itch.io

Mortars are completely stupidly OP to the point that going anything but Mortars is just throwing. The Weapon that gives all projectiles infinite pierce at the cost of -60% damage doesn't give Mortars pierce, just gives them -60% damage. Which to be fair, it would be gamebreakingly OP if it did work. But the bow with 2x projectiles does work with them, which is about as ridiculous.

Wave 1 feels completely imbalanced. If someone gets a high HP projectile unit they just win. Nothing else you do, can possibly get enough damage onto it, to stop it winning in Earthquake automatically, essentially.

Earthquake overall heavily punishes going for multiple low hp buildings. Since it's quite common to have the enemy on a single Ammo 3x slot thing, while you still have several damage buildings left, then still lose in Earthquake earlygame. Simply because they have a 300-900 hp brick (if they have that one helmet), that just auto-wins on time.

Going units at all only seems viable if you high roll your items to an insane level. Otherwise you just get all your buildings Mortared before they can do anything, since you can't exactly barricade the entire top of your base and still actually be able to produce enough units to even destroy their 2-3x Barricades before Earthquake. Let alone destroy their actual mortar/ammo setup. I think I've lost one single round to units going mortars, ever.

Also enemy burn never ticks down. I was wondering how the early game burner that should at most ever be able to peak at ~14 burn was applying 30+ burn to me. It's cause the ticks don't do the -1 at all. So it just infinitely stacks burn (slowly).

Trying to sell +x damage modules to a shop that has weapons in it will instead buff all the weapons in that shop. Normally annoying, but could also be used to apply the same buff to like 4x weapons at the same time, and then buy them all buffed.

Scented Candle does nothing, my Soldering Iron still has 2 Burn with it in inventory, and if you have both Scented Candle and Meteor affecting the same burn item it sets that items burn to 0.

also bonus completely reasonable amounts of burn on final boss:

The ammo reload upgrade here doesn't work either. Never got +ammo from the two multicasters above it:

The upgrade "Item on left side applies +1 charge to that item" doesn't do what it says at all. In fact what it actually does, is it increases the cooldown of the item itself by 1s, thus making it so that it will never ever trigger. I have 2x multicast soldering irons next to a Laser Turret with that upgrade. What should happen is that every time my Solder Irons trigger they should charge for 2s giving them 1s cd. What's actually happening is that my laser turret ends fights with 20s/6s CD and never goes off ever.

The crew member that gives +1 multicast to 2x1 items only gives the text that says the item has 2x multicast. It doesn't actually give multicast. They still only go off once.

A lot of other upgrades have similar issues where they just do not work at all, or you need to move the item for it to update and start working. Sometimes moving it only updates it to make it look like it works (adding multicast text and trigger fields) but the effect doesn't happen. The first time I gave my minigun +3 haste to random item it just perma-hasted all my items. The 2nd time, it never ever hasted anything.

Am I missing something or is the Year 8 power spike absolutely absurd. That Eveil Teeth enemy more or less oneshots and I don't see how I could have possibly had the econ to build both enough damage and health to get through the 200 or so EHP buffer to kill it before it kills me.

At least in the web version the choice of the rune that gives Rest: take 2x 5% of max HP true dmg or w/e gets cached. So if you start a new run after taking it. It will be active from level 1 on that run.

Virus vs. Virus just goes full infinite and whichever side has flat damage instantly kills the other side. Also virus in general is just incredibly overpowered.

I think it was "explosions leave poison clouds" with "2x explosions" upgrade that lead to it being as bad as it was, combined with several +duration upgrades to clouds. I had a frankly silly number of clouds that lasted long enough to still cover the screen on the next wave. I had a run that looked a lot more visually chaotic after, that only pushed my 7600x to like 70 degrees give or take. Whereas the first one was pushing it all the way up to 83, which is basically where it caps out with my cooling setup.

The hardest enemy was the end game FPS. And as can be seen on the ss in Flaise' post below when health goes over 1k, it starts to overlap the Armor text. Ended the game on exactly 6900 Armor, so that was nice!

Guess I just got destroyed by RNG then. Maybe put in some kind of safeguard so mimics don't spawn quite that close to your start location? Hard to know the tell when it's literally your second chest, and generally not the most fun new player experience to have unbeatable enemies spawn right next to your starting location.

Edit: Gave it another shot, no random mimic this time. But after I killed a random skeleton, instead of putting me back into the game world. It put me instantly into a fight with the Orc Warchief, which then upgraded all enemies and made me instantly lose the next fight to freaking 28/28 treants. Was that a bug or was the Chieftain just randomly hiding in the shadows behind that skeleton, and just jumped me as soon as we beat the skeleton? Either way, not a great experience.

It's a jam game, so the balancing being completely borked is expected. But it's pretty egregious. Also it isn't really clear that it's nearly impossible to get rid of organs. It's *very* unintuitive to skip rewards with open inventory slots, to save them for better organs later. But you still have to pick anything with one of the 4 or so actual useful stats. Or you won't make the very tight stat checks from the bosses. But if you do, once you're in zone 3. Your organs have simply been outscaled by the enemies, as they are insanely tanky while also having tonnes of damage. To the point where an average zone 3 enemy is arguably stronger than the zone 2 boss. I don't see any feasible way, outside of insane luck, to get past that point.

Oh and if you have time sensitive inputs that the player needs to make during combat, it's not an auto battler, and it shouldn't be tagged as such.

So you need to open chests to get stronger. But the 2nd chest is a brawn mimic that is 100% unbeatable and killed me. That felt fair and balanced.

Freeze, especially on tower, is incredibly overpowered. Even though it's a common the +30% tower shot freeze chance, as well as just the generic +1s freeze, are basically insane. More or less makes anything else you're doing trivial, since it just more or less permafreezes the entire board. I'm guessing the ice zone just after the demo will have freeze immunity to throw that out the window though.

The targeting is absolutely horrid. My ships literally did the worst thing possible and left every single enemy ship at 1 hit. Causing us to lose an absolutely impossible to lose fight. I know it's an auto battler. But it's not an "auto battle as incompetently as possible-r". Way too many newer auto battlers are doing this on itch, I've noticed. Where you have literally 0 control over targeting and the dev didn't bother making your units target in any kind of remotely reasonable fashion. Making targeting RNG be the only thing that determines if you win or lose, rather than anything remotely skill related.

Edit: Enemy crit makes it even dumber. The enemy crits A LOT. Like it's not at all uncommon for them to get back to back crits. And when they do, you instantly lose.

An idle game that punishes you for idling. What a novel idea.

The balancing seems a bit off. I got hard stuck on 1st boss for like 3-5 runs forget how many. Then as soon as I beat the first boss every other boss was a complete joke until the demo was over. Felt like their power didn't scale at all, basically.

If you end a wave too close to the "next wave" trigger. You just pretty much instantly start the next wave skipping the shop. Also if you have a recoil weapon that doesn't automatically stop firing between rounds, you can get more or less soft locked as your character will just get constantly yeeted across the screen until you manage to get it to clip over a shop to turn off your weapons.

I did try that, swapping boss didn't work. UI wouldn't update at all.

Edit: now I can get to the 2nd boss but any attempt at moving/adding/changing abilities doesn't update the UI. For most things you can just do the "start fight end fight" toggle to make it update. But when trying to setup interrupt the close button on the window doesn't work and that soft locks the game.

Game is too broken to really test currently. Tutorial soft locks you if you have a brain and instantly set the interrupt to Obliterate. It will never unlock the other skills or tell you how to proceed.

If you completely follow the tutorial and beat the boss. Then nothing happens, you're just stuck. Can't click anything, nothing works.

