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there seems to be something broken with the amount you have to spend buying drones to super high levels to selling them off. i wound up selling my mark 10-~500 drones last night for around...well let's say my cash count wound up saying something like 200G after EACH sell to equal around 600G, where G is your "billion" marker. and that's enough to make you pretty much become a god. i mean not that it matters much towards the fourth NG+, just bringing it to your attention
You are right. I did not think of that. What you get for consuming drones are influenced by the level of NG+ you are on and your intelligence but the cost for upgrading them are not, which would mean that eventually you could get infinite experience by upgrading drones and consuming them, making upgrades free and the game essentially over.
Yes. The only point at which higher salvaging would do nothing is when every single enemy drops a powerup 100% of the time, and that should be at a salvaging of 28571%, if my calculation is correct. =)
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LOL, i didnt notice, that the new better drones are not just 3-x, they are 4-x or higher and look just like the old ones. And i consumed them. *facepalm* So i dont need to wonder about the difficulty *doublefacepalm*.
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@kohlenstoff keep in mind i'm talking about the level 9 after beating the ng+ you're currently on. there are 6 all together and each one gets tougher
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@Cygnus: Level 9? Are you kidding me? I have beaten this in first Newgame+ with 12 Damage and 300 armor. I have beaten then Level 10 with 15 Damage and 220 Armor. Level 11 and 12 are the Problem, because these need ar least twice the amount of damage of level 9 and 10 to be beaten. I made just an calculation. I need to farm 75 million EXP to get enough atack power to pass level 12. With my equipment i need to pass one level 100 times to get these. And we talk about level 12 of 39.
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currently on level 9 of the second new game+ and i'm just not feeling this major difficulty kohlenstoff is talking about. the grind and the difficulty feel pretty comfortable as it is atm, though maybe that's because with the old drones i still have just over 1000% intelligence. other relevant stats right now are 124 damage, 1650 armor, 39% armor regen. the red shots (tier 8) right now still pack a pretty good punch but it feels pretty even with the other things to balance it out. i left out the shield stats because shield feels pretty useless and i've grown to just forget about it
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Levels are quite long, difficulty is pretty steep, yet I keep coming back. You're on to something good here, good job :)
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With which kind of equipment do you test? Level 150 drones? You say, you can get 10 million in one round of level 12. I do actually get 600 thousands, before i got 4 red minelayer, 2 many cannon ships and 8 big green colonys and some other things on screen and die. Something is wrong. I still got not enough firepower to pass level 11 and 12. There comes still more stuff in, than the cannon can destroy. Even if i take some days to upgrade, i cannot pass these levels. And its level 12 of 39. Sadly this newgame+ requires still way too much overgrinding. Maybe you should test newgame+ once with the minimum stuff, whith which you are able to beat normal games. Experienced players like me tend usually to enter newgame+ shortly after beating to prevent too easy gameplay.
In my test I started NG+ on normal with four m3-3 drones, 1 guardian, 1 fighter and 2 observers. I then made it to level 12 and beyond in about an hour, but I made sure to replace those initial drones with new m4 or better drones that I picked up. I always kept the 1 guardian, 1 fighter, 2 observer set up though (or colony/fortress/sapper/sapper), which I thought might be optimal. But this test was done before I reduced the power of observers and reduced the drone drop rate a bit, so a new test now would hopefully take longer than an hour, since that was too easy. So if you are not using the new drones or any observers, I think you should be. Intelligence bonuses will also increase how much experience you get for consuming drones, which is where 90% of that 10 million I wrote about came from.
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Somehow i still see just version 1.08. But i read since more than 2 hours, that the new version 1.09 is available. Is it my computer or my internet providers proxy or is there something wrong?
Sometimes the old version gets stuck in your cache I think. When that happens restarting the browser works for me, but it may depend on what settings you have.
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I see many problems there. Ressources of drone upgrading cannot be regained. Upgrading these drones to useful levels requires even with 4 time power lot of time. My old drones consumed more than 20 millions, which i aquired in unlimited 3 of old game,... if one starts newgame+ early (as i did) one has not such a comfortable way to get exp in useful amounts of time. And not to forget the time to get the drones or to find out, which kinds exists and which ones of them are good. It will be a big challenge to solve these problems without breaking the balance or making this newgame+ to an unlimited quest.
