Battlegrounds

[Terraziel]

Rather than continue in an old patch thread i Shall bring the quote with me.

Has anyone else tried battleground missions this patch? Since my allies and base aren't dying in two shots any more, they seem more possible, but it also still seems like the difficulty is rather high. I've only found one of them so far; they don't like to seed for me. But from what I've seen, it seems like the towers get almost infinite range on their shots, which makes it pretty hard to complete because you're racing to bring them down before their endless barrages wipe out your base from the far end of the field.

I just had another go at battlegrounds....(this is a couple of continents in so all the enemies are unlocked)

on The Chosen One, they are still impossible.

on Hero I just managed to complete one, but
A) it took me 3 in-game days
B) this was with the boosted health orbs
and C) It was only really possible through "cheating", by which I mean every so often i used splashback to push a clockwork probe high in to the air, the probe then just sits motionless in the air, more importantly your allies group motionless beneath it so that you can get a good group going rather than just watching them run to their doom. (when you want your allies to attack you just destroy the probe)

One way or another it was not my idea of fun.  I mean as noted above, on my difficulty of choice they are impossible so I have been actively avoiding them, so I don't want to profess too much of an opinion, but the question is does anybody actually enjoy these at the moment?

[x4000]

The question of whether or not anyone enjoys them at the moment, balanced as they are, is kind of irrelevant.  Nobody here is saying that these are balanced properly.

However, with all the health changes that I had to make in the prior version just to get some things sane (especially for battlefields), I couldn't very well go around with changing them at the same time.  Too many things changing too fast, we wind up with a bigger mess.

So the question isn't "are these fun," it's "what is making them too hard, and what do you want to do about it?"  It sounds like the long range of the towers is the main issue, yes?  Or at least one of the core ones.

[keith.lamothe]

Did the range of the towers go up?  They started at like 8000, which is long but was never (iirc) causing "enemy tower is bombarding your base" situations.  Are all enemy towers actually getting into the act?  Or just the ones on the near part of the map?

Or is it just a side effect of the towers actually spawning in all the possible tower spots?

[x4000]

The range that the projectiles go has nothing to do with the range of the towers; that's part of the problem.  You reused some enemy shot types with very high TTLs and homing, is part of it.

[keith.lamothe]

The range that the projectiles go has nothing to do with the range of the towers; that's part of the problem.  You reused some enemy shot types with very high TTLs and homing, is part of it.

Ah, I made the mistake of coding without enough ranks in Knowledge (What On Earth I Am Talking About)

[x4000]

Har har.  But that's one of the main things we'll want to change up here, is cloning those shot types and dropping the TTL for those towers.

[Terraziel]

As noted the reason i framed it like that was because I gave up even attempting to play them, so it's making sure it is not just me.

We will leave chosen one aside for now. But on Hero the issue i found wasn't the long range of the towers, once you get the first couple down they can't threaten your base anymore, it was still the fact that you allies are insane, even with the increased health they got recently, they just run one at a time to their deaths. Even with my cheat above they still got slaughtered pretty easily (mostly due to wisps). and it is always to their deaths, i have my doubts that your allies can take on the enemy one on one, but that never happens it is usually one on 5.

I stand by a suggestion I put on mantis which was to make the allies spawn in groups, to quote from said mantis "Preferably the size of these groups would be weighted against the enemies you are facing, so against [just] skelebots it would still do one at a time, but as enemies get stronger the groups get bigger but further apart."

[BobTheJanitor]

I've found a couple of these since earlier, and I agree that they're still problematic. Toning down the long range bombardment would help (or let me upgrade my base with a siege weapon so I can bombard back ) but the allies are still pretty fragile. I've tried staying near my allies and killing things as a group, which I assume is the intended mechanic, but they all just die so quickly that this seems pointless. I've tried jumping ahead and trying to take out the towers singlehandedly, but the damage flying everywhere makes this near impossible. I think if the towers stop being able to shoot across the whole battlefield, and ally health gets some sort of buff then we could take a look and see how it feels again.

Allies going out in groups might help as well. But if they had a bit more longevity that problem would solve itself. I remember in previous versions, when they were able to tank shots for 5 or 10 seconds, they would all tend to run up to the first enemy and stop to exchange fire, naturally grouping. As long as you provided supporting fire, this worked pretty well. Usually around the time one ally died, another one would be running up from the backfield. So in that way you could slowly roll towards the enemy base. Now it's just run up, die, run up, die, etc.

