Enter the Gungeon (Bullet Hell/Rogue-like)

[Wingflier]

What most likely happened is that there was a barrel by the IDPD portal and exploded somehow (an enemy probably shot it by accident), the explosion probably took out a bunch of guys and spawned the IDPD soldiers, if I had to guess. It happens occasionally.

[Misery]

That's weird man, I'm finding ammo boxes and keys galore usually.

By the way, have you encountered the Kill Pillars? I think it's one of the three 4th floor bosses. I got so wrecked I had to call my insurance company.

That boss, no.   I had a look at it on the wiki though (someone seems to have put up a guide for every boss).  They look fairly easy to me though I know I'm not the best judge of this and also that it's very subjective (third floor bosses seem harder; that stupid cannonball jerk is the most irritating to me so far, if I'm going to screw up idiotically, it's against that guy).   The guy's method for taking them out looks good though, that might be worth a watch if they're being trouble.

[Misery]

On a side note:  Is there some trick to finding secret rooms?  Like, some logic to how they appear?  Other than just checking treasure rooms.  They seem.... very difficult to find and the game's wiki is very incomplete as of right now so it's not helping.

[Misery]

Okay, so, I've defeated the Dragun for the first time.   I'm about 13 hours in?  I forget.  A lot less time than it took me to beat Nuclear Throne the first time.  If I could stop walking off of cliffs so often I might have done this sooner.  Eventually I'll learn not to do that.  Just like walking into spikes in Isaac or SR, bah. 

I've found that my typical strategy in this genre of "go totally berserk" seems to really be the best tactic in this.  In other words, ignoring ammo counts and mostly using guns that aren't the basic one.  However, there are times to use the basic gun, typically if you find a room that has only a few easy foes in it, or if it's a difficult room where you've cleared out many of the enemies and only have a few easy ones left... those are the right times to fire the basic gun.  So, choosing targets properly.

As it is I tore through floors 4 and 5 mostly without getting hit (got hit like twice against the High Priest and once by some jerk in a room, one more time by Unexpected Magical Appearing Hammer Thing.  Took a couple of hits against the Dragun and actually managed to walk off a cliff twice during that fight (no, I don't know how I manage to do that either; I've done things like that even in Starward, things like crashing into Crystal Mother, because... I don't know).  The Dragun was a lot easier than I expected.  Staying near the bottom left corner seems to be the best trick.  Took him down mostly with the, er, Meatboy Gun (no idea what it's actually called) which turned the whole screen into total chaos.  I will say, that's a well done boss fight.

Got one of the bullet components successfully brought to the Blacksmith during that run as well, thank you Jetpack.  If there was some other way to get that one (the second component, looks like a bag of something) I have no idea what it is.

This run done with the Convict.   I found one ammo box, and bought another (which I don't normally do, but wanted to refill my favorite of the guns that I had at the time).  Had some item that gives bullets a chance to inflict poison, which turned out to be really good in many situations (not as good against bosses but great against normal enemies).


Overall, the game does get a lot more fun when you just ignore the damn ammo issues and keep firing ANYWAY.  Same approach I take in Nuclear Throne, except that this game encourages you to do the opposite.  The reloading though is still very annoying.

And, I see, many players are in fact doing the bit with not firing guns.  Looking over the forums on Steam, ALOT of players have adopted the strategy of never using anything but the basic gun until floor 3, the boss of floor 3, or floor 4.  Really, this should say to the devs that there's an issue here.  I think the devs are still mostly in bugfix mode though.

And I swear the floor 3 bosses are the hardest group.  The Dragun isn't as damn annoying as those jerks.

[Wingflier]

I'm surprised you have so much trouble with the floor 3 bosses.

