Feedback after 9 hours

[Palandus]

Overall liking it, but there are several things I'd want to see changed:

1. Knowledge costs = Unlocked tier 3 research. 2000 points each. I had one good run, lasted about 2 hours, got to 830m, and earned like 3100 points, fully exploring 3 maps, and partially exploring 2 maps. 2000 points is way too much, considering the time investment needed to get that many knowledge points.

2. Ability to remove purple ground tentacles/vines. Really screws up base defense placement, and making good chokepoints.

3. Ensure that resources don't generate beyond the map edge. Had a few instances of Red or Blue resources spawning beyond the map edge and that hurt, not having access to them.

4. A resource converter structure would be very useful. Like say spend 10 copper to generate 3 titanium. The reason my 830m run failed was because a lot of my powerful units required titanium, and couldn't find any deposits at all, and ultimately got overrun because I couldn't do early research or build the powerful units.

5. Consistently provide "blood" when destroying those purple circles. Consistently provide "hive cores" from hives.

6. Those red circles that give "radium" are considered an enemy, when they never produce an enemy threat.

7. Would be great if we could find blue circles, that gives small amounts of titanium. Or just give titanium from those purple circles.

8. Would be great if I could have more units in each category. I had two wall types, two trap types, a medical turret and three turrets, but could only bring a total of 5 of them. When each of those things is situationally useful to have.

9. Single strike drones need to have their costs reduced and/or their damage/aoes massively increased, as multi-strike drones are better for hordes and resource efficiency.

10. I think body factories should be freely placed, and not require coal deposits. Then just heavily increase their price. Early-mid game coal generators are way more important and late game, I just can't find coal deposits to put them on without stretching my defensive lines too much.

11. The ability to tunnel through rock would be nice. Often I get places where the RNG almost places a tunnel but doesn't and that could provide an amazing shortcut... if I could tunnel.

12. A long-range artillery tower would be so nice. Something to hit targets from afar, but has minimum range so can't hit local targets. Or there is one, but haven't found the blueprints yet.

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Anyway will keep at it and have more feedback later for you.

[Palandus]

Well, ragequitted at 12 hours in. I've had enough. I might come back to it later in a few weeks. Some notes:

1. Enemies need to consistently react. When I shoot them, 50% of the time they ignore my soldiers and beeline for my base. This is what caused me to ragequit. An edge swarm spawned in, had 12 snipers and 6 heavies nearby. They fired on them, and they ignored my troops and flattened a large chunk of my base.

2. There needs to be a save option mid-game. If you run out of time to play and/or haven't found enough radium to leave, quitting ends the entire run. Which is a real piss off. The second part of my ragequit was when I had enough and hit quit, expecting to go back to before I started the run and instead ended the run completely.

3. Several upgrade modules seem like they would work for certain units, and they don't. Some better clarity on tooltips and/or what units can use it, would be very useful.

4. I just can't progress in terms of knowledge points. And its too hard the deeper I go, so I'm stuck.

5. Lightning towers have way too short range. You have to put them adjacent to walls to hit anything.

6. Medical towers need to heal more per shot. Even with 7 shooting at a titanium wall, the amount of damage from a 700m swarm still flattened the wall. With max tower upgrades.

7. We need a "gate" structure. Something that lets our units in/out, but keeps out enemies.

8. Sniper rifles are pretty short range, being only like 1-2 squares farther than a standard rifle.

9. The scrap option when you get three choices you don't want, is pretty paltry, when it gives back only 1 scrap for 7 spent.

10. Blood is way too rare. I clear an entire map of structures and at most get 50 blood, but with upgrades costing 10+ a pop, that goes fast.

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Anyway, with some improvements, I could see myself coming back to it, but until then its way too grindy for me to want to play it longterm.

[DrunkBunny94]

You don't really need much/any knowledge to win on normal, i think i wiped around 1500m~ and then won my following game and the winning run got me some 70,000 knowledge and let me buy almost half of each skill tree.
If you want to farm knowledge though you can always play on easy.

The purple stuff on the ground is supposed to make it harder to build defences there, its going to force you to station units there or hold somewhere else instead.

I don't think we need a resource converter - there is something similar later on for the miner a % chance to generate titanium - but again the point is to ensure your copper units/defences are capable enough for you to secure titanium.
If your copper units suck and you are reliant on your titanium then if you ever get a map where you are locked out of titanium you are going to get rekt.

