Not a bullet heaven at all

[lephro]

Game kinda - at least to me - advertises itself as a kind of bullet heaven game (vampire-survivors-like)... screenshots look as if you get screenfilling attacks and can go ham. But somehow whenever I play it, it turns into a stupid ass bullet hell game with no chance to beat it. In my whole playtime i didnt even remotly got to a build or something like that that felt "powerfull" in any way. Its always just a bullet hell.

I beat the game in a couple of runs but in most of them you just get swarmed by enemies - especially at the last stage. In my latest run I got to the last stage (in campaign) mode without any problems ... only to be swarmed by 3-4x the amount of enemies with bosses that just hide behind tons of enemies with no chance to even come close to them. It just feels like the difficullty is way too high.

The new combo weapons feel also super week. Whenever I "pick" one it feels more like a downgrade than anything else.

I'm probably pretty garbage at the game, but still it feels like very unnescessarily hard, up to a point where i just alt-f4 out of frustration, because the difficullty annoys the ♥♥♥♥ out of me. Its just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up to go through the campaign mode only to find out that you have no chance beating it, cause the game decides to throw tons of ♥♥♥♥ at you.

[Sharlatan]

You can definately get stupidly OP.
I usually kill the last boss in seconds in campaign mode.

Pick a weapon and some synergies and go ham with it. Constant beams, splitting/aoe projectiles multifiring, heavy shot pierces, drone swarm, missile spam, god beam madness (if your pc can handle it),
There are synergies you learn that really scale things up fast.

Some of the combo weaposn are good, point defense, sniper beam, black hole, but generally they require more knowledge to get working well as you need to build into them and their synergies.

[lephro]

I've tried many different builds... I went for projectiles only... beams only etc. always only focusing and rerolling for these things.... not once i've even remotely become op.

[IchigoMait]

You only can do that in the demo, the moment I got the main game, few upgrades were removed from the deck, like multiple projectiles. Main game became instantly a slogfest of grinding a second or so each time further.

[lightningstrike2010]

So synergies was mentioned, let me say somethings on this also. Less is more in your deck. The more cards you have, the more likely you are to get a card outside of a pure synergy build. So for example, if you go projectile, and are focusing on turrets, you could throw the tag module in there with the synnergies and get good results with certain (fire on tag) projectiles.

Your ship has a LOT to do with how well you do. The carrier sporting fighters and drones with a few turrets is an insanely powerful ship combo. Voyager starts with a cruise missile, so you need to synnergize missiles and maybe ions to really get as much out of it. DS9, the newbie on the block, has extra slots, so you can build a "weapons deep" build, meaning lots of weapons triggering off each other.

Generally your options though are this. Either A) Build around a single weapon, selecting all of its upgrades useful to it, and then other weapons should have some synnergy with it, such as tagging, splitting, piercing, or burning that causes a free fire. B) Build around a weapon type. Weapons should focus on synergy for individual upgrade cards, and you should focus on Type upgrade cards that impact the whole build.

If your deck is nearing 100 and the bulk of the cards aren't some kind of system/xp/modifier you need to look at your weapons loadout. A "random build" dies fast 9 out of 10 times.

As for the "upgrade" cards, I honestly really think they'd be better as single weapons, but you CAN get SOME use out of them in some build situations. The trade off of XP to load up with them, costing you 2 levelups for 1 card just isn't often worth it. If you DO build with those, build AROUND them. Hopefully the Dev re-evaluates the combo system, OR gives a way to boost XP gain a lot higher/faster to utilize it. I don't think I've burned through my deck on endless yet, so that says something. Latter level enemies don't really drop more XP, and you have to go through a lot of tagging options to really get the most out of latter levels.

[T-Bone Biggins]

Easiest way to become OP in a campaign or with a deck is to focus hard on just one weapon type, I like to go projectiles. Have the cards like heavy rounds, gives +5dmg to all projectiles unupgraded. The autoloader card gives you firerate boost. Stacking lots of the right types of weapons with those sort of upgrades helps, but the biggest to go for is that card that gives you more firepoints. That means an autocannon goes from shooting 1 shot to 2, and with the burst turret firepoints mod mixed with the general firepoints mod a single autocannon can be popping off 7+ rounds.

