Guardian Design is AWFUL

[psypsy]

Spend 3.5 hours crapping on 44 waves, skipping most of them towards the end to hurry it up, only to have my towers and walls be completely ignored by a new unit type "Guardian" that I have no way of knowing the strength of. Pretty garbage design to throw that at me with no chance at panic building to pick off the only surviving guardian moving towards my core to 5 shot it.

When I get by the first 44 waves without a scratch, it should be easy to complete the final wave. Either ramp up the difficulty in the waves prior to the end, or change the guardian wave. What a waste of time. Zero respect for the player's time especially when it was the first mission guardian waves were even a thing. I have zero way of knowing what's going to happen and while yes I could stack a million towers around my core as a safety measure, I've NEVER had to do that before. You're basically forced to learn by losing hours of time otherwise spent playing the game well.

Wouldn't be surprised if many players drop the game at this point. I'm sure I'll pick it up again, but I have little interest in playing through 45 waves all over again, doing the exact same thing that I KNOW works, the only difference being throwing a few extra turrets along the route to my core.

[PunCrathod]

Originally posted by psypsy:

You're basically forced to learn by losing

Welcome to video games. IMHO that is how they should be. If there is little or no risk of losing it's not a game but a sandbox.

And no you don't have to stack millions of towers. Just get a dozen higher tier ones and you are good.

[Zukabazuka]

Originally posted by PunCrathod:

Originally posted by psypsy:

You're basically forced to learn by losing

Welcome to video games. IMHO that is how they should be. If there is little or no risk of losing it's not a game but a sandbox.

And no you don't have to stack millions of towers. Just get a dozen higher tier ones and you are good.

Well other games ramp up the challenge as waves goes by, while Mindustry doesn't really do that much because the same turret wall you had on wave 1 would handle wave 44 just fine. There was nothing before that even pushed the defense to the limit. The part when it does push it to the limit is the guardian wave.

So the game sucks in that department, it would actually need to ramp up the amount of units it send. Because sending between 11-20 units is frankly insulting.

[The Faceless Man]

Tower Defense games in a nutshell.

[psypsy]

Originally posted by PunCrathod:

Originally posted by psypsy:

You're basically forced to learn by losing

Welcome to video games. IMHO that is how they should be. If there is little or no risk of losing it's not a game but a sandbox.

And no you don't have to stack millions of towers. Just get a dozen higher tier ones and you are good.

Losing = learning, this is true, but the way you lose and the amount of time lost is so extreme it goes beyond "this is how gaming works."

[Zefar]

Originally posted by The Faceless Man:

Tower Defense games in a nutshell.

Not really. Tower Defense games usually have waves that ramp up the normal units and the amount of them to the point where they are actually dangerous unless you have a really good defense. Hell plenty of them needs you to actually think what type of turrets you put up.
Majority of the turrets in the game are quite useless.

Here I could survive all normal unit waves with basically 2-3 Spectre Turrets, some walls in front of them and a healing tower.

But if I want to deal with an end game Guardian Wave I quite literally need 20 Spectre Turrets loaded with thorium because if that Guardian gets close enough to start destroying my towers the defense will crumble.

It goes from super easy to basically Insane difficulty. Then it goes back to Super easy.


To Topic starter: Look at the research and find the Spectre Turret and unlock it. Feed it Thorium and it will start making your life easier. A couple of them will outperform a wall of any other turret in the game.
It's expensive but nothing can compete with it.

[disabled inferno tower]

That's the point, guardians are meant to be an ultimate challenge, its meant to test your defences, and see if and when you need to change your defence.

[Bookslayer10]

Originally posted by Zefar:

To Topic starter: Look at the research and find the Spectre Turret and unlock it. Feed it Thorium and it will start making your life easier. A couple of them will outperform a wall of any other turret in the game.
It's expensive but nothing can compete with it.

Spectres are pretty solid. If you want the really crazy stuff, you should use Cyclones with Surge Alloy and Tsunamis spraying water. The status effect boosts the electric damage leading to some of the highest DPS in the game.

Of course, 90% of maps can be beaten with a few walls of Lancers and Scatters

[Zefar]

Originally posted by disabled inferno tower:

That's the point, guardians are meant to be an ultimate challenge, its meant to test your defences, and see if and when you need to change your defence.

