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Kizor words The Last Federation

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Trygvasson:
Ah well it's a moot point now, since the spy probe mission has been redesigned. You're quite right about the high skill ceiling on the bullet-dodging side, but I'd say the strategy part is actually quite easy unless you pile on some extra challenge like keeping all races alive.

In my 3rd game overall, by year 3015 I'm on track to get the Fed going on Nightmare level, with all races alive. While i admittedly do have some strat game experience, there seems to be little challenge with keeping wars to a minimum while giving the 'good' guys a huge advantage. Barring the occasional flare-up, most of my decisions are now this-is-good-but-this-is-even-better. Thing is, Nightmare level brings a lot of grief to the troublemakers, leaving me free to focus on the Fed development needs.

Misery:

--- Quote from: Trygvasson on November 07, 2014, 05:42:55 am ---Ah well it's a moot point now, since the spy probe mission has been redesigned. You're quite right about the high skill ceiling on the bullet-dodging side, but I'd say the strategy part is actually quite easy unless you pile on some extra challenge like keeping all races alive.

In my 3rd game overall, by year 3015 I'm on track to get the Fed going on Nightmare level, with all races alive. While i admittedly do have some strat game experience, there seems to be little challenge with keeping wars to a minimum while giving the 'good' guys a huge advantage. Barring the occasional flare-up, most of my decisions are now this-is-good-but-this-is-even-better. Thing is, Nightmare level brings a lot of grief to the troublemakers, leaving me free to focus on the Fed development needs.

--- End quote ---

Hm, did you mean the "dodge the big red orbs" spy probe mission?  I mighta been thinking something else...

If that's the one you mean, with the dropping off of initial tech, I typically just do 2 of them on Misery, and then let the other 6 races become spacefaring on their own.  The spy probe hitboxes (or circles in that case) arent as big as they look, as is typical in many shmup-type things.  I know where the actual circles are, but... ugh.  The OVERLAP.  Just looking at it is a headache waiting to happen.  It's hard to judge things like that when it's all overlapping each other (it works in actual shmups, but not in this case), and then you had to zoom around the whole mess sometimes to find the only entrance, and.... bah.  I was way too impatient to do more than 2.

But yes, that was the previous version.  Though, I honestly dont find the new version all that different... each probe now fires bullets, but for the most part they just sort of create a circular wall around each probe... the strategy becomes pretty much the same.   Well, MOSTLY circular... I can squeeze between some of them with some funky maneuvering.  Still kinda annoying though.


Also, you're right, it can be a bit too easy in the strategy side to keep problems to a minimum.  That seems to be the one major flaw with the game.  In the run I just completed, I was mostly playing a sort of reaction-based style... not much in the way of forward planning, I would mostly do useful dispatches, and whenever some event happened, stop the dispatch in progress, deal with event, and then back to the dispatch.  It's like there needs to be more going on at any one point.

On that note, if you have any ideas on how to make that aspect more challenging, consider making a topic for that on the forums here.... that sort of feedback and suggestions are very valuable to the devs. A higher skill ceiling for the strategy side would probably help to hold players' interest, like it does in AI War.

The actual shmup-ish part of the game is getting some difficulty enhancements with the expansion (the Obscura and other new ships (not the probes though) were done by me and as such are murderous, I didn't do the art/sprites for them though), and the new overall modes might add some difficulty overall as well... but the standard mode, I do think that the solar map stuff could use a higher challenge level.  I havent played on the higher levels in that, but I've seen what the differences are, and I'm getting the impression that I wont have to change up my tactics all that much to beat those as well.  Typically I'm also always trying to keep everyone alive, too.

Heck, the game seems too quick to finish, too, for that matter.

SugeBearX:
This was...amazing! Thanks for linking to it in my SBR thread. :)

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