The goal of boxing it in was to maximize time to failure if I had to leave before it was finished. I see just now that someone else doing this turned out valuable, because I came back after a while and everything was overrun except the left edge, which was only clear because someone had cleared the left 1/3 of the map before.
But some hidden mechanic messed it up when I tried to box it in.
The Battlefront rounds start seconds away from defeat. The corruption used to be kind of splotchy, leaving large gaps, but now it seems every level only has one gap in the top left and everywhere else just has little holes sprinkled throughout that fill out in seconds. I couldn't stop our freefall at all and I was right there. I ended up closing the page for fear that just my presence was causing it to go out of stasis repeatedly.
I suspect the main thing that has made playing without purifiers more viable is that we dropped down a lot. The difference in corruption growth rate is immense. It used to be wall off or nothing, and I noticed it became much easier before these updates just from dropping down. I can't be completely sure but I think that's what happened. We might see if we ever climb back up that high.
I am foreseeing a lot of time spent stuck on Heartland. You need 3 people to be actively playing for several minutes to get past, when everywhere else 2 playing briefly at the same time is enough. And on top of that, you're not very likely to lose it either, with a corruption growth rate of almost zero if people managed to get the anchors down.
I didn't know until that point you actually had to kill the hearts to win.
I also just found out that if there is actually nobody there, rounds are lost pretty quickly one after the other. I was tempted to let it keep going. The standard for defeat is a fair bit lower than the standard for victory, apparently.
It appears two strikes kill any heart at any level, but you get way more experience at higher levels where they have more health. I kind of doubt that was intended.
Sear gives a ridiculous amount of experience. Someone could shoot past 25 just spamming Sear if nobody finishes the hearts.
What if you just made all experience proportionate to energy expenditure? Then there is no incentive to play in any particular way, only to play. The game cannot judge how useful any given move is anyway.
Edit: Strike is even worse. I am gaining almost a whole level each time I use it. I am level 39 now.
I think Chain and Cataclysm are in good spots. Neither is good to just spam but both are good in specific scenarios, and can shape player strategies.
It's not very clear how Sear and Strike work exactly. Sear damage seems to keep getting higher, presumably just keeping pace with the HP gain on the hearts?
I wonder a bit about the new experience gain, as I watched someone go from level 11 to level 15 in 7 minutes.
Beyond attempts to lock in uncorrupted space at the very start, every map quickly turns very samey: a saturated rectangle we need to scrub clean.
It's kind of annoying how often synchronisation errors happen, where it turns out some move didn't go through. Some are hard to understand: I saw someone else's Cataclysm happen, get reverted, then happen again in a slightly different spot.
Reducing the spread seems kind of irrelevant. You make a solid wall of purifiers, or the corruption gets through. The rate of corruption growth doesn't factor into it. The only thing is, if you have enough people and you're fast on a new round, slower growth might let you win the round more quickly by saving the existing uncorrupted space. But even then, if you spend time killing hearts, you give up time you could have spent walling off the uncorrupted space.
That said, it's not entirely clear the rules by which the corruption spreads. Have you played any of the Creeper World games? I'm not saying you should copy them, but it's an example of a reasonably elaborate ruleset leading to reasonably varied player choices, with a similarly amorphous enemy.
Is defeating the hearts even useful? It takes 4 purifiers to cancel them out, which will have to be replaced once an hour. It seems to take much more to kill them, and people have been doing it right at the start when they could be gaining the most by trying to save the uncorrupted spaces there are instead.
I am into the concept of weird "MMO"s and I appreciate that you tried something new. I also like the Creeper games, which this is vaguely reminiscent of. But as it is, the game is way too simple to hold any interest.
I can't really care about leveling up either, since all you seem to get is abilities, and the abilities don't seem very relevant. Purge and Purifier seem to be all you need. The new Sear might be worth something. But I think you need to think about what exactly the role of the other ones is meant to be. Strike does 5 damage for 20 energy. You know what else does 5 damage for 20 energy? Using Purge 5 times.
The offline energy gain element doesn't seem very relevant when the cap is reached so quickly. At some point my cap went up from 100 to 110 though and I don't know why.
Also I don't get why the last hitter on a heart gets all the credit.
