Currently at year 81 - Some feedback

[erni79]

Hi! ^^
Some or all of what I want to point out maybe because of the Demo balancing, but maybe this is still useful for you.

first some general observations,
the bug that appears late game that makes enemies stop attacking and eventually crashes the game (if the battle takes too long), seems to appear more regularily on higher game speeds, I think I have not encountered it, if the game speed is set at 1

King of Blood still seems a bit underpowered, or I just have not figured it out

In most runs, it always seems the best tactic to focus on a single unit in the center and surrounding it with at least two libraries, and the other two with buff buildings depending on the unit, some more on this soon

Spells, Nature and Nothing seem vastly easier atm than Greed and Blood

Towers in general seem useless from about year 20 no matter how much I buff them, they just cant seem to keep up

so on my current run:
I am at year 81, having lost no life (game is still running in the background, am afraid it might crash before I can post this^^)
King of Spells, Baron level

Layout is:
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20
(all buildings and units except castle max level)
1 vault 2 vault 3 library 4 castle 5 blacksmith
6 spire 7 library 8 wizards 9 beacon 10 dispenser
11 beacon 12 orchard 13 blacksmith 14 elf 15 library
16 knights 17 forest 18 knights 19 library 20 spores

the stats of my wizards are:
health 28 Damage 466686,69
hits/second 2598,81
it says 28 Combustion and 28 Coat, but it is a whole lot more

elves are also buffed a lot with lots of coat enchantment

my global buffs were, in order, 3x overwork, double enchant, explosives, overwork, explosives, castle expand and finally scouting (for no real reason^^)

knights, spores, spire, orchard were all late additions

every battle starts with a couple of my knights dying and then the battlefield explodes and all enemies are gone, i have not seen anyone survive the first attack wave of the wizards since sometimes around year 30

in general it seems from about year 33 onwards battles always are completely one sided

I think there is a lack of snyergy between units which almost always favours having one super unit instead of a more varied approach, which I hope is not intended

Also did I mention that at this point libraries seem quite the sole way to go if you want to go far? ^^

Thanks for the game, having lkots of fun with it and hope it will be a lot better once its finished :)

[erni79]

I will stop now, it's late and I dont see this changing anytime soon,
especially after I got 2 additional re-enchants^^

a screenshot of my wizards
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3435389562

In general I think hit points don't scale well with the insane levels damage can reach

Good night! ^^

[Snowmech]

I do not believe you got past year 45.... *looks at image, takes hat off and begins to applaud*.. I still do not believe you got there... How the heck did you do that?

[Kronus]

At level 83 the game didn't want anymore, until then it was pretty one-sided.

What I wondered in between, wasn't there an enemy unit limit around 500? I had a enemy max of about 300+ on this run, is that how it should be?

Combustion and Steel Coat are some of the most important upgrades you can have right now. But what bothers me about Combustion is that it doesn't count as the damage of your troops.

Midas Touch is useless with it, I had 129 of them and it gives me 2 gold for 300 kills.

Steel Coat, on the other hand, is nice at the beginning and with 100 or more it makes your units rather immortal, unless machine gun elves (I mean the rate of fire) come around the corner. You don't even have to bother with hp because it's only relevant if the enemy can't touch it.

The strongest enemies were the ones with ranged fighters in the lategame (they can simply attack earlier...) and at the current state, I find things like the poison flask, or static are useless at the current state. They take way too long to take effect and if the battles only last seconds like now mhhh.


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3435395060
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3435403933

[glythe]

Originally posted by Kronus:

What I wondered in between, wasn't there an enemy unit limit around 500? I had a enemy max of about 300+ on this run, is that how it should be?

I am relatively certain that the enemy has way more units than the game says it has. I am not sure if they just kind of spawn in when a unit dies (total war style) or if they are just layered in a way that makes it hard to tell how many there are.

Originally posted by Kronus:

Midas Touch is useless with it, I had 129 of them and it gives me 2 gold for 300 kills.

I had noticed that Midas touch is not being calculated correctly. In theory when you have 10-20 stacks on the unit it should be a ton of income and it just does not deliver.

Originally posted by Kronus:

The strongest enemies were the ones with ranged fighters in the lategame (they can simply attack earlier...) and at the current state, I find things like the poison flask, or static are useless at the current state. They take way too long to take effect and if the battles only last seconds like now mhhh.