Also when you add the 4th ability it doesn't update the UI. So to add Burst Strike and set it up, you have to add it. Start fight (this updates the UI) stop fight, click "when staggered" this just locks the window and does nothing. So you have to manually close the window then hit start fight and at that point it will have the condition set. Then you have to stop fight again and move it above basic attack then start fight again. This will beat the fight and just soft lock the whole game as mentioned above.

As someone who used to spend a lot of time in SimCraft to do high level WoW theorycrafting, I do like the idea of a game centered around making APLs (Action Priority Lists). Since this isn't a rotation, really. But I get using the term since no one knows wtf an APL is. So if the game just actually worked it could end up interesting.

Thanks for the key! And yeah that awakening type mechanic does sound like it would add a fair bit of replayability. Currently most replayability comes from how often you're patching stuff. I've rarely played more than 1-2 games per patch. Because I'll have a couple ideas for what I want to try, and once I've tried them I know that run #2 of that same setup would be identical for all intents and purposes. So I feel no need to play it again.

I haven't actually played HS battlegrounds, I stopped playing before they added that mode. So not 100% sure what demons do. But for the consuming party units, it depends on how it would be implemented. But most of the time that would feel like a very "unfun" mechanic. You spend 50 rounds slowly but surely decreasing CD of and increasing crit of a singular unit that is 100% required to make your combo work. Then *poof* it's gone, and you instantly lose. Because it would take 40+ rounds to replace it, especially with how rare force upgrades become after level 100. I've gone 80-200 waves with 0 upgrades in the store post L100. But I know they *can* spawn after L100 because I got a few last run. Just didn't get a single one between around 100 and 187.

As for having something that can benefit a max rank unit in the shop that'd be nice. Something as simple as the random chance to get a +1 tier upgrade to it from the store itself would be 100% worth trying to roll for, even with relatively low odds.

Edit: My Steam version is borked for some reason. Install folder is 0B and verifying game files says it's all verified. But it's just an empty folder.

Edit2: The heal reaction still doesn't work.

The on crit -power (which is gamebreakingly OP) works, the Re-Haste (which is also gamebreakingly OP) also work. The Every 100 Heal does nothing (but if it worked it would be gamebreakingly OP).

A nice QoL would be to have the hero shops and upgrade shops have visually different icons. Something like the exact same icon as the hero shop, but with 2 gold chevrons and a gold outline or something like that. So you could instantly see if you're getting an upgrade, or a hero shop, at a glance.

Edit3: List of various new bugs.

-The unit that gives 2x power to the unit to the right as well as the enemies lowest power unit actually gives power to the unit to the left.

-When you have infinite Shield, the "insta kill" at the end of the fatigue doesn't kill you. It only removes all your shield (I hit what the game refers to as "infinity" on both regen and shielding at Round 35 using only 3 units all in the same column).

-It is possible to get the exact same reaction multiple times, sometimes this is just boring. Sometimes it's very broken.

-It is possible to get Every 10 Regen +x Shielding and Every 100 Shielding +x Regen in the same run as reactions. This should be made for impossible for all similar loops, as it's what let me go infinity at wave 35.

-Core reactions don't actually work until 2s into the fight. I had already seen something similar with the on crit -power reactions. But it was now confirmed. I had a 2.1s CD shielder who got buffed with +260B of shielding when my Regen core went off. The core went off at 1.0s and 2.0s. It should obviously have buffed it both times. But the shielder would shield with "only" 260B or so on the first shield. When I used -CD on that Shield unit to reduce it to a 1.9s CD. It would shield with 235 at 1.9s. Then right afterwards it would get buffed to like 360B or so and go off at 3.8s for that amount.

-The "an ally" definition is not consistent. Lifegiver's Every 10 Regen give +40 to the lowest power Ally can't target itself. Destiny dude's 1.5x Power to the lowest power Ally CAN target itself. Also not sure how the "an ally" triggering factor is supposed to work. But usually I feel like most units need another unit to do that thing for their reaction to trigger. But cores can trigger their own reactions as if they were "an ally". I kind of like that they can do that, but it's also very, very powerful. They can not however buff themselves.

-Settings menu is currently bugged in the web version. Background changes from blue to orange. But the menu never appears. Forcing you to refresh the page to get back to the main menu

-Plague Sovereign slows 4 targets at Gold, but only 2 targets at Platinum.

Life Weaver is still insanely OP. Basically an auto-include in every setup, as is whats-his-face war golem who shares 50% of his power to row. Oh btw, he's bugged. If you power share to him, even if he never goes below his post power shared amount of power as a result of using his ability. He will still revert to his pre-share power after the fight. Anyways, Since Every y give +x Shield is absurdly OP. You just get infinite shield on him, and then he shares it to the damage dealing and regen unit on his row, since you're usually able to get a unit with the "y" trigger on that row. It causes their power to go to infinity very fast, since he will buff that unit which will buff him etc. Not that it matters since the damage unit will just hit for like e32 damage and oneshot the enemy. But the ability to share the already grossly OP +x reactions to your whole row is just disgusting. Destiny Balancer would be OP if Life Weaver and row dude weren't just even more OP currently to steal his slot. You just stick him in your infinite row or column, depending on which actual good core you're running (prot or quick). Then he gives free exponential growth to everyone.

Edit4: Start of combat effects do not actually trigger at the *start* of combat. They trigger roughly 0,4s after combat starts. I think this is due to effects not happening when they "trigger" but rather after the squiggly line projectile it launches hits, and it appears to have a 0,4s travel time. This causes all kinds of non-sense and broken combos and timings that don't make sense. I'll take the "optimal" player build vs. "optimal" enemy build as an example.

As the player we have only two units, we don't need any others, they won't do anything (if things weren't bugged). We have Warbringer and we have Crit Core. We also have the on crit all damage allies get +e36 power. What should happen is this:

0,0s: Warbringer charges both the core and itself, the core hits, out core has 100% crit chance and will instantly buff Warbringer to 100% crit chance. We have purposefully left Warbringer at 2.1s CD. This crit from the core should add +e36 power to the Warbringer.

0,1s: The Warbringer hits for e36 damage and one-shots the enemy. We win.

That is not what happens however, what happens is this.

0,0s: Warbringer casts his reaction to charge all damage allies by 2,0s.

0,4s: The cast hits both the Warbringer and the Core. Both hit, order of operations means the crit from the core will be applied to the Warbringer so it will crit. Neither the core nor the Warbringer will be buffed with +e36 power at this time. Even though the Warbringer should be.

1,4s: The core hits again and crits. Still hasn't been buffed with +e36, neither has the Warbringer.

2,5s: The core now gets buffed with +e36 power and one-shots the enemy. However, let's see what happened on the enemy side. Why is this hit delayed by 0,1s? I don't know, but it is. (There was some haste involved that I think made this actually launch at 2,1s but hit at 2,5s. Leading to the frame perfect tie).

0,0s: Enemy Warbringer casts his 2s Charge.

0,4s: Enemy Warbringer charge hits either Spellblade or Glass Cannon.

2,1s: Enemy Spellblade or Glass Cannon launches their attack(s) at us.

2,5s: Enemy Spellblade or Glass Cannon attack(s) actually hits us. We get one-shot on the exact same frame that we one-shot the enemy and we win the tie.

So in a case where according to units read as written we should one-shot after 0,1s, and the enemy should one-shot us after 2,1s. We actually kill on our 4th crit total after 2,5s. So our +power on crit reaction is so delayed that we have time to attack 3 times before it actually even does what it says it does. Same thing with -power on crit, it also doesn't trigger until around then and just barely removes all Spellblade/Glass Cannon power in time to let us take 0 damage.

