advanced edition vek types are kind of bad

[aetherborne]

before anyone says anything, yes, obviously i know that i can just play without the new enemies, which is what im doing right now. i just want to get different opinions on this topic since im of the opinion that the new vek are by far the most underwhelming part of the update. also, at this time i havent memorized most of the new vek names, so im going to go by association.

the moths. i actually remember the name of this one, the design is quite unique but honestly its just a scarab with extra steps. obviously flying and also pushes itself back with firing making it infinitely more annoying than a scarab is since it often pushes itself back into buildings. dont have that much problem with this one but id still rarther not have it.

the grappling hook vek. not a lot of problems with this one, simply an inversion of the beetle. it gets a pass from me.

the vek that pushes itself back after a melee attack (sorry). causes the same collateral damage annoyance same as the moth, but more bearable since it isnt flying. its fine, i guess.

the starfish or whatever the hell. stuff of nightmares. having a common vek attack on 4 axes and diagonally is just so unbelievably bad. imagine a scorpion being perpendicular to 2 building tiles. most of the time you can push it in a direction where it will attack the blank space. imagine the same situation with the starfish. push it back or forth and its still gonna attack one of the buildings. if that thing places itself into a narrow building corrior youre just screwed by default.

the vek that raises an explosive rock. explosions are pretty annoying in the base game but a vek that makes permanent map objects with explosive qualities is the definition of unfun. even if you push it out of the way you still have this explosive rock you can set off at any time, which is problematic if its located near some buildings. even after killing the vek youre not out of the water. one more thing, the alpha version of this vek doesnt even create a stronger rock, it only has its health and damage increased, which makes little sense since the rocks he creates are always 1 health, making their attack function identical to the non-alpha version in 90% of the cases, just with more health.

the mosquito. a boring enemy, essentially a hornet with extra steps, creating a cloud of smoke before telegraphing an attack. this unit is so similar to the hornet it might not even exist. the scorpion, which has a similar ability, creates webbing instead of smoke. unlike smoke, the webbing is actually threatening. the only time i can see the smoke being threatening is in conjunction with the webbing. also i guess going along with the theme of creating annoying permanent map objects, lingering clouds of smoke which may ruin your strategy or potentially allow you to manipulate vek even better, which can even make it weaker than the hornet in the grand scheme of things.

psions. i have some issues with the new psion types. the damage amplifier one is actually quite cool and its a shame i cant cherry pick specific enemies id like to play with. however this update also introduces some absolutely useless psions like the one that blocks fire damage (unless youre playing flame behemoths i guess). also, it breaks the previous gameplay loop of there only being 4 psion types so you had to get through them all (the hardest ones being armored and explosive). with the new psions in circulations your psion choice across the 4 islands may wary from massively easier to only slightly harder in comparison to the way things used to be.

in my opinion all of these new vek types only end up to create a disruptive gameplay flow in comparison with the vek of the base game. i only really dislike the digger and the burrower from the base game, the rest of the vek are really quite beautiful in their simplicity, as they have powerful yet uncomplicated attacks all of which also can be quite easily countered. the new vek simply feel like the devs just brainstormed a couple of more "complex" sub-par vek just to say that they added some new enemies. what do you think? what do you like or dislike about the new vek?

[Sanglaine]

Agree wholeheartedly. I don't grasp what this was meant to add to the game. The dev said he intentionally wanted to add more challenge for experienced players was why some of them are OP. But why? That's what difficulty settings are for. (of which ITB has)

It just doesn't EXPAND the game, only stagnates it further; None of the additions freshen the experience.

I think that they wanted to, for some reason, add more complexity to a game already strained to the breaking point on choking the player for not taking hour-long turns to examine the board.

What looks like a bite sized game on the surface has become a mess of convolution just in time to be released on mobile devices. Which makes so little sense. It takes too long for a lunchbreak game and requires too much focus to be a netflix n' chill game.

This game is having an identity crisis and it's not pretty.

[x_equals_speed]

I like the new enemies. The decisions of which islands to do in which order feels more complex now with a greater variety of possible enemies. Their behaviour isn't so wild as to be completely unintuitive but is meaningfully different from what's already there.

[Gato]

git gud

[mcy]

Originally posted by Sanglaine:

Agree wholeheartedly. I don't grasp what this was meant to add to the game. The dev said he intentionally wanted to add more challenge for experienced players was why some of them are OP. But why? That's what difficulty settings are for. (of which ITB has)

It just doesn't EXPAND the game, only stagnates it further; None of the additions freshen the experience.

