Author Topic: .921 now out.  (Read 3373 times)

Offline x4000

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.921 now out.
« on: September 25, 2013, 12:19:19 pm »
Release notes: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Bionic_Dues_Alpha_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.921

Restart steam if you're in a hurry to get it to update.

Not a whole lot to add to this one beyond what the release notes say.  It's mostly a lot of polish.  We're hitting the point where that's just about all that's left, which is good!
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Offline Teal_Blue

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #1 on: September 25, 2013, 05:44:09 pm »
Very, very cool!!!  These are some nice changes. Thank You!!


Offline Misery

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #2 on: September 26, 2013, 01:58:31 am »
Good patch so far here.  Not running into any problems.


There is one other thing I wanted to bring up though, which is the manufacturing levels on Expert.  They might need toning down;  not so much because of difficulty, but because the combined ammo of every Exo all at once with very beefed up attack power cannot take down a group of the size I'm seeing.  It's not doable, not even close.  Heck, I just did a mission that was mostly Hunters, Avalanch, and SilenceBots, just a normal office mission, and I blew through half the ammo on my team JUST killing those.   And I didn't kill ALL of them, either;  I had a ShieldBot virused and tagging along for part of it, so I stopped about 13 or 15 of the enemy bots by simply by letting them run out of ammo and shut down.

Now granted, I've only found two out of four Bahamut stations, but the weapons added by those typically are very low-ammo types, so that isnt really going to help.

The current army looks like this:




The HideBots alone have 4000 HP each.  Blunderbots are about 12,000, DumbBots are about 2000.  The CommandBots have 4000 on their own, and of course are capable of boosting other things; I've found that commandbots can potentially upgrade 30-40 other bots in crowded areas, and those guys are going to be scattered among that final mission.

Now, things are a LITTLE skewed by the fact that I'd gone through most of this run with low-damage weapons, since the parts hadnt been balanced until I'd already hit the late game, so I couldnt do all that much damage in Tiger Den missions.   But this number would still be pretty darn high, particularly considering the nature of those missions.

In all honesty I should have brought this one up alot sooner, after the number of bots per mission, for normal missions, was dropped to balance with the shield and power increase as difficulty rises, as it makes sense that THESE numbers need to drop as well to account for this.



In other news, overall the whole game is going pretty well now.  I'll still advocate the idea of a difficulty higher than Expert, but I think Expert itself is just about where it needs to be.  Most players are going to find plenty of challenge here, and lots of good tactical stuffs to be done in it.  I've not lost Exos much myself, except in the Tiger's Den missions, did two of those, did some decent damage before going down considering my weaponry at the time, and had the occaisional death of the Science Exo by him essentially walking into chainsaws, or my Brawler when he dissolves himself, really must stop doing that. 


EDIT:  The number of bosses there isnt actually part of the problem.  They dont have particularly insane health, generally around 12,000 or so,  just very dangerous abilities instead, and there's assassinations yet to be done.  So that bit actually seems about right.


« Last Edit: September 26, 2013, 02:01:50 am by Misery »

Offline nas1m

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #3 on: September 26, 2013, 02:36:05 am »
Looks good so far!

Just FYI, for me, the single most annoying issue at the moment is the error thrown when placing a sentry.
Restarting the game everytime I forget I should not do that is no fun :-\ (not speaking about from not being able to use them).

I linked my (duplicate) Mantis entry to the one set to feedback. It contains another project file pulled using .919.
Maybe this helps. I definitely saw the issue using .921 and a .920 save yesterday...

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Offline PokerChen

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #4 on: September 26, 2013, 02:57:26 am »
Curious - did you guys attempt to estimate a balance ballpark according to the possible total amount of damage put out by exos -vs.- the total shield pool of the enemy forces? It's something that large weapon blast radii would throw out of the window ( until the bots fill the whole screen fairly evenly), but just curious.

