Good time of the day, fellow Keepers!
This week, we proudly present you with a whole set of important updates!
New Tower Type: The Golem
First and foremost, we're going full speed ahead implementing new towers and increasing both your tactical flexibility and the overall game's replayability value alike!
Tower of the week today is the mighty Golem, a hulking brute towering over puny little soldiers and other insignificant towers with its sheer scale! While very similar to Soldier from the Barracks in function, the Golem flounders around with the massive 3 health points, allowing it to survive a couple of hits with relative ease.
Thus, when built up close and personal, the Golem will surely tear through the ranks of your opponent, sowing chaos and destruction as it goes and making them panic while trying to organise any semblance of effective defence. This, however, raises the importance of support towers such as the Builder (allowing your Golems to be put to use immediately when built nearby) and the Sapper (guaranteed one-hit destruction of a Golem, provided it won't be destroyed before its construction is done).
We are quite sure you will enjoy using this new tower and are eagerly looking for your feedback, either here in Steam or in our Discord.
AI Navigation improvements
We have received a fair bit of constructive reviews regarding the ways a humble Soldier tower is navigating around the map:
- Soldier being unable to spot the enemy from afar and turn towards them
- Soldier getting stuck in certain tower patterns
- Soldier attacking useless walls instead of hitting the opponent's Keep
- Soldier's behaviour generally being rather hard to predict
Well, we have finally spent a fair bit of time addressing those issues, seeing as the newly born Golem would be bearing all the same disadvantages as its little brother. From today onwards, neither of those guys shall behave like lunatic anymore!
Let's see how the new navigation AI works:
- Check whether the cell that Soldier (or Golem) is looking at is occupied by the enemy - attack if yes
- Check whether any of the adjacent cells are occupied by the enemy - rotate towards them if yes
- Check whether there is an enemy in any of the cardinal directions from the Soldier (or Golem), and then either go forward if it's straight ahead or turn towards it first
- Go forward while possible, turn around whenever not possible to do so otherwise.
Besides, whenever having several potential targets at once, the AI will scroll through its priority list and try to attack the one with the highest priority (which would be the Keep, for example). This would hopefully help with potential disappointing situations of being distracted by the low-value towers.
While this kind of AI is far from being advanced, we are certain it will provide for a more pleasant experience using either Barracks or Golem and make them more attractive for you.
Balance fixes
Due to our recent assessment of which tower types are being used the least, it has become rather evident that quite a few of our towers require some improvements to see the sunshine:
- Defender Health reduced from 2 to 1
- Defender grows every 5 turns now instead of 4
- Shield grows every 3 turns now instead of 4
- Repair Health increased to 2
- Repair grows every 4 turns now instead of 5
- Builder grows every 4 turns now instead of 5
This was mostly due to the fact that Defender became significantly more useful than the humble Shield, while poor Repair was basically never used. With those changes, we are positive that you might consider using them a fair bit more often.
All in all, as you could see, it was a pretty eventful week, and we will be taking a few days off on the next one as we prepare for Ludum Dare #50. Meanwhile, stay calm and Keep the Keep!
Cheers!
Nebulate.me