So... Enemy damage scales up too quickly now. I can't come up with a good argument behind this but by turn 38 we are just getting killed way too fast. Maybe part of it is that 3 of our level up towers are sealed by "you don't have miniaturize" but even 2 more max HP would just be 1 more zepplin spikeball. Maybe the difficulty is half from tier 2/3 having many homing ammo spells (which don't work in MP still). Even if the +damage perks worked they aren't really needed because we 1-2 shot enemies anyway.
My personal suggestion is to tone down the perk bonus numbers to more reasonable numbers. Rather than have them compete with HP, just make levels add HP (every level or every other level, I dunno). Then you can throw in interesting things like "+5 secondary caliber" or "-1 ammo cost" to fill in for the slots the HP perks used to take up.
I dunno, it seems mostly fine to me.
Though, the level-up towers, with their extremely random placement, probably shouldnt really be "gated" like that (requiring specific feats).... since you really do NEED them. Though, I havent actually run into any such towers yet myself. Unless their generation onto the worldmap can somehow be done a bit better; like, only towers that are really far from the overlord's castle would ever be gated, since as you get further and further away from it, theoretically your power is increasing and you're gaining feats as you do so.
As the perks go, the values on them are pretty much fine now.... too much lower than that, and they would become not worth it, or just outright trivial/useless. A 50% power boost seems to work out pretty well. Particularly considering the effort you have to go through to get these, with the towers AND all the caves, as well as the constantly increasing difficulty & enemy power level, the perks really need to have alot of "impact" to work out. Yet none of them are so incredibly strong that they'll just let you annihilate everything.
I will say though, perks that add caliber to spells would be nice! Though, they should be pretty rare, because that could be a very strong effect depending on how it's used. Might also be hard to balance though..... a value of +5 would probably not be worth it at all, but +20 might be too much.
I do like the perk system in general though, when it's working properly.
Even with the big damage bonus numbers of perks, I now feel even MORE compelled to choose HP perks over damage bonuses, given the increased damage of enemies. In a mutual arms race between myself and the monsters, the monsters will win every time because there are more on them. On the most extreme case, a la Journey to Perfection, where everybody kills everybody in one hit, the monsters have a huge advantage. Only 1 of them needs to hit the player, the player needs to hit all of them. We were on turn 40 or so, and it already felt like I was dying in 2 or 3 hits. By turn 60 or 70 I think it might be a case of one-hit kills. All the damage in the world won't help me compensate with one-hit kills.
Not sure what the best compromise between player damage, player hp, and monster damage is, but the current settings still need a smidge of tweaking to feel right.
One of the features carried over from AVWW1 that doesn't seem to fit in is monsters shooting multiple shots as the game goes on. It's cool and all, but having a floating zeppelin that shoots 2 or 3 shots at once every second is ridiculous. It's hard enough to dodge one shot in Valley2, but three or more? Yikes. So you're GOING to get hit, and when you do, you die pretty fast due to the aforementioned scaling. Anyway, just a thought, I'm sure enemies with multi-shots can be worked in beyond just a global "2x shot mode activated" thing going on.
One question I have is, are enemies going to be assigned an attack pattern rather than their current AI? So, instead of [shoot every 1 secondss], will some of them be [shoot three times, wait 5 seconds, shoot three times], or whatnot? As of right now, it's easy to feel "stuck" pinned down behind a wall, with a bunch of land-squids or swamp-demons or hell-zeppelins shooting at you nonstop, with no sense of a "break" coming, never feeling like there is a "good" time to leap out and make your stand. I would really like to see these kinds of pauses put into enemy attack cycles, but I understand if it's too difficult to come with with good patterns that don't make the enemies too easy.
Hmm, I'm curious, what difficulty are you playing on? I'm on "skilled", for the combat difficulty, and I'm not dying in 2-3 hits.... Heck, I only turn on the perks for the full 7 hearts that I can currently have if I'm going into a research facility or something like that.... more often than not, I've got about 4 or 5 hearts, and then damage boosts, and Risktaker is often on. I'm on turn 37 in my current game.
As the enemy patterns go.... that's probably alot harder to balance. I think most of them are too easy, to be honest.... even the squid things dont give me much trouble, and the zeppelins rarely get a chance to fire. I'll probably jump the difficulty up in my next run, and see how that is.
