Experimental beta rant / Dev feedback?

[TortuousRobin97]

I don't know how anyone else feels about the next tier of gameplay but after an hour into it, its fair to say its impossible and i wouldn't recommend doing it just yet. I have almost 50 hours into 1 save game and have a crazy amount of op hero's, but in the new update, they're completely useless.
I managed to get up to the one before the industrial era, but given the risk which has seriously pumped up, i got attack, after attack, after attack, which gave me no time to rebuild units. I got reset over 17 times, i couldn't build anything on the map as it gave too much risk and the enemys are far to over scaled. I didn't enjoy it for one minute. I love this game but its beyond playable at this stage.

AI cities are far too big and spawning next to them gives you too much risk which causes a war crisis loop. And after a civ defeat, the buff in which you can't be attacked seems unreasonably low (4 or 5 mins), giving no time to recoup your losses and prep for another attack.
There is far too many predicaments that cause you to almost instantly die out (-95% food), i had 4 of these! Although the rewards are some what beneficial, it just seems too many.
I have yet to see any new elite hero's since 2 updates ago. Just get the same ones over and over again. I do like we can now combine them for additional perks!
Although playing with the -40% gold trait, i never got over 100k even though i could gain over 1 mil. And that was with 1200 of each resource.
Workers and secret keys are now a rare resource. When playing the end game, free workers are so difficult to get. It takes 6 workers just to make 3. I'd much perfer to gain warriors from a 'Scout camp' or 'military camp' building in which you could say consumes x amount of food and metal and then have the village dedicated to workers. (2 tiles = 1) (6 tiles = 4)... and giving that keys can now upgrade buildings and map tiles, there should maybe be like a map tile where you could buy them for say 10-25k a key, or separate building upgrades into 'architect permits' which could be bought from AI or on a 'port building', making use of the water surrounding the map.... Just a thought

[Ryan/Cooper]

I have 200h and counting, I love this game, but this crisis loop at stage two ... yeah ... also kills my vibe. Stage 2 right now, absolut unplayable unless u want to see how long u can survive this ... reaching future tech ... hell even industrial tech is near impossible.

[TortuousRobin97]

I have a hero with quicker windmill perk. I found the strategy was to activate Gardens and make sure you have all building perks ready and waiting. When a crisis hits, spam click defends in, then hit with double buffed heavys with the Castle, then spam warriors and keep spamming wood and iron to get warriors and heavys until its defeated but when its one after another it becomes a 15 minute battle in which you will lose anyway because there is that many attacks cued up.

[TortuousRobin97]

And i guess the only downside is, ive know lost my day one save because once you got into T2, you cannot go back :(

[HolyFarglesnot]

I kicked it's butt no problem. Get creative. I got my metal production so high I produce mechs in less than a second. It's brutal, crisis' die so fast the game sometimes crashes! Find your niche and be awesome, it just takes a few goes to make it work.

[Ondrej Homola]

Damage update is planned that will smooth out the beginning hopefully. Theres also a few masked issues with crisis spiraling on tier 2 that i hope to address at the same time. Beta will be slightly extended so we have time to test this update after holidays

[HolyFarglesnot]

Originally posted by TortuousRobin97:

I don't know how anyone else feels about the next tier of gameplay but after an hour into it, its fair to say its impossible and i wouldn't recommend doing it just yet. I have almost 50 hours into 1 save game and have a crazy amount of op hero's, but in the new update, they're completely useless.
I managed to get up to the one before the industrial era, but given the risk which has seriously pumped up, i got attack, after attack, after attack, which gave me no time to rebuild units. I got reset over 17 times, i couldn't build anything on the map as it gave too much risk and the enemys are far to over scaled. I didn't enjoy it for one minute. I love this game but its beyond playable at this stage.

