10:45 Mana Siphons are more economical than Mana Banks. Mana Banks are great AFTER you run out of (blue boxes). Thanks for introducing me to this game.
_I've been super enjoying this game. The two things I would like to see next is the UI being improved, because it's fairly trash, and like Wander mentioned, the balance needs a bit more tweaking._
Sorcery is an interesting situation. At the very beginning of the game, with little exp invested, that +3 is pretty important. And that's the only time it's important. Even with jagged terrain and bad luck, it's not hard to get more than +3 just from Mana Siphons. The basic +N fits really well with all the +1 to armour/etc upgrades thematically but isn't nearly as potent mechanically. So here are three different approaches to making Sorcery roughly as valuable as any other pick. Just make it scale better: Instead of +3/s, make it +1/s *and* +1% of your max Mana per second. Make it an investment: Sorcery I is +2, Sorcery II is +4, Sorcery III is +10% of your current mana regen. (Sorcery IV is +50%?) Make it solve a problem: Upgraded towers cost way more mana, making a flat +3 even less relevant. So make Sorcery reduce the mana cost of _every tower_ by an amount, say -2 mana/shot.
Something that I learned is that it's best to specialize your towers, have sprayers that trip shields/armour suplement them with balistae that will only target enemies that have protection over their health etc.
Exactly! It's also important to know that health types always ablate in the order Shield-Armor-Health, so your health-specced towers should generally be nearer to the tower, with shield-spec farther, and armor-spec and general purpose in between. Status effects should be positioned to hit waves close to their junctions to maximize spread if possible. Also, the base damage buff and multiplier buff start trading past about level 15 depending on weaknesses and spec. Remember that off-type damage gets a flat 50% debuff, and the fortified observers halve that again, which is what kills a lot of runs at 40 now.
@@BrianatorFTW Nope, it applies to both status effects and the damage multiplier of the type inflicted by the tower. So if you have 4 health-spec'd ballistae firing at a shield, it's going to be exponentially less efficient than having one or two shield-spec'd ballistae of the same level. same relationship with the status effects, but with those it's often either a full spec or using one or two to fill gaps in a challenge run.
@@Xaivius off-type is like poison on shield, burn on armor, they work on other health types but only half as well if I remember correctly, but the towers don't have "typed" damage, just type-specific multipliers, so they do "full" damage to all health types but have a different damage number for each type (calculated as base*typemultiplier, so a specialized tower just has a higher multiplier for that specific health type) but, as far as I know, their are no other factors to a towers damage lookouts add to any hit any other tower does (like it hiting at the same time any other tower hits) status stacks apply as a percentage of and on top of a tower's damage, completely separately from that status's typing but the damage each status does and thus the effectiveness of status stacks depends on typing (and the dps cap of that status type, something like 15-25 stacks per second increased by upgrades) while also suppressing the different health type's regen when applicable frost/slow is the most anomalous of them as I don't know the relationship between "slow stacks" (the blue bar near the health bar), the damage of the towers that apply them, (yes the frost bolts upgrade says 5% but I'm getting to that) and how much is needed to reach the cap and how fast it decays, I'm fairly sure at max the slow is 60% upgrades aside but how does that convert to "frost stacks"
@@BrianatorFTW Ah, I double checked in-game and you appear to be correct, the type-penalty does appear to only affect the DoTs. Thanks for the clarification!
I tried doing a ballistae run, and got to 40 (made a mistake of running Mana Bolts III, which ate too much of my mana & was building mana banks until I lost). Very OP, since they're very cheap (+10 per tower).
Also, doing a "Don't Use Mana" run. Basically, I can't use mana, even for generating money via haunted houses. So, ballistas, mortars, shredders, encampments, and lookouts only. No Mana Bolts, too. I'm getting there, still can't beat 40 though.
I feel like we can compare games to say...restaurants. AAA games are nice places, most of them all have the same things on the menu, but you know you're going to have a nice and expensive meal almost every time. They lack excitement but are consistent. Where the smaller games, you never know what you're in for. Like finding that pizza place on the other side of town that has the best pizza you've ever eaten and you had no idea it was even there. Sometimes it's terrible, but that makes finding the ones that are awesome more exciting.
I was listening to your comment about game dev between triple A and Indie. as sombody that work in game dev, I think it's worth talking about a few things. They are a few point I would like to had to the discution. I think compared to years past, game engine have become a lot more accessible and maleable than before. That gives rise to more opportunity for more game and the more it goes, the more chances someone idea will be really great and really well executed. Second point is as a indie develloper you are often pushed to take more risk than as a big devellope. For big name develloper taking risk is not as viable as before, most game company have so many peoples on they pay roll that they can't afford to have a bad game, something that sells repeatedly garanty cash flow and investor happyness. Third and I think one of the most important, I feel like more and more devs just get fed up with the bigger companies work flow and just find some like minded friends, get their shit together create their own company and go back to a time where the only thing that matered was making good game, not how many micro transaction can i fit in this most essential systemof the game. Extra intresting point is dev is exidingly tiresome as a job, it take a lot of will and energy out of you, very few are the people with more than 10 years of game dev because most of them burn out before that. Also, bought that game because of your videos, I managed one victory in single mode, but I have no idea how I could replicate the feat xD it was a lot of poison and flame thrower is all I remember xD So tahnks for the recomendation, but god damn is this thing addictive.
