My thoughts / Review

[SeveredSkullz]

In short, the game is fun, and I enjoyed my time playing it. 19.2 hours in, I am almost at the final zone - The City, and from what I've seen in the screenshots of other people, I maybe have about 40%-50% of the content unlocked. However, there are many fundamental issues with the game, and the grind is becoming more of a chore at this point and no longer engaging. The reason is that the Risk vs Reward payoffs are becoming less and less as time goes on. I'm having to spend an hour or so with each run with the possibility of losing it all. I could of course take less items back to me to lessen the amount of waves I fight, but then it becomes a payoff of Time over Progress.

Very rarely do I go through the trouble of making these long detailed reviews, but I think this game has an *unprecedented* amount of potential here thats left on the table, and would like to bring to light some of the flaws and design decisions that are holding this game back.

TLDR:

The gameplay loop is fun and engaging for the majority of the game, but gets stale quick as you are constantly trying to play Risk vs. Reward on hundreds/thousands of materials to expand your base to take on higher challenges. The "Tarkov" style looting is fun, yet held back by an extensive lack of variety in maps / POI. The route-based "Pacific Drive" enounter system adds a bit of flair to the exploration side of the game, but I feel there are too many punishments for actually *USING* your hard-earned base which eventually will run your resources dry before Recovery Day.

Weapons

Weapons can be customized with different effects and abilities, which make them versatile and fun to use, but I argue the level of customization is lackluster and in the end it likely forces players to utilize high ROF / damage later on due to the sheer volume of enemies in the later stages of the game.

Pros

• Buffs can be swapped out on the fly during deployment
  
• Handling is exelent. Recoil and "feel" is on point.
  
• Customization of different parts can alter the behaviour of the weapons, like a 3-shot barrel, or grenade launcher under-barrel.

Cons

• Not much variety in terms of "Cores". Ive found a Rapid Fire, Marksman, Fast Reload, and Damage core so far. The effects of which do not seem to do *anything* other than flavor text. The Rapid Fire core says its got some sort of accellerator on it to increase the ROF, yet Spray (the "fast" weapon skill) still has a 0.3 second cooldown between shots. The highest increase in Ammo I have found was 45 on a Legendary gun, which is next to nothing considering the average cost for the skills is around 10-15 ammo per shot. The cheapest I could get Spray down to was 6 ammo per shot. That means the most I can get is an extra 7 shots in my magazine... Whoop-de-do.
  
• Adding to the above point, there is not enough variety in terms of "Style" of FPS play. Ive found 2 types of skills that essentially turn the gun into a close range shotgun, but the range before the projectiles disappear is way too short to be useful on anything other than Exploration. There is nothing that would allow me to have an insane magazine size to fit something like a Machine Gun / SMG. The Marksman core is supposed to be your "Sniper" but I just took the skill off of it, and threw it on a Rapid Fire with a Heavy Barrel and it behaved exactly the same.
  
• The parts and benefit variety is extremely shallow. The only thing it seems to serve is damage / crit boosts, and some extra utility, like the previously mentioned 3 shot barrel, grenade launcher, and scopes that have thermal. I have yet to see any sort of bonus on it other than Damage related buffs. Give me some bonuses to the ammo capacity, or the rate of fire, or a cooldown reduction on my skills.
  
• Every weapon has a base "ammo" of 180 per magazine. I highly enjoy the idea of different guns taking different amounts of ammo in order to fire, but give us a way to mitigate this issue other than using the Core that gives us a tiny bit of extra ammo. Maybe introduce a Magazine weapon part?
  
• The design philosophy of the TDS modes do not encourage any sort of high damage / low ROF weapon combinations as the sheer amount of enemies will overwhelm you unless you are HEAVILY reliant on the TDS side of things, which we will get into the issues with it later.

Tour Mode / Exploration

The environments look pretty, but the maps are extremely small and same-y. The variety of POIs for each map are very minimal - less than a dozen different structures. If the map is procedurally generated, perhaps using some sort of tile-set fabrication of some of these POIs would have sprinkled a bit of variety to it. Once you see the current POIs and learn their loot locations, it becomes very monotonous and the "exploration" honey-moon phase dies off almost immediately. Combined with the fact that the most I've seen on these tiny maps is about 5 POIs, you can run through them in less than 10 mins or so for each map.

... There is not much I can say that is positive about the maps.

The Tour mode on the other hand is a decent substitute for the lack of large open-world maps. The problem I often run into is I am being penalized too greatly for *USING* features of my base rather than trying to save everything for Recovery Day.

The last thing I want to note is that I dont think I have *EVER* found a Core Weapon / Nanochip / etc. when it was listed as a "High Loot" probablity. I dont know what the numbers mean, but I even had a "2" on the guns and never found any.