AI cities are far too big and spawning next to them gives you too much risk which causes a war crisis loop. And after a civ defeat, the buff in which you can't be attacked seems unreasonably low (4 or 5 mins), giving no time to recoup your losses and prep for another attack.
There is far too many predicaments that cause you to almost instantly die out (-95% food), i had 4 of these! Although the rewards are some what beneficial, it just seems too many.
I have yet to see any new elite hero's since 2 updates ago. Just get the same ones over and over again. I do like we can now combine them for additional perks!
Although playing with the -40% gold trait, i never got over 100k even though i could gain over 1 mil. And that was with 1200 of each resource.
Workers and secret keys are now a rare resource. When playing the end game, free workers are so difficult to get. It takes 6 workers just to make 3. I'd much perfer to gain warriors from a 'Scout camp' or 'military camp' building in which you could say consumes x amount of food and metal and then have the village dedicated to workers. (2 tiles = 1) (6 tiles = 4)... and giving that keys can now upgrade buildings and map tiles, there should maybe be like a map tile where you could buy them for say 10-25k a key, or separate building upgrades into 'architect permits' which could be bought from AI or on a 'port building', making use of the water surrounding the map.... Just a thought

I got some advice to make things easier for you: adjacency! Expand yourself carefully at the start and build up adjacency bonuses on the map. Villages give adjacency to everything but other villages, fortresses give adjacency to all but other fortresses. Use these to get max adjacency on Forests, Quarries and Mines, as these three only get adjacency from other tiles of the same type. Each 6 adjacency Forrest, Mine and Quarry give a bunch of their resource and, more importantly, a global 35% multiplier to that resource as well. I can build to the point where I make a thousand supersoldiers the moment I press the button. Seriously, it builds so fast it lags! You can get resources in the MILLIONS very fast this way, which also translates to more gold than you can spend in a hundred playthroughs in just a few seconds with either Midas equipped or a bank built. Having lots of troops will help a lot early game, and don't be afraid to swap out heroes for ones that do what you want better, there are 3 quickbars for hero setups on purpose! I have one for hero farming, one for raw combat and one with so much quest reduction that 10 minute quests finish in about 4 seconds. Have fun, and remember, you are not supposed to be able to go one forever! Crashing out and ascending is not only normal, but to be expected!

[Fireproof]

I realized after my 1st play into T2 that I needed to pace much better. At first, it was a struggle but after careful planning and shifting focus towards keys, the game became tremendously easier.

I do share a few gripes but I understand the game will continue to flesh out in the future. Here's initial thoughts after a few days of play.

Future Tech
These suck right now. The sheer number of predicaments littered into the Future Tech tree is abysmal. I had to increase production into the millions, own the entire map, and acquire 100s of keys to ensure I can push deeper than my previous 2 plays. I'm now pushing past tech level 135 and everything is identical. I guess the only reason for me to continue is to acquire the highest lvl of heroes at this stage. This totally needs work because it's just hell in its current state and discouraging to return to the future tech tree after ascension because there's no lotus.

Industrial Pollution
I hate this predicament. This tends to drop in combination with storm, with resentment, rats, anything that makes Crisis a handful fast. This combined with storm and resentment will snowball into an endless hell especially when there are several predicaments. The only answer I found for this is to pace and stop playing for a few minutes. The only fun aspect of this crisis is the challenge it presents but when the answer is just stop playing, it's kind of boring. When you have 2000 light units and 100s of forts, you just ignore and outlast this predicament and the spawned crisis. I'd rather see substantially smaller gains (10%) from resource per click & resource per second - this would allow progression at the cost of click heat.

Crisis Attacks
Just feedback. When you have a bunch of crisis drop all at once, they receive a significant speed boost. In one of my games the other day I had 5 or 6 crisis drop simultaneously so that's like 434% speed boost. The 1st strike against the wonder was on the 2nd crisis - this was the 100% boosted crisis with weaker fort blocking. The game does not pause on any subsequent crisis so this led to my wonder being destroyed before I could do anything. Despite efforts to alt-f4 I could not get a fort to save that wonder because the game would load in without pause. This was just an incredibly annoying circumstance as there was zero warning and zero control to influence this particular outcome during a very heated moment. It was a couple of hours wasted trying to save that wonder - later I discovered the hanging gardens is basically entirely useless in future era tech due to resentment.

