This game is fantastic in a lot of regards, but I must stress something super important that i feel MUST be added. In "Into the Breach" (great game to pick inspiration from! : D) you are warned super far in advance after the enemies turn where the enemy will spawn from. I feel like this game desperately needs that. All too often i'll think im safe only for two grouped bomb sprouts to drop on my head and me to be able to do nothing about them, leading to extremely unfair damage.
Another indicator you should think about adding from "Into the Breach" is what the enemies move is going to be and what it's next target is. Bag of beetles can be next to useless sometimes when the enemy just decides to ignore them. and I don't realize they have, so i just die. I think having these two things would go a long way to make it feel more like strategy and a lot less like luck. Failing quests just because an enemy decides to shoot the thing your protecting from an angle you didn't know it was coming from just feels bad.
Other than that, keep on trucking. my favorite game of yours so far!
Thank you, I'm very happy that you liked it!
Predicted attacks can't work in this game since there's nothing to protect besides yourselves and quest objectives. Into the Breach would have been an incredibly easy game if you only had one mech and no cities. You can right-click on any enemy to see all of the tiles that it can hit. Drop predictions are something I have considered in the past, but they come with a variety of problems. It's a lot harder to tailor enemy groups to the board state if they are expected to appear later. There are also a lot of tile effects, minions and enemy ai considerations that would interfere with such a system. In my own playtesting experience, there have been very few times where the location of a random new enemy mattered more than my own actions. Focus your turns on clearing and positioning and you'll have little trouble dealing with the next wave (unless you're playing on the two hardest difficulty settings).
I did NOT know you could right click on an enemy. that knowledge makes everything much much better and removes the need for predictive attacks entirely anyway since i can see if they are in range of the quest objectives. i feel like a dummy for not trying that!
Though with the prediction, the objectives were more just a side thing. I mainly just wanted something that would show when an ally was gonna be targeted like the beetles and angels vs you, as sometimes they will attack them, and sometimes they won't. But it's random when they will and when they won't. Making them fairly unreliable. Maybe having an icon that shows what has aggro for the turn would work better for what im thinking, for example like you throw a beetle and there's an icon on the enemy that changes from like a face to a item to show what it targets for that round. Just shower thoughts of course, maybe that's how you wanted it as a possilbe balancing thing.
Nice to hear you at least considered drop notifications. I do agree with your reasoning on why they wouldn't work. It's mainly bomb sprouts and vacuums i have issues with in regards to that, but i can't think of anything that would help specifically with those two beyond adding a 1 turn fuse to the bombs, and it doesn't seem like you'd want to do that.
In any case, thanks for getting back to me and providing your thoughts! : )
No problem, glad I could help! I'm wrapping up development at this point so there won't be any drastic gameplay changes coming, I'm fairly happy with how everything is balanced at the moment. Enemy AI always checks if it can hit you or move once to hit you before trying to target your allies. They will also target any neutral terrain that's within two tiles of your position. There's a bunch of special rules and different AI variants, so there are cases where they don't act in the way you may expect. Bomb sprouts for example will not make use of their area of effect attack to extend their threat range or target nearby terrain as a way to make them a bit less chaotic.
Aaah, so it's not random, it always prioritizes you unless your out of range. I will keep that in mind then, thank you again!
Did not realize their were different brains for each sprout, that is really cool!
Thanks for answering everything, that is all!
PS. take as much time as you need with v9, I want it to be an absolute banger cherry on an already amazing game : D I'll be looking forward to whatever you put out next (I literally just discovered your games this week and im a huge fan now) : 3 take care ❤️
The public release of v9 is probably coming in late March or early April, but you'll get two other new games to have fun with while waiting. There are 6 AI behavior patterns in Monsoon: Standard, Cowardly (retreats from target), Cautious (only hits primary target), Trapper (creates traps and minions on empty tile after moving), Aggressive (tries to hit tiles close to target with area of effect), Sneaky (creates traps and minions while retreating).