Internal Playtest – Grenadier Buff, New Space Station, and more – 4/3

http://www.twitch.tv/metabolical/b/516739190

http://www.twitch.tv/metabolical/b/516741018

• Meta didn’t talk at all in the first video, which was strange. Nor was there any sound in the first video. Not sure if intentional or a twitch broadcasting bug. So it would seem that he very well may have been talking to us in the first video, but none of us heard anything.
• The colors look different… They look pretty cool. maybe they’ve finally fixed issues with telling the difference between certain colors?
• There were a handful of lag spikes, which is very unfortunate. I wonder if there’s some form of bug or something because they were happening at times where not much was going on. Hopefully they were just Twitch lag spikes.
• Doxes have a really hard time hitting moving units with the changes to the grenadier role. They seem to be nearly completely useless at hitting moving units. (edit, apparently this is a bug that has been fixed. looking forward to seeing the fix. source)
• It’s possible to Uber cannon your own buildings. Not new, just a little amusing.
• Meta didn’t build many units, but [Uber]Justice built quite a lot of basic units, primarily ants, doxes, and Infernos. They worked fairly well. Not sure if that’s because of balance changes or because of Meta’s lack of units. All around encouraging, but we need more data. I’d love to see what happens if two players are very aggressive with basic units.
• There was a bug where a Gil-e got stuck on the ramp of a bot factory. Meta was able to manually get the bot off the factory. It was likely tied into the unit shooting while it was on the ramp.
• Balance changes to the Dox. Not sure what they are though. (edit: Meta gave us info on the changes.)
• Due to the high econ consumption of advanced, it seems to be very difficult to step up to advanced without stalling, or suddenly going way positive. It’ll be interesting to see how it ends up playing out. But one way or another, it’ll likely be a very delicate and difficult transition. Which that could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it.
• Orbital fabbers can now only build Teleporters and Orbital Factories. Which is a new kind of orbital factory that is built in orbit. Right now the new orbital factory, or space station as it should more aptly be called, uses the advanced air factory as the model. More drastic changes are in the pipes! Time shall tell how they play out. It was pretty funny to see Advanced Air Factories floating in space.
• It seems that Anchors can only shoot at one thing at a time, so they can’t engage orbital targets and ground based targets at the same time. That’s a pretty nifty balance.
• Anchors currently outrange Umbrellas, but that will be changed.
• The experiment with space stations is to make it easier and less confusing for building orbital units. This’ll allow us to use continuous build, fabbers assisting the factories, and the like. Interesting ideas. The counter concern is if you lose the orbital layer, it’d be near impossible to get it back – in theory. We’ll see how it ends up.

I think you meant - 4/3

Having a space station will definitely make building orbital easier.

Eh, will take a lot of balancing and things to add to get an orbital factory to be good.

All the changes are confusing when in perspective to one another, hard to keep up the total score of what does what lol.

Overall though, I think it was okay when launcher built orbital units and orbital fabber built orbital structure like satellites. Like, the fabber and fighter were good examples of launchable, and the radars and anchors were good example of buildable. But this might add more diversity.

I just personally think i like the orbital you get early and the seperation of launched and built. This new concept of getting into orbit and then having to worry about establishing factories in space will be something that will need to win me over.

Thinking about it, one way it can, is if they added orbital units, then added a factory for each that just builds that 1 or 2 units, then you need to build 2-3 factories for each of 4-6 units. The pro to this, is you can build bulk units a la factory, much as we are used to terrestial army generation. Which is good if added to orbital layer. As long as some things are launchable still, and some things are built by fabber in orbit, just like the old, and the factories doing something a little different.

Then again, while we talk about that, I feel the exact same about naval, the slowly floating siege structures is fine, but another factory could really be nice to produce small fast craft with short range yet at least speed so you can actually claim naval instead of losing it to air or land or anything else really.

Thanks. Typo.

The more I think about the space station...

As long as we can build (well balanced) Avengers, then it sounds pretty great.

The Orbital Factory on the ground is like the basic bot factory, the orbital fabbers like advanced bot fabbers, and the space station would be like the advanced bot factory.

It does sound like it'll simplify orbital management a lot. I really really like the idea of infinite build for the orbital layer.