I'm testing the first NG+ right now, and at this point it is actually easier than the normal game, since I got more than 10 million for completing sector 12 once, so I don't think you need to worry. I think I will have to make it harder in fact. Observers are too powerful, since I have 800% intelligence and salvaging. =)
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I would also prefer to make the player stronger. The higher leveled dropped drones will not have much effect (even their sell value). The drones are near their limit. I use level 26 drones and can do level 11 (definitly last doable level with these drones). With level 50 drones i could do maybe level 20-25. The curve is increasing too drastically for such a solution. Most changes, which increase the limit of application of drones, could break the balance of the game. New upgrades are a definitly a better solution.
The new drones will be stronger than the ones you currently have. They start with higher stats and grow faster when upgraded. Upgraded to the same level as the drones you currently have, these should be about 4 times as powerful.
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Maybe there should be an continued upgrade system on newgame+ instead of the drone slot. The 4th drone does not have the power to make an real noticable impact. The main problem is the lack of atack power, which leads too fast to full levels. The other problem is too much peak damage. So i suggest 2 new upgrades: 1. Atack power (as much, as needed to prevent enemy flooding in highest levels without having level 100+ drones, i have level 26 and these took already very long time of playing after finishing game) 2. Damage reduction in % (up to 50-60% should be enough). These upgrades should rebalance it without any level changes. But i dont know how much efffort in programming this would need.
Right now what I am thinking is having enemies drop better drones the higher your NG+ level is. So the first NG+ would have drones of mark 4-6 and the second would have drones of mark 7-9 and so on. But I have also considered adding more upgrades. I would rather make the player stronger than decreasing the strength of the enemies.
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or maybe instead add the ability to buy more drone slots, at exponentially increasing high prices. this one really does feel like a good solution, especially seeing that you meant for the drone feature to provide infinite growth.
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lol, absolutely no way to get through level 39 on ng+...unless you have a constant laser. i thought of something that could make balancing a lot easier...maybe if you were to add a new drone slot on your ship for each ng+?
There will be a fourth drone slot in the next update, and with that along with having fixed salvaging (which did not work) I managed to beat sector 39 on NG+ with 4 drones at level 150. That's still too difficult though, I think, so in the next update NG+ will still probably get easier in general.
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The Invincible and Indomitable can only be made in level 39 and 3rd unlimited mode. I had in 3rd unlimited mode several times all bars full. In other levels you need lots of luck for Invinvible and.... uhm... a miracle for indomitable. But anyways you need lots of atack power to get them (at least 18 atack and all other atack upgrades, because you must kill in a certain amount of time a maximum number of stuff)!
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So how exactly is one to earn the Invincible and Indomitable achievements since the power up drop rate has been greatly reduced? A salvage heavy drone load-out does not seem to help much except to cause an increase in worthless drones to drop.
Just recently I noticed that because of a silly mistake I did, salvage actually does not do anything. I am sorry about that. I should have listened more to the comments telling me something was wrong with it. It will be fixed in the next update.
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The battle hardened did not replace drones. It rather completed them. During the first game, its definitly worth to upgrade drones first. I used fighters up to mark 3-13 in combination with 3. million EXP in battle hardened for beating the game. I used a upgraded guradian (mark3-10) and 2 fighter (the mark 3-13) and 5 million battle hardened to kill boss from last unlimited. I was then preparing 3 mark 3-25 guardians and aprox 30-40 million battle hardened for killing secret boss, but then battle hardened was gone and so did my hope to get enough upgrades in an useful amount of time to kill it (what means, before the grinding becomes too boring). So i begun newgame+. Now im stuck there (now level 10) and i dont have many hopes to pass even the half way, before grinding bores me to leave.
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I think the battle hardened was not so bad, as it seems. It was well balanced at least up to 40 million EXP (invested AND saved). Then it goes slowly into overpowered, but only very slowly. One needs to get 100 million EXP to overpower the ship too much. And i dont believe, that many player get so much. I made until now maybe 60 million EXP from which i wasted 20 million into wrong or unused drones. I play really alot and i still needed a week for this.
Since the cost of Battle Hardened does not increase, and the cost of upgrading drones do, it would eventually make upgrading drones not worth it. The only reason it existed in the first place was to give the player an upgrade that could not be maxed, and the drones do exactly that.
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Cygnus is right. I got just 3 mark 3-25 guardians and 3 mark 3-13 fighters, which i took from last game. I needed a week to grind for these. Now i can decide between too few firepower and too few armor. The lack of firepower makes late levels too full of enemies. I would prefer to have a possibility to go to the normal game back (allows to waste time until newgame+ is rebalanced).
