AVWW Beta 0.563 "Migratory Battlefields" Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2012/01/avww-beta-0563-migratory-battlefields.html

This one is one that I think players will find very exciting.  It's not as massive as the prior one, but it does include a number of key fixes and two major new features that have been asked-for.

The first is... a new mission type!  At long last.  This one is a "battlefield" sort of mission, and plays out with you and your army of spawned minions fighting a horde of enemy minions.  The battles are pretty pitched, and as you unlock more enemy types they get quite a bit trickier.  See the release notes for details.

The Removal Of Monster Spawners
The second major new thing in this release is actually two features: the removal of monster nests and the addition of migratory patterns for monsters.  Monster nests have bugged a lot of people for a while, and the general consensus among players was that they were fun in boss rooms but not much of anywhere else.

So there's a completely new way of spawning enemies anywhere except for boss rooms, which matches more the experience that folks were looking for.  There are a few things we still need to do there, mainly handle monsters drowning properly again (rather than trying to warp out to monster spawners that no longer exist), and also to make it so that monsters don't jump off of cliffs so readily.

Monster Migrations
In terms of the migratory patterns, the idea is that as the tier of enemy forces goes up, the monsters start spreading out of their regions that they normally would be in.  This is something I've wanted to do for a long time, because the idea of (say) the dinosaurs escaping the lava flats over time and running amuck elsewhere in the world is really appealing to me (and no, there's no lysine contingency).

Until all the recent work with the per-continent tiers, I never had a way to handle this sort of thing, but now we have monsters migrating away.  That adds a lot of considerations to the world map that weren't there before, because now monsters from a harder region type will eventually migrate into "easier" region types that are nearby.

Having one chunk hold monster types that normally wouldn't ever be seen together (robots and dinosaurs, hey) also really allows us to hit a high multiplicative complexity a lot sooner.  That was something that I've always liked about AI War -- the combination of the various ship types leads to unexpected results.  Having the segregation of not only 9 time periods in AVWW, but also indoor/outdoor/underground monsters, and region-type-specific monsters, really cuts down on how much we're able to have that happen.

We'd have to have something like 36x as much content as AI War in order to get the same amount of combinations of enemy types, and as more region types are added that would only get worse.  We want to have a lot of content anyway, but we also want to make strong use of every bit that we add.  The migratory patterns really pull that off in an interesting way, I think -- they avoid the other end of the spectrum, where everything is too homogeneous because there's always all the combinations everywhere.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

[BobTheJanitor]

Question before I mantis something, since I've been lax about trying out each update and I'm not sure if this is working as intended or not. Is the Ilari healing in your home settlement supposed to take you to your max buffed health, or just to your max base health? When I run past the stone after taking some damage, it gives me the 'gift of healing' message, but my HP isn't actually going up. However, I am buffed to 700something percent of my base health. So I'm not sure if it's a bug or if they just won't heal you after you've health buffed. Actually in that case it probably shouldn't try to heal at all to avoid confusion. So either way, it's probably not quite working right.

[Toll]

Max base health only. It heals you up to 100%, never above it.

EDIT: Oh, and I haven't had the time to test this exploit, and I'm about to head off to bed, so if someone else can confirm my suspicions that'd be awesome:

I suspect that, as long as your minions can hold their line relatively well on their own, you could simply use wooden platforms to (relatively safely) get to the other side of the battlefield. And if they don't spawn enough enemies, you might not even need that; just use a combination of Storm Dash and Ride the Lightning to jump over the heads of your enemies in one massive bound. Should get you into fighting distance of their base in a real hurry. Not knowing how exactly the battles play out, I can't say if you'd be able to destroy it by doing that, but it might be worth a shot.

[BobTheJanitor]

Ah, then it shouldn't keep spamming the 'I'm healing you' noise and effect and so on. I'll go post it.

[BobJustBob]

EDIT: Oh, and I haven't had the time to test this exploit, and I'm about to head off to bed, so if someone else can confirm my suspicions that'd be awesome:

I suspect that, as long as your minions can hold their line relatively well on their own, you could simply use wooden platforms to (relatively safely) get to the other side of the battlefield. And if they don't spawn enough enemies, you might not even need that; just use a combination of Storm Dash and Ride the Lightning to jump over the heads of your enemies in one massive bound. Should get you into fighting distance of their base in a real hurry. Not knowing how exactly the battles play out, I can't say if you'd be able to destroy it by doing that, but it might be worth a shot.

I was able to transform into a bat, fly to the back of the stage, transform back, and take out the enemy base while my allies held the line. I caught some potshots from the sniper bots in the back but they moved away from me as the line shifted. It might be better if the enemies would consider protecting their base a higher priority than pushing forward, but that could also be exploited by directly attacking the base just to lure enemies away from the front line to quickly gain some ground. Maybe the bases could have some stationary defenses that you'd really need to attack as a group to take down. I enjoy this type of mission and hope a way can be found to keep it interesting.

Speaking of which, I had a question about the mission types. The dev notes imply that this type of mission will only ever show up on wind shelter and NPC rescue missions. Is that the plan going forward, to tie mission types to specific rewards? I'd probably rather have those decoupled so that I could choose from the available missions based on the types I enjoy the most. I'd still have to do non-favorite missions if the reward was something I really needed and wasn't available anywhere else, so the risk/reward aspect would be preserved, but it might annoy me to be forced into missions I dislike to progress the game. Though maybe it won't be a major issue once more mission types are in the game. I'm just sick of boss towers, you know?