do things like expunge (extra [status effect] damage) add extra stacks of the status (which only does more damage if you can't keep the stack above that status' DPS until death) or damage with that status' weakness (poison is only full damage to shield, burn to armor, bleed to HP, each doing half to the others using up the same number of stacks)
I dunno if you talk to a dev: but maybe a good QoL component would be you can turn off a small number of your things you dont want. buy a card upgrade and you get to turn "off" 4 cards or something. in the end you can lose 1 entire weapon thats fully maxed or remove a handful of sub paths you odnt wana use.
Is it just me or do the occult shrines only spawn after unlocking the university? I haven't seen any spawn until after you got universities in the last like 10 runs.
They only spawn on waves 25-35 iirc or 25-45, which is usually when I pick up the university. Correlation, not causation, though I can see why it might look to be the other way around.
Did you manage to beat wave 40 yet? Can't go further, game just throws fast moving mobs that seem to ignore damage and slow at wave 40, no matter how many defenses you have they just run through.
Since you love to talk about indie games, I think I, a non-subscriber, will weigh in. AAA games are now a massive business, but also a massive liability. Risk versus return calculations will usually kill innovation because you need to maximize safety against creativity. When you pay $60 or more for a video game, you're not paying for additional content, greater levels of polish, or even a better gameplay experience; you're paying for a fancier color palette and higher pixel count. In today's world, AAA gaming's safest bets to make are the remake market, which is still pushing quite powerfully. Do I need to remind everyone what FF7's 10-15% Remake did when it released? Indie games are pretty much the opposite in every way for the most part; although they still take risks, theirs aren't quite as massive when you're talking about budget and return on investment.
10:45 Mana Siphons are more economical than Mana Banks.
Mana Banks are great AFTER you run out of (blue boxes).
Thanks for introducing me to this game.
_I've been super enjoying this game. The two things I would like to see next is the UI being improved, because it's fairly trash, and like Wander mentioned, the balance needs a bit more tweaking._
Sorcery is an interesting situation. At the very beginning of the game, with little exp invested, that +3 is pretty important. And that's the only time it's important.
Even with jagged terrain and bad luck, it's not hard to get more than +3 just from Mana Siphons. The basic +N fits really well with all the +1 to armour/etc upgrades thematically but isn't nearly as potent mechanically.
So here are three different approaches to making Sorcery roughly as valuable as any other pick.
Just make it scale better: Instead of +3/s, make it +1/s *and* +1% of your max Mana per second.
Make it an investment: Sorcery I is +2, Sorcery II is +4, Sorcery III is +10% of your current mana regen. (Sorcery IV is +50%?)
Make it solve a problem: Upgraded towers cost way more mana, making a flat +3 even less relevant. So make Sorcery reduce the mana cost of _every tower_ by an amount, say -2 mana/shot.
With the university's flat damage buff being 'per attack', you only have to maximize your fire-rate/money ratio to make a university run
I still believe that having universities focused on one research is much more efficient.
I'm really loving the music for this game. It is just awesome battle music.
Watching this makes me want a click and drag feature that selects the lowest level tower inside your selected area.
Something that I learned is that it's best to specialize your towers, have sprayers that trip shields/armour suplement them with balistae that will only target enemies that have protection over their health etc.
Exactly! It's also important to know that health types always ablate in the order Shield-Armor-Health, so your health-specced towers should generally be nearer to the tower, with shield-spec farther, and armor-spec and general purpose in between. Status effects should be positioned to hit waves close to their junctions to maximize spread if possible. Also, the base damage buff and multiplier buff start trading past about level 15 depending on weaknesses and spec. Remember that off-type damage gets a flat 50% debuff, and the fortified observers halve that again, which is what kills a lot of runs at 40 now.
@@Xaivius off-type only matters to the status effects' DPS right?
@@BrianatorFTW Nope, it applies to both status effects and the damage multiplier of the type inflicted by the tower. So if you have 4 health-spec'd ballistae firing at a shield, it's going to be exponentially less efficient than having one or two shield-spec'd ballistae of the same level. same relationship with the status effects, but with those it's often either a full spec or using one or two to fill gaps in a challenge run.
@@Xaivius off-type is like poison on shield, burn on armor, they work on other health types but only half as well if I remember correctly, but the towers don't have "typed" damage, just type-specific multipliers, so they do "full" damage to all health types but have a different damage number for each type (calculated as base*typemultiplier, so a specialized tower just has a higher multiplier for that specific health type) but, as far as I know, their are no other factors to a towers damage
lookouts add to any hit any other tower does (like it hiting at the same time any other tower hits)
status stacks apply as a percentage of and on top of a tower's damage, completely separately from that status's typing but the damage each status does and thus the effectiveness of status stacks depends on typing (and the dps cap of that status type, something like 15-25 stacks per second increased by upgrades) while also suppressing the different health type's regen when applicable
frost/slow is the most anomalous of them as I don't know the relationship between "slow stacks" (the blue bar near the health bar), the damage of the towers that apply them, (yes the frost bolts upgrade says 5% but I'm getting to that) and how much is needed to reach the cap and how fast it decays, I'm fairly sure at max the slow is 60% upgrades aside but how does that convert to "frost stacks"
@@BrianatorFTW Ah, I double checked in-game and you appear to be correct, the type-penalty does appear to only affect the DoTs. Thanks for the clarification!
