Post by jwiggs in IIslands of War comments

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Nice job beating the final boss! Anyways heres my answers to the things you pointed out.

-Tricking the AI into going above/below the danger lines is a strategy for now. The next update is working on making enemies smarter in many respects, including this one.

-Leaving the game right before you die or to get loot was never directly intended, but happened as a result of the save game mode. For now, I don't really care so much about how people cheat and hack the game, since it is a single player game and ultimately, you will know if you had to cheat to defeat the final boss.

-Multiplayer surely would be fun. I would also love to play this in multiplayer, but I need to solidify the core gameplay first, which is still evolving drastically.

-Lining up all your weapons is such a good strategy, enemies in the next update have started to get smarter and put their weapons together.

- I'm thinking of nerfing lasers a little since they are undoubtedly the best weapon in the game. Maybe making them not deal damage to shields might make other weapons more viable without completely destroying the power of lasers.

Thanks for your awesome feedback and I'm glad you enjoyed this game. It's not over yet though. In fact, this is only the beginning, since it has only been in development for the past two months. If you want to stay involved in the future direction of the game, come on over to the discord. I have given the community a while lot of power in deciding the future direction of the game, like the weapon groups and soon, unlimited weapons. Not to mention all the other smaller contributions they have made.

Hope to see you there!

McGician5 years ago

I tried to write another message in discord feedback section, but an angry bot ate it. Guess it was too long of a message. Just wanted to put all my thoughts out. Alright, I'll try it out here.
Lasers aren't overpowered.
I've played quite a lot games and tried stacking up different weapons, here are my thoughts on weapon balance.
- Best weapons:
Ions + 2nd highest damage in the game, and they ignore shields. - Pointless early on.
Missiles + The highest damage in the game. Fast, precise, ignore dodge chance, basic (need no energy structures). - Deflectable.
- Good weapons:
Crystals + penetrate shields, basic, - low focus damage.
Firearms + good early on, decent damage output, advance fire, very good against shield.
Lazers + Fast, precise, good focus, nondeflectable, - Require a lot of structure to be useful. Bad against shields.
- Situational/bad weapons:
Mortars - bad aim, low damage, only good if the opponent doesn't return fire.
Beam - eats tons of energy, extremely bad against shields, cannot crit and is stopped by armor.
Plasma - too slow, very bad against shields, cannot crit, stopped by armor, very easy to dodge.
- "what happened there?" weapons:
Tier 5 Turbolaser, size 3 over time does the same damage as Tier 4 Dual Laser, size 2.
Tier 5 "Mega Cannon": size 3, damage 10, CD 10. One boring, slow, forever alone, easily avoidable friendzoned projectile.
Tier 4 "Dual Missiles": size 3, damage 5x2, CD 8. Two interesting, rapid, always together unavoidable projectiles.
Mega Cannon is still one of the highest dps...

- Generally "bad" weapons are bad because they take too much effort/time to make them work, while other weapons can achieve same or better results faster. Sure beam can cut down all the shielding in a good shot. But for the time trying to make that shot happen crystals may already take down good amount of structure.
- Similarly "best" weapons are kinda just better version of "good". You may have a good aim and pierce blocks with lasers. But doing so with missiles would be even more devastating simply because missiles have more damage.
- Not as if they just better, weapons have their own strategic advantages. Lasers are at their strongest when they are focused together in one line. That is because their projectiles are fast. Firearms don't have fast projectiles, and that allows them to fire in advance from above/below to disable shields. It's very hard to advance fire with lasers.

Another thing I wanted to point out is that forging items seems to be detrimental. There usually enough space for everything, so why should anyone switch 3 floatrons_2 with 1500 power and 6% dodge to 1 floatron_3 with 1000 power and 3% dodge? Sometimes forge can be good for arguably shields, blocks and weapons. But then again, 3 machine guns combined have nearly exact same stats as 2 gatling guns, why switch them for just 1 gatling gun?

Also sometimes shops are very risky. They sometimes even give just one or two types of items, like only blocks or blocks, and generators. Maybe someone already suggested that, but it would be nice if shops had some sort of fixation so that at least 1 item of each type would be there - 1 weapon, 1 block, 1 structural ect...
Sorry for long post just wanted to share my thoughts on the game.
Okay I hope this time the message comes thru.

jwiggs5 years ago

Wow. Thank you for all of this weapon feedback. I have just gone through all the weapons and rebalanced them based on some of the changes in the next update. While I was balancing yesterday, I noticed that the turbo laser and mega cannon were both in weird places with respect to their dps.

In this next update, I have made weapons significantly heavier. This is due to the fact that you can now have unlimited weapons on your island. There is also going to be a new dodging and crit system. With dodging, the less extra thrust you have, the less you will dodge. With crits, every weapon lowers your crit chance by a set amount(each weapons lowers it the same) and only the core gives you an island wide crit chance.

With these changes, I want the "spam every weapon till they die" to still be viable, but I also want the "slowly and strategically" strategies to be good as well.

This in turn may also help the forge if you are going for the more carefully planned strategies. BTW, you don't have to put 3 weapons in the forge to get a weapon. Putting in 2 weapons and a non-weapon will still give you a weapon. Also putting in a block, module and weapon has the chance of giving you a weapon as well.

Shops do have fixed items in them. Each shop always carries a decent block, a module, a weapon, and a tech(in the new update) and a floatron.

Sorry about the bot deleting your wall of text. It does that to try to prevent spammers(we had some a while back).

Thank you so much for the feedback!

JC12235 years ago

I'd like to make a suggestion about beams. Perhaps you could take a page out of FTL's book and make it so beams only penetrate if their damage is higher than the shield's health at the moment of impact, but they don't reduce shield hp. I don't remember if I've seen any beams with individual damage higher than 1, so maybe it would be if the collective damage of all beams hitting the shields at that moment is higher than the current shield hp, or the collective damage of all beams hitting the same level of the shield, not just anywhere on the shield, is higher than the shield hp at that time, the beams penetrate (or in case #2, just beams on that level) but still don't damage the shield (unless, of course, the beams destroy a shield generator) and maybe even, like with FTL, they loose 1 point of damage they can inflict for each "layer" (shield hp) in the way of the beam. This would potentially fulfill your thought of making them not damage shields, but also perhaps be slightly more logical, since a shield would logically not be able to stop a weapon more powerful than itself, just reduce the damage. In other words, you could damage a shielded enemy if your beam attack was more powerful than their shield, but not with the full damage of an uninhibited beam, and it wouldn't outright leave the enemy unprotected against normal, more direct weapons that can't just have their energy scattered like a beam. Even lasers couldn't, since from a realism point of view, for beams and lasers to travel at different speeds, the laser is probably more akin to a blast of ionized gas.

itch.io

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