First post here so I'm not sure how it all works. Loving the game been playing for a few months, just got back into it recently since I have a working computer, and have been enjoying the multiplayer alot as well. I did have a few ideas of things id like to see but my list shrank significantly when I read the community feed back but still had two that I didn't see mentioned there.



On several games I have had the Stele pop up and be great or at least okay, but now and then they show up and the detriments outweighed the benefits for my current team, or for how I was set up and I was forced to deal with it for the amount of time it stayed. I figured this was on purpose, like you never know what it'll do and can be good or bad. Wanted so badly to just give up some resources or dust to just opt out completely rather than dealing with it. Maybe even just having that be an option on too easy mode. Didn't know if that was just me having the issue or not.



Another issue I kept having was fighting a big monster while several non-herotargeting mobs stroll by towards the crystal, or the opposite, my hero would be killing tons of little mobs while a big crystal warrior would casually walk by, pat me on the butt, then peace out to kill my crystal. Once again, I know this is part of the game that was most likely intentional to add difficulty and It factors heavily into strategy. I was thinking along the lines of it being a passive ability (or timed ability) where the hero will follow mobs that leave the current room. This could have been mentioned previously here, or might even be in the game, but I haven't seen it anywhere and I would use the hell out of it. Just a thought.



Hope I didn't make myself look to stupid with this post. Love the game so far, you devs keep up the good work.

An elegant solution would be to tie the Stele's reset to the science reset cost to be one and the same, but I think this would make the game too easy. My two worst Stele experiences on hard mode:



Opened a really far door from crystal (at least 6 doors away!), found stele, 5 waves spawned. Did not have time to read the stele, but after a character died, I found out it was the one that said Defense * 0.



After fighting blue and pink hydras in a multiplayer game of four, we recounted how many times we had to heal, on hard mode. There were four heals. We opened another door and found a stele healing cost * 2. At that point, if we fought another of the same wave and had to heal four more times, the cost would be over 100 food, forcing an early leave for the exit.



People think EMPs are unfair, but you never get a spawn at the same time. Stele + spawn is a potential game killer that you can't account for, but you can account for EMPs by just spending more moolah.



As for your second issue, there are a lot of ways to counteract enemies that leave into the next room, like pepper spray. It may not be a direct solution, and it's more like a knight in chess that can only kill by moving in an L shape, but it's far from preventable.

I hate steles. Once I had 3 games in a row, where very early on about floor 4, I got ignore steles and the monsters shredded my face. And my crystal. Then, a while later I had several games where I got an early 0 defence stele and they shredded a hero or 2, then shredded my crystal. Since then, they haven't been so bad, and occasionally really nice, but I'm forever scarred by those early horrors

So... You have two different suggestions.



1. Make Stele's destructable (possibly with resource cost)

I think Stele's are a fun but random factor in the game with which you have to deal with.

When you have enough rooms lit, you can always deal with them as long as you adapt your play to the Stele.

On the other hand, they can be hard to deal with when you've only unlocked a few rooms in a level and don't have the dust to set up defenses yet.

I think the feature is fine as it is. At most only spawn tele's when there is a minimum number of rooms opened (I suggest 4).



2. Add an ability that makes heroes follow units out of the room.

Did you know you can move your heroes around during the defense phase? =P You can manually follow mobs around.

The fact that heroes and modules have their own targeting system which you cannot control is one of the charms of the game, IMO.

To deal with this meet certain mobs away from your defenses to regulate which mobs enter your rooms first.

Fast characters like Sara can even juggle mobs that target heroes between rooms for extended periods!

I tend to agree on the steles. While I like the added randomness, finding out what they are doing while a wave is spawning is problematic, and ignoring them can easily result in death. Personally I'd like to see them made so they have no effect, and their timer doesn't count down, while the room is unpowered. That would give the players the ability to control when/whether they want the effect active, and it would allow for even more strategy since it would force the choice between powering the stele for its effect vs saving power for a more tactically important room. Doing that would require some mechanics changes though, for instance no self-powered stele rooms, being able to power/unpower the stele at-will could be pretty overpowered, and at least some of the effects would probably need to be reworked. But being able to buy them off would be good too.



From what I've read the lack of ability to target/follow specific mobs is intentional. Some hero AI improvements, either documenting what each hero AI focuses on (if they currently do that) in the character description, or allowing the player to choose the priority (for instance: attack lowest hp, attack highest dps, attack crystal attackers, attack hero attackers, attack module attackers) would be nice.