Edit5: Haste on start of combat, and probably haste in general doesn't stack at all. I know we have re-haste. But I was expecting to also have haste work somewhat like in The Bazaar where if you add haste to a unit with haste, it increases duration. At least with the start of combat reaction haste that's not the case.

For me the expected outcome here, keeping in mind I'm doing a "1 column challenge" so I only have two eligible units for it to be cast on. Is that the 8 instances of 1s of haste would be randomly assigned among the two units eligible them, for example 3s of haste on one and 5s of haste on the other. What actually happens is that after the customary 0,4s delay. Both units got 1.0s of haste. Which seems like that shouldn't be how that works.

That's not really the type of skip I meant. More like once you get past a certain point (though once balance gets more in line this will be less relevant) all you do between waves is just click "skip" 3 times on the shops. Because none of them do anything anymore. So more like it would be nice to have a few things added both to the "fight" screen and the "shop screen". In the fight screen I'd like the game speed slider from the menu to instead be like 1x 1.5x 2x speed (or w/e) values you desire in the fight screen. So that you can see what is actually happening at 1x when building a board. Then swap to 2x or more when you already know what's happening with your board and just want to see how far you can go in infinite. The other thing(s) I'd like to have be present both in the fight and shop screen is just a few tickboxes:

1. Skip unit shops. So if you already have all the units you want at plat, you don't get shops that you would never pick.

2. Skip unit upgrade shops. So once your units are all at 1s CD (the ones you care about) you don't get shops you'd never pick. If you fixed +10% crit and +10% power actually working. You'd never want to skip these, so that would make it probably pointless to add.

3. Skip "power share" shops. Again, if these actually work now, you'd probably never want to skip them. But previously you very much wanted to skip them.

That way once you're just zooming through infinite, you only get given the shops you actually care about and you don't need to click through 3 screens to get to the next fight every time. An option to set something like "auto pick +power" or "auto-pick +health" for your core would also be nice QoL to skip that screen in infinite mode. Since really there is 0 choice there in infinite. Since both those options give exponential growth you pick one and then pick that every time. There is 0 reason to mix and match.

Personally I'd honestly be okay with it working such that if you ticked the "skip unit shops" and you've gone into infinite mode. You always just get the one shop that has some combinations of 3 picks between "upgrade unit" "improve x unit(s)" and "power share". Just to speed up the process and lower session length. But I have to try playing again with the scaling having been fixed and see if we just lose fast enough that none of that matters anymore. Last patch when I went for Wave 300 I was just reviewing footage on my main monitor and clicking skip skip skip ready every wave on my 2nd monitor without paying any attention. Because the session length was getting pretty insane and there were literally no choices for me to make anymore.

Edit: Made it to Wave 53, lost every single round to Warbringer. To the surprise of no one, a unit that makes the opponent effectively instantly hit, isn't balanced. It's even more insane from a player perspective, since you can just go Arcane Anomaly + Warbringer and go instantly infinite at 0s. So yeah, that is not a particularly great design. My reactions worked (the -power on crit meant that unless I got instantly oneshot all enemies had 0 power for the whole fight, so numbers are a bit insane), and the one time I used power share that worked too. But I got a super early Lifegiver that just juiced my whole board nonstop since I was running a Quick Core in one corner, Row charger in the corner above it, Water elemental in the corner to the left of that setup. Which meant I had 3 free infinite slots and basically infinite scaling from the overheal that provided. Doesn't matter if Warbringer just one-shots you 2s into the fight before you have any time to scale though. Same issue as old Shadow Assassin, except you can't counter it by not running heal. So it just literally kills you no matter what at 2s, have fun.

Edit2: Yeah, Warbringer as player is...disgusting. I'm on Wave 120-something and the enemies can do absolutely nothing. Also once your own units hit e21 power their tooltip still shows their real power, but their board power becomes 2. When your actual applied shield hits 1,000,000,000T (however much that is) it also becomes 2. For QoL it would be nice if the "improve x type" also had persistent ordering of %damage, CDR and Crit. No performance issues so far.

Edit3: It's only a visual bug. The units still have their power, and I still have my shield/regen. It's just that e21 and above I think you just get nothing but the leading number. Or it's how many e over 21 it is. It's kind of hard to tell, cause it's acting really weird. At Wave 221 the enemies health becomes 1, but that's actually 1 e21. And you do need 1e21 damage to kill it, not 1. The -power on crit is so dumb, combined with Warbringer I put every enemy power to 0 (from 100,000,000T) before they get to do anything.

All the "improve type x" seem to work, except +10% power to heal. That one keeps resetting every single wave. But crit to damage works, %damage to damage seems to work, hard to tell with my setup, crit and +10%power both appear to work for regen, crit works for shield, haven't tried 10% power cause it would do literally nothing with my setup as I gain +INFINITY flat power to shielding per regen then use the big rock dude that spreads 50% of his power to row to put that onto a regen unit as well as a damage unit. So my infinite shielding turns into infinite regen that turns into infinite shielding, except doesn't matter I just hit the enemy for e32 damage before they got to hit me (with 0 power anyways).

Edit4: Nvm, +10% power doesn't work on regen either, just applied it then instantly upgraded the unit and it went 2.1B->2.3B->2.1B. So it just gets overridden. Crit works though.

Edit5: Yeah, it's the leading number that shows, only. Enemies went to "1" when they had 1 e21 Power on Wave 245, then up to "2" when they reached 2 e21 and "3" when they reached 3 e21 power. Their tooltip still has the correct value (though with A LOT of decimals). End screen also has the correct values, but again, with a lot of decimals causing it to spill over onto other UI elements.

Edit6: Wave 257 and Wave 266 both had the same bug, several enemy units wouldn't load in. It would freeze up, with the ready button not being clickable (but without any notable CPU usage) then after like 20 or so seconds the missing units would load in and I'd be able to click "Ready".

Edit7: Calling it quits at 300 again. Enemy cannot possibly catch up with my scaling, so losing would be impossible.

(My Core reduces enemy power by e28  to all enemies 10x per second and enemies have about e25 power)

Oh and Happy Holidays! I'm Swedish so we celebrated yesterday.

Good find. That will hopefully fix the remaining performance issues. And yeah, currently the gameplay experience past like wave 40(ish) doesn't really change in any way. So if that's where things cap out for now. It's probably a good thing. Your build is more or less complete by then and you're mainly just clicking "skip" 3 times between every wave, unless you luck out and get an "upgrade" option. Since once you get either one 1.1x to x allies and one crit to allies on x. Or two 1.1x to all allies. Upgrading your core is what pushes you into overflow territory very, very fast on upgrades. I'd say if you intent to keep the 1.1x effect, which you probably shouldn't. Make it like at most 1.05x and never scale that number with upgrades, only make it hit more targets with upgrades. And I'd also say it's probably a good idea to make those reactions "unique" as in, if you get one 1.1x reaction the others are removed from the pool for that run. Same with the crit ones (until crit scaling is fixed, and probably even then Edit: Just noticed that crit has been fixed and now does basically nothing past 100%). The flat numbers on those  +x per 10y reactions also get really really out of hand. So the formula for that needs to be toned waaay down.

For unit balance that one Phantom Knight or w/e it's called that steals column power for itself is a scheduled loss until like wave 10(ish) when on the enemy team. For player units the really big problem units are:

Prot Core: It's already basically a top 2 shield unit, then the 5* or 10* from wave 1 is just absurdly powerful.

Water Elemental: Part of what makes the infinite "T" work. Also the +6* to regen units is super overtuned and give you basically infinite regen early.