[KDR_11k]

Allies are little more than living cover right now, something that absorbs a few hits while you do the real damage. It's just a big problem of these "action RTS" systems: How do you make allies useful without making the player useless? Being 2D really doesn't help here because one dimension is reserved for progressing towards the enemy so you have one dimension to move in. And since the player is the main factor it's really just slowly creeping forward, hoping to kill enemies faster than they respawn.

I think one major problem is that there's no real strategic decisions here: You just walk up and keep shooting. Battlefield sounds like something where you need to come up with strategies but instead it's just a prolonged head bashing. Balancing can't really change anything about that because you're still just shooting, maybe with more need to stay close to your allies and withdraw if they die but still just shooting. There are tons of games on the app store that have one dimensional RTS gameplay but even with manual unit purchasing these tend to be just as boring with only the added annoyance of an infinite upgrade grind (most likely to make you buy ingame currency with real money...). Swords & Soldiers is the only one I've seen get that right to any degree but that works by having a tech tree and stuff so you need to spend your money wisely (with the whole early-mid-lategame progression of regular RTSes, just simplified) and give spell support to your units to win. That's a whole lot of extra work to make one mission type more interesting.

Another game I keep talking about is Glory Days 2 (which is based on Rescue Raiders), in that you have an actual avatar in the form of a fighter plane or gunship and use your bombs and missiles to destroy enemy ground targets (which would otherwise be roughly evenly matched with your forces) while fighting off enemy "players" trying to do the same to your troops. So you're in a direct fight against a small number of equally capable opponents while blasting weak NPCs (some of which have weak attacks that they fire at you) below you. Only your ground troops can capture the enemy base though so you need to get them through. Unlike, say, DOTA there's no level progression to anything.

While I do think that having an intelligent enemy that you're fighting yourself would fit fairly well into the framework there's the issue that the "creeps" would run into you since you're not an airplane and everything happens on a side view. Also the airplane-supporting-troops games tend to give you limited supplies so you can't just bomb away as long as you want, you need to return to the base to rearm. On the other hand you can fly deep into enemy territory with only a bit of weak AA as an added obstacle so the frontline isn't a hard obstacle for you.

[x4000]

For the record: Keith and I, from the start, were talking about adding a lot more strategic options to the battlefields if people found them interesting.  But the exact mechanics of that are tricky, because we don't want to force you to pause all the time, or get shot while making decisions, or lose ground in the battle because you were making strategic decisions.  Etc.  So we pretty much tossed that stuff to post-1.0.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, basically my pattern was Swords and Soldiers and maybe even a dose of DotA, but just wasn't time, and a lot of other related stuff has changed since then too that probably would have made the un-breaking process even more complex if we'd had a more fleshed out battlefield mission.

[Terraziel]

I had consciously avoided commenting on the need to expand them to make the more interesting but....

The simplest way I can think of, even if it is only a stopgap solution, is to give the player a bunch of random temporary items in the prep area of the mission, say "summon urban crawler" scrolls,"summon tower" scrolls, some scrolls that buff your troops, or what have you. This gives you strategic impact without any extra interfaces or being too complicated from the players perspective.

By putting them before you actually enter the battleground it gives you time to put the items in accessible locations in your ability bar, and lets you look at your options.

Actually using them, well that's the players problem but in theory (obviously this doesn't stand now) your allies should be able to hold ground for a few seconds whilst you decide what to do.

[BobTheJanitor]

If a mechanic could be introduced for making items that disappear as soon as you leave a given area, whether they be scrolls or enchants or even spells, I think the entire mission system could be blown wide open. But that's post-1.0 thinking again, I'm sure.

[Martyn van Buren]

Would it be simple to code in some sort of basic control for how far your allies will advance?  I'm imagining a series of gates on the tower sites, which have to be activated for allied creatures to move past them.  They should probably be on by default, and turning one on should automatically turn on all those behind it --- anyway what I'm thinking you could do is pick a hill to hold until you can build up enough allies to move forward, making them less useless and giving the player at least a small strategic decision point, at least as a quick fix.

[x4000]

Technically speaking, either of those would be pretty straightforward, yeah.  Instead of gates you activate, it could also be a spell that you use that says "don't advance past this point" and basically leaves a ball-of-light-like marker.  And then all the other such markers in that chunk disappear at that time.  Some basic ally commands would definitely be possible using that, and then there would be no need for batching of allies -- part of the strategy would be to batch them yourself, and then use them to overwhelm one tower at a time.