[Coppermantis]

I haven't encountered one of the new missions yet, but they sound awesome.

I'm noticing I do much less damage than I used to. I'm not completely understanding  the Tier system, so should my formerly lvl. III spells be Tier III? They're currently Tier I.

[BobTheJanitor]

Hey, I just noticed that the overlords are now 'him' and 'her' instead of 'they'. My grammar OCD thanks you very much! I think I reported that months ago. 

[Coppermantis]

Indeed. When I asked the reason is that it was in the neuter, not the plural but that's still incorrect grammar.

[keith.lamothe]

Indeed. When I asked the reason is that it was in the neuter, not the plural but that's still incorrect grammar.

I know "they" is not the 3rd person singular but I use it that way because I consider that abuse less-bad than writing two words separated by a slash ("he/she", etc) or writing "it" when referring to a person who is not actually gender-less.

[BobTheJanitor]

I know "they" is not the 3rd person singular but I use it that way because I consider that abuse less-bad than writing two words separated by a slash ("he/she", etc) or writing "it" when referring to a person who is not actually gender-less.

Well, 'it' could work for the robo-lords. But yeah, the singular 'they' just grates on me for some reason. Probably not a big deal for most people, but still thanks for fixing it.

Completely unrelated question: Was there not a plan at one point for a diving suit to allow ocean exploration? I messed around in the oceans a bit with the old health system, when I could constantly slam healing potions to allow for it. But now that deep sea diving is going to mean acid water constantly chipping away at my buffed health total until I lose it completely, it seems that the price of diving is too high.

[x4000]

I was able to transform into a bat, fly to the back of the stage, transform back, and take out the enemy base while my allies held the line. I caught some potshots from the sniper bots in the back but they moved away from me as the line shifted. It might be better if the enemies would consider protecting their base a higher priority than pushing forward, but that could also be exploited by directly attacking the base just to lure enemies away from the front line to quickly gain some ground. Maybe the bases could have some stationary defenses that you'd really need to attack as a group to take down. I enjoy this type of mission and hope a way can be found to keep it interesting.

Part of it will probably be for the enemies to turn around and come back after you if you are behind them, I think.  I'll start with that one tweak to the AI logic, and we'll see what that does.

Speaking of which, I had a question about the mission types. The dev notes imply that this type of mission will only ever show up on wind shelter and NPC rescue missions. Is that the plan going forward, to tie mission types to specific rewards? I'd probably rather have those decoupled so that I could choose from the available missions based on the types I enjoy the most. I'd still have to do non-favorite missions if the reward was something I really needed and wasn't available anywhere else, so the risk/reward aspect would be preserved, but it might annoy me to be forced into missions I dislike to progress the game. Though maybe it won't be a major issue once more mission types are in the game. I'm just sick of boss towers, you know?

Making the mission structure and the mission reward make sense together is something that requires us to keep those at least loosely coupled.  THAT said, every mission gives you some rare commodities after completion (assuming any rare commodities are unlocked and available at your tier at all), and every mission will also be giving you some guardian powers once those are in (hopefully later today).  So in terms of those two core things, any mission can get you them.

When it comes to many other specialized missions that we've planned, some of those would have specialized rewards.  But those would also be more rare and more to the side.  For most of the more central stuff, like wind shelters or NPC rescue, etc, there's going to be a lot of mission variants for them.  These each require unique icon art and flavor text anyhow, so that you can tell both what the mission is and what it's reward is when looking at it on the map, so again hence the tighter coupling.

Bottom line, we understand that anyone who has been playing the game much up to this point has probably seen enough rare commodity towers that they literally never want to have to play one again if they don't have to.  And that's something we want to make possible, through secret missions and otherwise -- in general, if someone hates a given mission type, the goal is that they never HAVE to do it.  Or at least only once or twice at most, if they are being a completionist about unlockables and such.

I'm noticing I do much less damage than I used to. I'm not completely understanding  the Tier system, so should my formerly lvl. III spells be Tier III? They're currently Tier I.

Wow, you updated from waay back, it looks like.  You're not doing less damage, the monsters have more health.  The old spells-with-levels system was removed in December or so, and spells all went level-less.  The new tiers system for spells really bears no relation, and everything starts out at tier 1 (enemies, your spells, etc).  But in general, the days of hitting enemies just once and they pop like a bubble are behind us; it's kind of hard to have any meaningful combat when everything is one hit kills; it's just a reflexes game then.

[freeformschooler]

Now that combat is much more interesting, it's brought to the table a different problem: Why don't we have the ability to duck? Is there a major design reason for this? I've found that, for example, fighting espers in close quarters is maddening because I have to retreat to a more open space after getting a shot in every few seconds. Ducking could encourage more dodging and finesse in combat.

[keith.lamothe]

Now that combat is much more interesting, it's brought to the table a more interesting problem: Why don't we have the ability to duck? Is there a major design reason for this? I've found that, for example, fighting espers in close quarters is maddening because I have to retreat to a more open space after getting a shot in every few seconds. Ducking could encourage more dodging and finesse in combat.

Have you tried the miniature spell?  Double-tapping down will trigger it.

[x4000]

Right -- the miniature spell is basically ducking.

[freeformschooler]

Ah, thank you. While it's not quite the same, it's certain useful.

Since I'm full of questions today, I'll also ask: If we have no T2 missions listed in an era where we could break a vase to get clay, do more pop up after completing other T2 missions or is that what secret missions are for?