I think that they wanted to, for some reason, add more complexity to a game already strained to the breaking point on choking the player for not taking hour-long turns to examine the board.

What looks like a bite sized game on the surface has become a mess of convolution just in time to be released on mobile devices. Which makes so little sense. It takes too long for a lunchbreak game and requires too much focus to be a netflix n' chill game.

This game is having an identity crisis and it's not pretty.

I have no idea what your definition is, but a game becomes stagnant when it offers no challenge. This is why precisely the advanced edition does expand the game. Advanced players that you mention are people who can breeze through the game at its most difficult, so anything that doesn't increase the challenge would mean nothing to them. Now that there is this, some of those people are returning to the game.

Difficulty settings are for people who aren't at that level to play around until they understand the game better, so that they can get into that set. The game doesn't owe you ego boosts (if that's what you are looking for, there are a million gacha games out there, go pick one); if you want to win, learn how to play better.

There is no need to take hour-long turns if you are good at the game; the entire game can be beaten in under 20 minutes. This game has always had a very distinct identity; it's just not what you want it to be.

[aetherborne]

Originally posted by Derre:

git gud

i play steel judoka on unfair for fun get on my level. typing this out also made me realize that all of my experience with the new enemies has been on unfair so far. i suppose the mess the new vek create wouldnt be so bad on normal per se.

[LHGreen]

Yeah, I figured it'd be the starfish. I can see a lot of people not liking that one, but it's not as radically different as it seems. It's only got 2 health, which is important. But other than that, it's kind of like the snake or the centipede, which also attack diagonal spaces. This one just does it backwards, too. And it's melee only, so in a way it's less annoying than the centipede.

The moth is indeed pretty underwhelming, and feels redundant. It seems like it should be a 1hp Vek. And for damn sure it shouldn't be objectively more powerful than the scarab.

As for those rhino/dung beetle looking guys, the rock is quite annoying, since it can't be safely destroyed like the bombs. It forces you to have a non-damaging push, when that may not be possible for your current team. At the very least, the rocks should disappear or disarm when the enemy dies, just to balance it more with the diggers, who have low health but annoyingly surround themselves. Still, one has to get into the mindset of viewing those things more as opportunities than obstacles, right? Anyway, as for the enemy itself, I didn't understand it at first, but when it attacks the rock, that's a separate attack that does a ton of damage. So making sure that a vek is where that rock was, and not your units, is important to consider when dealing with the rock. From the description, I initially thought the vek spends one turn summoning the rock, and attacks it on the next turn, which would also probably feel more balanced than the way it currently works, given the nature of the rock.

The mosquito is more like a flying scorpion than a hornet, since it only ever attacks one space. And it has less health and a debuff that is more long-term than short-term, to balance out the flight. However, the boss moth DOES web, in addition to smoking, which is appropriately brutal. So really, it's like if they had balanced the moths against the scarabs correctly.

(Although, come to think of it, the crabs have also always been objectively better than the scarabs, so maybe it's more like the scarabs were always getting screwed, and it's more accurate to compare the moths to the crabs. They're less poorly balanced, in that view....)

Anyway, for the most part, I feel the new vek are fine, and I don't have a problem with the new psion types adding some variation to that aspect of the game. The burrowers should have been advanced edition content, and the gastropods main game content, and everything would have been fine. You could have turned off the annoying guys who create obstacles or environmental objects, and that could be the overarching theme of the advanced edition enemies. But that's not what they did, so whatever, it's fine. I only have a problem with the moth for being disappointing, yet annoying, and the two guys who create rocks, one of whom I have less of a problem with because I feel it now fits in thematically and mechanically with the new batch of vek, rather than being some weird outlier. And that's all.

But a bestiary would've been nice, I wish they'd added that. Fill it for an achievement, maybe.

Originally posted by Sanglaine:

What looks like a bite sized game on the surface has become a mess of convolution just in time to be released on mobile devices. Which makes so little sense. It takes too long for a lunchbreak game and requires too much focus to be a netflix n' chill game.

This game is having an identity crisis and it's not pretty.

What that means is it's not so much the game itself that's having the identity crisis, it's more like the marketing is at odds with the game. But for the most part, it's only casual audiences of a given media that hate having their expectations subverted. More avid consumers enjoy it.