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the NG+ difficulty feels about right, but there feels need for some tweaking with the power of the ship. i have 847 armor and 37% armor regen and i'm getting wrecked by tier 3 drones. i understand it's meant to be able to do some bullet surfing but when the screen gets loaded with tier 3 bullets, you're bound to get hit by a few, and at stats this high it still means almost instant death in this situation. perhaps a possible solution would be to make the cost increase per drone level a bit less. all 3 of my drones are already above level 200, the lowest being 221 and the cost to upgrade is 8.9mil. they'd need to be at i'd imagine level 500 in order to survive, and even given the significant exp increase you gave new game+ enemies, it still takes a good number of rounds to complete just to get one level. it would simply take way too long to get strong enough to hold one's own. instead, maybe you could allow for further boosting of stats as if playing the game the first time through?
I haven't really tested the NG+ difficulty levels, I just gave the enemies the same increase per tier as in the rest of the game, but that does mean that their power increases exponentially, and I knew that it would become impossible at some point, but if not even the first level of NG+ can be completed I think the power curve of the drones do need to be toned down a bit.
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I get nothing but slowly falling stars, music, and a cursor. No AdBlock, latest version of Chrome and its built-in Flash.
You are right. I must have done something wrong. I will try to fix it as soon as possible.
EDIT: The game was trying to read something from a save file that did not exist. It should be fixed in a few minutes. =)
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I'm REALLY enjoying the character development between the pilot and the ship. Especially the part about dehumanization in war.
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well the thing is i actually follow the boss, essentially ramming the mines and absorbing the damage instead of killing them, so i don't get the exp. i've watched the counter at the side of my eye as i did it to make sure that it wasn't the mines. 5 minutes before typing this i just got 4 times the experience that i normally would from the secret boss kill, and that wasn't the first time. sometimes it's twice the amount as well.
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I finally did it. The minimum damage to beat Level 39 is 20. So much is required to prevent flooding the screen with enemies and bullets.
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What kills this game is the UBBERLONGLEVELS,the upgrade system and everything was nice,but to much longer and sometimes you pass around 90% of the level to in the last 10 seconds come 948928459428598 shots and you die.
Existing levels won't be getting any shorter, but I have been thinking about adding more variety and making the game less linear, so that there are always several levels to choose from to progress and not just a single bottleneck all the time.
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does the secret boss give experience based on how long it takes to kill him? because one time he gave me one amount and then another time he gave me twice as much.
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found something like elshog. noticed a major slowdown when on the third endless mode. after positioning my guy in the middle of the screen to farm exp, i took my cursor off the window. everything started to slow down like crazy and there was nothing extra on the board like there normally would be, and at endless mode 3 level 20 that's like everything
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The difficulty of endless modes increases not continously. There are certain combinations of enemies, which are deadly (when repeated, which occurs often). These combinations cannot be killed before they fill upt the whole screen with bullets, even if one after another is targeted and no own bullet leaves the screen and rate powerup is online. These combinations can occur at the beginning of unlimited or late. It dpends on luck.
Yes, it is random, but deadly waves are less likely on lower levels and more likely on higher. The endless modes are supposed to kill you anyway, sooner or later. =)
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In response: First endless mode, around 350,000 earned EXP it became unbearable. It seemed to me that somehow, missed enemies keep cluttering the buffer or something, because I missed a lot of enemies along the way. Slowdown occurred only with enemies on screen, and did not persist through dying.
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an option to view the scenes again would be great, so one could do a sort of new game + by playing the levels in order again. also, maybe an extra endless mode which just makes it forever harder and harder to survive, with more and more enemies spawning based on some formula and not a fixed amount per level. i mean the current endless modes are fine, but after you get past the level 19 wave and you aren't dying, it's just a matter of how long you want to sit there and farm exp before you get tired and eject
Going through the game again as powerful as you are at the end would be boring, but introducing a new game+ with enemies with boosted stats would be a good idea. Making the endless modes past level 20 (which is the highest level, it gets decreased to 19 every time you die) even more lethal would probably also be a good idea. I am thinking of remaking the endless modes into something more interesting in the future.
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Salvaging seems not to work as described and expected. @EMCEW I made the invincible achivement in the second unlimited mode 2 hours ago. The weapon achivement seems to be impossible. I never reached half load of even one weapon powerup. @Amberhelix: I was now after many trys able to beat level 39 with 16.5 damage + 14.5 shield regen and lot of optimal timed occurring powerups and lot of luck.
Salvaging works by rolling a random number up to 500, and if that number is lower than the enemy exp value you get a powerup. Salvaging increases the exp value for this random roll, so an enemy worth 250 exp would drop a powerup 50% of the time, but with 100% salvaging he would drop 100% of the time. And sector 38/39 will be getting easier in the next update, I did make them too hard. =)
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When I hack my xp so I can pump up a drone sufficiently that my salvaging is over 2000% you'd think the indomitable and invincible achievements would be easily attainable, and yet they're still impossible. You might want to reconsider the way those two achievements work.