Poison is perhaps the most obvious example of poor scaling because it ticks for one damage. Poison might actually make sense if it said : inflict poison on all enemy units at the start of the battle. If you had a unit with 30 ticks of poison then wow that would be relatively equal to something wizards can do.

Put very simply units do not scale enough without the library.

Originally posted by erni79:

In general I think hit points don't scale well with the insane levels damage can reach

One of the issues I have with the design of the game (and why I will not be buying it) is that the game does not scale properly. Most of the game the scaling makes sense with +1 flat or +2% being a meaningful change. Later on that goes out the window completely because the AI units are scaling at what seems to be a geometric rate.

Put very simply units do not scale enough without the library.

Originally posted by erni79:

King of Blood still seems a bit underpowered, or I just have not figured it out

A finite supply of imps is quite weak relative to the other three factions.

Originally posted by erni79:

In most runs, it always seems the best tactic to focus on a single unit in the center and surrounding it with at least two libraries, and the other two with buff buildings depending on the unit, some more on this soon

Originally posted by erni79:

Towers in general seem useless from about year 20 no matter how much I buff them, they just cant seem to keep up

Someone was getting to 80+ several days ago with just Greed towers and no units so I am pretty sure they got nerfed.

Originally posted by erni79:

in general it seems from about year 33 onwards battles always are completely one sided

I think there is a lack of snyergy between units which almost always favours having one super unit instead of a more varied approach, which I hope is not intended

Also did I mention that at this point libraries seem quite the sole way to go if you want to go far?

I agree with this analysis and think that's probably bad for the game overall.

"Super buffing" one unit is currently necessary for proper late game scaling. Things would be a lot more fun if for example there were an automatic upgrade (given at turn 40) that said something like : all buildings now give all their bonuses to all adjacent units.

I would say Blue is probably the current best faction because of what you already discovered in one of your best runs : double output+double enchant.

[Kronus]

I can only agree with you, the library seems to be one of the core buildings of the build in almost all situations at the moment.

I have to say: your description of the Poision sounds more like a tower than a unit, in which case the library would at least not be usable.

Regarding the towers, yes I also think that the current towers can't keep up with the scaling in the game, only the dispenser with its +1% attackespeed per earnd gold can do that.

With the King of Blood, the best strategy right now seems to be to develop the bombers into a weapon of mass destruction so that the explosions are powerful enough and reach far enough to wipe out all life on the battlefield.

As far as the scaling is concerned, it's already clear that more work is being done on it and that there will also be more difficulty levels. That should change the story again. And by the way, most of us will have 5 more kings, some of us only 4, which will probably change the balance of power quite a bit. In addition to everything else that's coming.

I will probably get the game, according to an influencer, the game will have a “price point” of 6.99 euros. With all the quirks that the game might still have, the price/performance is better than some of the big games that have come out.

[erni79]

Originally posted by Snowmech:

I do not believe you got past year 45.... *looks at image, takes hat off and begins to applaud*.. I still do not believe you got there... How the heck did you do that?

Once I had the basic idea, I went through many different itterations. First I thought Knights were the way to go, stack hp, coat enchantment and poison aura global.
That worked okey, but I still died around year 35.
Then I switched to ranged units, and it was immedeately easier.
It took a lot of attempts, you basically need a lot of luck to get the rights cards and globals. Overwork is absolutely neccessary, you should have 2 or 3 by the time you reach the king fight.
I originally tried with two blacksmiths (which I still think is the better option if you try it with archers) but the wizards need the attack speed to get their first kill in, and the subsequent explosion.
The vault was also important so I could buy cards, once I had overwork twice I was cashing in pretty consistently and could buy 2-4 cards from every merchant.

also you need to get your unit up to lvl3 asap, the building buffs will be much more efficient then
and for enchantments, stick exclusively to combustion and coar, the more enchantments the less likely the libraries will raise the correct ones.

Nature and Greed are probably more important to have as enemies at the start. You will need to procreate quite a bit to get the numbers high enough.
So depending on how willing you are to restart it can take a while, but I am pretty sure that it can be repeated and in fact be optimized even further.

Once you get rolling there should be nothing that can stop you anymore for a long time. Had it been earlier in the day I would have pushed further, but I doubt the enemies would have caught up anytime soon.