Problem is, it's the ONLY challenge. Might as well not have any other waves because they are so weak that it's a waste of time.

You need to balance it out. It's bad game design to just make one wave being a threat.

Originally posted by Bookslayer10:

Originally posted by Zefar:

To Topic starter: Look at the research and find the Spectre Turret and unlock it. Feed it Thorium and it will start making your life easier. A couple of them will outperform a wall of any other turret in the game.
It's expensive but nothing can compete with it.

Spectres are pretty solid. If you want the really crazy stuff, you should use Cyclones with Surge Alloy and Tsunamis spraying water. The status effect boosts the electric damage leading to some of the highest DPS in the game.

Of course, 90% of maps can be beaten with a few walls of Lancers and Scatters

Lancers and Scatters can not beat 90% of the maps. The moment a Guardian shows up which it will do, it'll just drive right through that defense line.

I've lost to Guardians with more turrets of higher tier and Scatters can not get to those dps levels. I've almost taken over the world in the game.

Spectre are the absolute best in terms of defense. Best range, high rate of fire and high damage.

[Bookslayer10]

Originally posted by Zefar:

Originally posted by Bookslayer10:

Spectres are pretty solid. If you want the really crazy stuff, you should use Cyclones with Surge Alloy and Tsunamis spraying water. The status effect boosts the electric damage leading to some of the highest DPS in the game.

Of course, 90% of maps can be beaten with a few walls of Lancers and Scatters

Lancers and Scatters can not beat 90% of the maps. The moment a Guardian shows up which it will do, it'll just drive right through that defense line.

Okay fine, it can beat most maps all the way up until mid game when you are unlocking things like surge alloy. That's what I meant by 90% of the maps, I meant most of the story ones can be beaten with just lancers and Scatters.

Originally posted by Zefar:

I've lost to Guardians with more turrets of higher tier and Scatters can not get to those dps levels. I've almost taken over the world in the game.

Spectre are the absolute best in terms of defense. Best range, high rate of fire and high damage.

Obviously Scatters can't take down an Eclipse or something like that, but with proper walls and manipulating enemy flight paths into the kill zone you can take on T3's and even T4's.

Foreshadows are better than Spectres in the range department, if you can afford them it's just free DPS as they sit in the back line and chunk away at bosses. Cyclones are range 25 while Spectres are 32.5, so they have a slight edge there. Spectres are okay for AoE but still aren't the best against something like a swarm of air units, you need more AoE than that especially if they come from an award direction instead of head-on. Meltdowns are good just for wiping out trash mobs like that, but Cyclones can also serve that job admirably. Surge Cyclone + water is the highest DPS in the game, hands down. Honestly though for most maps I'd just use Spectres because Surge is a pain to supply to turrets on attack maps compared to thorium.

[Nerdbopper]

Same problem as They Are Billions tbh. Only that game warns you HARD that billions of zombies will be coming on Day 0.

[Zukabazuka]

Originally posted by Nerdbopper:

Same problem as They Are Billions tbh. Only that game warns you HARD that billions of zombies will be coming on Day 0.

True but the waves before always got stronger and you would see the amount of zombies on the next wave would be able to smash through your previous defense if you didn't upgrade it. The game at least pushed you to build stronger defense.

[Zefar]

Originally posted by Nerdbopper:

Same problem as They Are Billions tbh. Only that game warns you HARD that billions of zombies will be coming on Day 0.

Eeeh no. You had to keep building towers and have your soldiers go up in rank. Along with expanding your base. In fact for some maps if you where a bit sloppy a single zombie would wipe out all of your stuff. As that was all it took.

Every wave was a threat until you actual proper defense set up. Here? Only Guardian wave is of any threat.