I find that the drill and 2 energy gens are more than enough energy, all coal after that point goes into body factories. If you could freely build them it would negate the need to expand for coal and would make clearing the map much easier since you could turtle and while infinitely pumping out troops. You'd never need to build a turret because you'd be building troops instead.

I think the long range tower is supposed to be the drones.
I agree the 1 off drones are rather weak as they lack the +bombs damage scaling.
Imo the 1 off bombs like the nukes should just deal full damage to buildings. Like if im spending 100 titanium on a nuke i shouldn't need 2 to kill a spitter.

With regards to medical turrets they are just weak early on because you cannot equip damage items to them. So the only damage bonuses they get are from augments, once you are in act 2 and 3 with the extra damage augments and higher base damage turrets they start making more sense.
But the point of them is not to out heal the damage they're supposed to repair the walls inbetween waves.

The "blood" income is fine, unless you are spending all your blood for cores re-rolling early on you should be able to max out your Barracks, Factory and get most of your core stuff by 1km and enough cores left over to max out radium storage (not efficiency).
All the "blood", "gears", "cores" and knowledge you find ingame are multiplied by your radium, if you look in the end screen it will show you a radium multiplier.
So if you increase your radium storage augments and knowledge and with your first few cores you get more rewards.
This means in act 2 and 3 you end up with more blood than you need if you are full clearing. Same applies to Gears.

Snipers being 7 range is significant, its 60% more than shotguns and 40% more than rifles. Its the only weapon that can safely kill the spitters. Snipers are the last weapon that need a buff lol they are already so strong.

[DrunkBunny94]

Anyways 3 tips i can give you to help you out.

1, Vision tower range augments. Its cheap at like 3 or 4 "blood" and it makes your vision tower cover like 20% of the map. This lets you find all your resources like your titanium faster and gives you a clear direction to push towards.
Later on with upgraded drones you can also snipe the spawns.

2, Get radium storage, this will multiply all of your rewards like gears, blood and cores and helps kick start your economy. Ideally you have storage at 5/5 before hitting 1,000m, efficiency can stay at 0/5 until you are ready to pick up the pace.

3, Go fast. The swarm rage is persistent and it increases the HP of enemies and buildings in future missions. So Typically you want to start the fueling process almost as soon as you have max radium once your turrets are all set up to hold.
While the fueling process is going on you can still be active and search the map. Seeing where the enemies are coming from will tell you where spawns are - sometimes these will be hives (the ones on the floor you cant destroy) but also they can be the coins or the boxes that give you gears.

[DerGeissler]

The number one most important tip: Spacebar pauses the game and you can still do stuff whole it is paused. Number two most important tip: If you want to leave a run while in a map, just alt f4. You have to restart the map, but not the whole run

[scavenger]

Will admit I would quite enjoy having a tower that is the sniper equivalent. Seems weird we can have a sniper unit but not a sniper tower, despite weapons and turrets almost being the same with several exceptions.
Will say that having the sniper with the current range is fine since they are able to shoot a enemy turret usually before they start shooting back, and there is a modifier where if a unit dies, it becomes "infected" and starts heading to your core. Imagine having to fight that when it will outrange any turrets you likely have in the way.
But as drunk said, get radium storage, since the bonus at the end from a full storage makes it quite worth it.

[DrunkBunny94]

Originally posted by scavenger:

and there is a modifier where if a unit dies, it becomes "infected" and starts heading to your core. Imagine having to fight that when it will outrange any turrets you likely have in the way.

I almost wiped at 5800m to that modifier, I was being greedy pushing for a spawner and lost 10~ snipers that were doing 2k damage per shot and they came and started melting my defences. Had to fire all my drone strikes to kill them.
Nope'd out of that map pretty fast xD

[Psilo]

I just finished the game on normal difficulty on my third run, getting 64k knowledge in the process. Your complaints on kownledge are 100% skill issue, im swimming in it after 3 runs.
Same goes for blood ressource...abundant. Just explore the map while fuelling and you'll pick up everything

Game doesnt need to be easier

[SMN47]

Is it just me, or the sound of hovering over buttons is a bit too crispy? Just purchased it, and it's just right away the very first thing I wanted to point out before even starting the game