Achievements are supposed to be skill based, not "Hey, you won the lottery".
You can get both those feats on the endless modes, especially if you keep going to level 20 when things start getting really crazy. I've also gotten them on sector 38-39. So it's not impossible. =)
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@elshog, nothing slow here, but it does loop at level 19. also is it possible for projectile stat higher than 1 on any single drone?
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Endless mode can't be beaten because there are too many slowdowns in the later levels. By the pattern of that slowdown, I suspect that there's a memory leak somewhere. Please check on that.
I haven't experienced any slowdowns, but it sounds bad. Could you be more specific? Which endless mode did you play? What was the pattern that makes you think it is a memory leak? At what point did it slow down? Did the slowdown persist after dying and restarting? Did it persist after restarting the game? The more details you can give me, the better.
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I made it from level 32 to 36 without any death. But i cant pass since 2 days the levels 37 and 38 due lack of firepower (i got all upgrades, and 15.45 atack + 1.25 drone bullets). Even the correct drops do not help. Can anyone do these levels without trying more than 10 times?
You are right, the last two levels do still rely too much on getting lucky. But you should have it easier not going all out attack, since you need to be able to take a lot of damage. Thinking about it, I may have accidentally made them too hard when I first tested them because of a bug that made the player do too much damage with the Battle Hardened feat. I need to test them again.
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Nice update. But i fear, that i accidentially consume one of my drones, in which i invested already millions of EXP. I suggest some kind of lock funktion. I would do following: A button in the menue, like the update or consume butten. One clicks it, and then one clicks the drones. The locked drones have then another text color (or some other visible sign) and must be unlocked (another click on lock button) first to be consumed.
I don't want to get rid of them, just make getting them less important, which I think the latest update did, though it may still need some more testing. =)
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This game is nice, but some things are not really good: 1. Regen and enemies coming immediately after killed whole group. This can be exploited by letting one of the enemies alive. Without this tactic regen is often useless, because enemies accumulate then to deadly amounts. 2. Firepower and luck. Many parts of the levels can only be done with the dropped powerups from the enemies. The own maxed firepower is simply not enough to clear such areas and to prevent accumulating of deadly amounts of enemies. If a area depends on such things, dont let it depend on luck. It leads to frustration. 3. Enemies spawn directly after last kill. This is a bad combination with regen, but its also a bad combination with common gameplay. Flying to the right wall and killing the last mine leads often to a immediate collition with a rocket. One second time should be at least given between spawns.
When there are no active enemies the next wave is sent so that you don't have to wait. I'm not going to make the game any slower, but regeneration can be exploited in that way, as you say. I don't think it's a big problem, but you did give me some ideas about how it could be fixed. The reliance on powerups is something I would like to change a bit and I am looking into it right now. =)
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bug: sector 27, after the enemy waves, there's nothing. the game effectively stops and you're left to do nothing but eject
That's my fault. I will update to a new version as soon as possible.
Edit: And now it is fixed. There was a positive number that should have been negative. Sorry about that. =)
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feels like apogee's 1994 pc title raptor:call of the shadows, and that's really saying something. add a sorting button to the drones. pushing on to level 20, that's my only complaint so far. the pace is indeed slow like others are saying, but that's really not a bad thing...it just makes for a longer game, and more satisfaction when you finally get somewhere. kudos on going the hardcore route with this game rather than casual. BTW to the players, there are actually infinite upgrades, it only depends on how much you want to put your mind to it. that's actually one of the defining points of this game.
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Having powerups drain over time is kind of a slap in the face considering the frequent (long) pauses between waves. If you really want that feature (to make the Indomitable feat more difficult?), you could at least slow it down. Like, by half. That would go a long way towards addressing the complaints about needing drops to survive.
If I am going to change the need for powerups I am leaning towards reducing the rate at which they drop and making the player stronger in general, like troglodytic suggested. But I have no definite plans right now.
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why does this game have a 3? it's clearly deserving of way more. clearly there's a lot of work put into it, and the author is regularly updating.
people's main gripe is the length of the levels. seriously? you guys are really gonna knock off 2 points because you don't like how long the levels are, and ignore the ingenious simplistic yet complex design, the fantastic upgrading system, and a story packed with cerebral humor?
i'd give this game a 4 at the very least, but i'm giving it a 5 to do my part in evening out the bias from people mad about the level length.