[mrcool]

To be honest the guardians are a part of the game that is a difficult hurdle to jump over but without them the campaign would be boring. The first time you struggle with a guardian is when the game tells you "good job on capturing that sector, but you don't want to just watch lancers and scatters shred tier 1 and 2 units 50 more times do you?" and then proceeds to kick you in the nuts by spawning a buffed unit of the next higher tier. The guardians teach you and important lesson, to not be afraid to over-prepare. Some advice I can give you is to use meltdowns with cryo-fluid as soon as possible. Another thing is to look at the guardian alert message because it displays the unit the guardian will be. I would also like to mention that if you struggle with the game just take a break for a few mouths like I did and try again. I have over 130 hours and still have not beaten the campaign. In short, the game is trying to kick you in the nuts so dodge it and punch it in the face for being an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Edit: They also have the best soundtracks in the game.

[Zefar]

Originally posted by mrcool:

To be honest the guardians are a part of the game that is a difficult hurdle to jump over but without them the campaign would be boring. The first time you struggle with a guardian is when the game tells you "good job on capturing that sector, but you don't want to just watch lancers and scatters shred tier 1 and 2 units 50 more times do you?" and then proceeds to kick you in the nuts by spawning a buffed unit of the next higher tier. The guardians teach you and important lesson, to not be afraid to over-prepare. Some advice I can give you is to use meltdowns with cryo-fluid as soon as possible. Another thing is to look at the guardian alert message because it displays the unit the guardian will be. I would also like to mention that if you struggle with the game just take a break for a few mouths like I did and try again. I have over 130 hours and still have not beaten the campaign. In short, the game is trying to kick you in the nuts so dodge it and punch it in the face for being an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Edit: They also have the best soundtracks in the game.

We don't want to nerf the Guardians it's that we want to balance it out. We want the normal enemies to be an actual threat. Or make it so we can send multiple waves to speed things up.

Right now the normal enemies can basically just be removed and you wouldn't notice a difference.

It's also that the guardian can be about 100 times more powerful than any wave in the game. It's just a ridiculous spike.

Meltdowns are also not a good option. Use a lot of power which might not be easy to get on most maps for new people. Not to mention you want that power for production facilities.

Spectre use 0 power and is the strongest rapid fire tower in the game. You put up double lines of that with 6-7 each in a row and pretty much nothing gets close to it.
Just fuel them with Thorium that is readily available on a lot of maps. Maps that do not have it are easy to win on.

I put even up triple rows or more if the map has 50+ waves. Put up storage along the belt to keep extra ammo available for them.

I've taken over the whole first world and it only takes time because you need to launch so many bases but it's not hard. Just takes time.

[mrcool]

Originally posted by Zefar:

Originally posted by mrcool:

To be honest the guardians are a part of the game that is a difficult hurdle to jump over but without them the campaign would be boring. The first time you struggle with a guardian is when the game tells you "good job on capturing that sector, but you don't want to just watch lancers and scatters shred tier 1 and 2 units 50 more times do you?" and then proceeds to kick you in the nuts by spawning a buffed unit of the next higher tier. The guardians teach you and important lesson, to not be afraid to over-prepare. Some advice I can give you is to use meltdowns with cryo-fluid as soon as possible. Another thing is to look at the guardian alert message because it displays the unit the guardian will be. I would also like to mention that if you struggle with the game just take a break for a few mouths like I did and try again. I have over 130 hours and still have not beaten the campaign. In short, the game is trying to kick you in the nuts so dodge it and punch it in the face for being an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Edit: They also have the best soundtracks in the game.

We don't want to nerf the Guardians it's that we want to balance it out. We want the normal enemies to be an actual threat. Or make it so we can send multiple waves to speed things up.

Right now the normal enemies can basically just be removed and you wouldn't notice a difference.

It's also that the guardian can be about 100 times more powerful than any wave in the game. It's just a ridiculous spike.

Meltdowns are also not a good option. Use a lot of power which might not be easy to get on most maps for new people. Not to mention you want that power for production facilities.

Spectre use 0 power and is the strongest rapid fire tower in the game. You put up double lines of that with 6-7 each in a row and pretty much nothing gets close to it.
Just fuel them with Thorium that is readily available on a lot of maps. Maps that do not have it are easy to win on.

I put even up triple rows or more if the map has 50+ waves. Put up storage along the belt to keep extra ammo available for them.

I've taken over the whole first world and it only takes time because you need to launch so many bases but it's not hard. Just takes time.

Well use meltdowns until you get spectres.