I tried doing a ballistae run, and got to 40 (made a mistake of running Mana Bolts III, which ate too much of my mana & was building mana banks until I lost).
Very OP, since they're very cheap (+10 per tower).
Also, doing a "Don't Use Mana" run. Basically, I can't use mana, even for generating money via haunted houses. So, ballistas, mortars, shredders, encampments, and lookouts only. No Mana Bolts, too.
I'm getting there, still can't beat 40 though.
I did the same yesterday XD it was going very well untill that one upgrade
Finally a title without the word "Ballistas"
enjoyed the chill vibes hope to see more!
If sorcery was based off of the round instead of a small base number it would be far better
I feel like we can compare games to say...restaurants. AAA games are nice places, most of them all have the same things on the menu, but you know you're going to have a nice and expensive meal almost every time. They lack excitement but are consistent. Where the smaller games, you never know what you're in for. Like finding that pizza place on the other side of town that has the best pizza you've ever eaten and you had no idea it was even there. Sometimes it's terrible, but that makes finding the ones that are awesome more exciting.
I was listening to your comment about game dev between triple A and Indie. as sombody that work in game dev, I think it's worth talking about a few things.
They are a few point I would like to had to the discution.
I think compared to years past, game engine have become a lot more accessible and maleable than before. That gives rise to more opportunity for more game and the more it goes, the more chances someone idea will be really great and really well executed.
Second point is as a indie develloper you are often pushed to take more risk than as a big devellope. For big name develloper taking risk is not as viable as before, most game company have so many peoples on they pay roll that they can't afford to have a bad game, something that sells repeatedly garanty cash flow and investor happyness.
Third and I think one of the most important, I feel like more and more devs just get fed up with the bigger companies work flow and just find some like minded friends, get their shit together create their own company and go back to a time where the only thing that matered was making good game, not how many micro transaction can i fit in this most essential systemof the game. Extra intresting point is dev is exidingly tiresome as a job, it take a lot of will and energy out of you, very few are the people with more than 10 years of game dev because most of them burn out before that.
Also, bought that game because of your videos, I managed one victory in single mode, but I have no idea how I could replicate the feat xD it was a lot of poison and flame thrower is all I remember xD So tahnks for the recomendation, but god damn is this thing addictive.
do things like expunge (extra [status effect] damage) add extra stacks of the status (which only does more damage if you can't keep the stack above that status' DPS until death) or damage with that status' weakness (poison is only full damage to shield, burn to armor, bleed to HP, each doing half to the others using up the same number of stacks)
This game stopped me from drinking. Eye for an eye
I dunno if you talk to a dev: but maybe a good QoL component would be you can turn off a small number of your things you dont want. buy a card upgrade and you get to turn "off" 4 cards or something. in the end you can lose 1 entire weapon thats fully maxed or remove a handful of sub paths you odnt wana use.
how do you get so many upgrades? I only get upgrades like... idk very few times lol. you seem to get them every round.
Is it just me or do the occult shrines only spawn after unlocking the university? I haven't seen any spawn until after you got universities in the last like 10 runs.
They only spawn on waves 25-35 iirc or 25-45, which is usually when I pick up the university. Correlation, not causation, though I can see why it might look to be the other way around.
Did you manage to beat wave 40 yet? Can't go further, game just throws fast moving mobs that seem to ignore damage and slow at wave 40, no matter how many defenses you have they just run through.
Very good
You know you can beat the game with only a single Tesla, I did it and got my Tesla to like lvl 160 or something I also had lookouts and frost towers
Peg the Snorlax ahahaha xD
Wow I am out of touch. My immediate response to you saying everyone is going to get Elden Ring was "what's an Elden Ring?"
Is your internet back wander?
Yup!
Since you love to talk about indie games, I think I, a non-subscriber, will weigh in. AAA games are now a massive business, but also a massive liability. Risk versus return calculations will usually kill innovation because you need to maximize safety against creativity. When you pay $60 or more for a video game, you're not paying for additional content, greater levels of polish, or even a better gameplay experience; you're paying for a fancier color palette and higher pixel count. In today's world, AAA gaming's safest bets to make are the remake market, which is still pushing quite powerfully. Do I need to remind everyone what FF7's 10-15% Remake did when it released?
Indie games are pretty much the opposite in every way for the most part; although they still take risks, theirs aren't quite as massive when you're talking about budget and return on investment.
Hahaha peg The snorlax xD
They are strong
haha that typo
Which typo?
Weird that you didn't go for the achievment of completing a game only with ballistas
just build a tesla tower on a +3 near the only entrance to a line and upgrade all 3 of its dmgs and u win the game
you are welcome i ruined the game