Balance 3rd Map

[Skyhawk]

The first and second maps are still acceptably manageable with Upgrade grind. The trees provide enough wood and there is enough space to build. Even with poorly rolled maps.

With the third map you are too dependent on the luck of the dice on the map. Due to the many trees (one tree: 50 instead of 300 wood), there is hardly any space to build. Raw materials that are urgently needed are not available, if I can even find them quickly enough.
Then the route must be revealed. The monsters all feel faster and stronger, not to mention the birds with shields. I can't keep up anymore and just run after the problems. I haven't made it past day 6 yet. The much-needed iron production didn't occur until day 5 or 6, far too late. I can't build the much-needed level 2 towers. And I didn't have time to look for crystals on the third map.

It's good when the difficulty increases, but on the map it happens at all levels and is too strong overall.

A pause function to take a breather and plan construction would be very nice.

I think the game concept as a whole is very nice and varied. Due to the many tasks, balancing is very demanding.

Edit:
After five attempts on the map, I did it. But there was a lot of luck with maps and treasure chests. The resource boxes are a nice addition, but they shouldn't be the difference between victory and defeat.
Especially on the larger maps, it would be nice to play longer than 10 rounds so that you can take advantage of the variety of buildings.
It quickly turns into stress.


What I would like:
- a pause function
- optionally more visible quick bars (no scroll)

3rd map
- more building space and accessible iron/coal deposits

[Thats How We do action in Uganda]

4th map is even worse.

[fartingisfun]

I think the design is that you just rush exploring and kill the enemy tower before the micro manage gets you. I'm not a fan of it but I remain optimistic that it will be addressed later as the game is still early access. Some of it could be alleviated with some kind of "palate function" where you can group 4 wood choppers together (along with their belt combiners) and move them together with a single click. As it is now, the micro manage just catches up to me (I'm pushing 40 and my actions-per-minute just aren't what they used to be) and I end up playing in level 2 to avoid it (i've already ground out what I need and am just playing for fun now). Here's to looking forward to improvements in the future though, this game has great potential for sure.

[Twin]

You aren't the only one with similar opinion in this area....

The micro and Tier progression detract, combined with crystals and bonus encourages you to grind lower levels instead of the new.

Though I will say I was sort of impressed, I did get similar coin failing on level 3 as I do finishing level 2 at round 5. Though the smaller trees, cramped space, combined with the Tier 2 requirement just makes the grind frustrating instead of a mindless grind.

Funny how mindless grinding is preferred to challenging grinding :)

[zumwaltwood]

Finally got past map 2 and on to 3 and saw the forest, so to me it was about ridding all the trees and fast, so i laid down tons of foresting machines, i had so much wood i had no way to use it, but, the challenge to this map is the number of monsters you start to face and the fact their life just increases on each day, it out lives you fast, the strategy is obvious really from the go, got to find the castle fast then find the gems fast, otherwise your dead by day 4

[MeGa]

+1 to pause

[SIUnit]

Stage 3 you more or less have to rush tier 2 buildings if you really want to play it "legit".

Once you find an iron deposit, drop down a furnace to make coal (yeah took me awhile to realize I could do this lol), then feed that coal into a second furnace along the iron ore to make ingots. This lets you get buzzsaw towers which are going to be your main anti-ground turret. Ingots also gets you tier 2 woodchopper, which work twice as fast and more importantly has 1 extra tile radius, which is essential so you're not wasting half your time rearranging your tier1 choppers.

Feeding wood into furnace to make coal has has the secondary effect of clearing out all the trees so you can clear out the area for more build space.

The 2nd ingot production chain need to split into 2 forges making iron plate for bombards to deplete the high armor on those lizards. Once you have a few bombards up, change one of the forge to produce rods instead since later buildings will need that.

The 3rd ingot production chain will need to split into 2 iron plates again, but also add 2 wooden planks to feed into workshop to produce reinforced planks in order to make rockets (anti-air) and electroball (anti-shield).

The 4th ingot production chain will split into plate+rod to feed into workshop to make gears, which is need for the quake tower. Getting a bunch of these is basically essential in the later waves to be able to massively deplete the armor/shields in a huge AoE so your buzzsaw towers can chew through their hp pool.

At this point you're probably good to crystal their castle at your leisure, thought you can start making laser towers if you really want to last to the end of day 10.


Alternatively, both stage 3 and 4 can be beaten with only tier 1 buildings with some luck if you focus on fog-of-war to find the 3 crystals quickly. It's actually how my first clear of stage 4 ended up happening.

[Wat]

Originally posted by Skyhawk:

Due to the many trees (one tree: 50 instead of 300 wood), there is hardly any space to build.

I build wood choppers near the area where towers are going to be built, in front of the light tower. By the time you have resources to build the towers, the area is already cleared.