Thanks for listening and implementing auto-attack

[General T.Montana Tropic Thunder]

...I directly bought the game twice :)

[MoonlightEmber]

Have you tried the feature out yet? We would love to hear your thoughts on it! :)

[General T.Montana Tropic Thunder]

Thanks for investigating. It could be tweaked a bit more, in the way that units directly attack as soon an an enemy is in visible screen distance. I guess players would also welcome the following feature "Options: ON/OFF Autopause game as a unit health reaches xx % hitpoints".

What I spent most time on in 10 hours playing: Sorting out the best DPS armor vests, DPS helmets and highest class items and constantly trashing stuff. If items would be inventory-split-presented, an inventory box for armor, an inventory box for vests, and one inventory box for class items...All of these boxes arranged visually next to each other. - Somehow visually better presented and organised to see those things better...That would save a lot of time. Right now one constantly has to click on "Sort Armor" and "Sort Damage" and its all presented in a big "Bin" xD

Also a button "Sell all items which are not worn/in use by characters" would be a time saver :)

BTW I love the humor of the crab "I need a woman ?" or the taped up mummy ! Keep the humor up, great stuff !!!

[happyscrub]

Originally posted by LadyAijou:

Have you tried the feature out yet? We would love to hear your thoughts on it! :)

I would too. I was gonna buy this game long ago until i saw the auto attack complaints. I already got burnt on lack of that feature on Satellite Reign. Not gonna waste money making the same mistake

[General T.Montana Tropic Thunder]

The current attack funcions in the game are already decent, at least IMHO

However, my finger is constantly on the default attack key "Q" + left mouse click on appearing enemies, as initially the system needs to be told "Attack", to initiate the battle ...Otherwise my folks often just stand within a bunch of enemies and do nothing.


It would be great if an alternative "always-auto-attack" gets implemented as a "Attack behaviour Version B" in the Game Options, as an alternative to the current auto-attack-behaviour where the player needs to define the first initial strike
( So the current implementation is "Auto attack version A" ).

Attack behaviour Version B would be the AI attacking anything showing up in the screen,
which would avoid that the crew just stands around doing nothing with new enemies popping up.

The suggested Attack-Version-B auto attack would leave players lots of time to focus on using the crew abilities, right now I seldom use them as Im always busy with pressing key "Q" and clicking on new attack targets.

[Serath]

I believe an "always auto attack" is a feature currently in the works in the beta version, something I didn't rhink this game would have since it's out of EA.

[MoonlightEmber]

Originally posted by III - I`ll be back...:

The current attack funcions in the game are already decent, at least IMHO

However, my finger is constantly on the default attack key "Q" + left mouse click on appearing enemies, as initially the system needs to be told "Attack", to initiate the battle ...Otherwise my folks often just stand within a bunch of enemies and do nothing.


It would be great if an alternative "always-auto-attack" gets implemented as a "Attack behaviour Version B" in the Game Options, as an alternative to the current auto-attack-behaviour where the player needs to define the first initial strike
( So the current implementation is "Auto attack version A" ).

Attack behaviour Version B would be the AI attacking anything showing up in the screen,
which would avoid that the crew just stands around doing nothing with new enemies popping up.

The suggested Attack-Version-B auto attack would leave players lots of time to focus on using the crew abilities, right now I seldom use them as Im always busy with pressing key "Q" and clicking on new attack targets.

We have always said that we wanted to avoid entirely automating the game, because in early development we *did* use that method, and it did not play well. While convenient, it also took control entirely out of the player's hands. A person could click once, and the entire planet would end up clear without further input from the player. That to us felt disappointing and something more apt to be seen in a mobile game than a PC experience. What we've done with the current implementation is put in a way to defend yourself automatically without causing the game to play itself for you.

We previously also used a mechanic where anyone that was attacked, would instantly attack back, and the result was again, that your crew would chain-aggro everything on the level, and keep running, without allowing you the option to stop it in any way. There was no way to choose *not* to engage those enemies by running instead of fighting. Player choice has been a huge influence in the way we've made our development decisions.

[General T.Montana Tropic Thunder]

Much appreciated that you interact with your customers :)
Yeah, I thought you would experience your described things during practical development.

I played the game another 5 hours,
an hardcore mode where 3 x more enemies are on the screen would be great.
That would be a superb blast, like on a good coin up arcade machine.