Pros

• "Choose Your Adventure" style route system for what you want to focus on in regards to materials / equipment

Neutral

• Maps are very small. You can strip them bare in about 10 mins or so, but as this is also how you "save" after a raid, it makes each mission piecemeal and easy to put down if you have your toddler pulling on your pants leg begging for attention.
  
• Base can auto-harvest Building Materials for free, but the rate is *rediculously* slow, and depenedant on your X-Field size, which is barely enough to cover a few resources. On average, youre likely going to get only about 100 materials at most on average in the early game.

Cons

• Penalties for using your base during exploration are *INSANE*.
  
• Benefits of harvesting scrap materials like wrecks and trees are not worth it until you have *multiple* power cores to convert 150 material into 15 Energy.
  
• Power requirements on many of the abilitys should be removed. Scanning the map takes 5 energy for a quick 10 second reveal of the items within a certain distance of your tower. To get this for "free" you would need to find and harvest a Huge Wreck for 300 Building Materials which in and of iteself costs 25 Power. This nets you 30 Power after using the Tower to convert it, leaving you with a net positive of 5 Power, which you can now use to scan the map. This constant need for conversion is not only anoyying to have to do, but also frustrating due to the long cooldowns on these features.
  
• Another example would be Ammo Boxes and the Drone. Ammo Boxes take 100 Building Material, which early on is huge. The exchange rate for Energy / Ammo would be 3 Boxes (3000 "Ammo") for 25 Energy. Drones take 30 energy in order to deliver items *direcly* to your base and avoid the need for recovery. This cost is at - and sometimes double - the cost of traversing to an entirely different zone.
  
• This brings us to the final point: There is no net-positive way to restore energy other than converting materials from your tower / power cores. The trade off is so minimal, it is almost not worth it having to wait for the cooldowns for a net positive of 5 Energy. The only mitigation to this is to spam the aboslute HELL out of batteries onto your basee, which gives you a higher cap of 5 energy per battery - but this assumes youve found the ingredients to craft them in the first place, meaning this problem will only mitigate itself over the long run, and there is no short term solution early game.
  
• "High Loot" is not a garuntee - and from my experiance is more an indication that it WONT spawn. This makes targeted looting / raids almost completely pointless. You're better off just rolling the dice for RNGeesus.

[Naesala]

After having looked over big portions of your view, I can confidently say that you have barely scratched the surface of the customization within the game, which is understandable because this game is extremely slow, you may think 20 hours is a lot, but it's not, you need a hella lot resources. Oh and the autoreloader tower can store ammo crates between those mini-tours until recovery day, even the ammo create boxes can keep the ammo crates as long you don't take them out, so you can stock up on all the ammo you need before recovery day, further more, you're in dire need of a material/power converter, but you would know about them if ya would play the game more, find all the blueprints, because those help your power sustain immensely.

As for your operative critics, I got a coregun on me right now, it got this ammo specific stat, yeah all coreguns got a random stat roll, the grade of the coregun/part determines the maximum value that can be rolled, in my case, it's a lvl 3 ammo roll granting 201 extra ammo in the magazine, so instead of being stuck with 180 ammo a mag, I got 381 ammo. There exist much more customization here than you believe, problem is that you're still just early into the game and the customization is more towards the hard mode area, well, when it comes to gear that is. Thinking of gear, you didn't go over gear slots, only the coregun to a lesser degree, levitation boots, double jump boots, dodge boots, defend boots, sprint boots, and that's only about boots, there still exist chest, gloves and head, all with their own quirks, gloves got very many on that front. Next we got operatives, you only focused on the main abilities of the operatives, while missing out on the 4th option mech buddy and bubble shield, but that's beside the point, the point is that there's more to operative traits than only the main 2 abilities. For example, lets take Fae, ya got fast cd, cryo effect, amp dmg, contuous, fighter's will and defensive on his free fire ability, now take a look at another operative, they might just have fast cd and electro effect on theirs, but that's not all they have, they also have other talents, maybe they got something boosting their abilities in dispatch, or might improve specific base management aspects, I even got one operative who can get 100% dmg reduction while free fire is on, and if they kill an enemy while it's on, they even get armor per kill. Exist a buncha differences between operatives.

Yes the start is real slow, but once you can complete a tour difficulty on its highest grade, then you can start throwing in risk events, so you can gain even more gold for trade port, which can then translate into resources to build out your base even faster, so 500+ energy is easily achieveable and even 2k+ material limit. I would recommend you to get an assembler when you can though, so you can take an ammo crate and 30 gold, then turn it into a different element so ya got 3k ammo of an element instead of 1k kinesis rounds. I personally think the ammo crates are mainly for turrets while the elemental crates are meant for your personal usage.

