Segments from an email from the dev: Apothys. "Iron Vice ended up being a commercial failure and we had to pull the servers. For a while, we were planning on relaunching Iron Vice on Steam and Armor Games, hence the trailer. Unfortunately, due to various financial and timing issues, that never panned out, and so the trailer became more of a way to chronicle Iron Vice, as the game is no longer playable. As someone who dumped literally thousands of hours in making the game, I'm also pretty bummed that it died the way it did. We did have some pretty cool things planned if the game had been successful, alas... Such is game development. I won't say Iron Vice is dead for good; I know the team would like to revisit it at some point. It is certainly in hibernation though, and Black Tower (as a company) is going through some restructuring at the moment, so the future of its IPs is a little shaky. Fingers crossed that we get to revisit it sometime in the future."
As far as the community goes, yes, this game is currently dead with only a couple people getting on now and then including but not limited to myself. As far as development goes, to the best of my knowledge the development for this game has been stalled and is being put on hold due to some issues with releasing this to Armor Games and a couple other locations. Once that happens this game should be back on track and a community outside of Kongregate should form. After that and along with the announcement for the next update (which according to the devs will occur once this game is released to AG), some of the kong community should return as well. Do note that they have to pay to maintain servers and those are currently still running, so the game hasn't been abandoned yet. The game's still entertaining as is and feel free to provide a tad bit of support by watching the ads. I wouldn't expect people to pay during this stalled period.
From what I gather, turmoil seems to be the biggest complaint people have about the game. I think it's honestly a very well executed system. It basically forces you to make tough decisions. You have to look at and understand how your character gains and potentially loses experience. I feel like the people who are struggling a ton with this game are probably both wasting time by killing more monsters than necessary while NOT clearing the floor, and/or they're simply rushing from one floor to the next when they're low on health without spending a little time to explore some of the map to mitigate their losses while they try to get a low enough turmoil level to rest their characters effectively. Also, for those who think that experience should never regress, it's not like you lose your level (aka knowledge). It's simply that since your character is struggling and continues to struggle, it is simply taking him that much longer to figure out what works and gain new skills.
-kingblane, Your best bet is to try to find someone who gets online at around the same time you do and try to manually set up matches with them. The community is not large enough here for the quickplay option to really be of that much use.
As a final note, if you are concerned about the revive tokens, those two are refreshed each day so you don't have to pay for those (or be as concerned about using them).
-MichelWK You really don't need to pay for faster progression, you just need to find someone to do missions with. Admittedly that may be challenging since the community is so small but if it's going to get larger people need to stick around. Next, schematics are meant for late game unlocks since you only buy the schematic once. It will give you a common version of the item at your level with max driver slots and it unlocks that weapon for further drops from chests. For the 'junk' gear, all I'll say is that's what recycling is for. Recycling will boost your affinity with using those items. For getting past tier 3, chest drops are capped by +/-2 of your level so make sure you aren't too far ahead of your zone. Also, if you're stuck on core, although it's a pain, if you survive long enough you'll be tped out and complete the mission. Sorry you weren't able to get many co-op games going, but do consider sticking around cause that'll add another member to the community.
-johnmykel22: This has been brought up to the devs before, and while they do agree it'd be cool and I'm pretty sure that they'd like to do it at some point, it would be a lot of tedious work for them and they'd rather spend their time improving other portions of the game that they think are more worthwhile. It prolly has a good chance of showing up in a later update, just not soon.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a really good, promising game and the two things it needs the most are more people and time. Now, people have been having issues with the game not working on certain browsers, lag, and some bugs... and the devs have been in the chat, every day paying attention to what's going on and working really hard to fix whatever issues pop up within the game. Yeah, maybe this game was released a tad too early, but by no means is it finalized. They are looking for the community's help and input in providing both information to improve performance, and ideas for what people want in the game. If you don't see them in the chat, PM one of them and I'm sure they'd be happy to listen to you, given that it's constructive or helpful. They have responded to every single one of the questions I've asked them, and they have been very grateful for any assistance I give them. Please have some patience and try to work with the devs, it'll be worth your while.
I think most people are just waiting for the upcoming performance fix cause there's so many people experiencing lag/crashes. I'll keep getting on now and then to try to encourage the community for this game to grow cause it needs help getting off the ground. Would be a ton more fun with more people.
Thanks, Flash. We're in this deployment mode called "Soft Launch," which is where the game is advertised in very brief spurts on Kong's front page (for testing purposes). We're planning on fully launching come early November and will hopefully get more traction when we're on the front page for longer than 2 hours :P Major thanks for all your help. The game is better because of it.
Is it just me or are the robot healers in tier 2 insanely OP when you're in single-player, trying to solo the boss? Spent about 10-15 minutes bringing him down to just a few pixels, then one healer got in range and in less than a second the boss was back to full. Percentage based healing should not be a thing imo.
Hey Flash. That very well may be a bug. Support Cores aren't supposed to heal high value targets like bosses, assassination targets, or legendaries. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We're looking into it.
*EDIT* Found the issue. It's a doozy. It's bad enough we're considering a hotfix, as it makes core completion practically impossible. Thanks again for the alert.
I think this is the best game of the SFH series so far. I really like how much you can customize your entire team, ranging from weapons and attachments, to traits and classes. The choices you get for character bonuses at lvls 5, 10, and 15 combined with the random trait+flaw increases the uniqueness of your characters. Because of the increased diversity I actually like the "tired" condition because:
A) It forces you to try different things and not just stick with the same character/class for your entire gaming experience.
and B) It only lasts for one mission so it's not much to complain about in the first place.
The only problems I've found with this game are:
A) The story (which you're given the gist of it with minimal depth).
and B) Just for the heck of it, I'd like to know the stats of the default weapons...
So yeah. Awesome game-play combined with a basic, almost non-existent and (imo) unnecessary plot/story means that this game gets a 5/5 from me.
Someone will probably bring it up at some point or another and I figured I might as well be the guy... "multiplayer?" I know it's very difficult any I wouldn't expect anything soon, but it's just food for thought. Anyway, an automatic 5/5 for such a great game. It's a rarity coming across a good RTS game on websites such as kongregate, so thank you.
thanx man, i really have put alot of work into this. as for multiplayer, version 2 will have mp for sure. im using this version to nail down all the mechanics and gameplay.
If you don't know what certain "enemies" are, learn your prefixes for the easier enemies. For later "enemies": "Pack"s are groups; "Pulsars" seem to pulse in and out; those named after storms and tornadoes are shaped like spirals; the red dots in "Orions" are positioned like those in the star constellation Orion's Belt. Also, later achievements are given for defeating harder and more complicated "enemies". If you use your common sense, you will be able to figure out what most of the "enemies" are, images for the achievements are not needed.
 "Iron Vice"){kind=icon}
 "Steel Champions 2035"){kind=icon}
 "Caverns of Turmoil"){kind=icon}
 "Strike Force Heroes 3"){kind=icon}
 "Days 2 Die"){kind=icon}
 "Starship Commander"){kind=icon}
 "Defuse"){kind=icon}
 "Flur"){kind=icon}
 "Zombie Splatter"){kind=icon}
 "Reverb Part 2"){kind=icon}
 "Ultimate War"){kind=icon}
Thanks, noted!