Hi there! First thanks for the chance to give feedback and the good work on the game so far!



As I understand it, the game is intended in part to be a cross between a (tower) defense game and a dungeon explorer, and it's a really cool concept! I'd like to discuss some elements of the current design that I feel negatively affect the game-play, and whether the experience is shared by others, and whether it's the intended experience.



Here's a list of some things I run into in my play-throughs:

• Due to such huge resource bonus for having somebody operating a module during the opening of a door, every time I open a door I tediously (re)assign all but one member of my team to a module purely for the resource bonus. Then, those assignments become meaningless as soon the new door is opened, and I'd have the team members run to whichever room I'd set up as a choke point if needed.
• Not every floor, but most floors, I find I'm required to set up all my defenses in the first couple rooms. Here are the major reasons why:
  
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• The first reason is that since I don't know which path will lead to the exit, the only safe investment for defense until you've found the exit are the rooms immediately adjacent to the crystal.
• The second reason is that I only seem to find dust sporadically, and often times don't even have enough power to light more than the first few rooms until much later into the exploration.
• The third reason is the frequency and behavior of the spawn "waves" appearing in any unlit room. Due to the way the map generates and having no idea which door will expose the exit, you wind up with a lot of unlit rooms in multiple directions from the crystal that you have to deal with constantly. Naturally then, there's no reason to install defenses any deeper into the dungeon than near the crystal until absolutely necessary or to help with the crystal extraction once I've found the exit.
  
  

Because of what I described above, I wind up with one "runner" character who's job is simply to trek down the current hallway I've carved out to open a new door, then run back to the choke point ASAP. The rest of the crew aren't really participating in the exploration aspect of the game because every "door turn" they are put to best use just standing in a room with a mod back near the crystal.

On the occasion that I found a person I could hire, or a merchant, they were very often left twisting in the wind on the next spawn wave because my defenses were too far away, or it simply was not cost effective for me to extend my defenses out that far to protect them.

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I'd like to hear if others have the same experience!



The rest of my post is my opinion and conjecture, so if nothing else I'd like to hear if others have experienced or relate to the above. Otherwise, I'll give my two cents about these things as far as design.



There are a couple reasons I say these experiences negatively affect the game-play. The first is I believe it hampers the elements of a tower defense game that make tower defense fun, and similarly hampers the elements of a dungeon explorer that make dungeon explorers fun. The second is it becomes tedious to play through large levels. To my first opinion; The fun of a tower defense is orchestrating your resources and acquired technologies in a design of your choosing that successfully stops the invasion. Right from the start your options for placement are limited, and the long-term effectiveness of those investments is mostly random, because the next door you open on your current path could be a dead end. So the most effective strategy is to always keep your defenses right around the crystal until the exit is found. I feel this limits options, particularly in trying to make effective use of some of the other more interesting well intended "small mods" that you can research, which ultimately aren't very effective. But it also plays into the second reason I find it negatively affects game-play, which has more to do with detracting from the exploration side of the game.



It became tedious to manage the game between combat action and re-setting up for the door-turn. With the runner making his sometimes lengthy run out to the new door, alone, then running all the way back to defend usually near the crystal in one or two rooms at the most with the rest of the team, the back and forth wore on me. And more importantly it really detracted from the exploration aspect. I didn't feel like having the other party members helped in the exploration at all, they were just resource boosters. And I didn't feel like I was making progress in the defense of my crystal by exploring until I actually found the exit. Threats could spawn from any dark room, and investing in defending any place except near the crystal was a potentially huge waste of resources without any perception of the potential reward.



Anyway, thank you for your time, I'd like to hear if other players have experienced or deduced the same things or have simply found more effective ways to overcome them. What I've described are just my experiences and opinions on /some/ portions of this amazing game. I always approach game design holistically and some of the elements I've pointed out could be completely intended, or serve to achieve the intended goal if only implemented in a slightly different way. So I'd like to hear about your experiences along these lines, and if these things are intended or not, if not, maybe ways to avert them. Addressing what are the root elements the designers or you like, or would like better, and ways to achieve that! IE: A common solution might be to have a way to assign each party member to a given room and be able to call them back to their assigned rooms with a hotkey, but something like that doesn't really address the underlying elements that are causing that nesessity. What would be a better way to spawn monsters? Or what if your team wasn't most effective stuck to a mod room back near the crystal all the time?



Thank you again! I look forward to see where this game goes!



-Nibiki

Hi,

Thanks for this very accurate feedback: we agree with your remarks and are working to improve the game in this direction!

In the next update, there will be some adjustments which could reduce some of these problems.

Nibiki wrote:
I'd like to hear if others have the same experience!



...



To my first opinion; The fun of a tower defense is orchestrating your resources and acquired technologies in a design of your choosing that successfully stops the invasion. Right from the start your options for placement are limited, and the long-term effectiveness of those investments is mostly random, because the next door you open on your current path could be a dead end. So the most effective strategy is to always keep your defenses right around the crystal until the exit is found.