The command mode is arguably the weakest point of the game atm, wish ya could travel over the map a little better and even use the minimap better too (sometimes it get real janky and stuck over you, rather than show where the command mode shows, so using it to navigate can be difficult at times). You can number group the tower and even the modules, you just gotta use the ctrl+ (number key), only problem is that ya can't seemingly do that during the outpost editing phase at base (or maybe I don't understand that part good enough), but ya can do it on tours. As for your guardian fabricator, I would recommend going to the base, edit it so it's on the top, if ya want to keep it safe, just build walls around it, but leave the top open, then when ya fabricate a guardian, spawn it outside, the fabricator will launch the guardian there as long it's within a couple of tiles distance, given that the roof part ain't blocked. If you want to farm resources quick, bring along a stack of 50 fuel (buy a full stack for 100 gold at trade port sometimes), then spend the fuel to convert trees and wreckage into materials, wreckage gives the most, some give 300 material a wreckage, if ya got those 30% more material obtained upgrades on a tour, it can become even more.

Right, you wanted a minigun-ish alternative, alright, then get a cooldown field xen, use an operative with free fire with the extra duration on kill talent on, use spray and a double tap barrel, activate free fire, shoot cooldown field beneath yourself, then unleash hell on ya enemies, maybe throw in a damage rotor xen into your spray or whatever while on it too, that way, ya will fire VERY fast, you got all these booster xens ya can stack to get even more of a certain effect if you so want, but it's up to you to get them and place them, legendary coreguns got more slots, so gear optimization is more achieable later on in the game, maybe a lil earlier if you're doing infinity siege, that mode can reward epic quality stuff quite early. The first 30-50 hours of the game, you will be very reliant on doing manual mini-tours to get more resources, but as soon ya base is better built, so ya can do risk events regularly (if ya can do normal difficulty grade 3 mission, then ya can do easy grade 3 with all the risk events you can get), your base building speed will get exponentially faster, so much so that ya will spend hours just building a new outpost layout, then take on the fun tower defense aspect of the game more regularly.

[Rhiawhyn Zerinth]

To give you an idea of how many different base attack options there are over those three. One turns your attack into shmup wave blast, another turns it into the melta gun from the old space marine game, cone of plasma shotgun style. One turns it into an autocannon, another turns it into a blaster rifle. The city isn't the final zone either. On top of that, I am just now barely getting heavy artillery on the base, as I skipped over the pre war artillery due to it's limited ability. I'm still struggling to find nano chips, but I can run into them occasionally.

You can easily make a minigun like weapon by using a double tap barrel, two fire rate mods, a rapid core xen and the rapid fire mod. You utterly spray hundreds of rounds at such a rate it's almost as fast as a hellfire turret. You basically have to build your gun, and while there might be a minigun style barrel you have to keep in mind something.

There are heroic tier xen mods and guns that have utterly wild powers. I have one which turned me into the TF2 soldier, complete with rocket jumping and market gardening. That massive matrix style swarm? Yeah I blast it in two shots with the explosive rounds. Turns out, a massive swarm of weak bots tend to struggle against AOE weapons that are basically homing cluster spread tactical nukes. Yes you read that right, homing cluster spread tactical nukes. That's the ♥♥♥♥ you can make in this game.

20 hours is nothing for where you go. Outright. This isn't the stock AAA game which is meant to be consumed in about 1-2 minutes and dropped, you have to actually play it for a long period of time to even get to the high end stuff. Push for the higher difficulties, push for the challenge. You WILL find it and you WILL find some utterly crazy ♥♥♥♥.

[SeveredSkullz]

Originally posted by Naesala:

A bunch of Hype

Originally posted by Rhiawhyn Zerinth:

A bunch of Hype

That makes me happy to know there's a LOT of content I simply haven't seen yet. While this does give me hope in terms of the games longevity, I dont think its going to do much for most player's initial impressions. Given Steam's 2 hour refund policy, I dont know if many people will stick with it outside that window on the premise that they *MIGHT* enjoy the game 60-80+ hours down the line

[StellarSkys]

Originally posted by Rhiawhyn Zerinth:

To give you an idea of how many different base attack options there are over those three. One turns your attack into shmup wave blast, another turns it into the melta gun from the old space marine game, cone of plasma shotgun style. One turns it into an autocannon, another turns it into a blaster rifle. The city isn't the final zone either. On top of that, I am just now barely getting heavy artillery on the base, as I skipped over the pre war artillery due to it's limited ability. I'm still struggling to find nano chips, but I can run into them occasionally.

You can easily make a minigun like weapon by using a double tap barrel, two fire rate mods, a rapid core xen and the rapid fire mod. You utterly spray hundreds of rounds at such a rate it's almost as fast as a hellfire turret. You basically have to build your gun, and while there might be a minigun style barrel you have to keep in mind something.

There are heroic tier xen mods and guns that have utterly wild powers. I have one which turned me into the TF2 soldier, complete with rocket jumping and market gardening. That massive matrix style swarm? Yeah I blast it in two shots with the explosive rounds. Turns out, a massive swarm of weak bots tend to struggle against AOE weapons that are basically homing cluster spread tactical nukes. Yes you read that right, homing cluster spread tactical nukes. That's the ♥♥♥♥ you can make in this game.