I usually encounter the Treadnaught and I find that thing to generally be a piece of cake. Most of its attacks are short ranged, and most of its homing rounds are pretty slow moving. I've found the best way to deal with that boss to simply keep running in circles around the map, keeping near the edge of the stage while firing at him from offscreen. The reason that works is because, though he's pretty fast-moving, his turn speed with the treads is absolutely atrocious, so as long as you can keep him rotating, he's at a huge disadvantage.

The most annoying part of that boss are the soldier bullet minion guys he spawns, but you can generally just ignore those usually, or kill them in a few shots.

Actually I think the Treadnaught used to be harder but people were complaining about him so he got nerfed.

The Cannonballrog, he's mostly just annoying. Don't get me wrong I've died to him once or twice, but he's not so bad once you figure it out. He doesn't even really fill the screen with bullets, he just fires them in waves that can be easily dodged with a well-timed roll. The most annoying thing he does is roll across the screen, and that's frustrating because he becomes hard to hit and he's liable to run into you while you're trying to fire at him. My favorite "phase" of that boss is when the screen turns dark and he shoots the huge cannonballs at you. Those things are obnoxiously slow and easy to dodge, but of course you can't fire at him in that form so I digress.

I think I once encountered the "Boss door" as an actual secret boss on the third floor and got absolutely destroyed. But anyway, I find the 4th floor bosses to be much tougher, though they seem to be much more "pattern based" (fill the screen with massive amounts of bullets, leaving only a few small areas to move that you can avoid getting hit), than the previous bosses which are much more "wave based" (shoot wave after wave of bullets, in a semi-random pattern, usually at set intervals). Maybe you find the "Japanese style" boss rooms easier because you've had so much practice with traditional SHMUPS, and of course you hate rolling that might contribute.

edit: In terms of the way to use guns, I pretty much agree with you. I never really worry about ammo. Out of the 30 hours I've played this game, I only remember 1 run in particular where ammo became a problem for me (I had like 5 guns and they were all empty) and that was just bad luck. Generally speaking the way I do it is to try to run each weapon completely out of ammo (or two at once, switching between them), so that way when you find an ammo crate, you can refill an empty gun instead of having like 4 half-loaded guns that you have to choose between. Between the random ammo drops, the gun munchers, the guns you can buy at the shop(s), and the fact that you generally find 1-2+ guns per floor, I haven't really had to be that conservative overall. I'll sometimes use my pistol when the enemies in the room are practically target practice, but that rarely happens on the lower floors.

Some weapons are better for bosses anyway and you pretty much want to waste the whole clip in that fashion (Demon Wang comes to mind).

Overall, I like the ammo system better than Nuclear Throne because you can actually *choose* where your ammo goes, and it's not a coin flip to determine whether you'll ever get ammo for a particular gun again. In NT, even if you win the coin flip, that's still only a fraction of what the weapon can hold, and for energy weapons, that generally doesn't go very far. The full reload thing is really nice in EtG, and I generally find 1-2 ammo crates per floor, not including the ones you can buy in the shop.

In my next post I'll provide some more information on how to find secret rooms. There was a post on reddit with people complaining about how difficult it was to find them after the devs fixed an exploit which allowed you to discover them with your pistol. A dev responded with the claim that secret rooms were supposed to be hard to find, but also giving some tips on how to do it in a legitimate way.

Honestly, you're not missing much. At this point I've been finding ~1 per run, and you'll usually get like half a heart, or a blank, or a key if you're really lucky. I may have found a gun once, but that's extremely rare. It's usually pretty disappointing.

[Misery]

I hadn't seen the boss door yet myself... I looked that up on the wiki, interesting to see there's a hidden "could appear anytime, *evil laugh*" sort of boss.   He looks like he has interesting attacks.  Is he particularly rare?  I've been watching some others play this too (such as Sleepcycles, he's hilarious no matter what game it is, that's for sure) and never saw it in videos either.