I would imagine that on Expert and above it may actually be better gameplay to not have enough ammo in certain missions and the final mission, to make sure virusing and related tactics come into play.  Depends on the bots you get, I guess.


Offline Misery

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #5 on: September 26, 2013, 05:46:24 am »
Curious - did you guys attempt to estimate a balance ballpark according to the possible total amount of damage put out by exos -vs.- the total shield pool of the enemy forces? It's something that large weapon blast radii would throw out of the window ( until the bots fill the whole screen fairly evenly), but just curious.

I would imagine that on Expert and above it may actually be better gameplay to not have enough ammo in certain missions and the final mission, to make sure virusing and related tactics come into play.  Depends on the bots you get, I guess.

Well, even if you have more than enough ammo, typically you need viruses/mines/whatever on that difficulty as it is, even on normal missions.   Unless I get a bizarrely easy mission, like one with tons of cover and thunderbots everywhere, generally I'm using those sorts of things in every mission.   Which is, of course, a big part of why I like this mode.

Those things though wouldnt add enough to damage output to make the final fight work, though.  Typically they dont entirely take out bots on their own, you need to use them in conjunction with actual weapons to get the best results out of them.   Quite alot of depth in relation to all of this, really. 


The good thing is, right now, this is the only part of the game that seems to have any major issues at the moment.  At least, on this mode.  Most other things seem to be well-balanced.

Offline x4000

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #6 on: September 26, 2013, 09:16:35 am »
For the next version:

* The per-day manufacturing level increase is now 6 on hard and expert, rather than 7 and 8, so that it now matches normal difficulty.  Given the way the bot health increases on hard and expert, this was kind of double-dipping.

If we need to drop them all to 5, do let me know.

Regarding the balance of the damage output versus the enemies at the end... that's super complex because we don't know which exos you have, what parts you have, how you put your parts in, etc.
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Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #7 on: September 26, 2013, 11:51:41 am »
Regarding the balance of the damage output versus the enemies at the end... that's super complex because we don't know which exos you have, what parts you have, how you put your parts in, etc.
In theory we could do a baseline based on an Assault/Siege/Sniper/Science party with maybe +100% attack on each weapon, +150% ammo on each weapon, and +50% exo-wide attack.  Since that represents one full attack part and one full ammo part on each weapon, and about 1.7 full exo-wide-attack parts across the whole exo.  Max-level part stats, that is.

But as zharmad mentioned there's issues with the AOE weapons having a _much_ wider variance in how much damage they can do.
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Offline Cyborg

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #8 on: September 26, 2013, 06:47:26 pm »
I would like to see the end robots a randomized variance on a baseline. Sometimes, you might really roll complete crap and have to pull a rabbit out of a hat. The minimum should be based upon the level you are playing at.
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Offline Histidine

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #9 on: September 27, 2013, 01:11:49 am »
Expanding on what Misery said, the bot health multipliers on Hard/Expert combined with the exponential growth has resulted in some pretty OTT health gain in my game:


(covered bot is Cannonbot x 30)

At 8k health, my strongest single-hit weapons (Railgun and Plasma Cannon Shadow Torpedo Launcher) require just over three hits to kill one TreadBot. And there are four hundred of them, and they kill you in one hit! (For comparison, the DragonBots have 12k health and 245 damage; the ScorpionBots have 23k health and 1302 damage)

Perhaps the non-boss exponents need toning down a bit?
« Last Edit: September 27, 2013, 01:32:02 am by Histidine »

Offline Misery

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #10 on: September 27, 2013, 02:56:28 am »
How..... how in the world did there get to be 400 of one bot?!?

These bots really are pretty damn random in their strategies, arent they  :P



I'm starting a new game on Expert myself, so we'll see what happens with those numbers now changed up.

Offline x4000

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Re: .921 now out.
« Reply #11 on: September 27, 2013, 10:01:55 am »
Thanks!

* The number of bots that were getting created for the final mission were vaaastly too many, and have now been cut down quite a bit.
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