Well, many bugs found and reported today. The EMPBots are still glitchy as heck. Their effect still locks down enemy bots as it seems to strip all the ammo from them.
Also, Thunderbots. I've killed entire missions by just getting in sensor range and hitting the whistle when it's a mission fulla cover objects, and then just watching them go berserk and explode everything and everyone. These guys need therapy or something, I keep wondering just what the poor, 11-HP cover objects did to them to deserve the Super Nuke Beam.
And a tip to everyone: That bot that can restore it's shields by sucking power out of allied bots? Yeah.... dont give it a virus. Just dont.
Overall, it goes well. Items seem to scale up decently enough, the stats are pretty balanced now it seems, though I'm noticing one thing with the shop, which is that the amount you get back when you sell something is very close to the amount that you can buy it for; if you have just a couple of purples or a small number of blues that you can sell.... and you almost always will.... you'll have ALOT of money really fast. It hasnt hit the point that alot of games do where the money just stops mattering, but it's getting pretty close. It was more interesting when you had to save up over the course of a couple of missions.
It's hard to fully judge the difficulty since the bots still dont "wake up" properly when things are happening near them (except for the whistle), so I get the impression I'm not fighting as many of them in some situations as I could be. I do feel that the Bahamut missions in particular should be more difficult though; the reward for finishing these is huge, after all. It also seems like I got access to these very early in the game.
The Murderbot mission was one of the most interesting, though it seems he's easily distracted, as every now and then he'd just stop and sit there for 2 or 3 turns.
It seems that most of the balance issues in this are going to be related to all of the various enemy bots. That and the health boost for Normal mode may have been a BIT high; the enemy bots attack values are still set on the much lower original values, after all. So quite alot of enemies will attack and only be doing like 5 damage a hit when you've got over 1000 health. Many of the enemy bots seem like they need to be scaling better as their level rises.
Though there is one other type of balance issue I can think of: The Epic Science Exo, the Chaingun he has is the best weapon I've seen so far. On a SCIENCE bot. This could probably do with a bit of a nerf.
But still, this is going very well. I cant think of any other major issues and I dont think I've had any crashes today.
Gotta say, I'm gonna be very interested to see what kind of a reception this game gets from reviewers. I'd figured that if you guys ever got around to making a Roguelike of some sort it'd turn out to be very good, and so far I think I'm right, hah.
