularly hard to find now that watchtowers, supertanks, and drill stations are less common (the other enemies, including the particularly powerful extraction tower (which is a bit too powerful for the relatively small loot it drops - it's easily more powerful than a watchtower), have made pulch-dropping enemies (which don't even have a guaranteed pulch drop) particularly hard to find). In a few hours of playing in a team with Stupidity and lather Jufda, I found two pulchs. That means it would take ~20 hours of playing to restore a full set.

I would prefer to see one prism go away completely instead of each prism de-leveling, since de-leveling all prisms means that I have to find twelve prisms to rebuild rather than one. An excessively severe death penalty like the current one penalizes using "fun" playstyles - in order to avoid risking death, for instance, I've pretty much done no scouting since build 32.

Also, the method I died raises an issue with the control scheme: I died hitting Z repeatedly, but since I was in chat mode nothing happened other than my chat box filling with Z's. I would really like to be able to remap the safety key to something that would still function in chat mode - ESC would be my personal choice.

[rob]

Tarbomb,

I added escape as a synonym for Z. It should be available in the build 35.

Thanks for the other feedback too.

Rob

[sven]

Passing through boundaries appears to be a breeze. The only tool I used to get through was the usage of Performance Stats from the top left corner of the screen. Very adjustable to FPS depending on the location of clicking within the box of performance. Clicking the top area increases fps, where the lower decreases. Setting it below 10 FPS is where the tank can gain enough to have time to recover shield and high chance of evading damages. After finish recovery, I increase the fps just by a couple clicks away to commence to with the exploration.

[Jufda]

Today my client freezed partially. The healing (gems?) disappeared and the thunderbolt looking items too (later, does't seem to be in screecshot). Also when i killed enemy, it turned invisible and i continued to shoot it. None of the enemies shot back at me. After restarting all the items came back and there were a few more parts of drill left that seemed to be left while it was frozen.

Game seems to be down now. Screen just went black and when I restarted browser and press play, it goes black again.

Thunderbolts seems to have reseted to 0, but that is due to server restart? Seems to be bug.

Frozen partially
After restarting