Keys
The grind for keys is just tough because it's insanely time consuming. I wish there were more options available to acquire keys considering how costly the tile upgrades are, the cost of the workshop upgrades, and the sheer number of tech and predicaments. It would be nice to have an option to perform quests on behalf on your neighbor civilizations for rewards, including keys.


Love the game
Some stability issues are more prevalent in the future era when 600k stone/sec builds bunkers at 53/sec and a lot of things are happening all at once. The level up recipe seems pointless and the cost on it for unique heroes is disgustingly expensive. Love the combinations of heroes and the few challenges presented though the game seems to snowball very fast. Keep up the great work, thank you! Merry Christmas!

[NavySeniorChief]

Badge is spelled wrong on the achievements

[TortuousRobin97]

Also something i noticed is (and im not sure if its a bug) is that when caught in a crisis loop, you loose out on the rewards as they time out before you can collect them. IE Hero upgrade materials and gold ect. Either a auto-collect while in a crisis or remove the time too. Loosing out on so much good loot :(

[Mak Lesser]

Originally posted by Fireproof:

Crisis Attacks
Just feedback. When you have a bunch of crisis drop all at once, they receive a significant speed boost. In one of my games the other day I had 5 or 6 crisis drop simultaneously so that's like 434% speed boost.

Just use "pause when crisis starts" in settings (and slow game).

Originally posted by Ondrej Homola:

Damage update is planned that will smooth out the beginning hopefully. Theres also a few masked issues with crisis spiraling on tier 2 that i hope to address at the same time. Beta will be slightly extended so we have time to test this update after holidays

Is there any limits in levels of game?

I managed go to lvl 143 and so far game is going on and on...


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3394552980

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3394557787

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3394558419

[Mak Lesser]

I mean, it would be nice if you added some kind of counter, like “147 levels completed out of 200”.
So that the player understands where to aim and how many levels he has not completed yet. Well, if player completed everything, then, for example, give in the end some super unique hero to motivate him to go through all 200 again.

[TortuousRobin97]

Originally posted by Mak Lesser:

I mean, it would be nice if you added some kind of counter, like “147 levels completed out of 200”.
So that the player understands where to aim and how many levels he has not completed yet. Well, if player completed everything, then, for example, give in the end some super unique hero to motivate him to go through all 200 again.

I remember seeing in a post that beyond the future era, its endless until T2 is finished or until T3 is in development.

[TortuousRobin97]

Also, how do you farm the unique heros? I'm getting around 3-7 heros (random) per playthrough and since the new heros, i think i've only got maybe 1 or 2 of them (Adams and 2x Ghadi)

[Ondrej Homola]

Originally posted by TortuousRobin97:

Originally posted by Mak Lesser:

I mean, it would be nice if you added some kind of counter, like “147 levels completed out of 200”.
So that the player understands where to aim and how many levels he has not completed yet. Well, if player completed everything, then, for example, give in the end some super unique hero to motivate him to go through all 200 again.

I remember seeing in a post that beyond the future era, its endless until T2 is finished or until T3 is in development.

Yes the Future era will get small updates in the upcoming major updates, so the current implementation is a kind of a 'first version'. I'll think what can be done to make a bit more sense to the endless levels for the meantime.

[Ondrej Homola]

Originally posted by Fireproof:

I realized after my 1st play into T2 that I needed to pace much better. At first, it was a struggle but after careful planning and shifting focus towards keys, the game became tremendously easier.

I do share a few gripes but I understand the game will continue to flesh out in the future. Here's initial thoughts after a few days of play.

Future Tech
These suck right now. The sheer number of predicaments littered into the Future Tech tree is abysmal. I had to increase production into the millions, own the entire map, and acquire 100s of keys to ensure I can push deeper than my previous 2 plays. I'm now pushing past tech level 135 and everything is identical. I guess the only reason for me to continue is to acquire the highest lvl of heroes at this stage. This totally needs work because it's just hell in its current state and discouraging to return to the future tech tree after ascension because there's no lotus.

