Reply To: The Sentinel 4 Suggestion Symposium – Towers

[pendell]

You’re welcome! 🙂

 

Okay, just finished campaign 2.  The farming strategy here made all the difference. Where it took me 8 tries to finish the pit, I got through the Last Stand first try. I viewed the early bosses as opportunities , using slow turret to hamper them, then allow the resource drones to harvest while I use repair beam to keep the barrier up. The energy drones could recharge my repair faster than the boss could knock it down, so saved up 8000 credits this way.  Then it’s just a matter of a rich man’s war.

 

So … additional feedback.

 

1) The sniper turret is overpowered for what it does. It’s good against all comers land and air. The drawbacks — expense and long reload time — are overcome at the end of the later scenarios with a metric ton of cash, allowing you to cover the board with them.

 

2) The sad thing is that the board NEEDS to be covered with them.   In wave 149 of Last Stand, I was doing my level headed best to cover every available space on the board with either a sniper tower or a booster and it still was just barely enough!

 

That’s a problem, I think. Game balance breaks in the higher levels. Only large quantities of sniper towers will bring down the boss enemies , and zerg enemies will be simply mowed down by 20 or 30 sniper towers. All the other wonderful towers, with the exception of the beam, simply fall by the wayside as they simply don’t have the firepower to bring down the last enemies.

 

I would suggest that steps  be taken to ensure that all towers remain viable throughout the game.     “Farm a bunch of money and then cover the planet with snipers, boosters, and beams” should be *a* viable strategy, not *the* viable strategy.

 

One possibility would be to extend the upgrade cap — instead of just 3 upgrades, you can have additional upgrades.  Each one brings an exponential increase in effectiveness, with an exponential increase in cost.     So this would give the user the question of whether he wanted to upgrade his level 3 line laser or flamethrower to a level 4 UBER WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION AND DEATH (for the low, low price of $5000)  or spend that money on 2 or 3 level 3 sniper towers instead.

 

Do you see what I’m getting at? At present most of the towers top out at a certain point and become obsolete. Extending the upgrade path would allow players to mix and match tools to fit their playing style, rather than forcing them to steadily discard turrets in favor of the one  or two models that actually have a prayer of bringing down a late-game warrior.

 

Also … I’ve never played endless mode (I prefer scenarios I can win) , but it might also make endless more interesting. Am I correct in guessing that in every wave, the enemies continue to strengthen in health and numbers, but there is a finite limit to the number of turrets you can place on the board and a hard cap on how much damage each turret can put out, even with a booster.  Which means there is a MAXSTRENGTH the user can have,  which  the enemy will eventually exceed and the player will slowly lose. While possessing tons of money the player can do nothing with, because there’s nothing more to buy, and nowhere to put it if they did.  Extending the upgrade path would keep the game interesting by allowing the user to continue to make choices even when the board is totally full.

 

3) Speaking of endless — I don’t like losing. How about an option which would allow you declare “victory” at a wave and take however much XP you’ve earned up to that point?   Say, set a personal goal to make it to wave 50, then stop the scenario, collect XP, restart at level 1. Do it again to level 60. Collect, restart. And so on. As it is, I think the user only has the option to play until defeat , which can take a very long time indeed.

 

4) Wasn’t there supposed to be a fast regen orbital ability? I never got it.  At any rate, the commander heals quite slowly.  How about a “vampire” commander ability, allowing the commander to generate a field which will replenish his/her health at the expense of the nearby enemies?

 

5) A bit of a silly thing … In the 1978 short story “Mr. Jester”, by Fred Saberhagen, now made available in the public domain by the publisher here , an alien robot drops a custard pie on the planet, probably the most unusual orbital bombardment in the history of fiction.

 

Food for thought.  If you guys are ever in the mood for an easter egg, I would like a no-cost joke orbital weapon I can drop on the bad guys as a last FU just before I lose.  A flock of chickens.  A birthday cake.    A kitchen sink (you’ve thrown everything else …) . Something to relieve the tension.

 

Respectfully,

 

Brian P.