Add in autoloader and it's firing those 7 rounds faster than a single round of the base gun without upgrades. Stack on 3 autocannons on the left, front and right, stack on 3 burst cannons, stack on 3 flak guns, then make sure to get the damage upgrades.......and you firing off like a CWIS at anything nearby constantly and doing more damage than a heavy cannon with each bullet. This doesn't even account for the bullet splitting and piercing upgrades, which you can also easily afford in a projectile-only build. Splitting makes all those bullets multiply again.

This is just one notable example. A projectile deck was my first to build and seemed like the easiest for me to work with, but how much of that was me just getting lots of projectile-based cards early on? I don't know, but keep unlocking cards because there are certainly some super-powerful cards like the general firepoint bonus that you need to make you more powerful.

[lephro]

Originally posted by T-Bone Biggins:

Easiest way to become OP in a campaign or with a deck is to focus hard on just one weapon type, I like to go projectiles. Have the cards like heavy rounds, gives +5dmg to all projectiles unupgraded. The autoloader card gives you firerate boost. Stacking lots of the right types of weapons with those sort of upgrades helps, but the biggest to go for is that card that gives you more firepoints. That means an autocannon goes from shooting 1 shot to 2, and with the burst turret firepoints mod mixed with the general firepoints mod a single autocannon can be popping off 7+ rounds.

Add in autoloader and it's firing those 7 rounds faster than a single round of the base gun without upgrades. Stack on 3 autocannons on the left, front and right, stack on 3 burst cannons, stack on 3 flak guns, then make sure to get the damage upgrades.......and you firing off like a CWIS at anything nearby constantly and doing more damage than a heavy cannon with each bullet. This doesn't even account for the bullet splitting and piercing upgrades, which you can also easily afford in a projectile-only build. Splitting makes all those bullets multiply again.

This is just one notable example. A projectile deck was my first to build and seemed like the easiest for me to work with, but how much of that was me just getting lots of projectile-based cards early on? I don't know, but keep unlocking cards because there are certainly some super-powerful cards like the general firepoint bonus that you need to make you more powerful.

I did exactly that on my last run. I focused on projectiles and upgrades for them... I breezed through the campaign only to realize that iam not able to get even remotly close to the boss... (medium (+25% cc) difficullty) There have been much much more enemies than I could remotly kill. It was super frustrating and one of the main reasons I made this post. I've unlocked 3/4 (or probably even more) of the cards. It was far from beeing something that felt powerfull and even further away from the pictures and media that the game advertises with. Dont get me wrong... I don't hate the game or anything... its just that I feel like that the games failes to be a "vampire-survivors-like"-title, but somehow wants to be that. It makes me frustrated every time I try a build rather than giving me the rewarding fun feeling that I've gotten powerfull and can smash an armada of alien ships.

I guess I just suck at this game. I'm gonna try another run now... I still have hopes that its somehow possible to enjoy this game rather than to alt+f4 out of frustration once again.

[lephro]

I just realized that I still got the savegame of my last run, so I figured I'll upload some screenshots of the build, so you can see what I'm talking about. I might have done something wrong or idk....

https://steamcommunity.com/id/lephro/screenshots/?appid=2060750&sort=newestfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=grid

Let me know if you see any major mistakes that I should avoid next time

[KellyR]

You have 6 weapon types. That's too many. Aim for maybe 4 at most, ideally. Don't have Auto Turret, Burst Turret, AND Auto Sniper, for instance, that's too many, too unfocused.

Aim for just 2 or so fixed gun types for your front quadrant, and 2 or so turret types for the other quadrants (Or a fixed type like Atom Beam or Plasma Cutter that spreads with firepoints so you can put one in each quadrant and have more or less 360 degree coverage, once you get some firepoints).

But yeah, Auto Turret is burn focused, Burst Turret is split/firepoint focused, and Auto Sniper is tag focused, so they don't really synergize at all. Shot Cannon is kind of useless, except as an all-quadrant weapon when you have enough firepoints to give you very wide coverage. Assault Cannon is good, Heavy Cannon is good but possibly not the best for a beginner.

I would drop Shot Cannon and Sniper Turret from this build, and focus on just getting the upgrades for Assault Cannon, Heavy Cannon, Burst, and Auto turrets. And try to spread Burst and Auto Turret around so there's at least one in each quadrant because Burst Turret has a +1/2 firepoint card, and Auto Turret has a +burn chance card, and both are "all quadrant equipment" cards, meaning you want one of the weapon in each quadrant to anchor the effect so that you get the upgrade on all your equipment.