Arcane Anomaly: The other part that makes the infinite "T" work.

Growth something something white dog with regen and charge row: You put this on the same column as Water Elemental and Arcane Anomaly and you get 2 free infinite slots to do whatever you want and infinite regen all in one.

Crystal Dog thingy with +4* to Column on Row Haste: This thing gives you all the scaling you'd ever need for most builds early. Then you yeet it later to put in something like that when left units does any +7 crit to right unit, since that works well on the infinite row as the middle unit.

Currently you do actually kinda need all these trouble units and you need to do degen stuff to beat the insane power level of early boards with unlockable gold units on them. But once those get fixed to only spawn later game, the above units will make you literally unbeatable. Going full tank is still largely OP. But Poison Core poison unit spam with picking only +health to core is surprisingly effective. Since the core itself is only there for the +5* on slow. You literally don't care about upgrading its power or lowering its CD. You want the scaling and the level up reactions. Then you stick the core itself in the corner and let it cry itself to sleep, or something.

Edit1: The every 100 heal do x is currently broken. It was working at first giving +10 to my Prot Core over and over, but after a few upgrades it shot up to +3600 per 100 healing and as far as I can tell it either isn't giving any +power at all, or it is giving so little that it's a rounding error that won't show up in the UI.

Edit2: Upgrading Destiny Balancer makes it objectively worse. Goes from -100 power from max ally and adding 1.5x to weakest ally. To -200 to strongest ally and 1.2x to weakest ally.

Edit3: The Re-Slow all allies of shield gain is also broken, doesn't do anything. The Every 10 Poison one does work however.

Edit4: The power curve of enemies has been almost entirely flattened. Instead of having 160m power enemies around wave 83 you have 93k power enemies. So, they pretty much can't do anything against my build despite 2/3 of my reactions being broken to the point of not working at all. On the plus side, no performance issues so far.

Oh and power share is still completely broken as is permanent +10% power and +10% crit. The latter two get wiped as soon as you hit the next "shop phase". The former will sometimes last 1 fight, sometimes 2, sometimes more. But it will eventually disappear. I think the only way I've gotten shared power to ever stay was when I shared power from my Water Elemental buffed Mana Source to my Prot Core, then next shop phase I upgraded Core power. This seems to have at least locked in the +power from the shop upgrade. Thus starting the exponential growth of my core with a nice base.

Edit5: Two QoL things that would be appreciated. First having thousands dividers on the numbers in the end screen, so 9,000,000 instead of 9000000. Really helps with readability, and secondly some kind of ability to filter/skip shops. Currently the only option I care about is picking +power to my core and then any random upgrade option I get. Everything else is an auto-skip. So the vast majority of shop phases I just click skip 3 times and end up taking longer to go through those than I do in the actual fights. Soulstone Survivors has a relatively neat way of handling their "shop phase". Where you have a few toggles, one to skip active skills (skip unit shops here). One to skip unit upgrades would also be nice. Then one to skip power sharers too. That way you'd be able to only populate a single shop per wave instead of 3 if the player has both those options ticked. And that shop would either have 1 upgrade, 2 upgrades, 3 upgrades, or it would be empty and just send you straight to the next fight.

Edit6: The Every 10 Regen give all regen allies +x power and the similar damage/shield versions should probably be reconsidered, as they give all units of that type exponential growth. I ran into an enemy with 4 regen units and a Platinum Lifegiver. The enemy had about 1.2b regen by the end of the fight and it went until the game auto-killed both of us and I won the tie.

Edit7: Another nice QoL would be to make the order of the upgrades in the Core specific shop be consistent. Currently the order is random, but I want to pick power every time. So instead of just being able to click that same spot, I have to see which option it spawned as every single time.

Edit8: The game appears to simply stop offering force upgrade options in the shop after a certain point. Either that or I'm insanely unlucky. I'm on wave 202 and I swear I haven't seen an upgrade option since around wave 100.

Edit9: I retired the run after wave 300. The power scaling caps out at 1k per wave and I was at 1000T power on my core and obviously gaining 10% of that every wave. So losing is literally impossible.

Haste and slow probably don't need that added scaling. Their effect is a multiplicative scaler on everything already. Doesn't need to be stronger than that. If you have haste, all those other units that just gained scaling will now have twice the scaling because of the haste. And the opposite for slow, halving enemy scaling, effectively. Currently all the re-haste and re-slow abilities are so strong they literally break the game. So they don't exactly need *more* scaling. The fact that you're allowed to reduce CD of units over time kind of automatically makes re-haste and re-slow happen more often. For enemies since their cooldowns stay the same, I'd say the one thing that might be worth scaling is how long their hastes last for. So that eventually your enemy boards are very likely to get perma hasted, making trying to include slow in your own build a lot more incentivized. Currently I only really run slow to abuse the busted re-slow effects. Not for the slow itself, unless you can fit a slow in your infinite loop. It's simply too slow (hah) and too inconsistent at slowing what needs to be slowed, to be worth using for its actual effect.

Edit: The internal cooldown means in combat lag is now completely gone (at least from all the things that used to crash the game). However the load in performance issues still persist. At wave 84 currently and I'm spending more time frozen than not frozen and chrome is starting to throw "this page is not responding" messages just before it finally managed to load in. It's also auto-closing full screen mode every load.

That's what my CPU load looks like, the slope is actually playing the game. The plateau is trying to load into the next fight. And that ss was from like wave 82, it's getting much much worse every wave at this point. Also I'm getting integer overflow on all my regen units dropping them to 0 regen. But since they have put up aroung 700,000,000T regen by the time it happens. That's not so much of an issue. But sometimes they manage to pump enough regen/s that it too overflows to 0. Which might eventually kill me (but the game will crash before that point on load i'm 99% sure) also the scientific notation on the end of fight screen doesn't kick in until 10^21, which might be a bit too late, and when it does it doesn't cut off fractions. So the number still goes outside the tooltip by a lot.

Edit: New bug, when you get into this lategame stage the sound effects won't play during the fight. It's completely silent, then at the end of the fight it plays every single sound effect that should have played at once, over the top of each other. And as is often the case when the same sound effect plays over itself, it increases the volume. I damn near blew out my left eardrum as a result. So for now I'm playing full muted.

Edit2: Calling it quits at wave 90. The freezes are now several minutes long. Wanted to go for wave 100 since the enemies has literally no shot at touching me. But the lag is just too much.

Should be interesting to play around with.

As for the cooldown scaling thing, that's also an infinite mode issue I've been meaning to bring up. It seems that the enemy scaling is "flat" as in all units gain x power where x is based on some exponential function.

This means that past a very, very, very early point. Whatever the base power of a unit was is completely irrelevant. All that matters is their cooldown (part of why old Shadow Assassin was a run ender). A unit with 2 million and 20 power is no different than a unit with 2 million and 60 power. But one has a 2s CD and the other has a 6s CD. It causes all units to lose their identity over time.

The same is obviously true for all flat power reaction units. Having +20 power whenever something hastes only matters very early for the enemy. Beyond a point all that matters is their base stats. So every unit that doesn't do crit/haste/charge is just reduced to a stat stick with a CD. Nothing else on the unit is relevant.

I think moving some of the enemy scaling away from flat power gains and towards scaling their flat power reactions would make your enemies scale a lot more like you scale and make stat check one-shots less prevalent. Currently you either die from the first hit from an enemy in infinite, or you literally cannot die as you will outscale them through the fight, and then be stuck in slideshow mode for about 5 minutes as the game engine dies trying to process everything scaling towards infinity.