As for boss difficulty.... VERY subjective, that's for sure.  It's interesting to see what someone considers easy VS what someone else does.   Even with something like say, Starward.  I get complaints about Wallmaster a lot.  Always wallmaster.  But he's effortless to me.  But there IS a boss that screws ME up.  Centrifuge.  Yep, that one.  Yes, I know I made the damn thing.   .....stop laughing.    For whatever reason that damn thing trips me up easier than any other boss.  On Hard mode, typically, I don't play Normal much.   But even with Hard, the complaints are usually all Wallmaster. 

Fusillade gives me trouble too at times, the jerk.

So yeah, that's kinda interesting.

The secret rooms, yeah, I looked around to see if I could find info on that, but I couldn't.  I figure, it's worth it for the simple fact that I pretty much ALWAYS have Blanks to spare.  I don't try to go for secret rooms until AFTER the boss is brought down (so I can have the blanks there in case I do something derpy, since I want those Master Rounds).  Most of the time though the blanks go unused, so if I can find the secret rooms better via that info, well... maybe I might find a key in them occaisionally at least (which is what the couple of them that I DID find had inside).


As far as the bit about NT goes, technically, you can choose where your ammo goes when it comes to actual ammo crates (they give you whatever you are holding as your active weapon, but random if you're holding a true ammo-less weapon).  Other than that though I just don't think it's needed since every ammo type is hyper abundant (and while the ammo PACKS are sorta random, all the guns laying around ALWAYS give only their own ammo type).   But in THIS game, yes, while I think the drop rates are a pile of bird poo, I like the IDEA of the ammo boxes the way they work in this game considering the large number of different guns that you have at once.   Even if I don't get to USE the damn things much without calling in an ammo drop with the soldier guy.


On a side note, I *really* must remember to never try to leave feedback on Steam forums for any game.  Even if I am abnormally calm on those forums (here I'm more open about stuff because nobody ever yells about it).  Doesn't matter what I say or if I like or dislike something, someone is ALWAYS going to snap.   I don't know why I forget this EVERY time.    I don't even remember what I said anymore; it didn't even have to do with the drop rates or that sort, it was something else.  Don't remember if it was positive or negative.  I just know it exploded. 

[Wingflier]

Generally speaking, the best place to check are 'chest rooms'. Shoot at the walls with a non starting pistol weapon and it sometimes reveals cracks which you can destroy with blanks, revealing the hallway to the secret room. There's no reason to check walls that are adjacent to other rooms, as the secret room has to have enough space to spawn, and therefore you generally only have to check 1 or 2 walls (in the chest room) in order to be safe.

I know it's a little more complex than that, which is why I'm still trying to figure out the pattern or some kind of reliable tell to decide how the map layout generally generates them, but thus far I'm kind of at a loss still.

By the way, if you're having trouble with ammo, I would generally recommend Pilot. He can hold more ammo than any other character (by quite a significant margin), which also means that finding an ammo crate gives you more ammo since you have a higher capacity. In addition, his reduced-price shop vendor stuff allows you to buy ammo in a pinch more easily as well.

Can you send me the link to that Steam forums review or complaint you had about the game? I tried to find your post by accessing your Steam profile, but maybe since we aren't friends I can't search by what you've posted. I'd be very interested to see the sh!tstorm, I mean, aftermath / rampant butthurt constructive criticism that ensued.

[Wingflier]

Nevermind, I found it:

Honestly, I think alot of players reach the later points, and end up just getting frustrated at how bloody long it takes (which then makes them not play so well.... you cant focus properly if you're aggravated). Not EVERYONE of course, but many.

People wouldnt be complaining about it as much as they do otherwise.

Good. Let them complain about design choices the developers intentionally put in there during beta testing because the people playing the game thought it was too easy they could just use their pistols the entire game because there was no incentive to use stronger weapons.

Hopefully they will stop coming back and flooding the forums with their stupid, objectively wrong opinions and move on to things they actually like.

