itch.io

Cute game.

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.

There are some issues I'd like to point out.
- You can trick the AI into crossing the high altitude and it would break their shields. Not that it's unfair or bad, but it can kind of give too much of an easy advantage.
- Also you can close the game at any encounter before leaving to the map, and in this way to reroll the encounter and it's reward.  This allows player to cheat...
- But it's also the only way to save the island you like if you don't want to be stuck after the final boss. If I have an island I like but I want to try out other tech, I kind of have to rewrite the save with a new game.
- It sure would be lots of fun if the game goes multiplayer.

This is the island I had most fun so far. Also the most powerful one.

Because whenever I'm firing my lazors I cut their islands in half.
Horizontally

So I guess I can say, I got your... nose?



It took me like 5 restarts to aim both at shields and "nose" without damaging other structure much. But yea, with this weapon alignment I often just destroyed other islands in one charge.

Thanks for this good game. Best wishes for your future projects.