Because it's not even a CPU limit past a point. Yes at first you have a couple cores pegged to 100%. Then the engine itself just loses its will to live and you drop to like 60% utilization as the game just grinds to a halt. Then when the enemy dies, the wave doesn't end. The game just keeps resolving triggers that got backed up for another couple minutes before you can end the wave.

The freeze on loading into waves that starts around wave 66 is also still a thing and it gets longer for every wave. I'm guessing something about how that exponential function adds power to enemies is the reason it just takes longer and longer every single wave and starts to be problematic once power added is north of 1m.

Edit: Just faced a 1.2k power column +20 knight thingy on wave 4. That's not okay.

This amount of shielding was not enough to beat it, for reference. It just one-tapped me before I really got to do anything.

Edit2: When I reloaded the run after editing this post, my units swapped positions by themselves, breaking my combo. So that's a new bug.

Edit3: Wave 8 and the game is broken, have to retire the run.

The core is stuck in an infinite reaction loop as you can probably tell from the reaction sprite being layered so much it's just a white circle.

If I had to guess, it's that the overheal caused my bottom regen dude to have 1m power regen (also that unit was already good, now it's OP with row charge instead of charge right). So every time it goes off it triggers the +2 power to allies 100,000 times. Since it's charging the Water elemental to its right, that is just overhealing non-stop pushing the 1.4x power on top of that to create numbers that maybe shouldn't exist on wave 8.

Edit4: The "Every 10 regen do x" just killed another run at Wave 13. That effect either needs to be scrapped or you need to code it to work way more efficiently. It just breaks the game currently.

Also so far outside of a single random "get a gold unit" store I haven't seen a single one of the new incredibly overpowered units in stores. But my enemies usually have 1-2 of them on their board. Meaning that if you are unlucky and hit a board like that before you've hit full build with enough scaling/upgrades. You simply lose and no choice you made could have changed that. Going damage seems completely doomed currently as most enemy boards spam shield/regen to the point where nothing you could have built damage wise at that wave would ever break their tank. So it's just a tank-off until fatigue kills.

Edit5: bruh, I just faced TRIPLE golden new OP unit on WAVE 1.

Edit6: Not sure if bug, or intended. But when a unit that slows 4 targets uses its slow, it counts as 1 slow for the Poison Core's reaction.

Edit7: Made it to Wave 60 before the game hard crashed. It did not enjoy my 368B power Witch, at all. So yeah, you can get about 2/3 of your board infinite still. Water Elemental + Arcane Anomaly + That row charging regen dog in one column. Then you put Shielder+<haste/slow/crit for whichever reaction your core got> on the dog's row and you have infinite shielding, infinite regen and infinite damage with a flex slot for infinite slow or haste or crit, whatever you feel like really. Takes a bit to come online, but it's still there.

Edit8: Ooh boy is the -% power bugged.

Which leads to this:

The overflow is real, and it will kill you (and your CPU). I instantly closed the tab when I saw this happen, but it still yeeted my CPU to 90 degrees instantly, who needs Cinebench anyways? This is more of a CPU stress test.

Yeah, the re-haste core reaction for crit is nuts. I got it twice and it scales up to 480% crit per trigger to 8 units very, very early. I got it twice on my Prot core in the same run.

Also prot core is crazy OP. It being shield is already good, having +5 permanent on top of that is just crazy. You just build a regen+shield board early and let every round go to max fatigue. By round 2 you've already outscaled all possible enemy damage and it only gets worse from there.

Once crit gets fixed to something more manageable. Honestly even with the 1/5th value thing it would still be what I'd stack. Because you still have full infinites. So like your right column will just be column +crit guy, prot core and arcane anomaly. Anomaly+core creates an infinite loop and the crit guy gives 100% crit to both basically instantly and then scales them to the moon with flat +power. Not as badly as right now (i normally end up with like 270,000% crit by the end of a round. Unless the game crashes before then.) But yeah, I'd say as soon as crit is fixed, arcane anomaly and gunslinger should probably be next.

Oh and as much as the change to mana source made it less insane, it's still insane. You just have to put in a little bit more work to make it so. (put it, water elemental and crit column regen guy on the same row and they outscale anything the enemy can do to you until like wave 50).

For early game that shield dog that gives permanent power to column on row haste is basically mandatory as it gives you instant easy permanent scaling AND shield AND column haste.

Then later you get the froggo with mana source and the ent above it to just trigger regen like mad and give flat +power to your core until it's stong enough that the core +power upgrade every level just sends it to infinity. I had a 1.2m prot core when I retired my last run at wave 78 due to lag. If power share wasn't still bugged you can then just share 25% of that to your Mana Source and Arcane Anomaly and now you have infinite regen, shielding and damage. Well you would if the game didn't completely die when you have those numbers.

I'd say overall everything with permanent scaling is currently OP. Because the choices just don't make sense. Would you like a unit that gives +5 temp power on haste or a unit that gives +4 permanent power on haste? That's not really a trade-off worth thinking about. Why would you pick temp power when the upside is +25% per trigger? I don't really think anything should have more than 1 base permanent power gain. Look at the ent, it starts at 1 permanent power gain and it still somehow always ends up being like a 20k power unit eventually.

The other overall just general balance thing is that full tank is just too good. There is just no reason to build damage when you can always out-tank the enemy. And there is currently no room to really increase damage output, because of how small health pools are. But then again, if defenses were made weak enough that you needed a health buffer, I'd just start taking the +health option on core level up again. Currently it's completely pointless due to how much shield+regen you get and how hard enemies hit (pre 10 since they can't break your tank, then in infinite it's because you can't keep up with their damage scaling)

Edit: I'd strongly advice to just implement an internal cooldown as well. At least until you've fixed all the infinites, assuming you want to remove them at all. Because the game just simply cannot handle the current infinites. I just made a very, very weak infinite with low numbers (by this game's standards). And it still became CPU melting at wave 36. Oh and until the +crit reactions are either tuned waaaay down or just removed. Crit core is useless. It gives like +10 crit at the same time that a core reaction would give +100 crit to 4 allies. Like what is even the point at that stage? Same with the +x instead of +x* cores like mana crystal. It just doesn't do anything when compared to the reactions. There really isn't any reason to pick any core but prot. Since your core is just a reaction stick, with the only possible relevant upsides being permanent scaling (yay) or shielding (also yay) or regen (we get regen elsewhere, don't care).

The other crit builder (+crit on row when row does something) is basically equally OP as the Geode. Also a large part of the issue with Mana Source is how the charge works, it charges 0.5s per effect on its row allies. So since some allies do 2-3 things every time they trigger, sometimes even more with how they seem to interacts with core abilities. It means that instead of charging 0.5s every time your row allies go off. It charges 1.5s, which makes it trigger A LOT. It becomes an infinite regen source with barely any upgrades.

The "big number issue" whatever in the code it might stem from, is what worries me a lot. Since 10 win is so easy and over so quick, I see infinite mode as the game. And this issue made infinite mode basically unplayable. Hell the 1.1x on crit/re-haste/re-slow broke the game to the point of crashing as soon as wave like 4. So that isn't even an infinite mode issue. Spammable exponential growth is just not the best idea unless your game is built to handle absurdly large numbers (like most incremental games).

The way crit works in general is just so overpowered that any build that doesn't stack crit is simply useless compared to any build that does stack it. With it being as strong an effect as it is, it should be really sparse and hard to come by. But last patch it was everywhere. Also the +power to core upgrade needs to be tuned down a lot. Since it's deterministic and you get it every single round, it just gets out of hand too fast. Add in that there is still the bug where any time you use a +flat power the unit forgets any % modifiers, and you can just use 25% row share, then use +power on the core and it will regain the 25% power it lost and then gain the +power. Meaning you can just yoink 5m power from your core then instantly get it back for free next wave.

