Thoughts on Adventure Mode Gameplay Improvements/Mods

[Glory]

I've been thinking about how adventure mode works, as that's my current favorite way of playing the game (barring designer mode of course). I'm a relative newb to adventure mode, however, and my runs have only managed to get up to a 100k or so craft before dying. There are a few small improvements that I was hoping to either mod in myself or see if someone else already has, but I need a bit more information regarding how precisely the mode works first.

Firstly, it seems difficult to determine when you should go through a red portal (seeing as the overall point of the mode, at least to me, is to get to level 100). Enemies seem to scale with your ship cost rather than the difficulty level - I've seen TG 80k mechs after three portals. It would be great if enemy spawns were set to a materials limit that increased at each red portal, and then told you (perhaps in the escape menu, alongside the current level information) the current range of enemies that could spawn, as well as the range you would encounter at the next level. This would give you a materials goal for your own craft to reach before entering the next portal, as well as providing a grinding opportunity if you want to "overlevel" your craft a bit before moving on.

Secondly, I honestly don't enjoy building in real-time. I've been ambushed while retrofitting my craft at 15% completion too many times, and I've finally resorted to saving all my basic hull designs as prefabs, which I then tack onto the front of my current ship and transfer weapons and the heartstone over manually when I need to upgrade. It feels extremely awkward. You get a lot of down-time between enemy spawns, but that's either too little (for a total retrofit) or too much (swapping a gun turret). I get that blue portals exist, but those feel like an overcomplicated way of solving the basic issue, and they don't spawn frequently enough to be a reliable post-fight upgrade method. There's a very similar game called "Reassembly" that I also enjoy - think FTD Adventure mode, in space, in 2D. Killing things increases the material value cap of your ship, which you can then edit to your hearts content in a separate build screen while the main game is paused. I have no idea if this is even possible in FTD, as pausing with f11 prevents most types of construction. However, if it is possible to build while paused, a simple way to balance this would be to disable all construction during combat. The game already prevents "Undo" commands in combat, so there should be a way to implement that if the pause-construction issue is solved.

Thirdly, a big part of the fun I get from the missions and campaign modes is the big fleet engagements. Adventure mode seems to focus on one-on-one duels, with the occasional honorable third party showing up if you take too long dispatching your current enemy. Having a small enemy fleet (scaled appropriately by level) show up a fair proportion of the time instead a of a similarly priced "boss" enemy would make things a lot more interesting, as it would encourage the player to spawn in a specialized fleet of their own instead of just one cobbled-together-mega-doom-raft (this also means less real-time building, which I like! I tend to use a lot of drones in adventure mode). There's nothing stopping the player from building a fleet of drones, but it would be a lot of fun if the AI had fleets as well. This would be super easy to implement with the mothership/drone system already in the game - I think, at least.

Fourthly, the heartstone system just feels painful. I get that something needs to be done to keep rambot from spending even more of her life in the abyssal depths, but there's nothing stopping the player from making a rubber coffin with the heartstone and an engine inside, hopping in, and sinking to the bottom of the sea while fighting entirely with drones. It really sucks when you're trying to modify a design and have to scramble to move your heartstone, as you can only have one on your ship. Maybe setting the heartstone death timer to take about 3 or 4 minutes to run down instead of the 30-odd seconds you get (half of which the game renders you basically blind for) would be a nice improvement.

Fifthly, going through a red portal (the main goal of the mode) is frankly uninteresting. It seems to just remove all the current portals, enemies, and material zones, while leaving everything else the same. A very simple change that would make going through a portal seem more significant would be to have the weather change when going through a portal, and stay unchanged until the next portal. Blue portals could guarantee a flat calm for easier building. This also creates an interesting choice if the player runs into a gale with an insufficiently seaworthy ship design - they could either stay and fight to the best of their ability, rush the next portal knowing that their craft might be badly underlevelled for the next area, or even turn their ship into a submarine or airship to ride out the storm below or above the waves. If there is enough basegame enemy diversity, it also might be worth considering having only one (or two, if you want to be the aforementioned honorable third party) faction inhabit each level, with more lategame/expensive factions only appearing when enough of their designs can actually spawn in based on the level material cap (see #1).