I'd love to get my hands on these mechanics.

OH god yes! orbital factories!

Wow, another one already? Sweet.

Hmm...
It seems like orbital's getting a "proper" tier 2.
I'm not against that idea, but, I'm not sure if it's the right way to go around it.
It's interesting nonetheless and I'm definitely interested enough to want to play around with it.
We'll see how it plays out, hopefully soon because I am just itching for a new patch.

Also a new patch means I'll have more reason to play PA and less reason to curse Ubisoft for making Watch_Dogs take forever to release.

Uber, you have a few unused models, notably a T1 artillery bot model. It will be very little work to add a role without compromising current unit roles by putting that back into the game as a grenadier. Why then are you altering a unit and annihilating its current role to change it over to the very role that the unused artillery bot model was meant to be for?

"Doxes have a really hard time hitting moving units with the changes to the grenadier role. "

I believe there's a bug with some of the weapon aim code. Investigation on that already underway.


"All the changes are confusing when in perspective to one another, hard to keep up the total score of what does what lol."

Welcome to video game development my friend. I think it's incredibly awesome that we're doing these livestreams. We are literally the only developer in the world showing off this side of development. There's gonna be a bit of a learning curve on not just our end of showing stuff but on you guys in how you react to it. I'm super excited and I hope you guys are as well.

I still think that the orbital fabber should be able to build certain things (radar, solar array, anchor) but I guess that's just because I see those as structures rather than units...

Dox: Damage: 20 -> 40, Range: 90 -> 95
And on 4/2 we did:
- Air Scout: Speed: 110 -> 90
- Bomber: Damage: 100 -> 150, Full Damage Radius: 3.5 -> 1, Splash Radius: 7 -> 10
- Adv Bomber: Speed: 75 -> 60, Splash Radius: 12 -> 10, Full Damage Radius: 6 -> 1
- Air Fab: Speed: 40 -> 35
- Adv Air Fab: Speed: 40 -> 35
- Advanced Fighter: Speed: 90 -> 75, Damage Radius Removed
- Gunship: Speed: 75 -> 60
- Anti-Nuke: Missile Metal Cost: 51840 -> 10080, Metal Drain: 108 -> 42, Energy Drain: 3000 -> 2250
- Defense Satellite: Health: 1000 -> 500, Damage: 75 -> 25
- Ion Cannon: Health: 3500 -> 1500, Damage: 350 -> 100, Rate of Fire: 2.0, Energy Capacity: 3000 -> 1000, Energy Drain: 1000 -> 4000, Per Shot Energy: 1000 -> 250
- Orbital Fighter: Turn Speed: 45 -> 90, Damage: 50 -> 25
- Orbital Laser: Health: 1000 -> 1500
- Radar Satellite: Health: 400 -> 1000
- Radar Satellite: Health 4000 -> 5000

We also are testing Uber cannon being on a 4 sec cooldown using our ammo system, but we don't really want to add that until we get the ammo loading animation working correctly. It's a crappy experience to try and shoot it and have no indication why it didn't go.

Oh, and my sound was broken on the stream at the start. I was talking but didn't hear anything from the game. Eventually I restarted the game and the stream and all was well.

I suspect it was because I had unplugged my [USB] headset to move a cable and plugging it back in didn't recover well.

Wow, i just finished watching yesterday's and you give us already an other one. When am I supposed to sleep.

By the way, i didn't watch this one yet but the laser rain from the anchors is totally epic. Continuous laser beams would be the perfect visual effect for the SXX but it's more adapted for DoT damage, which the SXX doesn't have.

For me it makes sense because they can test the grenadier change without having to spend some time adding a unit that may not get into public builds.

There's going to be an ammo loading animation for the Uber cannon?
Kewl.

I'm liking a lot of those changes.

Particularly to the air units and uber cannon.

Was this bug also occuring on Pelters or is its innacuracy intentional? (It could be)

I like Pelters being inaccurate.

Remember the Pelter build? Where two pelters could kill an entire army?

They already have most of the files. All they need to do is make a unit.json for it, add it to the unit list, and add it to the bot factory's build list. Not a whole lot of work there AFAIK. The hard stuff is already done.