Edit: Oh and yes please on the tooltip toggle. I much prefer the old version, let you see what a unit did at a glance much faster. Also made it more instantly apparent what was part of the CD ability and what was part of the reaction. It would also be very nice to have lockable tooltips where you can mouseover terms and a get a tooltip as to what exactly it means, it took me a second to realize that re-haste and re-slow wasn't a new mechanic. But rather just haste being reapplied to an already hasted unit etc.

Ok, so there are issues. The change to Crystalline Geode completely breaks the game. To the point where my 7600x got stuck at 100% utilization and the game froze for around 30s at wave 16. Basically the crit only going to row is insanely OP. Making it so whatever is on that row becomes godlike instantly. Just slap a regen and shield unit on the same row and you cannot take damage. To make matters worse, Mana Source and Crystalline Geode (at Tier 1) create an infinite loop. The triggers from Geode charges Mana Source that then Hastes Geode + the other row ally which causes Geode to give crit 4 times which charges Mana Source. You get the point. I then upgraded Mana Source to Tier 2 for funsies. This was what broke the game completely. The -power on crit upgrade for the Core is also completely broken. Since it goes up to -300% power to 7 units pretty much instantly. This sets enemy units to like -1.4m power and is probably part of what causes the CPU to just die. Had to abandon the run at that point since it was effectively unplayable.

Edit: Oh and the grammar of unit descriptions has issues. Specifically the syntax you use works for spell effect, but not on damage. I forget what the exact wording is, but the expected wording would have been something like "on dealing damage" but it was instead "on used damage". Something to that effect.

Edit2: On some more testing, the infinite only seems to work with Quick Core. That being said I just got 10 wins running only Protective Core + Geode+Mana Source with no other units. So yeah, the power level of that row is not okay.

Edit3: The exponential growth re-slow and re-haste skills also have issues, as can be seen below:

Those two units started the fight with like 2k power. They now have 2.1 and 4m power and the Mana Source also has several thousands of crit despite that being a tier 1 Geode.

Oh and if you tab out of the game (to write this post, for instance) from the end screen where you pick if you want to go infinite mode or not. That run just disappears, no choice to pick resume run and go infinite. It's just gone.

Edit4: The regen unit that gives crit to column instead of row on any is also completely busted. Got it with +1.1x on crit and it instantly killed the game. Last I saw one of my units had 16b power on wave 9 before the game crashed (after being frozen for over 5 minutes).

Edit5: Fatigue counter renders on top of menu.

Edit6: Fatigue damage is way too low. Every single fight beyond the super early game goes to full Fatigue duration, which means it becomes optimal to build 0 damage and 0 poison. Then just do a full shield+regen permanent scaling build, and just sit out the full duration every fight, to outscale the curve as long as possible.

Edit7: The bug where permanent +10% crit gets removed between rounds when you give temp crit still persists.

Edit8: All the various power share bugs are still a thing too. I'm on wave 75 with there being 0% chance of anything killing me. But I'll have to abandon the run because it seems the game just cannot handle power numbers in the millions very well. Just loading into a fight freezes the game for 5+ seconds and 100% utilized at least one core every time it happens. Then once the fight starts it's just a slide show. The game especially struggles with regen and poison once they get north of 1m per tick (and that happens in seconds). When I dropped my 17m power poison guy for a 27m damage guy instead. It temporarily made things not that bad. Then I upgraded my regen guy from 4.4m power to 20m or so and the game went into full slideshow mode again. The biggest difficulty currently isn't the enemies. It's trying to make the game not crash.

Looking forward to testing it tomorrow, most likely.

Agreed the haste/slow/healing units need a lot of love. Since really the only point of "healing" is to counter poison in real scenarios, and regen is just plain better at that. It kind of leaves healing without a purpose, also the average CD of healing units is way too high, you're very likely to die between heals with the unit effectively doing nothing. For slow, like previously mentioned, anything that will kill you will either do so before you have time to slow it (Shadow Assassin) or doesn't care about slow at all (poison reactions). So that kind of makes slow a non-mechanic. For haste, it's obviously made largely useless by virtue of infinite charge chains. But outside of that, the Spell(breaker?/blade?) is the only useful haste unit since you can just get full board haste with that +1 low CD poison unit. The others kind of just...do nothing?

To me what would make more sense is if healing units had very short cooldown with relatively low base healing numbers and regen units had very long cooldowns with relatively large base numbers. That way heals now serve a purpose (buy time to get your regens off) and regen isn't just faster and better heal. For slow, I think if that witch unit with self +x on slow was actually given an active that scales with power it would open up slow builds to having a purpose. The other half is obviously just getting charge balance right, once that's sorted. Slow kind of automatically becomes better. Same as doing what The Bazaar did as well, just upping the CD on everything automatically makes haste and slow better. Since they have time to actually come into play. When you die to a 2s CD unit's first attack, slow/haste will never be relevant. And yes, you can get one-tapped by both Shadow Assassin and Spellblade prior to infinite. It's just a bit more rare.

A unit that would be interesting to me, would be a counter-counter. Something like "The Silencer" On (Enemy Reaction) Put that reaction on CD for 0.5 / 1 /1.5 / 2s. That way you don't automatically die to reaction units, there is counter play. Then you would probably end up with silly Silencer mirror matches where one would cancel the other out. The issue with a unit like that is that it would (in the current state of the game) be a 100% mandatory infinite mode unit. It would probably need to have some kind of hefty downside or large internal cooldown per unit on the effect, or it would just completely delete a lot of boards.

Edit: Made it Round 56 in the new patch. A lot of fun stuff going on, but still lose to getting one tapped by poison reaction when their base goes up to like 270k poison over 10s. Just can't beat that, I was able to build up to north of a million per tick regen. But it's just so fast there isn't time to get there before you die.

Got a cool 52m shielding a couple waves before I ate it to poison RNG at least.

Edit2: Figured out that by going slower on damage to only focus on Regen and Shield I could get back into the 60s. Hit 66 then died to a 2m poison reactor one-tapping me. Found a bunch of bugs, basically everything relating to +10% power upgrade and the two different power sharers is broken. Sometimes if you use 10% back to back, it only works the first time. Sometimes after combat you lose the 10% again. When you use power share (either one) sometimes it works, but most of the time it will remove the +10% bonuses you gained since last share and then add the share amount (The give 50% of power to allies also still reduces the unit that uses it to 0 power). Which late game means using power share reduces your units power. Also, not entirely unexpected, CPU usage when you get to late game is absurd and also the end screen UI breaks when you get past the 100m mark on things. Edit5 addition: So I've noticed a bit more about what happens. When you use +25% power to row (or +50% both bug out the same way). Then use another power sharer, the new one simply overwrites the old one, as well as removing any +10% applied to the old one. So if you had shared power to gain +5k power, then do +10% for 5.5k power. Then you share another power for +3k power. You don't end up with 8,5k power, you end up with 3k power. Any +10% power that was applied to the 5k power is gone, and the 5k is overwritten. This makes keeping up with the exponential growth basically impossible.

Edit3: I'd suggest probably changing all the poison reaction units to work the same as the regen one (charge on enemy regen). That unit is actually possible to beat if your build is incredibly strong. The on shield poison ones just aren't. They are 100% death with no way around it, and early game they are basically useless. So changing them doesn't really impact 10 wins. Only impacts infinite mode. I've figured out how to solve for Shadow Assassin (except with growth core obviously). So now I literally lose to the same two units (that are effectively the same duplicate unit) every single run. The only counter is to not run shield, which makes you lose to literally everything else. So there is no solution.

