In version 0.1.20 I quite like the difficulty. It balances watching your heroes health along with major modules, but without the swamping that I encountered in the last patch. However I remember quite a few people enjoying the previous difficulty. It crushed me and I enjoy a challenge but the mobs were too numerous and too strong. I wanted to hear some others thoughts on the new difficulty versus the old one.

I'm one of those who found 0.1.16 to be about right.

Imho the difficulty now is fine for the first 3 levels but gets too easy in Level 4 and 5 respectively once your heros are fully equipped.

Part of, if not the main reason for that is the weird way armor currently works.



Currently Damage=RawDamage/100*(100-Armor)



Which means that at 100 Armor you characters are completely immune to any damage. Also anything above 50 armor will lower their damage-intake so much that you barely notice it anymore.



So while I was healing a lot in level 2 and 3, this simply wasn't necessary anymore in level 4 and 5. So I ended the game with over 700 banked food.

Hi,

Good news, we're officially working on Armor for the next update

Ail wrote:


Currently Damage=RawDamage/100*(100-Armor)



Which means that at 100 Armor you characters are completely immune to any damage. Also anything above 50 armor will lower their damage-intake so much that you barely notice it anymore.



So while I was healing a lot in level 2 and 3, this simply wasn't necessary anymore in level 4 and 5. So I ended the game with over 700 banked food.

Dayum, 700 food huh? I love the idea of having levels that have no Major Module nodes, hopefully this idea stays. I get the feeling that it is going to take a long time to get the game properly balanced.



As far as ideas on the difficulty goes. I think the Amplitude devs had it right with the amount of waves they were throwing at you in 1.16, personally. The rate at which they spawn as of 1.21 seems correct though. I personally think that if the mobs dropped just a little more dust, the mob difficulty in 1.16 wouldn't have been so bad. As in you would have more powered rooms around your choke point to fortify.



Also, is it just me or does this latest update have an awful lot of Module Nodes, in levels 1-4? Most of the rooms I opened had one. It was so easy and convenient to fortify rooms that it wouldn't really even matter what gear you had by level 5.

@Mysterarts:

That is very good news indeed!



@Endless Despair

700 food and around 500 industry. As you said yourself: The new levels 3 and 4 had much more module slots nearby than previously. My heros were maxed out before the end of level 3. With some experience you can min-max placing defenses a lot and will find that very little is actually needed. When it is located in a way, that you can put your heros in the defense-room usually 18 Industry for one +Defense and one +Offense module is enough to hold a choke-room against everything the dungeon throws at you. I've barely built any towers as module-buffed-heros are just so much more efficient in dealing with monster-waves.



In Levels without Major-Module slots you'll never need more of these rooms than your crystal has entry-points.

@Mysterarts: While you're at it: -0.1 Cooldown should be changed to -10% Cooldown. Otherwise, with good-enough gear you could run into a situation where the Cooldown would be 0 which would be equally bad for the game as 100% immunity.

Or they can add a hard cap same as there is for Health Regen (which caps at 30 if I am not mistaken?).

How does the game handle percentages once they pass 100%?

Ail wrote:
@Mysterarts: While you're at it: -0.1 Cooldown should be changed to -10% Cooldown. Otherwise, with good-enough gear you could run into a situation where the Cooldown would be 0 which would be equally bad for the game as 100% immunity.

Seems like that would be easily accomplished by not having 3 items that can stack to enough cooldown? The thing about changing it from -0.1 to -10% is that it shifts who the item is best for from those with the highest AP to those with the highest DPS. Personally I prefer the current itemization where heroes broadly break into two groups which makes things more interesting IMO.

Well, I'm always keeping in mind that the game should be made in a way that it would actually have an endless-amount of levels and endless amount of item-progression aswell.

If there for example is a formula like: Item X's stats in Level Y after the story-line is: Best Storyline-item-stats+Storyline-item-stats*0.1*y



So in this case it shouldn't be -10% Cooldown either but +10% Haste, which works like Cooldown=BaseCooldown*100/(100+Haste)



Then again one could simply leave cooldown out of the scaleable stats and only scale the oters like Att, Def and HP.