20 hours is nothing for where you go. Outright. This isn't the stock AAA game which is meant to be consumed in about 1-2 minutes and dropped, you have to actually play it for a long period of time to even get to the high end stuff. Push for the higher difficulties, push for the challenge. You WILL find it and you WILL find some utterly crazy ♥♥♥♥.

I’ve been trying to make a infinite beam but it’s not been working so well yet.

[Rhiawhyn Zerinth]

Originally posted by SeveredSkullz:

Originally posted by Naesala:

A bunch of Hype

Originally posted by Rhiawhyn Zerinth:

A bunch of Hype

That makes me happy to know there's a LOT of content I simply haven't seen yet. While this does give me hope in terms of the games longevity, I dont think its going to do much for most player's initial impressions. Given Steam's 2 hour refund policy, I dont know if many people will stick with it outside that window on the premise that they *MIGHT* enjoy the game 60-80+ hours down the line

Sadly, yeah. I have no idea of knowing if what I've found is the bottom of the barrel for gear. It gets exponentially harder and multiple choices the devs have made make me think they are deliberately trying to pad out game time with low drop rates. So I have little idea how far the rabbit hole goes and if I'm at the bottom or not. This is a big problem because the two hour window isn't remotely enough for this game as you don't even get to have heavy artillery until like, 15ish hours in unless you somehow get lucky on the blueprints early on.

There is plenty to do even then. Including factory automation for making your base self reload/produce ammo. It all requires nanochips which seem to be more rare then all of reddit collectively getting a girlfriend though.

[StellarSkys]

Originally posted by Rhiawhyn Zerinth:

Originally posted by SeveredSkullz:

That makes me happy to know there's a LOT of content I simply haven't seen yet. While this does give me hope in terms of the games longevity, I dont think its going to do much for most player's initial impressions. Given Steam's 2 hour refund policy, I dont know if many people will stick with it outside that window on the premise that they *MIGHT* enjoy the game 60-80+ hours down the line

Sadly, yeah. I have no idea of knowing if what I've found is the bottom of the barrel for gear. It gets exponentially harder and multiple choices the devs have made make me think they are deliberately trying to pad out game time with low drop rates. So I have little idea how far the rabbit hole goes and if I'm at the bottom or not. This is a big problem because the two hour window isn't remotely enough for this game as you don't even get to have heavy artillery until like, 15ish hours in unless you somehow get lucky on the blueprints early on.

There is plenty to do even then. Including factory automation for making your base self reload/produce ammo. It all requires nanochips which seem to be more rare then all of reddit collectively getting a girlfriend though.

Okay but take a step back and imagine if all the stuff you have access to now, you saw within say an hour.

How much stuff would that be to sift through and understand? The game already has quite a bit to show off early on. Taking under the assumption the game has reasonable design and isn’t trying to overwhelm you of course there’s going to keep being more. That’s how progressive systems work.

[StellarSkys]

Originally posted by SeveredSkullz:

In short, the game is fun, and I enjoyed my time playing it. 19.2 hours in, I am almost at the final zone - The City, and from what I've seen in the screenshots of other people, I maybe have about 40%-50% of the content unlocked. However, there are many fundamental issues with the game, and the grind is becoming more of a chore at this point and no longer engaging. The reason is that the Risk vs Reward payoffs are becoming less and less as time goes on. I'm having to spend an hour or so with each run with the possibility of losing it all. I could of course take less items back to me to lessen the amount of waves I fight, but then it becomes a payoff of Time over Progress.

Very rarely do I go through the trouble of making these long detailed reviews, but I think this game has an *unprecedented* amount of potential here thats left on the table, and would like to bring to light some of the flaws and design decisions that are holding this game back.

TLDR:

The gameplay loop is fun and engaging for the majority of the game, but gets stale quick as you are constantly trying to play Risk vs. Reward on hundreds/thousands of materials to expand your base to take on higher challenges. The "Tarkov" style looting is fun, yet held back by an extensive lack of variety in maps / POI. The route-based "Pacific Drive" enounter system adds a bit of flair to the exploration side of the game, but I feel there are too many punishments for actually *USING* your hard-earned base which eventually will run your resources dry before Recovery Day.

Weapons

Weapons can be customized with different effects and abilities, which make them versatile and fun to use, but I argue the level of customization is lackluster and in the end it likely forces players to utilize high ROF / damage later on due to the sheer volume of enemies in the later stages of the game.

Pros

• Buffs can be swapped out on the fly during deployment
  
• Handling is exelent. Recoil and "feel" is on point.
  
• Customization of different parts can alter the behaviour of the weapons, like a 3-shot barrel, or grenade launcher under-barrel.