Oh and poison core is actually pretty good now. Went 10-0 and then 54 waves with it.

Edit4: New bug, units will just randomly revert to base power during the upgrades screen. This is the most gamebreaking bug yet. It will just arbitrarily kill runs. You'll have a unit with 1k+ power drop to 20 power by itself and it's game over. And cores still lose all reactions on upgrade.

Edit5: Oh and make it so you can lock tooltips to be able to scroll in them. When you're in infinite mode you quickly have your Core's tooltip go off-screen, so you can't see what all your reactions are. Since I've come to realize health is actually completely useless, only shield and regen matters. I've started to just spam add reaction post getting 1s CD. But you can only see a few of them. Since reaction shields don't trigger poison counters, they let you bypass the scheduled losses of poison on shield. Sadly the one time I actually got a good shield reaction on my core, and could see it and build for it. I then forgot about the "upgrade removing reactions" bug and lost the reactions and promptly lost the game.

Edit6: Got to Wave 74 with a no shielding (except reactions) build. Around Wave 70 the game start to freeze every time you load into a new fight. Takes like 5 seconds of it being completely frozen before it loads in. At that point even with me getting over 1B shielding per fight Shadow Assassin starts one-shotting again and the Charge on Enemy Regen poison dude is also completely unbeatable. So it's down to RNG of how early you get those two units in a setup after they hit critical mass.

1.38B shielding from a core that comes with no base shielding, obviously I massively undervalued add reaction (because I forgot reactions don't trigger reactions). That being said, my Mr. Krabs (Coral Builder) was still gettings its +16* after I removed all shielding from my build. So some reactions seem to trigger from reactions. But it was really buggy and it didn't always gain it. But suddenly it just decided to gain +4k power between two rounds, after having gained nothing for the previous x amount of rounds.

At least in the web version the sound volume is insanely loud and it resets to 50% volume whenever you start a new run/go back to the main menu. I had to drop it to 5% to get around the expected audio levels.

Edit: nvm, windows installed an update without asking, I had to reconfigure EqualizerAPO as a result. But the whole "resetting to 50% is still an issue".

The power steal I think at least currently, would probably be one of the only things that can actually counter the oneshots you're getting the losses to. But I also think it would be incredibly overpowered as long as charge is still being too chargey. But that's more a charge issue than anything else.

I've still been having the issue where I most certainly am not dying to fatigue since it happens like 2-3s into the fight and through tonnes of shield, with the shield still being present after I died. It's always with the poison reactors. The post combat will show I took 0 damage from any source, including the poison. But I still just get one-shot. This also happens when regen>poison. At least I think it does, but it's hard to tell since as soon as you win/lose your poison counter goes down by a tonne. So sometimes you'll only see what the actual max poison was for like a single frame. Not sure if it's a bug with the end screen or a bug with poison sometimes dealing damage when it shouldn't. I think it's the latter. Because I've also had my health bar slightly dip earlier in the game when my regen>poison and having shown me as taking 0 poison damage. Though I guess that could also be just the end screen being bugged, at least it's not specific enough to only happen when tick damage is > your max hp. It consistently happens throughout.

Oh and unless it was fixed very recently, Arcane Anomaly is typoed to Arcane Anomally.

If you intend to keep reaction units largely the same as currently. I'd strongly suggest making it so that the enemy cannot ever generate a board with more than 1 counter unit on it. Because then it's still at least vaguely possible to race them and win. When they get 2x "on shield" poison. it's 100% doomed and there is nothing you can do. Shadow Assassin's numbers on the reaction (or their cd) probably still needs to be looked at, same as the any +crit on Spellblade. Both of those can and will deal north of half a million damage almost instantly on certain boards with there being essentially no counterplay. If you get to wave 40 or wave 50 or wave 60 with a good build is pretty much 100% down to RNG on which boards you face, not on how strong your build is. Having obscene amounts of fast shielding is 100% needed or you lose to a lot of things. So then you're just praying for no +all crit boards or poison reactors. Since those are effectively scheduled losses.

At least with the current charge meta the game speed is so high it's effectively impossible to tell what is happening. Also the particle effects/beams/whatever you want to call them will usually completely block everything to the point where I'm really just looking at beams. Normally can't even see the fatigue timer as it's behind the beamception.

Also there is kind of a duplicate unit currently. There are two different on enemy shield poison units. The snakey looking thing and the fairy dragon looking thing both are the exact same unit but with the latter having slightly higher base values. There was something else I was going to report on, but I've currently got quite the fever, so brain is not braining.

Something making the cores a bit more unique wouldn't be bad. Currently you're more or less running the same board no matter what core you get. Sort of the issue Dooley had at one point where you just went drill and pretended your core didn't exist. But most cores here are strong enough that you actually want to build around it (or they were last patch, maybe not so much this patch). I think with us now having a physical damage charge infinite unit (Inquisitor) Crit core went from one of the better ones to practically useless, since your inquisitor will just do what it does, except better. Growth and Quick are probably the best ones rn. With Growth being the better one due to its insane long term potential. The others are all more or less "meh", but build-aroundable and easily capable of 10 wins obviously. But I feel like 10 wins is so fast that Infinite mode becomes the game.

The Poison core I'd say is probably by far the worst one. Since it's just worse than normal poison units and also to make it do something you need to charge engine it, but your inquisitor is part of the charge engine and will just out-damage it exponentially. I guess it makes your Spellbreaker give permahaste faster/easier than using the charge right regen unit + the lowest cd poison unit for the same thing? And it will perma slow your enemy at the same time. Which to be fair, would be super strong, if you didn't have an infinite charge engine that makes haste pointless, and you die from reactions, which don't care about slows...so yeah, it's basically useless.

I think long term you probably need to just build some way of scaling core HP into the base of the core, something along the lines of +x* core health on <insert thing that is the identity of that core>. And completely make away with the flat +hp option on wave complete. Because currently you just pick HP early game to keep up with early stat checks. Then after that you get your core to 1.0s then you only pick hp after that. There really isn't much actual choice in that screen. So if the HP went away and just became a core mechanic of each core. Then it would probably help open up that design space to actually allow for some choices.

I think for me something more or less ideal would be if that screen always had "decrease cooldown". Then the other two would normally be 2 randomly selected reactions that you can add to your core (as in you get two randomly rolled ones, but you see what you get before you pick one), then a small chance for one of the 2 "reactions slots" to instead be a "upgrade core" option. That would lead to some actually interesting (and skill based) choices.

Random reaction in its current implementation  is kind of problematic. Since 99% of the time any reaction you add that give shielding/healing/regen will just kill yourself faster against enemy poison reactions. So I personally never pick it, because any power it gives is so far outdone by how much it is 100% going to kill you later.

Also on the "improve x" option between waves. The increase power one needs to be rebalanced to something like +10% damage instead. Because when two options are multiplicative and one is additive. The latter will becomes useless by wave 2 normally. Adding +10% crit to a 120k power units is quite impactful, adding +10 damage is not. Same with the "sacrifice effect for power". That is never useful, +10 flat power is never stronger than whatever it ends up removing, and the gains are so small that something like picking gain random reaction -> sacrifice reaction, on repeat, won't ever be useful. Because it's just way too slow. So those two are basically "dead buttons" at this point.

