Ascension 10... what changed?

[Daywalker]

The patchnotes say that ascension 10 changed, but not at all what was changed.

[Rogue Command Official]

Originally posted by Daywalker:

The patchnotes say that ascension 10 changed, but not at all what was changed.

true, it's a mechanical spoiler, so I am not sure yet, if I should have something like that in the patch notes.

If you have beaten the A10 Boss before, you know that their boss unit factory had a mechanic, where you basically had to destroy all of them within a certain time frame or they would come back to full strength.
This never really played out in a really fun way, so instead now killing one of them will make the other remaining factories build 2 free giant units, if you do not destroy them within 90 sec. So you still have an incentive to try to set up a situation where you maybe keep one alive to not face those extra waves, but it does not punish you, should one of your units have accidentally triggered the threshold for the previous mechanic.

Hope that makes sense. I think I will still not add these kinds of infos in the patch notes, because there are people who want to discover these things on their own, but I am always happy to answer questions.

[Daywalker]

I don't really understand why the final mission has to be so brutally punishing, but atleast it's not as massively frustrating and straight up unfair like it was before.

so it's a good change I guess.

I can understand that you want to keep some things a "surprise" but considering how important a change like this is
(ascension 10 made me ragequit and completely stop playing the game)
I think it is important to write changes like this in the patchnotes.

you can also put a spoiler blocker on changes like that.

[Rogue Command Official]

That's a very good point,
I think these are available in the steam event formatting tools as well. Will try to think of it, when it becomes relevant again.

As to why it is so punishing...
Balancing is still an active area of work for us and will be throughout EA. That being said, for me personally I think it is important that the final battle currently in the game should always be something that actually challenges you.

I just finally managed to beat A10 last weekend on my private Steam Account which I consider my actual "real" Rogue Command save and it was an absolute nailbiter, where I lost tons of buildings and battles, but managed to finally win in the end. I was pretty happy with that as a player and as a designer.

But yeah, balancing is crazy for a game like this. Not only is the skill gap between RTS-newcomers and veterans insanely large, there is also widely varying expectations. From the refunds we get both "game was too easy" and "game was too difficult" in about equal amounts. So I think we will need to add some ways to adjust it for the players. Which is fine, but something that for me personally runs a bit counter to the idea of a roguelike.

[Rogue Command Official]

added it to the patch notes too.

[Daywalker]

I just think it's weird that you can get through ascension 10 and then have a massive difficulty spike just on the final mission, not even ascension 10 as a whole.

I think you should change ascension 10 to only have 1 super building and then add ascension 11-15 and also make it clear in their descriptions that they are meant speciffically for hardcore strategy players.

that would result in a better difficulty curve, make it clear to casual players like me that they should stop at ascension 10 while still offering the intended experience for the hardcore players with ascension 11-15.

[Daywalker]

I feel like my comments sound a bit negative so I do want to clarify that the game is really good and apart from the final battle in ascension 10 I actually have very few complaints with the game.

[Rogue Command Official]

Thanks, and no worries. If you made it to A10 I assume you must have enjoyed it at least a bit.

There is more ascensions planned and also something to go even harder after that.
Apart from that I can only say again, that balance is actively being worked on.
The update that went live today is the first since launch where we have started to tackle that area in a targeted way. It'll never be perfect, but I am confident it will become a lot smoother until we hit 1.0.

[eLCi @ Proton FTW]

Originally posted by Daywalker:

I just think it's weird that you can get through ascension 10 and then have a massive difficulty spike just on the final mission, not even ascension 10 as a whole.

I think you should change ascension 10 to only have 1 super building and then add ascension 11-15 and also make it clear in their descriptions that they are meant speciffically for hardcore strategy players.

that would result in a better difficulty curve, make it clear to casual players like me that they should stop at ascension 10 while still offering the intended experience for the hardcore players with ascension 11-15.

i also think its better to add additional ascension 11-15 with an hardcore label; younger players will elsewise shurly be frustrated

i think strategic and tactical excellence comes with years, not with a single game
[and to finish the boss: LUCK comes with retries] :D