Cons

• Not much variety in terms of "Cores". Ive found a Rapid Fire, Marksman, Fast Reload, and Damage core so far. The effects of which do not seem to do *anything* other than flavor text. The Rapid Fire core says its got some sort of accellerator on it to increase the ROF, yet Spray (the "fast" weapon skill) still has a 0.3 second cooldown between shots. The highest increase in Ammo I have found was 45 on a Legendary gun, which is next to nothing considering the average cost for the skills is around 10-15 ammo per shot. The cheapest I could get Spray down to was 6 ammo per shot. That means the most I can get is an extra 7 shots in my magazine... Whoop-de-do.
  
• Adding to the above point, there is not enough variety in terms of "Style" of FPS play. Ive found 2 types of skills that essentially turn the gun into a close range shotgun, but the range before the projectiles disappear is way too short to be useful on anything other than Exploration. There is nothing that would allow me to have an insane magazine size to fit something like a Machine Gun / SMG. The Marksman core is supposed to be your "Sniper" but I just took the skill off of it, and threw it on a Rapid Fire with a Heavy Barrel and it behaved exactly the same.
  
• The parts and benefit variety is extremely shallow. The only thing it seems to serve is damage / crit boosts, and some extra utility, like the previously mentioned 3 shot barrel, grenade launcher, and scopes that have thermal. I have yet to see any sort of bonus on it other than Damage related buffs. Give me some bonuses to the ammo capacity, or the rate of fire, or a cooldown reduction on my skills.
  
• Every weapon has a base "ammo" of 180 per magazine. I highly enjoy the idea of different guns taking different amounts of ammo in order to fire, but give us a way to mitigate this issue other than using the Core that gives us a tiny bit of extra ammo. Maybe introduce a Magazine weapon part?
  
• The design philosophy of the TDS modes do not encourage any sort of high damage / low ROF weapon combinations as the sheer amount of enemies will overwhelm you unless you are HEAVILY reliant on the TDS side of things, which we will get into the issues with it later.

Tour Mode / Exploration

The environments look pretty, but the maps are extremely small and same-y. The variety of POIs for each map are very minimal - less than a dozen different structures. If the map is procedurally generated, perhaps using some sort of tile-set fabrication of some of these POIs would have sprinkled a bit of variety to it. Once you see the current POIs and learn their loot locations, it becomes very monotonous and the "exploration" honey-moon phase dies off almost immediately. Combined with the fact that the most I've seen on these tiny maps is about 5 POIs, you can run through them in less than 10 mins or so for each map.

... There is not much I can say that is positive about the maps.

The Tour mode on the other hand is a decent substitute for the lack of large open-world maps. The problem I often run into is I am being penalized too greatly for *USING* features of my base rather than trying to save everything for Recovery Day.

The last thing I want to note is that I dont think I have *EVER* found a Core Weapon / Nanochip / etc. when it was listed as a "High Loot" probablity. I dont know what the numbers mean, but I even had a "2" on the guns and never found any.

Pros

• "Choose Your Adventure" style route system for what you want to focus on in regards to materials / equipment

Neutral

• Maps are very small. You can strip them bare in about 10 mins or so, but as this is also how you "save" after a raid, it makes each mission piecemeal and easy to put down if you have your toddler pulling on your pants leg begging for attention.
  
• Base can auto-harvest Building Materials for free, but the rate is *rediculously* slow, and depenedant on your X-Field size, which is barely enough to cover a few resources. On average, youre likely going to get only about 100 materials at most on average in the early game.

Cons

• Penalties for using your base during exploration are *INSANE*.
  
• Benefits of harvesting scrap materials like wrecks and trees are not worth it until you have *multiple* power cores to convert 150 material into 15 Energy.
  
• Power requirements on many of the abilitys should be removed. Scanning the map takes 5 energy for a quick 10 second reveal of the items within a certain distance of your tower. To get this for "free" you would need to find and harvest a Huge Wreck for 300 Building Materials which in and of iteself costs 25 Power. This nets you 30 Power after using the Tower to convert it, leaving you with a net positive of 5 Power, which you can now use to scan the map. This constant need for conversion is not only anoyying to have to do, but also frustrating due to the long cooldowns on these features.
  
• Another example would be Ammo Boxes and the Drone. Ammo Boxes take 100 Building Material, which early on is huge. The exchange rate for Energy / Ammo would be 3 Boxes (3000 "Ammo") for 25 Energy. Drones take 30 energy in order to deliver items *direcly* to your base and avoid the need for recovery. This cost is at - and sometimes double - the cost of traversing to an entirely different zone.
  
• This brings us to the final point: There is no net-positive way to restore energy other than converting materials from your tower / power cores. The trade off is so minimal, it is almost not worth it having to wait for the cooldowns for a net positive of 5 Energy. The only mitigation to this is to spam the aboslute HELL out of batteries onto your basee, which gives you a higher cap of 5 energy per battery - but this assumes youve found the ingredients to craft them in the first place, meaning this problem will only mitigate itself over the long run, and there is no short term solution early game.
  