Furthermore, your path through the campaign map is not optimal. You should be hitting as many sectors as possible, You missed at least 5 that you could have gone to. Also always aim to hit the last upgrade station on the map, because that way you have the most cards to upgrade at that point. Skipping that second upgrade station probably meant you were about half as powerful as you could have been.

[Sharlatan]

Originally posted by IchigoMait:

You only can do that in the demo, the moment I got the main game, few upgrades were removed from the deck, like multiple projectiles. Main game became instantly a slogfest of grinding a second or so each time further.

There is a general card that offers +firepoints, which upgraded adds +2 to ALL firepoints. burst turrets still add +firepoints (upgraded to +2) to all quadrant equipment, so if you are stacking a quadrant, that actually is better than before imo. it just makes positioning actually important now.

[Quinox]

Holy mother of, okay. My first point is this build lacks arc synergy. Those auto turrets are weapons that need to share their arc with other weapons. The burn chance affects everything in the arc and the whole point is to apply it to other weapon types, not, just the auto turrets. There's a huge miss in the lack of any ion freeze in this build to proc ion shock, this build focused entirely on projectiles which imho is a dead build.

(Since I didn't state it initially, your front arc needed one auto turret in there to spread arc synergy, no question.)

There's far too much benefit from picking up anything from ion fences to tesla coils to open up potential for freezing on this ship and then stacking ion shock to the point the screen itself just pops. I've never built a ship that just focuses all direct fire weapons on one arc like this, it's overkill in my builds but I don't know how your run is/was going.

Further, these auto sniper and assault cannons are just horrible, again imho. These cards you've drawn are only helping that one weapon do more damage, not the whole arc, or the whole ship. They're selfish equipment that have no real synergy with anything except themselves. I always skip these bastards because their draw pool is bad for the ship as a whole.



I dislike every experience card in this game. Each of those draws is a level, a level that gets exponentially harder to get and thus they become less effective as the game goes on. Because remember the whole point is Return on Investment. If you don't get two levels out of this card, it's done nothing but kill your build. It has to earn you one level to pay for itself, then another to actually GET any value out of picking a card that only gets you more levels and not damage by itself.

If you have a hard time picking up xp gems, break asteroids. Break them always. The green pick ups scoop up the whole screen, which is great, and makes all your pickup range extender cards pointless. The blue ones give you a card draw for free, it doesn't increase ship level or XP requirements. Break asteroids always. Each one is a potential pinata of goodies.


P.S.

Actually let me hammer this home with one more point. The experience cards need to be compared between runs. If you typically end at ship level 25 without them, and 26 with, then you've gotten nothing out of picking that card. You got 25 useful draw, and one experience card that did jack squat for that run.

Every free card draw, every blue pick up or mine cleared for a free card draw, none of those benefit from having an experience card in your deck. Tracking?

[KellyR]

Originally posted by Quinox:

Holy mother of, okay. My first point is this build lacks arc synergy. Those auto turrets are weapons that need to share their arc with other weapons. The burn chance affects everything in the arc and the whole point is to apply it to other weapon types, not, just the auto turrets. There's a huge miss in the lack of any ion freeze in this build to proc ion shock, this build focused entirely on projectiles which imho is a dead build.

(Since I didn't state it initially, your front arc needed one auto turret in there to spread arc synergy, no question.)

There's far too much benefit from picking up anything from ion fences to tesla coils to open up potential for freezing on this ship and then stacking ion shock to the point the screen itself just pops. I've never built a ship that just focuses all direct fire weapons on one arc like this, it's overkill in my builds but I don't know how your run is/was going.

Further, these auto sniper and assault cannons are just horrible, again imho. These cards you've drawn are only helping that one weapon do more damage, not the whole arc, or the whole ship. They're selfish equipment that have no real synergy with anything except themselves. I always skip these bastards because their draw pool is bad for the ship as a whole.



I dislike every experience card in this game. Each of those draws is a level, a level that gets exponentially harder to get and thus they become less effective as the game goes on. Because remember the whole point is Return on Investment. If you don't get two levels out of this card, it's done nothing but kill your build. It has to earn you one level to pay for itself, then another to actually GET any value out of picking a card that only gets you more levels and not damage by itself.

If you have a hard time picking up xp gems, break asteroids. Break them always. The green pick ups scoop up the whole screen, which is great, and makes all your pickup range extender cards pointless. The blue ones give you a card draw for free, it doesn't increase ship level or XP requirements. Break asteroids always. Each one is a potential pinata of goodies.