Industrial Pollution
I hate this predicament. This tends to drop in combination with storm, with resentment, rats, anything that makes Crisis a handful fast. This combined with storm and resentment will snowball into an endless hell especially when there are several predicaments. The only answer I found for this is to pace and stop playing for a few minutes. The only fun aspect of this crisis is the challenge it presents but when the answer is just stop playing, it's kind of boring. When you have 2000 light units and 100s of forts, you just ignore and outlast this predicament and the spawned crisis. I'd rather see substantially smaller gains (10%) from resource per click & resource per second - this would allow progression at the cost of click heat.

Crisis Attacks
Just feedback. When you have a bunch of crisis drop all at once, they receive a significant speed boost. In one of my games the other day I had 5 or 6 crisis drop simultaneously so that's like 434% speed boost. The 1st strike against the wonder was on the 2nd crisis - this was the 100% boosted crisis with weaker fort blocking. The game does not pause on any subsequent crisis so this led to my wonder being destroyed before I could do anything. Despite efforts to alt-f4 I could not get a fort to save that wonder because the game would load in without pause. This was just an incredibly annoying circumstance as there was zero warning and zero control to influence this particular outcome during a very heated moment. It was a couple of hours wasted trying to save that wonder - later I discovered the hanging gardens is basically entirely useless in future era tech due to resentment.

Keys
The grind for keys is just tough because it's insanely time consuming. I wish there were more options available to acquire keys considering how costly the tile upgrades are, the cost of the workshop upgrades, and the sheer number of tech and predicaments. It would be nice to have an option to perform quests on behalf on your neighbor civilizations for rewards, including keys.


Love the game
Some stability issues are more prevalent in the future era when 600k stone/sec builds bunkers at 53/sec and a lot of things are happening all at once. The level up recipe seems pointless and the cost on it for unique heroes is disgustingly expensive. Love the combinations of heroes and the few challenges presented though the game seems to snowball very fast. Keep up the great work, thank you! Merry Christmas!

re Future techs
Future techs will need a bit more balancing but yes there's hardly much point going beyond level 100 now. I expect a couple of patches for 0.10 ill get us some finishing touches to make this playable reasonably until about level 100, and then it will be extended in v.11 and 1.12 (at which point it will become possible to add things like leaderboards since the difficulty scale will be almost final)

re Crises
This was reported elsewhere in similar words and the overall Crisis UI flow will need update. I haven't yet decided when to do it, it won't happen in this patch as I want to pair this with some other tweaks, but yeah in general I think I'll be adding some appearance phase when the crisis will just present itself to give the player a few seconds to plan.

Also the clustered appearance will need to change (the crisis trigger roll is done at the ame time for all crisis types - resulting in 4 of them appearing at once).

Separately there's a few combat updates I'd like to experiment with which will require a UI update on the crisis 'bar' so they'd best be done at the same time. Specifically I am not happy with the unblockable attacks right now and with the attacks being spread evenly on the crises (this is hard to scale for higher difficulties where some simpler 'hierarchy' would be better). This ties into your comment on Wonder destruction in the first couple of seconds in which you have no way to interfere - i'd like to solve that with better attack structure as well.

re Keys
Keys system will be a bit improved in the upcoming patch but for tier 2 there's going to be no key farming. This will come in T3.

re Predicaments
The Future era difficulty will have to be balanced out. Yes you are correct that predicaments being the sole problem results in enforced slowing down of the game to prevent them (since we dont yet have any way to cure them). This is not good.

To balance this we'll need to introduce another issue there (paired with smaller number of Predicaments) which will force players to speed up the game and thus provide with an 'opposite problem'. This will be easy to do in T3 and T4 where some planned features will play this role, but I'll probably need to come up with some compensatory mechanism here in T2 as well... will think about that but my intention is to use the Nemeses for this purpose.