• "High Loot" is not a garuntee - and from my experiance is more an indication that it WONT spawn. This makes targeted looting / raids almost completely pointless. You're better off just rolling the dice for RNGeesus.

So i'm at home now and read through your section on the maps, i wanna say, once you get a decent x-boost range you can be getting hundreds of material per map. i'm consistently breaking 400 now and end up leaving while its still going. (perhaps giving the core tower the same upgrade miners get for mining faster would be nice.

but at early game the range is fine, i constantly was finding myself with more material i can do with. maybe having a 2nd starting generator to speed up early conversions would be nice but eh.

as for early power and material mining. every outpost now starts with a power converter, so the arbor trees which make up the majority of every tree in every map is 40 materials to mine and 3 lumber dropped, for 6 power. 3 lumber into the power converter is 6 power. so with 0 conversion needed you are generating materials. and 4 trees is 160 material which you can take to 150 to 15 power via a generator.

you also never once mention how enemies always drop at least 1 material when killed. so when you go on to explain how much ammo costs, drastically blows how expensive ammo is outa proportion.

a turret costs 2 of its 1k ammo to fire. and can normally score a kill in 3-5 shots. so thats about 10 ammo to kill on a higher end. 100 ammo to kill 10 mobs. 1000 ammo to kill 100 mobs. 100 mobs is 100 materials, your mg just scored even material on a low end assumption of damage. meaning it should be bringing itself even on how much material it is consuming if not creating positive.

doing this again with 30mm its 40 ammo a shot, 1000 ammo again. but can pretty much 1 shot any medium or small unit. so yes 30mms can go into negatives, but seeing as they can normally kill at least 4 smalls a shot or a couple mediums, its generally not going to bad on ammo itself. and seeing as we took a low end of damage for the mg, between the mg average positive generation, and the 30mms not being all that hungry you should in the early game be generating as much material as you consuming for ammo usage.

you also start bringing in mid game items like the drone, while talking about early game experience for resources. like saying a drone is double the cost of going to a new zone sometimes. thats almost only on near empty stages on high difficulty or on very low difficulty stages. and the drone provides a very powerful usage you are seeming to downplay to exaggerate its cost. i drone'd out 3 red and a gold item in my first city ruins run being 3 blue prints and a rare item. those 4 items would of easily added well over 100 seconds together to my recovery day. but as i droned them out, i managed to fully loot a decent amount of nodes and walk out with 1 hazard tile for my recovery day. which i still barely pulled out due to my base still not being fully outfitted with snow ruins items. the drone is extremely powerful and honestly cheap for what it provides. also you should be having hundreds of energy by the time you get it.

i think i already talked about how to make lots of materials and power generation. so lets go down a little more.

if you highlight over the node buffs some items it says rate up, some items it shows will spawn. like the core gun icon is just a rate up on weapons, where as a 30mm barrel is a for sure chance. (now yes for some items like pre war arty barrel it will show up, but deny to spawn even though it says it will spawn, but thats because you haven't gotten far enough in story for it to start spawning yet, once you do get far enough it should start spawning properly). i think your issues comes with assuming they always said they will spawn, but thats not actually how it works.

[SeveredSkullz]

Originally posted by StellarSkys:

So i'm at home now and read through your section on the maps, i wanna say, once you get a decent x-boost range you can be getting hundreds of material per map. i'm consistently breaking 400 now and end up leaving while its still going. (perhaps giving the core tower the same upgrade miners get for mining faster would be nice.

but at early game the range is fine, i constantly was finding myself with more material i can do with. maybe having a 2nd starting generator to speed up early conversions would be nice but eh.

as for early power and material mining. every outpost now starts with a power converter, so the arbor trees which make up the majority of every tree in every map is 40 materials to mine and 3 lumber dropped, for 6 power. 3 lumber into the power converter is 6 power. so with 0 conversion needed you are generating materials. and 4 trees is 160 material which you can take to 150 to 15 power via a generator.

you also never once mention how enemies always drop at least 1 material when killed. so when you go on to explain how much ammo costs, drastically blows how expensive ammo is outa proportion.

a turret costs 2 of its 1k ammo to fire. and can normally score a kill in 3-5 shots. so thats about 10 ammo to kill on a higher end. 100 ammo to kill 10 mobs. 1000 ammo to kill 100 mobs. 100 mobs is 100 materials, your mg just scored even material on a low end assumption of damage. meaning it should be bringing itself even on how much material it is consuming if not creating positive.

