Author Topic: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!  (Read 10137 times)

Offline Gemzo

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #15 on: December 19, 2012, 03:01:46 am »
So uh +damage% perks do nothing. Just FYI.

Edit: Also you can hack the same SRF multiple times. But "winning" doesn't give you the feat after the first.
« Last Edit: December 19, 2012, 03:46:51 am by Gemzo »

Offline Misery

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #16 on: December 19, 2012, 04:03:25 am »
So uh +damage% perks do nothing. Just FYI.

Edit: Also you can hack the same SRF multiple times. But "winning" doesn't give you the feat after the first.


I can confirm this one, the perks arent doing their jobs!   Does indeed seem to be all of the damage type perks.


On another note, I beat the Research Facility from Hell, and I get...... POWERSLIDE?!?!?  I thought it was going to be a double jump or something!   Its out of the way though at least.... facilities AFTER that shouldnt have the old, looooooooong generation anymore, so a big yay to that one!

I defeated the boss that was in the magma room as well, but..... I really did have to jump at him and erase him with the overpowered Ocean Spray to win;  it took all of 2-3 seconds, and he STILL somehow managed to break half of the crates in the room!

Also, on the note of that boss, before I forget to mention it:  Multiple times, he'd spawn IN the magma (under the boxes), and the final time, he actually spawned in a wall (and sorta popped out of it after 10 seconds or so, I didn't try attacking until then)

Offline Gemzo

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #17 on: December 19, 2012, 04:23:56 am »
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.

Offline Teal_Blue

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #18 on: December 19, 2012, 04:44:05 am »
Started out in over my head, due to well... not knowing the game and then evened out a bit and haven't been dying as much, i haven't gotten to the part where the speed and armor and ammo of the enemy is increasing yet, but guess i will eventually, anyway, just wanted to mention that i love the part where you go into a tile and there is a bit of dialog, it really is nice!  :)

And the art for all the different types is really nice too! I am really, really liking this game, actually more than the first game, don't get me wrong, i really like the first game a lot, but this one is really really nicer, the art and the new music, tell Pablo, I am LOVING his music!  :)   And the enemies seem just right in the levels and the bosses, well, you know the level up bosses seem a bit hard, but usually there is a method that some times takes me several tries to figure out, and then i can get passed them.  :)  One of them got me to 0.1 health and i was backed into a corner, but because i was just out of his reach i stayed alive, all the way to getting him instead of me, which was very unexpected, but way cool to have happen.  :) 

Anyway, I am having a blast and just wanted to let everyone know this is a very cool game! 

-T



Offline khadgar

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #19 on: December 19, 2012, 05:17:54 am »
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.

Offline Misery

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #20 on: December 19, 2012, 05:29:45 am »
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.

Offline tigersfan

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #21 on: December 19, 2012, 07:36:30 am »
c4sc4 - Thanks, that's a huge help.

Nanashi - c4sc4 is right, that's a bug, not a double jump slice. I've fixed that one for the next version. Sorry about that.

Gemzo and Khadgar - What difficulty level are you guys playing on?

Offline MouldyK

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #22 on: December 19, 2012, 08:42:09 am »


I'll just leave this here. :3

Hint: It's the red text saying it can't find the directory.
« Last Edit: December 19, 2012, 08:52:14 am by MouldyK »

Offline madcow

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #23 on: December 19, 2012, 09:03:10 am »
I was playing a new world and the very first level up windmill required a double jump to progress in. Not sure if that was intended or not in some of the windmill levels. Screenshot attached. Is there a way to tell what the actual slice is?


Offline tigersfan

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #24 on: December 19, 2012, 09:09:25 am »
Not for you, but I can. Would you please send me the world file with you in that room? Thanks!

Offline madcow

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #25 on: December 19, 2012, 09:26:07 am »
Sent!

Offline madcow

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #26 on: December 19, 2012, 09:36:53 am »
Sorry about the double post, but it might be a good idea to put a link on the title page to the arcen forums (or an email addy if that's preferred) for people to send beta feedback once it hits open beta.

Offline Neko_Baron

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #27 on: December 19, 2012, 10:00:21 am »
I'm also feeling pretty burnt out on playing and making a new world every patch to evaluate the difficulty levels, its great the games getting patched quickly but at the same time it feels like there's a huge rush.

Biggest issue is knowing if any bugs we report are "being delt with"/"not a bug"/"already fixed but not shown in change log yet", obviously its always the same issue with testing if someone doesn't have the time to collaborate all this but I get the feeling a lot of us tend to report the same issues.

Arcen want to consider a separate AVWW2 sub forum yet? at least then people with multiple issues could post all the data together in one place plus suggestions can be discussed openly, I know I suggested survivors being able to warp recently and it was nice to see it added though I'm curious if anyone else was thinking of it too previously. Plus I don't feel larger suggestions belong in just emails with it being a community driven game.

Offline madcow

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #28 on: December 19, 2012, 10:29:45 am »
I just reread up through some of the previous posts and one I had been thinking myself that would be a great is the add caliber to spells perk. I would also add a perk for increased particle speed, cooldown reduction, and attack range (this would obviously only impact bolt/particle type attacks and not things like whips or touch spells.)
« Last Edit: December 19, 2012, 10:32:30 am by madcow »

Offline tigersfan

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Re: Valley 2 alpha v0.704 released!
« Reply #29 on: December 19, 2012, 10:32:47 am »
There is a bit of a rush, we really want to hit beta this week (and we will).

As for feedback, I'll be creating a Mantis section for Valley 2 really soon (maybe today).

As for responses to the e-mails. Sorry. To be honest, we've gotten a TON of e-mailed feedback, but, there is really only one person (me) reading them directly. I can assure you, I've read each and every word for each and every e-mail that has come in, but, as I said in the instructions, I just don't have time to respond to every one of the (probably hundreds of) e-mails that we've gotten.
And yes, some of you do report the same issues, but, this is actually ok. It gives us an idea of how frequent an issue is coming up, and helps us prioritize what to do next.

As for a forum, I'm not sure that's necessary yet. If folks aren't spending a lot of time talking about the first game, I don't see why we can't use this one for both games right now.

 

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