I am not sure that just adding more complexity will actually make it good, but at least it is easy to think of ways to do it. Here is some brainstorming:
Cute game.
The base and the mining game seem to have virtually nothing to do with each other. It would be interesting if they were deeply integrated. Like perhaps you need dwarves to bring tools to the mineshaft to get to go on expeditions at all, and upgrades, like better tools and better torches, are achieved by actually making better tools and torches in the base.
The combo thing would benefit a lot from an audio cue, like matching the beat in the music or something.
Some upgrade node ended up being precisely underneath another so I could not interact with it. It branched off some lucky wheel node.
Investing into debt management seemed like a complete waste of time, since your income upgrades are far more powerful. It's not clear what makes the interest rate go up. No point to the debt twist ever became apparent to me.
In Chrome, the upgrade screen ended up lagging a lot, but actual gameplay was mostly fine.
Cute game.
For whatever reason I always enjoy this genre of games (if it's not excessively slow to progress, which this game wasn't). That said, it doesn't really seem to have any unique twist or anything.
The transition through the upgrade tree, from having so few bubbles you click them all as you spawn, and so many they fill the screen, is very abrupt. I ended up with so much money from one run I could just about buy out the entire (non-locked) tree.
It also felt a bit weird that fixing the ship gives you nothing (presumably) until it's all the way done, so it never seems like you have much reason to do it over actual upgrades, until the end.
Very cute! I finished the game, but I forgot how long it said I took. I played it in Chrome.
The mid to late game could use some balancing. Pretty quickly, my willingness to keep clicking the upgrade button became the bottleneck to upgrades, and my computer's ability to simulate 200 dudes running around at high speeds became the bottleneck for buildings. Despite that, the tower levels just shot up due to the intense speed of harvesting.
Some minor nitpicks: bridges aren't refunded when destroyed, and roads are destroyed with no refund when a building is placed over them.
I would like to see more of this game.
Cute game. Here are my criticisms:
The font is just too much. How do S and Z both look like an I? But I looks like an =.
I broke the game at some point by clicking the next node on the world map, then another that I had noticed became enabled for the animation. I had clicked the next fight node, then the reward branch I hadn't picked before. I completed the fight, then ended up stuck at the reward branch on the journey map with nowhere to go.
In my opinion, economy upgrades in games like this are always boring. I also wasn't really sure what upgrading range or speed was good for most of the time. Everyone seemed fast or ranged enough.
If evasion is actually simply your chance of avoiding any given attack, and defence is a fraction the damage is reduced by, both seem virtually worthless in the early game.
I suspect that maybe you realized they become extremely powerful at high values, so you wanted them to grow slowly. But now their usefulness curve makes them practically irrelevant early and then late game (if not limited) they suddenly shoot up to damage immunity.
There are functions out there that exist to help make their usefulness more linear with their numerical value. Basically what you care about is their impact on effective hitpoints (EHP).
Right up my alley as a concept, but it doesn't really work as a game. There is no reason to ever do anything but wall of drills. Fuel tanks are irrelevant because of the coal upgrade not being bound by them. If fuel tanks ever became useful, the next strat is just a mass of fuel tanks behind the wall of drills. There is never any reason to use structural blocks, or pistons, or more than one magnet. Not sure what sticky wheels do.
I will try this again if it gets updates.
Cute game. Here are my criticisms:
The tutorial broke on me. It told me to upgrade the weapon, I upgraded damage. It didn't acknowledge that I had upgraded it. Then when I clicked the system slot, it just gave me the tutorial for equipping one. But then it gave it again, when I clicked the other system slot. And it gave other tutorials again as well, until I had beaten two waves, then they finally just stopped coming up at all.
I think the shop broke at some point. It started only ever giving me Hull Reinforcement, Pulse Laser, and I think Reactive Hull. This happened after (somehow) unlocking a bunch of things, which I never ended up seeing.
The first run was a little too long for me, especially because I didn't realise I was working towards unlocking new things with my actions. I think I would have been more interested if that had been communicated to me. I did eventually unlock things but I had no idea what I had done to unlock them.
Lots of things are just a bit unclear, including the UI itself, but you probably know that already.