For me, it always comes down to maxing the total food (or industry, once heroes are maxed) that I'll farm from a floor. A big part of this is starting each floor with 50-100 industry, so I can bankroll whatever towers and generators I need. There is randomness, yes, but it seems to come out in the wash. For every time I say, "Oops, that tower was useful only a few times," I have multiple towers that do heavy lifting wave after wave. As long as I'm not overbuilding (e.g. building Teslas before I know I'm not about to run into a dead end), that 50-100 industry is enough that I can recover instantly even if some towers do turn out to be poorly placed.



As for your comment about the exit, I wonder if we don't have radically different strategies. I build for resource generation, and on every floor except 8, I try to open every door. It doesn't matter if my generators and defenses went opposite the direction of the exit; once the floor is clear, I'll simply unpower them and light the wing with the exit (and, if I'm feeling unsure, maybe spend a dozen industry on Prisoner Prods at some key junction).



Anyway, you have good observations; I just thought I'd share the differences in my experience.

Thanks for the responses guys. :>



Well, I have the same experiences. If I build enough resource generators I wind up with enough resources to pay for anything I could need or want regardless of its long term usefulness. And I mentioned building extra stuff once the path to the exit was found. I would venture that everybody builds for maximum ind/food resource generation. There are a lot of elements leading to that, such as the lack of attractiveness in most of the researchable mods, the strength of leveling characters, or having food handy to keep them from dying. (I'm personally not a fan at all of the way that's implemented currently either. Damage is very spikey and having to notice somebody in trouble, pause the game, and then heal them doesn't sit right with me. But I just wanted to focus on other elements in this thread.)



But that's possibly more a matter of balancing the nitty gritty in the numbers which I would examine more after deciding more broad game elements. I was more curious about the intent of the crew members and how they play into the exploration aspect, and then how the exploration plays into the defense aspect. :>

I've clocked nearly 50 hours playing the game, and I've had very similar play experiences. I have my runner, the three resource boosters, and every time I open the door I spread tell the runner and boosters to run back to my choke point(s) to fend off the waves.



Some solutions:



Bonuses for opening multiple doors at once (I feel like I've read somewhere that there are such bonuses, but I've had all four characters open four doors at once and aside from an enormous wave of enemies, didn't feel as though I acquired anything special for the added risk--there again, I haven't tried that in the most recent versions of the game).



"teleporter" modules/equipment: The players can purchase a teleporter tag from a merchant or find one in the dungeon. If you've encountered an Endless research module, you can research a minor module that allow the character wearing the teleporter tag to move back into the room the module was built in. Each teleporter tag is keyed to one module, so if you want your characters to be teleporting instantaneously together into rooms, they'd need four of these tags.



Also, to avoid abuse: the tags have a 1 door "sync" time. A character can't use the tag the instant it's equipped--the tag has to calibrate to fit the character's biorhythmyaddayadda--that way the mechanic isn't being abused too much.



A character can't use the ability to teleport the crystal to the exit--the Dust in the crystal deflects the energy used for the teleportation for reasons.

I've been playing with a heavy bias towards SCI. It means starting out more fragile, but the late game becomes practically trivial. I won on 'easy' with excessive resource surplusses (800/300/300) because I spent my early game boosting my FIS levels to max. I pushed my operator module to lvl4 and spammed them around shops. Then, I had smokey sit around reading grimm's fairy tales to her robotic children.



Lvl7 was trivial because each door earned me 6 dust, and mob drops made up the remaining four, aided by stumbling across a merchant in the first few doors. Problem I ran into was that I couldn't find enough artifacts to spend my science on, which left me I little further behind than I would have preferred with some other techs. The set I had was sufficient regardless, and I was able to mitigate module damage by building multiple LANs.



LVL8 was a tipping point. Resource generation was no longer relevant. My heroes were all tops, but I was still losing modules thus suggesting they may eventually chip away at my surplus. The game, in a sense, was just beginning - booster modules (ie. LAN, HUD) were becoming increasingly important.



This suggests an interesting direction the game may go beyond current end-game, necessitating a change not in tactics but in strategy in order to keep up with new threats.

gorbadoc wrote:
For me, it always comes down to maxing the total food (or industry, once heroes are maxed) that I'll farm from a floor. A big part of this is starting each floor with 50-100 industry, so I can bankroll whatever towers and generators I need. There is randomness, yes, but it seems to come out in the wash. For every time I say, "Oops, that tower was useful only a few times," I have multiple towers that do heavy lifting wave after wave. As long as I'm not overbuilding (e.g. building Teslas before I know I'm not about to run into a dead end), that 50-100 industry is enough that I can recover instantly even if some towers do turn out to be poorly placed.



As for your comment about the exit, I wonder if we don't have radically different strategies. I build for resource generation, and on every floor except 8, I try to open every door. It doesn't matter if my generators and defenses went opposite the direction of the exit; once the floor is clear, I'll simply unpower them and light the wing with the exit (and, if I'm feeling unsure, maybe spend a dozen industry on Prisoner Prods at some key junction).



Anyway, you have good observations; I just thought I'd share the differences in my experience.

Hi same for me i have no problem with that you dont know there the exit is YOU have to find it and make enough money food and everything gonabe olright