P.S.

Actually let me hammer this home with one more point. The experience cards need to be compared between runs. If you typically end at ship level 25 without them, and 26 with, then you've gotten nothing out of picking that card. You got 25 useful draw, and one experience card that did jack squat for that run.

Every free card draw, every blue pick up or mine cleared for a free card draw, none of those benefit from having an experience card in your deck. Tracking?

The Machine learning cards are terrible, yes, but the Tagging Module's +2 xp on tagged enemy killed is literally 300% xp (Most bugs only drop 1xp), in combination with the "tag on hit to all quadrant equipment" cards. Will easily end up netting you 10 levels for a handful of cards, that you probably would have played anyway if you're using Fire On Tag weapons.

[Quinox]

For a very long run that's probably true, but my issue with that is you then have to take a tagging module. That's a lot of card draw that doesn't lean into any of the builds I've ever run and an arc slot I'd rather not waste on something of questionable short term synergy. Perhaps it'd be useful for this particular build, but I honestly don't see it salvaging this build so handily and would prefer to see proof for that.

[KellyR]

Originally posted by Quinox:

For a very long run that's probably true, but my issue with that is you then have to take a tagging module. That's a lot of card draw that doesn't lean into any of the builds I've ever run and an arc slot I'd rather not waste on something of questionable short term synergy. Perhaps it'd be useful for this particular build, but I honestly don't see it salvaging this build so handily and would prefer to see proof for that.

I wasn't suggesting it for this build, just pointing out it's useful. If you're going into Auto Turret and Heavy Cannon, they both fire on tag, so a Tagging Module makes sense anyway, and once you've got the quadrant tag on hit upgrades, your guns now self-trigger.

And trigger is particularly valuable for Heavy Cannon, since it has a low fire rate normally.

[puschit]

It's not just combos and synergies of what you pick. You also have to make your way to the boss as long as possible. This means, for one, as has been mentioned, to never go directly to the next sector, always go sideways. That way you get to play more levels and thus you earn more XP which means more cards.

But that isn't all. Second thng to do is to prolong individual missions as much as possible. For example, if the round ends with 750 enemies killed and 100 gold picked up, you want to avoid picking up gold as long as the threat level is comfortable. If you have to kill 4 hatcheries, only kill 3 and stay close to the last one, then kill everything else and level up. When things get messy, kill the last hatchery. Etc.

Third thing to do: If a green globe drops that picks up every single XP blob, do NOT grab it immediatedly! Only do that when the round is about to end, so you don't waste any XP!

Fourth thing to do: Always pop those asteroids! If you don't have anything else to do (see above), go hunting for them. They can drop blue spheres which grant you extra cards directly!

Since I do all of that, I get significantly more cards total during a run compared to my early ones. And all of this is coming from a noob, I bet there are more tricks to min-max the sh1t out of runs.

[KellyR]

Originally posted by puschit:

It's not just combos and synergies of what you pick. You also have to make your way to the boss as long as possible. This means, for one, as has been mentioned, to never go directly to the next sector, always go sideways. That way you get to play more levels and thus you earn more XP which means more cards.

But that isn't all. Second thng to do is to prolong individual missions as much as possible. For example, if the round ends with 750 enemies killed and 100 gold picked up, you want to avoid picking up gold as long as the threat level is comfortable. If you have to kill 4 hatcheries, only kill 3 and stay close to the last one, then kill everything else and level up. When things get messy, kill the last hatchery. Etc.

Third thing to do: If a green globe drops that picks up every single XP blob, do NOT grab it immediatedly! Only do that when the round is about to end, so you don't waste any XP!

Fourth thing to do: Always pop those asteroids! If you don't have anything else to do (see above), go hunting for them. They can drop blue spheres which grant you extra cards directly!

Since I do all of that, I get significantly more cards total during a run compared to my early ones. And all of this is coming from a noob, I bet there are more tricks to min-max the sh1t out of runs.

I agree with all of this, but I'll add to it that when you plan your path through the map, you should take the longest path you can, but that it should be the longest path that nonetheless hits as many shops as possible along the way, and absolutely, top priority, has you visit the very last upgrade station on the map before the boss zone.

And yeah, any time there are multiple options for your path that are more or less equally valid (Take the same number of steps, and don't prevent you visiting an important shop or upgrade station), you should always pick mining station missions, or hatchery missions, in that order, where available.