I love your top notch indy game, its technically and gameplay wise well developed, good dynamic enemy strength scaling ! Some sub bass sounds for rocket launcher, explosions ...a bit more variety on the sound side in battles would be a nice addition.
( More sound variety on lasers, MG, knifing etc. )

Kind regards,
a big fan of this "Diablo sidescroller bash out extravaganza"

[General T.Montana Tropic Thunder]

Im kindly asking if there perhaps is a plan to implement a harder mode, with 2 - 3 times more enemies ? That would be great and make me return to the game again :-)

[Devrailis]

Originally posted by LadyAijou:

We have always said that we wanted to avoid entirely automating the game, because in early development we *did* use that method, and it did not play well. While convenient, it also took control entirely out of the player's hands. A person could click once, and the entire planet would end up clear without further input from the player. That to us felt disappointing and something more apt to be seen in a mobile game than a PC experience. What we've done with the current implementation is put in a way to defend yourself automatically without causing the game to play itself for you.

We previously also used a mechanic where anyone that was attacked, would instantly attack back, and the result was again, that your crew would chain-aggro everything on the level, and keep running, without allowing you the option to stop it in any way. There was no way to choose *not* to engage those enemies by running instead of fighting. Player choice has been a huge influence in the way we've made our development decisions.

Hi Lady. Just wanted to say that the autoattack has been an interesting addition to the game and I'm glad to see that additional updates are still being worked on. I've been playing the game since launch and it still draws me in.

I do wonder if perhaps the concerns for autoattacks making the game feel like it is on "auto-pilot" to be a bit misplaced?

I think the problem for me is that it isn't manually attacking individiul targets that makes the game interesting. I played the game perfectly fine without auto-attack as a feature and I did not notice that having to manually click on targets to attack took away from my enjoyment of the game. However at the same time, manually clicking on targets also did not add to my enjoyment of the game or make me feel that the game was more interactive, mainly because clicking to attack did not feel like a meaningful decision, it was just something I had to do.

Perhaps this is because I have been playing the game on the higher difficulty levels but where the real interaction happens is with abilities that you have to use when simple autoattacking will result in a failure. Having to pause and click to time and place a smoke bomb, or moving my medic around my formation so I could reset the most number of cooldowns, these felt like meaningful "manual actions" because often, if I did not perform them at the correct time and place, I would risk a party wipe (on hardcore!).

A lot of the class abilities currently translate to extra DPS. Most CC abilities are also either very short lived or situational and do not feel very useful (the sleep dart tends to break immediately after application).

Perhaps having a full auto-attack feature in place would not take away from the interactivity of the gameplay if on the harder difficulties, additional manual usage of abilities were required in order to succesfully complete a run. I would love to see abilities to additional crowd-control at the expense of ability damage. This would necessitate that I pay attention to my fights and intervene with a well timed crowd-control ability forcing me to interact because pure auto-attack would not be sufficient to guarantee a win.

I would also like to see certain abilities and tools shifted around a bit. Currently, I do not bring medics to heal. There is no reason when the engineer's heal-bot does so so efficiently. At the same time, I always bring a pair of medics because on hard-core, sometimes squishier members of the team (stacking DPS or item fine gear) have a tendency to get one-shot and it makes no sense to carry anything besides a defibrilator on my medics for the instant revive. This also means that healing is not that important when your privateers are either perfectly fine (they don't need healing), and then dead (they can't be healed).

Making everyone tankier, both the privateers and the enemies would make healing more meaningful, and removing the healbot option on the engineer or giving it to the medic would make the medic feel more like a primary healer again.

I've also suggested this before, but I would like to see the resistances on enemy mobs greatly increased and decreased for certain damage types. Currently, we still have a glut of weapons that feel very redundant and do not really offer much as they simply do not offer enough DPS to be considered. They do have interesting damage type combinations however.

If monsters have greatly increased resistances to most damage types (say Fire) but are vulnerable to other types of damage (Corrosion), it would benefit the player to micromanage who their individual privateers target in order to maximize DPS. It would also greatly increase the range of viable weapons as the pure DPS value of the weapon would matter less than the combination of damage + damage type.

This would be especially interesting with elite mobs who would then require specific damage types as well as a large amount of CC to defeat. Currently, I just throw a smoke bomb down and then have everyone focus fire the target to death. Whether or not autoattack is involved makes very little difference as I either watch my Privateers blow everything away, or I click and then watch my Privateers blow everything away.

I am glad to see that autoattack is on a toggle as there are many times when it is beneficial to not draw too much aggro.