itch.io

Agreed the haste/slow/healing units need a lot of love. Since really the only point of "healing" is to counter poison in real scenarios, and regen is just plain better at that. It kind of leaves healing without a purpose, also the average CD of healing units is way too high, you're very likely to die between heals with the unit effectively doing nothing. For slow, like previously mentioned, anything that will kill you will either do so before you have time to slow it (Shadow Assassin) or doesn't care about slow at all (poison reactions). So that kind of makes slow a non-mechanic. For haste, it's obviously made largely useless by virtue of infinite charge chains. But outside of that, the Spell(breaker?/blade?) is the only useful haste unit since you can just get full board haste with that +1 low CD poison unit. The others kind of just...do nothing?

To me what would make more sense is if healing units had very short cooldown with relatively low base healing numbers and regen units had very long cooldowns with relatively large base numbers. That way heals now serve a purpose (buy time to get your regens off) and regen isn't just faster and better heal. For slow, I think if that witch unit with self +x on slow was actually given an active that scales with power it would open up slow builds to having a purpose. The other half is obviously just getting charge balance right, once that's sorted. Slow kind of automatically becomes better. Same as doing what The Bazaar did as well, just upping the CD on everything automatically makes haste and slow better. Since they have time to actually come into play. When you die to a 2s CD unit's first attack, slow/haste will never be relevant. And yes, you can get one-tapped by both Shadow Assassin and Spellblade prior to infinite. It's just a bit more rare.

A unit that would be interesting to me, would be a counter-counter. Something like "The Silencer" On (Enemy Reaction) Put that reaction on CD for 0.5 / 1 /1.5 / 2s. That way you don't automatically die to reaction units, there is counter play. Then you would probably end up with silly Silencer mirror matches where one would cancel the other out. The issue with a unit like that is that it would (in the current state of the game) be a 100% mandatory infinite mode unit. It would probably need to have some kind of hefty downside or large internal cooldown per unit on the effect, or it would just completely delete a lot of boards.

Edit: Made it Round 56 in the new patch. A lot of fun stuff going on, but still lose to getting one tapped by poison reaction when their base goes up to like 270k poison over 10s. Just can't beat that, I was able to build up to north of a million per tick regen. But it's just so fast there isn't time to get there before you die.

Got a cool 52m shielding a couple waves before I ate it to poison RNG at least.

Edit2: Figured out that by going slower on damage to only focus on Regen and Shield I could get back into the 60s. Hit 66 then died to a 2m poison reactor one-tapping me. Found a bunch of bugs, basically everything relating to +10% power upgrade and the two different power sharers is broken. Sometimes if you use 10% back to back, it only works the first time. Sometimes after combat you lose the 10% again. When you use power share (either one) sometimes it works, but most of the time it will remove the +10% bonuses you gained since last share and then add the share amount (The give 50% of power to allies also still reduces the unit that uses it to 0 power). Which late game means using power share reduces your units power. Also, not entirely unexpected, CPU usage when you get to late game is absurd and also the end screen UI breaks when you get past the 100m mark on things. Edit5 addition: So I've noticed a bit more about what happens. When you use +25% power to row (or +50% both bug out the same way). Then use another power sharer, the new one simply overwrites the old one, as well as removing any +10% applied to the old one. So if you had shared power to gain +5k power, then do +10% for 5.5k power. Then you share another power for +3k power. You don't end up with 8,5k power, you end up with 3k power. Any +10% power that was applied to the 5k power is gone, and the 5k is overwritten. This makes keeping up with the exponential growth basically impossible.

Edit3: I'd suggest probably changing all the poison reaction units to work the same as the regen one (charge on enemy regen). That unit is actually possible to beat if your build is incredibly strong. The on shield poison ones just aren't. They are 100% death with no way around it, and early game they are basically useless. So changing them doesn't really impact 10 wins. Only impacts infinite mode. I've figured out how to solve for Shadow Assassin (except with growth core obviously). So now I literally lose to the same two units (that are effectively the same duplicate unit) every single run. The only counter is to not run shield, which makes you lose to literally everything else. So there is no solution.

Oh and poison core is actually pretty good now. Went 10-0 and then 54 waves with it.

Edit4: New bug, units will just randomly revert to base power during the upgrades screen. This is the most gamebreaking bug yet. It will just arbitrarily kill runs. You'll have a unit with 1k+ power drop to 20 power by itself and it's game over. And cores still lose all reactions on upgrade.

Edit5: Oh and make it so you can lock tooltips to be able to scroll in them. When you're in infinite mode you quickly have your Core's tooltip go off-screen, so you can't see what all your reactions are. Since I've come to realize health is actually completely useless, only shield and regen matters. I've started to just spam add reaction post getting 1s CD. But you can only see a few of them. Since reaction shields don't trigger poison counters, they let you bypass the scheduled losses of poison on shield. Sadly the one time I actually got a good shield reaction on my core, and could see it and build for it. I then forgot about the "upgrade removing reactions" bug and lost the reactions and promptly lost the game.

Edit6: Got to Wave 74 with a no shielding (except reactions) build. Around Wave 70 the game start to freeze every time you load into a new fight. Takes like 5 seconds of it being completely frozen before it loads in. At that point even with me getting over 1B shielding per fight Shadow Assassin starts one-shotting again and the Charge on Enemy Regen poison dude is also completely unbeatable. So it's down to RNG of how early you get those two units in a setup after they hit critical mass.

1.38B shielding from a core that comes with no base shielding, obviously I massively undervalued add reaction (because I forgot reactions don't trigger reactions). That being said, my Mr. Krabs (Coral Builder) was still gettings its +16* after I removed all shielding from my build. So some reactions seem to trigger from reactions. But it was really buggy and it didn't always gain it. But suddenly it just decided to gain +4k power between two rounds, after having gained nothing for the previous x amount of rounds.