I'm still not 100% sure on this. But it feels like fatigue damage is flat, rather than % of hp? Either way, fatigue starts way too soon and when you have 1k hp to your opponents 500k hp. It's not exactly fair. I've realized that some of the deaths I thought were to random poison ticks were actually just due to fatigue starting way faster than most builds could feasibly chew through 5m hp + shielding + healing + regen. And since it hits you super hard and basically doesn't seem to impact the opponent at all. It feels pretty unfair. Not like there's a counter to being one-tapped by fatigue when the fight has pretty much just started.

Well, not sure if intended or not. But if you use the force upgrade option. You can upgrade charge units indefinitely. Inquisitor + Sand of Time or w/e the row charger is called can still make a full infinite loop. You put Core - Sand - Inquisitor and upgrade Inquisitor's  charge to 3.5s and Sand to whatever CD you've used "improve damage" to reduce inquisitor to. They then full infinite and also infinite the core (or whatever your third unit on that row is) Ideally the growth core or the charge column core if you need two more infinite units for...something. Then you could put that regen charge right unit on that row to spread it even further, I guess? But at least you really have to work for your charge engine now. You don't just get whole infinite board for free by like turn 5-8.

Mirror of Eternity or w/e the +10 Top shield unit is called is also pretty much an auto-include in anything that isn't using +x*. Since you can just upgrade that infinitely. I think +120 is the highest I've had it. But that was last patch, this patch you need too many upgrades elsewhere (charge). I think just by design the "Any" triggers are way too strong. Same goes for the regen tree dude with +1* on Any. Even with me using it to share power to my poison unit every time I got the option. It still ended up around 15-20k regen.

The share power thing is completely broken currently. It drops the power of the unit you use it on to 0 and give seemingly 50% of the base value of the unit you use it on to the other two. I used it on a 500-something unit and it gave +7 to the other two units and set itself to 0. The other one, where one unit gains 25% of the other two units on the row still works as intended though.

Edit: Made it to 47. Every single loss was to poison counters one-tapping me with no counterplay. The crit interaction is so OP though. I had the Any +x crit regen dude with +45 crit to 9 random allies. So my Inquisitor was infinite hitting for around half a million per hit (which still can't get you to level 50). I also had several millions of shield and Regen ticks in the 50k range. Doesn't matter though since 19k base poison being applied to you via reactions will just instantly kill you. The weird thing is when your enemy has poison < regen their damage from poison doesn't show up in the after fight report. But it does still move your health bar and can still kill you.

Edit2: If you use something like "improve heal" +10% crit. Then gain +crit during combat. The +10% "permanent" crit gets deleted at the end of that combat. Also got to Wave 51, scaling around 50 gets completely cursed. Base values go from like 20k to 220k in I think like a few waves. I had a 98k poison reactor one-tap me. Then at level 51 a  Shadow Assassin with 260% crit chance clapped me for over half a million about 1s into the fight. Even my obscene amounts of shielding can't deal with that.

Well, Charge is dead now. It seems like enemy crit is bugged and values above 100% causes them to get obscenely strong. I've seen comps randomly go infinite on both shielding and regen without having an actual proper charge core, with values of like 2500% crit that seems to maybe be affecting charge durations too, or something? It was weird. Either way, since the enemies are still gaining most their power from just constant flat number gain. And we as players were made a lot weaker this patch. It's very very difficult to keep your damage high enough to keep up with health scaling (not to mention enemies that will hit you for 50k 1s into the fight, which you can't "beat" with charge spam anymore. I had 15 million shield on Wave 38, but still died to physical damage on Wave 40 because I just got oneshot before I had time to build up shield (got one cast of 24k off at 1.0s, but the enemy also hit me at 1.0s and that resolved first, so I just instantly died)

I think the core issue with the reaction isn't the effect itself. It's more an imbalance between your health (which has no natural growth) and their base numbers, that do. Towards the end of the run enemies have 10k+ poison per application. And I'm applying shield as often as the internal cooldown of charge will allow, same with regen usually. So I technically have the regen/heal/whatever to keep up with the DPS of those poison applications just fine. It's just that a single tick instantly kills me from full health. Since even with taking +100 health every single upgrade after you get 1s CD on your core. You still only have about 4.5k hp at that point, and it doesn't take a lot of triggers before each tick of poison deals more than that. Enemies also have HP in the millions at that point. So as strong as my attacks are, it still takes a couple seconds to chew through that.

Another option is to make regen and poison work the way I seem to recall it working in The Bazaar. Where if you have say 1100 poison and 1000 regen. It just makes you have 100 poison effectively. So unless you out-poison the regen, you can never kill with poison. That would make this solve-able as long as you have enough regen scaling. But it might also make it so you literally cannot lose.

Edit: Made it to 65, but died to the poison on shield counter again. I tried to purposefully remove my shielder from my charge loop to make it go slower, and only upgraded the CD to where it would go before shadow assassin. But eventually that was still enough to make the counter one-shot me before I could eat through the 1.5-2m worth of hp they have.

I did also encounter a bug. I think it was the regen unit that gains temporary +5 either per poison or per haste trigger. I forget. Anyways, it still counts as having its in combat values out of combat. It looks like it has like 30 regen or whatever. But when you use the "spread power on row" effect. It spreads whatever value it ended combat with.  Didn't have that happen with the other in combat self buffers when I tried it on them, only that one. Sometimes on upgrade units will also lose any spread power they had and just replace it with the base value of the upgraded version. I think it was the poison core where I had that happen. I used the power bug to transfer about 200 power to the poison core. Then upgraded it and it went down to like 8x power.

Edit: Made it to 44 wins in Infinite, it's pretty RNG. Shadow Assassin is a guaranteed loss, basically. It just oneshots you no matter what, unless you run a no healing setup, I guess.

Edit2: Solved the Shadow Assassin issue with some silly 2m+ shield shenanigans. But then the Shield(Enemy) x Poison over 10s becomes the lose con instead. It's impossible to solve for both, basically. If you get enough shield to live Shadow Assassin, you die to the other one and vice versa. At least with heal core (which is what I had). I'll try with some other core and go regen+shield only and see which enemy 100% oneshots me with 0 counter play then. I'm pretty sure there's a poison on enemy regen as well? Guess we'll see.

Edit3: Yup, Void Spectre. So all 3 of the "counter" units are completely broken OP and automatically one-tap you in Infinite mode, literally no way to build to counter all at once. So it's just RNG on how long it takes you to face 3-4 of those late game. Wave 62 is the longest I've been lucky enough to hit so far.

Charge is incredibly OP, and way too easy to access to the point of going infinite. 100% Haste uptime is guaranteed from a single unit with no special requirements, meaning you just "have haste" for all intents and purposes. Crit core with nothing but charge and the Any +10 Top shield dude and the +5 on Haste commander means it just kills essentially instantly. Prot core with full charge setup does get like 10k shield in a second or two though, so maybe that just tanks it?

Game eventually softlocks since your character will just sit still at a chest and enemies will get stuck on each other and never approach you. Also Backstab is insanely OP and makes for the usual issue these types of games has. Which is that defensive stats are completely useless. You just spam damage to keep up with enemy HP scaling and oneshot everything before it hits you.

The fact I can't open the shop until I close all other UI elements is a deal breaker for me. Makes it a PITA. Going from the state you'll likely be in (building menu open, to-do list open) to shop, then back to that same state takes the following inputs: Close building menu, close to-do list, open shop, open water, click max, click sell, click close shop, open building menu, open to-do list. That's 10 inputs for something that should probably just be at most 2 clicks. Also heaven forbid you forgot to check how many items the to-do list asked you to sell. Because then you have to do it all over again, every...single...time.

Took 3-4 retries before I really got the mechanics. That there is no way to lower Notice and that you're just trying to brute force before day 50. Got World Domination win con on first try after I realized that (but on Day 50, so it was close).