Dying *crying*

[crazyroosterman]

Nevermind, I found it:

Honestly, I think alot of players reach the later points, and end up just getting frustrated at how bloody long it takes (which then makes them not play so well.... you cant focus properly if you're aggravated). Not EVERYONE of course, but many.

People wouldnt be complaining about it as much as they do otherwise.

Good. Let them complain about design choices the developers intentionally put in there during beta testing because the people playing the game thought it was too easy they could just use their pistols the entire game because there was no incentive to use stronger weapons.

Hopefully they will stop coming back and flooding the forums with their stupid, objectively wrong opinions and move on to things they actually like.

Dying *crying*

yea that bit was quite cringy also may I add that when I played nt I was really surprised by how fast I could kill certain things with the starter pistol? in fact I'm surprised by how fast I can kill a lot of things like when I unloaded 80 percent of my mini gun into the dog boss and killed him in 20 seconds.

[Misery]

You know what makes this whole thing funnier?   I don't mean this specific set of lines, I just mean the rambling mess on the forums in a general sense.

I'm seeing a lot of players on there getting pestered because they "don't own the game' or don't have enough hours/achievements in it.   So their opinions are thrown out.

.....they are console players who came to the Steam forums because that's where the talking is happening.  I've done this before myself in some cases.


But people are pestering them for those reasons; I'm starting to see why some players hide their account info, really.

Good grief.  It's absurd how this gets sometimes.  It just entertains and saddens me at the same time to see people doing that.  I don't get WHY they do that.   Cant everyone just scream at each other in a civilized manner?

yea that bit was quite cringy also may I add that when I played nt I was really surprised by how fast I could kill certain things with the starter pistol? in fact I'm surprised by how fast I can kill a lot of things like when I unloaded 80 percent of my mini gun into the dog boss and killed him in 20 seconds.

Most things in Nuclear Throne don't have very much HP.  Heck, wait'll you see how fast Lil' Hunter (boss of area 5) can be taken down.  It's possible to bring him down in one shot with some weapons.  His HP is very low.

There's exceptions though.  The Throne itself is a long fight (particularly if you want to loop, since that means you HAVE to deal with the generators first), the fight with Ballmum (boss that only appears during loop) takes FOREVER because her HP is so absurdly high.   But most individual things don't have that much HP.   Vlambeer wants the game to be very fast instead of slow and calculating.  Which is pretty different from the rest of the genre when you think about it.  Sometimes I'm surprised they managed to pull it off with that formula.

[crazyroosterman]

You know what makes this whole thing funnier?   I don't mean this specific set of lines, I just mean the rambling mess on the forums in a general sense.

I'm seeing a lot of players on there getting pestered because they "don't own the game' or don't have enough hours/achievements in it.   So their opinions are thrown out.

.....they are console players who came to the Steam forums because that's where the talking is happening.  I've done this before myself in some cases.


But people are pestering them for those reasons; I'm starting to see why some players hide their account info, really.

Good grief.  It's absurd how this gets sometimes.  It just entertains and saddens me at the same time to see people doing that.  I don't get WHY they do that.   Cant everyone just scream at each other in a civilized manner?

yea that bit was quite cringy also may I add that when I played nt I was really surprised by how fast I could kill certain things with the starter pistol? in fact I'm surprised by how fast I can kill a lot of things like when I unloaded 80 percent of my mini gun into the dog boss and killed him in 20 seconds.

Most things in Nuclear Throne don't have very much HP.  Heck, wait'll you see how fast Lil' Hunter (boss of area 5) can be taken down.  It's possible to bring him down in one shot with some weapons.  His HP is very low.

