NG+ balance

[coyot]

I probably just need to tone down the cultist healing. I don't think we can set them up to not self-target (Lars, correct if wrong), but they're likely OP regardless.

Well, them healing normal creeps a lot, that I could live with. Could they be just made immune to healing? That'd be an effective solution to the problem of groups of cultists growing way too strong...

[larsiusprime]

As of right now, just setting them to be immune to healing wouldn't automatically work, but that would be the way to do it. Healing is applied as a special case of attack rather than the side effect of a flavor, but it'd just take a quick if statement or two to fix that and make it respond to immunities. File a bug report for it under "enhancement" and I'll get to it if/when I work my way down the triage list.

[coyot]

Done, bug 414

[IanIanIan]

Trying to beat one of the last few levels where you don't have Archers is pretty brutal. I totally forgot the ash zombies have porcupine, taking them out without archers is proving to be a real pain

[Anthony]

It's very possible that I have a few unreasonably difficult levels. Can you be specific about which level and which difficulty? And what level was Azra at the time?

[IanIanIan]

Following Zelemir. Azra level 60..

Monsters that have porcupine and alot of health (20k+) are just way too difficult to kill without archers.

Even in the next level, Zelemir's Army, they are difficult when you also have archers. Porcupine damage is just too damn high! It might be better if it had a cooldown sort of like Counter for the Knight.

I also don't see anyone killing the sheep without being able to use slows on it.

[Anthony]

In the new build that Lars put up I believe the super sheep can be slowed, and I toned down the porcupine damage on the cultist guys. Were those the ones giving you trouble, or was it someone else? I agree that it was too damn high before.

[IanIanIan]

Bonus level is fine now without them.

Still dieing on the level Following Zelemir on extreme. I'm almost max level on all troops..yet I'm losing on like the 4th wave, every single time. Without archers, that can hit three lanes from one spot, there's not enough psi to be able to cover three separate paths and do enough damage in each one. Porcupine still murders berserkers since they attack so fast, but it wasn't as bad as before

Will try super sheep later

[Anthony]

Cool, thanks - I will be the first to admit that the Extreme levels are not all tested, so I'll keep adjusting based on my tests and feedback from you guys. They are indeed supposed to be hard, but at max levels for all characters they should certainly be possible.

[Nepene]

Bonus level is fine now without them.

Still dieing on the level Following Zelemir on extreme. I'm almost max level on all troops..yet I'm losing on like the 4th wave, every single time. Without archers, that can hit three lanes from one spot, there's not enough psi to be able to cover three separate paths and do enough damage in each one. Porcupine still murders berserkers since they attack so fast, but it wasn't as bad as before

Will try super sheep later

It's doable. Ice mage boosted by priest is really a monstrously powerful unit and can rip enemies to shreds. You need lots of magic.

I just tried it out. I almost won, perfect, just my units stopped attacking the mad ghouls at the last moment. Just let them through. They have phase, maybe there was a bug in phasing?

[IanIanIan]

Ice mages don't do enough to whittle down other normal foes with higher hp though:/

[Nepene]

Ice mages don't do enough to whittle down other normal foes with higher hp though:/

It was my experience with the early levels that the ice mages could often take a group's health down by 50% or so. It's easy enough to have two ice mages on each track.

My build order, up to round4.



You need to add another knight to the centre, but this layout is very solid and can win. Once they start using zeal they are even more deadly.

[IanIanIan]

Has anyone managed to 3-star all the levels yet? I'm stuck on extreme on a bunch of the last few levels with a lvl 60 party -.-

[Anthony]

I'm trying to determine how difficult I want the super sheep to be. Right now he has 50 million hitpoints, but with Hollow's nearly maxed party I was able to take him out at less than halfway through. This would suggest to me that 100 million would be a pretty good choice - it is totally doable, but you'll need to be nearly maxed. Obviously not quite ideal for the non-grinders, but it's something that those who enjoy maxing things could actually go for at the end. I'm leaning towards bumping it up. I'm sure some of you (coyot definitely, and understandably) will disagree, but I feel like there should be something in there for the top-level players to sink their teeth in to. Though I suppose that could also be the endless modes.

[Hollow]

I managed to take him out at the bottom right corner of the screen. So, yeah, halfway through.

[coyot]

you already kniw my opinion but just for the record, I think it should be tailored to be just about doable with party that has all gold stars, NOT maxxed out. That is, if you're missing just this last star, you should not be forced to grind.

Instead, offer selectable starting level for endless maps (or autoadjusted) so that maxxed-out parties will have easy and quick access to something hard enough.

[resa]

Two things regarding the super sheep:

1. I agree with coyot about the "balanced for all gold stars" thing. Otherwise you preclude anyone not into grinding from finishing the game which seems to be going against the design goal for the rest of the game.

2. Speaking of design goals: Given how much effort you put into not wasting anyones time, I don't get the level design of the super sheep anyway. The challenge of the level is getting enough DPS to kill it in time by smart positioning, loadout, defender builds and so on. (Which is great btw and I would very much approve of more extreme levels in NG+ that force you to really think about specific builds.)
But why don't you just make the super sheep faster instead of giving it insane HP? As it stands right now, you have fun for a few minutes figuring out how to kill it and then you spend 1/2h in a miserable slog to whittle it down. If you're set on making it twice as hard, please just half the HP and quadruple the speed.

[Nepene]

I'm trying to determine how difficult I want the super sheep to be. Right now he has 50 million hitpoints, but with Hollow's nearly maxed party I was able to take him out at less than halfway through. This would suggest to me that 100 million would be a pretty good choice - it is totally doable, but you'll need to be nearly maxed. Obviously not quite ideal for the non-grinders, but it's something that those who enjoy maxing things could actually go for at the end. I'm leaning towards bumping it up. I'm sure some of you (coyot definitely, and understandably) will disagree, but I feel like there should be something in there for the top-level players to sink their teeth in to. Though I suppose that could also be the endless modes.

It probably should be one of the special optional modes. That way you'll have easy sheep for the casual players and hard sheep for those dedicated enough to grind 200 stars.

[Anthony]

Well, one might wonder what the point of upping the level cap is if there isn't any content for capped players. We also have the XP speed up option if the game starts to feel too grindy. But I can dig the argument about being roughly appropriate for all stars, which is around level 50. So I'll try it in that range and see how many HP makes sense. The fact that we have a few endless modes will hopefully be a good offering for high level players to try to optimize.

Regarding time wasting, I don't see the super sheep as a time waste, unless I suppose you keep failing at it, which would suck a bit. It doesn't take 30 minutes, at least on 4x (which you should be able to mostly do). I haven't timed it precisely, perhaps I should. Either way, I see it, along with Endless 2, as somewhat cathartic. It lets you stop worrying about health and protection and various paths and instead just deal out crazy amounts of damage. I'm sure not everyone agrees, but that was the goal of the level (along with providing a silly super boss).

[larsiusprime]

One quick thing about the level cap - right now it's enforced through the code itself, and it's a hard-coded constant. We did this because it was the quick, easy solution and we generally agreed we wanted a level cap. I think I want to move this to a data file soon, because I can see modders wanting different values in different mod experiences. Whether or not we make it configurable in the options menu itself is debatable, but at the very least I want it to be data-driven in some form.

Beyond design/balance, etc, there's a fundamental necessity for some kind of level cap on the code level, because if a character exceeds the highest defined level in the levelup table, the game will break. I think there's a basic safety check there, so even if there wasn't a "designer-imposed level cap" one would still be de-facto enforced by the size of the levelup table itself.