Atrociously Unreasonable Final Ship Requirement

[Emuser]

This game is completely disrespectful to the player's time for those that care about achievements, or in this game's case the right to unlock the last ship. It is locked behind destroying 500K units. This takes about 70 hours of binging Arcade Mode over and over again. 30 hours in or so you would be close in upgrading most of the other ships fully entirely, meaning that there's 40 hours of grind hell to get the last ship which is the laser specialist ship and nothing new at all this whole time where you would've experienced the whole rest of the game and all of the weapons available by the time 30 hours happened.

The game doesn't give you any way to track your enemies destroyed when you are between 50K and 500K destroys. I had to use Cheat Engine to dig for the number myself and I was only at 165K total destroyed at about 30ish hours. There is absolutely no way the last ship is worth THIS level of extra investment. Even at 200K it wouldn't have been worth the effort.

[Jeneki]

I was looking at survival mode for racking up kills, as you can lock yourself onto an earlier stage with lots of little zako and there's no boss / stage transitions. Still took too long to get just 10k and got really boring. :/

On a more interesting note, I found out there's a unique boss-tier enemy (not in arcade mode) that shows up in survival if you play for around a half hour.

[Emuser]

I did my best over the weekend devising ways to farm enemy kills, but the problem in pretty much any stage in unlimited mode is that bigger enemies show up in waves later and the number go down for how many enemies you are destroying per wave.

The most effective numbers I could get running ships with maxed out upgrades was 5500 per arcade mode run, or ~1700 every 6 minutes on stage 3 and then restarting the stage due to the many waves of popcorns that spawn early, taking the raiden II ship with max out passive of earning 1 bomb per level up lets you reach 1700ish in 6 minutes of in-game time fairly reliably before restarting without needing to pick up anything since all of those things will slow down progress.

Factor in loading times restarting Unlimited Mode or playing through Arcade mode in general and needing to stop to sort out power ups along the way, there's no reasonable way to do this in a fair amount of time I'm afraid.

[SprigganXIII]

Agree this achievement is complete garbage!
Unlimited Mode is the worst way to rack up kills BTW as around level 50 your damage starts to drop off and by level 100 (you are fully upgraded) the enemy ships appear to take more damage to destroy it feels like you back at level 1.
Thought when doing the predecessor achievement (50k enemies killed) you had to do it one one attempt - and with a fully upgraded ship with all weapons fully upgrade during the game you get about 8k - 10k kill per hour.
This game feels unfinished and is still in the Alpha phase of development.
Where is the Walker Tank boss shown on the art for level 3? In fact where are the ground enemies such as tanks that are in every other Raiden game ever made? Only ground units in Nova are turrets and they kinda look like they are floating.

[Jeneki]

I've been trying some different afk builds in normal difficulty unlimited (as per the achievements page, easy difficulty likely doesn't count). I'd setup a build just before bed, lean something on the controller right stick to keep it shooting, and let it run overnight.

The longest run I've had was this build:

Ship: Azuma, which has scaling damage based on level. Since the enemy scales up over time in unlimited mode and it's way more noticeable in normal difficulty, having some scaling of my own seems to help offset it a bit longer. Azuma also give bonus lives, but I'm unsure how much this extends the run time as I'm not watching it play out. Ship of Dragon also has scaling but with hp, however based on my testing this scaling nets less play time than scaling damage with Azuma.

Upgrades: All purple upgrades including main shot, for the regen bonus and weapons that cover a lot of enemies once evolved. All orange upgrades, to evolve the defensive abilities and more muti-directional weapons. The two remaining slots get red Assault (another damage boost) and Gatling (allows evolving Assault). I've tried a few different combos in these last two slots but have had the most success with this combo.

The main sticking point with this build is that Azuma starts with vulcan instead of plasma, and switching to plasma can be annoying and eats up rerolls.

