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.
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!