There's exceptions though.  The Throne itself is a long fight (particularly if you want to loop, since that means you HAVE to deal with the generators first), the fight with Ballmum (boss that only appears during loop) takes FOREVER because her HP is so absurdly high.   But most individual things don't have that much HP.   Vlambeer wants the game to be very fast instead of slow and calculating.  Which is pretty different from the rest of the genre when you think about it.  Sometimes I'm surprised they managed to pull it off with that formula.

yea yea I'm pretty impressed with nt and I somehow haven't found something that pisses me off yet apart from the portal spawning on me that pisses me of sometimes but nothing like for instance the borked spawning in sub terrain that drives me f ing nuts
but wait the throne has a gender?!......o dear I hope it looks as cool as its name sounds so far the designs have been pretty sick.

[Misery]

The throne has a gender, what...?


.....oh.  No, when I said "her" I was referring to Ballmum, which is a boss like a giant purple frog.  It comes AFTER the Throne during Loop (where you replay all the previous stages, but they're MUCH crazier and some new stuff appears).   The actual Throne itself is, well.... you'll see it soon enough.   They did a great job with it's design.

I'm not sure what you mean about the bit with the portals there though.

And what's this borked spawning?

[crazyroosterman]

The throne has a gender, what...?


.....oh.  No, when I said "her" I was referring to Ballmum, which is a boss like a giant purple frog.  It comes AFTER the Throne during Loop (where you replay all the previous stages, but they're MUCH crazier and some new stuff appears).   The actual Throne itself is, well.... you'll see it soon enough.   They did a great job with it's design.

I'm not sure what you mean about the bit with the portals there though.

And what's this borked spawning?

no no no don't bother your self with what I said about spawning I was referring to an entirely different game there and the portal thing is when a portal spawns right on top of me I know its intended but it drives me nuts when it makes me miss out on stuff(which I guess is the point really)

[Misery]

Ohhhh, THAT.

The portal will always spawn directly on top of the final enemy you killed in the level.  OCCAISIONALLY, if you kill an enemy and it's corpse breaks some object (you know, little environmental things) the portal might appear on that instead.  But mostly , it always appears on that last enemy corpse.  So you can avoid getting instantly sucked in if you watch out for that.

PARTICULARLY in the scrapyard.  You've probably noticed that cars tend to explode in the presence of portals, heh...


There is though a glitch in the Desert specifically; every now and then the portal will just appear in a random spot.  It only happens there though and I *think* it's in 1-3 specifically, not 1-1 or 1-2.

[Wingflier]

There's exceptions though.  The Throne itself is a long fight (particularly if you want to loop, since that means you HAVE to deal with the generators first), the fight with Ballmum (boss that only appears during loop) takes FOREVER because her HP is so absurdly high.   But most individual things don't have that much HP.   Vlambeer wants the game to be very fast instead of slow and calculating.  Which is pretty different from the rest of the genre when you think about it.  Sometimes I'm surprised they managed to pull it off with that formula.

Actually, I think you forgot the Hyper Crystal (also a loop boss). That thing seems like it has 8 billion health, which is more frustrating than anything because it's probably the easiest boss in the game. If you stay out of its range you can just snipe it to death from afar until it finally dies, but if you get anywhere near it, it's practically instant laser death from 100 directions. Maybe the reason it seems like it has so much health is because you have to stay so far away from it (literally off screen) to shoot it, so you're probably missing a lot, and the endless crystals it spawns are also blocking a lot of the shots.

edit: Just checked the Wiki, the Hyper Crystal has more health than Mom by a significant amount.

But yeah, the Nuclear Throne itself is actually pretty easy to kill. The first time I killed it I think I had a Nuke Launcher and I must have shot it 4-5 times before it melted. I was actually really surprised. It wasn't until I actually started attempting to loop the game that I began to realize the true challenge of beating Nuclear Throne. Then of course, there isn't much time to celebrate because of Nuclear Throne II, but we'll let you discover that little gem on your own.

Anyway, the first time I successfully looped the game - On stage 1-1 I was so excited and shocked by the sheer number of monsters that I pooped my pants and blew myself up with the Cluster Launcher at point blank range against a wall. It was a very bittersweet moment for me, but in the end I was smiling.