After starting the run, evolving all skills takes around an hour of play time depending on luck with metal/gold bonus enemies and how aggressively large enemies are taken out (including the unlimited-exclusive boss, which gives multiple levels upon defeat). At this point I was able to get about 7 hours of afk time (8 hours total) before game over, netting around 90k total enemies for one hour of effort.

There are a few other things to test out, such as different stages. But I think I'm done giving this game free cpu time overnight. If someone else wants to experiment more here and finds a more effective build combo, please post your results.

[kev]

Originally posted by Jeneki:

I've been trying some different afk builds in normal difficulty unlimited (as per the achievements page, easy difficulty likely doesn't count). I'd setup a build just before bed, lean something on the controller right stick to keep it shooting, and let it run overnight.

The longest run I've had was this build:

Ship: Azuma, which has scaling damage based on level. Since the enemy scales up over time in unlimited mode and it's way more noticeable in normal difficulty, having some scaling of my own seems to help offset it a bit longer. Azuma also give bonus lives, but I'm unsure how much this extends the run time as I'm not watching it play out. Ship of Dragon also has scaling but with hp, however based on my testing this scaling nets less play time than scaling damage with Azuma.

Upgrades: All purple upgrades including main shot, for the regen bonus and weapons that cover a lot of enemies once evolved. All orange upgrades, to evolve the defensive abilities and more muti-directional weapons. The two remaining slots get red Assault (another damage boost) and Gatling (allows evolving Assault). I've tried a few different combos in these last two slots but have had the most success with this combo.

The main sticking point with this build is that Azuma starts with vulcan instead of plasma, and switching to plasma can be annoying and eats up rerolls.

After starting the run, evolving all skills takes around an hour of play time depending on luck with metal/gold bonus enemies and how aggressively large enemies are taken out (including the unlimited-exclusive boss, which gives multiple levels upon defeat). At this point I was able to get about 7 hours of afk time (8 hours total) before game over, netting around 90k total enemies for one hour of effort.

There are a few other things to test out, such as different stages. But I think I'm done giving this game free cpu time overnight. If someone else wants to experiment more here and finds a more effective build combo, please post your results.

This intrigues me since the 500,000 kills for the last ship is an egregious waste of time. I'm guessing you're doing this on PC. I'm going to try this on PS5. So, you lean something on the controller to keep shooting but are you sitting in place or moving while AFK? I'm guessing you aren't moving so you aren't running in to the super boss starfish thing?

[kev]

Originally posted by Jeneki:

There are a few other things to test out, such as different stages. But I think I'm done giving this game free cpu time overnight. If someone else wants to experiment more here and finds a more effective build combo, please post your results.

Okay, I tried this on PS5 and I think it went pretty well.

Fully upgraded Azuma

Evolved:
Plasma Beam
Plasma damage upgrade
Assault Frame
Full Court Armor
Armor Frame (can't remember the name of the other one)
Homing Missiles
Radar Missiles
Catch Plasma
Homing Plasma
Gatling Gun
Recovery Unit

Not evolved but level 9:
Laser Blade
Option Enhancement
(Am I missing one?)

Maxed out around 1 hour and 15 minutes, parked Azuma and rubberbanded the controller and walked away. Came back later and was at 5 hours.

Re-oriented the controller to fire straight downwards instead of to the right as there are some tougher enemies on Stage 1 Endless that come in a group of four and have a high chance of getting shots off and doing damage.

Went to bed, woke up several hours later and had died with 11 hours and 7 minutes on the clock and ~127,000 kills.

Excellent work, Jeneki

[kev]

I got my 500,000 kills early a couple days ago.

Seems like the above setup is superior to using Laser Option instead of Laser Blade. Sounds weird but every time I used the exact setup above I got above 11 hours and with Laser Option instead it was never much over 8 hours.

Laser Blade being the 360 degree spinning laser and Laser Option being the independent single target auto tracking weapon. Trying to follow the numbers on screen doesn't really make one look more powerful than the other but that's four separate runs, two with each weapon.