doing this again with 30mm its 40 ammo a shot, 1000 ammo again. but can pretty much 1 shot any medium or small unit. so yes 30mms can go into negatives, but seeing as they can normally kill at least 4 smalls a shot or a couple mediums, its generally not going to bad on ammo itself. and seeing as we took a low end of damage for the mg, between the mg average positive generation, and the 30mms not being all that hungry you should in the early game be generating as much material as you consuming for ammo usage.

you also start bringing in mid game items like the drone, while talking about early game experience for resources. like saying a drone is double the cost of going to a new zone sometimes. thats almost only on near empty stages on high difficulty or on very low difficulty stages. and the drone provides a very powerful usage you are seeming to downplay to exaggerate its cost. i drone'd out 3 red and a gold item in my first city ruins run being 3 blue prints and a rare item. those 4 items would of easily added well over 100 seconds together to my recovery day. but as i droned them out, i managed to fully loot a decent amount of nodes and walk out with 1 hazard tile for my recovery day. which i still barely pulled out due to my base still not being fully outfitted with snow ruins items. the drone is extremely powerful and honestly cheap for what it provides. also you should be having hundreds of energy by the time you get it.

i think i already talked about how to make lots of materials and power generation. so lets go down a little more.

if you highlight over the node buffs some items it says rate up, some items it shows will spawn. like the core gun icon is just a rate up on weapons, where as a 30mm barrel is a for sure chance. (now yes for some items like pre war arty barrel it will show up, but deny to spawn even though it says it will spawn, but thats because you haven't gotten far enough in story for it to start spawning yet, once you do get far enough it should start spawning properly). i think your issues comes with assuming they always said they will spawn, but thats not actually how it works.

I feel like you and I are playing 2 totally different games, my guy. What you've stated is like *nothing* I've experienced. I was never netting a positive in materials nor energy in the early game. Even currently I only have a maximum of 1200 building mats and a "whopping" 168 energy as my max. Thats with over 50 batteries. Ive reached a point I literally cannot build more due to resource constraints.

Regarding turret ammo effeciency - as I stated in the very first post, I play this game like a FPS during exploration and for the majority of the Recovery day. My turrets almost next to never get used, which could explain the sheer difference in ammo usage. Im having to spawn 3 or 4 ammo crates every few zones just to keep up, which is taking away from energy resources.

Im glad you're at a point where youre getting 400+ materials per map - but the key words are "once you get a decent x-boost range you can be getting hundreds of material per map"... I am obviously not there yet. Im at about 180 Core Power, and my X-Field is still ridiculously small... barely double the size of my base, which is also small. Ive got a whopping 60 material crates Ive been farming for to help with capacity, and just under 50 batteries. At this point, I need more materials to expand, and thats been going at a snails pace from all the other problems Ive been facing. Your explanation about the spawn rates is extremely helpful and does explain some of the oddities ive seen about things saying should be there but arent.

Just for you understanding / info, Ive uploaded some screenshots of the base / stats
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3212670119
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3212670836

Regardless, I appreciate the helpful tips / tricks from everyone here so far. Its a nice change of pace from the typical Steam Forums :)

[StellarSkys]

Originally posted by SeveredSkullz:

Originally posted by StellarSkys:

So i'm at home now and read through your section on the maps, i wanna say, once you get a decent x-boost range you can be getting hundreds of material per map. i'm consistently breaking 400 now and end up leaving while its still going. (perhaps giving the core tower the same upgrade miners get for mining faster would be nice.

but at early game the range is fine, i constantly was finding myself with more material i can do with. maybe having a 2nd starting generator to speed up early conversions would be nice but eh.

as for early power and material mining. every outpost now starts with a power converter, so the arbor trees which make up the majority of every tree in every map is 40 materials to mine and 3 lumber dropped, for 6 power. 3 lumber into the power converter is 6 power. so with 0 conversion needed you are generating materials. and 4 trees is 160 material which you can take to 150 to 15 power via a generator.

you also never once mention how enemies always drop at least 1 material when killed. so when you go on to explain how much ammo costs, drastically blows how expensive ammo is outa proportion.

a turret costs 2 of its 1k ammo to fire. and can normally score a kill in 3-5 shots. so thats about 10 ammo to kill on a higher end. 100 ammo to kill 10 mobs. 1000 ammo to kill 100 mobs. 100 mobs is 100 materials, your mg just scored even material on a low end assumption of damage. meaning it should be bringing itself even on how much material it is consuming if not creating positive.

doing this again with 30mm its 40 ammo a shot, 1000 ammo again. but can pretty much 1 shot any medium or small unit. so yes 30mms can go into negatives, but seeing as they can normally kill at least 4 smalls a shot or a couple mediums, its generally not going to bad on ammo itself. and seeing as we took a low end of damage for the mg, between the mg average positive generation, and the 30mms not being all that hungry you should in the early game be generating as much material as you consuming for ammo usage.