TL/DR: Stuff I wanna see:
1) More Obvious/Clearer Difficulty Scaling
2) Pause while in Build Mode + No Build Mode in Combat
3) Small Enemy Fleets instead of Just Single "Boss" Ships
4) Heartstone Lasts Much Longer or Just Get Rid of It
5) Weather/Enemy Faction(s) Change on Red Portal

[Flying Rhino]

1) Its being actively worked on. Its been an issue for a while.
2) That's what Blue portals are for.
3) I cant speak much on this, but this is going to make part 1 SO much worse, with the addition that more work will need to go into the collision avoidance of fleets of smaller ships. Additionally, if you can swat 1 Duster at Dif 5, why would you send 5 of them at Dif 15?
4) Heartstone timer is what it is so you cant spend your whole Adventure play-thru as a pirate.

[Flying Rhino]

5) There are some valid points here. But I would want to avoid the RNG problems of "I rolled really bad weather and SD enemies this L40 portal, guess I'm dead"

[Glory]

Ah, yes, I totally forgot that the pirating feature even existed lol. It's fun in campaign (I might have to do a pirate-only run sometime) but being able to scrap a captured ship for full value is definitely OP. Of course that begs the question, why even have it in adventure mode at all? Removing the feature entirely would be more work but would solve that problem much more conclusively than shackling the player to their ship with a very short chain.

Much of my annoyance with heartstones comes from only being able to have one on your ship, which makes retrofitting (either by hand or with the build in feature) that much more difficult. That constraint really doesn't makes any sense, as if it gets knocked out in battle you can just stick another one down in a safe part of your ship (giving you two when the original gets repaired, nice!), and besides, the other one-block critical system - the AI Mainframe - can have as many backups as you want. I've never actually designed a ship with more than one AI, so I'm not sure how precisely that works if one gets destroyed, though.

Maybe instead having player heath drain rapidly when aboard enemy ships and much slower when not on board a friendly ship would keep the good parts of the system while removing the bad. I have no idea how practical this would be to implement though.

I do underuse blue portals. That's probably a big part of the reason I tend to get my overly small ships sunk out from under me before getting too far lol.

A lot of the SS aircraft and basically the entirety of the TG drone line already spawn in mothership/drone squadrons. I'm not sure if having larger ships spawn the same way would cause issues, though. 5 Dusters not being much scarier than one is a fair point, but the Duster can be shot down with pretty much anything, including the .50 cal MG. I feel bad shooting at Dusters sometimes. On the other hand, a more specialized squadron - say a dodgy helicopter, a fast jet, and a heavily armed and flare carrying prop plane - might end up stronger than the sum of its parts and be a more interesting fight besides.

I think that a lot of my overall objections with this mode can be summed up as saying that adventure mode honestly isn't sure if it wants to be a sandbox with progression mechanics or a roguelike. It's got permadeath, but - unless your rambot is unlucky enough to take a 300mm shell to the face - it's surprisingly hard to die as long as you have a heartstone/engine prefab set, as building in combat is allowed. There is some RNG in terms of what kind of enemy spawns, but you always know that you'll only be dealing with one enemy at a time and can build your craft accordingly. If it was a sandbox I'd prefer to be able to pause the game to build, and if it was a roguelike I'd personally prefer a bit more RNG-induced "fun" to make each run more unique. It's almost worth having two different difficulties for the mode, one more sandbox-y and one more rougelike-y.

[fleatoad]

I often have several enemies spawn in adventure.
If you go through the blue portal build a small base with a heartstone you can move rambot over and refit all you want.
My game does not allow me to build a 2nd heartstone when the first is destroyed.
You should experiment with using more than 1 ai. Putting different guns with different roles on each one. For example I have aa on a separate ai to prioritise fast vehicles. Sabots target hot spots.

I mostly play sea adventure not land. I also tend to drag my feet with moving on and will be at over 1 mil mats before I hit lvl 10. My last game ended with a 7mil super flyer.

I agree adventure mode does need an overhaul but what you propose wont really fix anything in my view.

1)There is already limits on what can spawn at each lvl but it could be made clearer.
2)No, building while fighting is the only real challenge the adventure offers.
3)We already have that.
4)Plenty of ways to cheese the game but you are gaining nothing as you gain nothing from completing the adventure. Dont punish everybody because some players cheese the game.
5)Not really sure I like this. Maybe have the weather worsen over time to force slow people like me to move on to calmer waters. However this would just encourage me to build more flyers.

[Glory]

Here's proof that you can put down additional heartstones when destroyed, at least in my game. A sneaky Pontus decided to test the power of flex-tape and sawed my ship in half, taking my engine, AI, and heartstone with it. I killed it with torpedoes while spamming down heartstones as each ran out of power. This is after repair bot spam fixed up my ship:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3139816297