[LIBRA]

Originally posted by kev:

Originally posted by Jeneki:

There are a few other things to test out, such as different stages. But I think I'm done giving this game free cpu time overnight. If someone else wants to experiment more here and finds a more effective build combo, please post your results.

Okay, I tried this on PS5 and I think it went pretty well.

Fully upgraded Azuma

Evolved:
Plasma Beam
Plasma damage upgrade
Assault Frame
Full Court Armor
Armor Frame (can't remember the name of the other one)
Homing Missiles
Radar Missiles
Catch Plasma
Homing Plasma
Gatling Gun
Recovery Unit

Not evolved but level 9:
Laser Blade
Option Enhancement
(Am I missing one?)

Maxed out around 1 hour and 15 minutes, parked Azuma and rubberbanded the controller and walked away. Came back later and was at 5 hours.

Re-oriented the controller to fire straight downwards instead of to the right as there are some tougher enemies on Stage 1 Endless that come in a group of four and have a high chance of getting shots off and doing damage.

Went to bed, woke up several hours later and had died with 11 hours and 7 minutes on the clock and ~127,000 kills.

Excellent work, Jeneki

Actually you missed some correct upgrade, you can see the "Evolve" things at the right side of each upgrade, that means the current upgrade is the condition for ultimate evolution upgrades.

[kev]

Originally posted by LIBRA:

Originally posted by kev:

Okay, I tried this on PS5 and I think it went pretty well.

Fully upgraded Azuma

Evolved:
Plasma Beam
Plasma damage upgrade
Assault Frame
Full Court Armor
Armor Frame (can't remember the name of the other one)
Homing Missiles
Radar Missiles
Catch Plasma
Homing Plasma
Gatling Gun
Recovery Unit

Not evolved but level 9:
Laser Blade
Option Enhancement
(Am I missing one?)

Maxed out around 1 hour and 15 minutes, parked Azuma and rubberbanded the controller and walked away. Came back later and was at 5 hours.

Re-oriented the controller to fire straight downwards instead of to the right as there are some tougher enemies on Stage 1 Endless that come in a group of four and have a high chance of getting shots off and doing damage.

Went to bed, woke up several hours later and had died with 11 hours and 7 minutes on the clock and ~127,000 kills.

Excellent work, Jeneki

Actually you missed some correct upgrade, you can see the "Evolve" things at the right side of each upgrade, that means the current upgrade is the condition for ultimate evolution upgrades.

Yes, I'm sure I missed one but I think everyone gets the point.

[StoneGolem]

Originally posted by Emuser:

This game is completely disrespectful to the player's time for those that care about achievements, or in this game's case the right to unlock the last ship. It is locked behind destroying 500K units. This takes about 70 hours of binging Arcade Mode over and over again. 30 hours in or so you would be close in upgrading most of the other ships fully entirely, meaning that there's 40 hours of grind hell to get the last ship which is the laser specialist ship and nothing new at all this whole time where you would've experienced the whole rest of the game and all of the weapons available by the time 30 hours happened.

The game doesn't give you any way to track your enemies destroyed when you are between 50K and 500K destroys. I had to use Cheat Engine to dig for the number myself and I was only at 165K total destroyed at about 30ish hours. There is absolutely no way the last ship is worth THIS level of extra investment. Even at 200K it wouldn't have been worth the effort.

Could you find a way to edit it via CE ?
I really wish to know how? I really don't want to leave my PC ON for days.

[Emuser]

Originally posted by StoneGolem:

Could you find a way to edit it via CE ?
I really wish to know how? I really don't want to leave my PC ON for days.

After you get the 5K and 50K achievements done, what I did previously was start a random stage then pause, then search first by number greater than 50,000. Restart stage and destroy 1 enemy. Next scan for higher number value, repeat and destroy 1 enemy then do another scan etc until there's only one number left in CE which is hopefully your destroyed units number. Setting this to 499,999 and then restarting stage and destroying one enemy should finish it up at that point.