you also start bringing in mid game items like the drone, while talking about early game experience for resources. like saying a drone is double the cost of going to a new zone sometimes. thats almost only on near empty stages on high difficulty or on very low difficulty stages. and the drone provides a very powerful usage you are seeming to downplay to exaggerate its cost. i drone'd out 3 red and a gold item in my first city ruins run being 3 blue prints and a rare item. those 4 items would of easily added well over 100 seconds together to my recovery day. but as i droned them out, i managed to fully loot a decent amount of nodes and walk out with 1 hazard tile for my recovery day. which i still barely pulled out due to my base still not being fully outfitted with snow ruins items. the drone is extremely powerful and honestly cheap for what it provides. also you should be having hundreds of energy by the time you get it.

i think i already talked about how to make lots of materials and power generation. so lets go down a little more.

if you highlight over the node buffs some items it says rate up, some items it shows will spawn. like the core gun icon is just a rate up on weapons, where as a 30mm barrel is a for sure chance. (now yes for some items like pre war arty barrel it will show up, but deny to spawn even though it says it will spawn, but thats because you haven't gotten far enough in story for it to start spawning yet, once you do get far enough it should start spawning properly). i think your issues comes with assuming they always said they will spawn, but thats not actually how it works.

I feel like you and I are playing 2 totally different games, my guy. What you've stated is like *nothing* I've experienced. I was never netting a positive in materials nor energy in the early game. Even currently I only have a maximum of 1200 building mats and a "whopping" 168 energy as my max. Thats with over 50 batteries. Ive reached a point I literally cannot build more due to resource constraints.

Regarding turret ammo effeciency - as I stated in the very first post, I play this game like a FPS during exploration and for the majority of the Recovery day. My turrets almost next to never get used, which could explain the sheer difference in ammo usage. Im having to spawn 3 or 4 ammo crates every few zones just to keep up, which is taking away from energy resources.

Im glad you're at a point where youre getting 400+ materials per map - but the key words are "once you get a decent x-boost range you can be getting hundreds of material per map"... I am obviously not there yet. Im at about 180 Core Power, and my X-Field is still ridiculously small... barely double the size of my base, which is also small. Ive got a whopping 60 material crates Ive been farming for to help with capacity, and just under 50 batteries. At this point, I need more materials to expand, and thats been going at a snails pace from all the other problems Ive been facing. Your explanation about the spawn rates is extremely helpful and does explain some of the oddities ive seen about things saying should be there but arent.

Just for you understanding / info, Ive uploaded some screenshots of the base / stats
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3212670119
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3212670836

Regardless, I appreciate the helpful tips / tricks from everyone here so far. Its a nice change of pace from the typical Steam Forums :)

i'm actually really low for where i'm at the in the game and i only have just under 250 core output.

but yeah you shooting your gun is super expensive unless built not to be. thats likely why you are having more ammo problems. i pretty much only shoot if i have a skill up that negates ammo usage for almost the entire tour.

you actually have more material storage than i do. and we are at the same atc level or i'm 1 past you.

but i have almost 250 energy. largely because i have a room i'm filling with pillars to stuff batteries on, and almost every external wall that isnt facing the front has a battery on a 3 floor base. where as yours is only 1 floor which gives me more wall space.

but yeah turrets are actually alot cheaper to fire than core gun so that preseves and makes a lot of materials. that and again chopping down trees, lots of materials from that.

[FearParable]

Using an operative from tiger squad (MC's squad) gives you the use no ammo skill which is absolutely amazing for clearing nodes before recovery day. I avoid combat unless i have that skill off cooldown and when its active I hunt down as many enemies as I can. Bullets are your number 1 resource. 100 materials = 1000 bullets. that is very expensive going around maps.

In fun gear design I got a gun setup that uses my full 180 clip to fully reload a turret with 1000 bullets. I have found Computing armor that says if i reload an empty clip i save 30% ammo refiling it so it only costs me 126 bullets to fully reload a turret. Normally the Reload shot I think is supposed to refill 200 bullets in a turret, but i have the scattershot barrel for 3 bullets fired, and i used a chain xen morph to add another proc when it hits to also boost the cost of the shot so i could fully empty my gun for the armor proc.

But I also have an engineering helmet that lets me reload a turret for 150% of its value if i need to do it manually. This is mainly with just purple gear as well.

[harisenvin]

eh. its awesome for what it is - a ambitious and brave take on the looter shooter and TD genre, they have my respect because somebody has to do it and it mostly works. for $25 i cant really complain.

hoping and praying things will just get good from here when they get the steam money they deserved. like squad update, increase level cap or more variety. make Tours more interesting. more optimizations etc. etc.

DLC pls. and make vanguard edition available to us non believers that bought standard.

also 20hrs is nothing, game was made to be grindy and be played for hundreds if not thousands of hours in its current form. someone on reddit used ch*ats and found out that max core power caps out at 10k, max supplies caps out at 100k.