[FlufflyKittens]

My main complaint is that a lot of the new enemies are very similar to existing enemies, just with a small mod like "move back" or "smoke first". It clutters the enemy pool to the point where I feel like I need to hover over enemy abilities every other mission to remind myself what they do.

[Sanglaine]

Originally posted by mcy:

I have no idea what your definition is, but a game becomes stagnant when it offers no challenge. This is why precisely the advanced edition does expand the game. Advanced players that you mention are people who can breeze through the game at its most difficult, so anything that doesn't increase the challenge would mean nothing to them. Now that there is this, some of those people are returning to the game.

I don't agree at all there. A game can still be played and enjoyed in spite of providing no challenge at all and really has nothing to do with how alive it is. It's not necessarily even a bad term in spite of it being used very often to describe things derogatorily. Plenty of creatures live in a swamp for example.

Stagnation occurs when nothing new is being added to it. A river flows, a pond stagnates. In spite of all the new life, it is stagnant. Stagnation is when you get to actually see how truly good a game is for example. In this case you can(stated not as fact, but a potential) see even adding these new things the game rapidly stagnates. This burst of life won't last and will show the new content only causes a negative impact to it's long term life. No one is going to pick up the game and think "I should play with 'less' content enabled." resulting in a more negative and quicker abandoned experience.

And for people who are experienced, not everyone is someone who plays on the top difficulty every single time and may view them as an annoying nuisance which drives them away from the game faster. (refer to the original OP in which I replied. Their commentary was what sparked my own comment)

But to be specific and simple about it: The new enemies will damage the experience of a new player and accelerate stagnation of the game for experienced players who don't like the new enemies.

Who is going to look forward to a game again after having it soured by a content update?

Originally posted by mcy:

Difficulty settings are for people who aren't at that level to play around until they understand the game better, so that they can get into that set. The game doesn't owe you ego boosts (if that's what you are looking for, there are a million gacha games out there, go pick one); if you want to win, learn how to play better.

Are you agreeing with me or?

Originally posted by Sanglaine:

The dev said he intentionally wanted to add more challenge for experienced players was why some of them are OP. But why? That's what difficulty settings are for. (of which ITB has)

There's different difficulty settings in the game, yet not all difficulty is tied to them. Some of it is tied to a checkbox billed as 'extra content'. Calling it 'advanced content' won't mean anything in the eyes of someone who doesn't want to miss out and might see the game as too hard because of crap like moths.

Also what's the reason for mentioning a gacha game? Is it meant as a personal insult or were you trying to make a point about ease of winning? I mean you do realize that you can literally press tilde and type 'kill' and win at ITB. I'd argue a gatcha game is harder lmfao.

Originally posted by mcy:

There is no need to take hour-long turns if you are good at the game; the entire game can be beaten in under 20 minutes. This game has always had a very distinct identity; it's just not what you want it to be.

The hour-long turn thing was what some would call exaggeration. But I'll apologize for the identity crisis statement. It's not quite so extreme of a change to shift the identity, only muddy it. Originally each vek really only did one thing. it was only the player who was allowed to, sort of, cheat. Upgradable weapons and an additional weapon slot.

But if there are going to be vek that perform the actions of other vek, and more, then it comes close to an identity shift.

Would the game be the same if there were more vek like the moth? How about one who pulls you in, then knocks you back and spawns a spider? Perhaps one who applies fire to the ground? Maybe one that freezes you? That is the reason for calling it as such, not as a shallow insult for the sake of being an insult.

From my perspective the game seems to not know what it wants to be if it's going to both add a moth and the mollusk (the grappler one I don't know it's name off hand and I'm not looking it up) to the same tier. Two vek at opposite spectrums of difficulty. That's a confusing, and confused, decision in my eyes. An identity crisis if you will.

Also telling someone that a game is 'not what you want it to be' instead of like, I dunno, trying to create some kind of argument against it just makes you look a bit salty they just spat on the thing you like. I like the game too so chill out. I'm just upset about the additions to the game because I want to click the check box and experience the new enemies, but I don't like everything IN the checkbox and might just ignore the next update as a result.

[LHGreen]

Originally posted by FlufflyKittens:

I feel like I need to hover over enemy abilities every other mission to remind myself what they do.

Lol, I was already doing that, anyway, because I haven't played in a while, so it makes no difference to me. And when I first started out, I did that a lot, too, until I learned which vek did which attacks. I imagine things will go the same way the second time around.