Preface
I'm going to start putting my design thoughts up for players to comment on. There are aspects of the game I feel are necessary to change for it to move forward. Posts like this are to avoid surprising players before a new big impactful patch comes out, and also give them some insight into my thoughts and goals behind these changes.
I believe the item system (in the original, non-remake game) is now one of the weakest parts of the game. This post details a way I intend to go forward in the next major update. Please let me know YOUR thoughts here, on the Idle Armada Subreddit, and on Discord.
Item System Goals (These Aren't Changing):
- Players should have a way to get more powerful without purchasing upgrades (auto collecting mechanic helps a bit with that today)
- Players who prefer an active (instead of idle) playstyle have something they can do actively to accelerate their run
- Item visual effects / triggers make battles more fun to watch
Problems Today:
- Although picking up the very first item of a type often has a decent effect on battle, picking 5-10 more items of that same type barely makes a dent. Even auto-collecting items for hours doesn't make a big difference in combat effectiveness. This alone means item system is not really accomplishing goals 1) or 2).
- Item mark system, while it allows items to scale into infinity, also makes the items at different battle levels feel samey-samey. Items you get at level 60 are more powerful versions of the same items you get at level 10.
- Items diminishing in effectiveness as battle level increases is hard for players to understand, and makes the effect of getting the next item mark feel vague
- Existence of fast forward button (and fear of extremely fast, repetitive prestiges) severely limits the design choices available for items in general, and this bleeds into other aspects of the game balance such as raising the minimum level required to prestige.
- Badges just plain dominate the economy way too much in general.
- Late levels can have so many drops at once that it annoyingly clogs the screen
- Item system is confusing for new players (why did items reset on prestige? What the heck is an item mark level? Why are item drops so weird after I maxed out the common drops?)
Proposed Changes:
- Items remain permanently through all prestiges (try game "Tower of Hero" on Android/IOS for a vague example of what I'm picturing)
- Items are ONLY dropped when defeating each boss level for the first time in a run (to collect more items from those same levels again, you must prestige and beat those bosses again)
- Items dropped in this way can never be missed even if you are idle at the time they drop. They will simply show in the Item Tab as a treasure to be opened.
- Each item pickup, while way less frequent, should feel more meaningful to pickup than today
- Items have no caps, and every item is designed to scale infinitely
- Eliminate the item mark system. Instead of seeing every variety of item before level 10, and then that same variety of items repeating at a higher mark the next 10 levels -- instead the low levels only drop the basic items, and you must beat higher level bosses to get a chance at the better items.
- Rethink of all item effects in general, to reflect their new low level "easy to get" status, or high level "gotta grind high to get" status. Fun visual effects like Dual / Triple / Big Shot will be preserved. Most other effects to be rethought from the ground up.
- Badges will be made extremely rare, and also toned down in effectiveness so they no longer dominate the economic game.
- Instead of a "battle level resistance" mechanic that some special effects use to scale today (such as big shot and dual shot), such mechanics will entirely be based on how many of that item you have, and a formula involving the ratio between the attacking and defending ship's mark levels. So just like today, you'll see these things fire more often at lower battle levels, and less often at higher battle levels you get. But unlike today, your highest-mark ships will have a far better chance than your weak ships of triggering these effects, and any enemy scaling reduction abilities you have will help these mechanics to trigger more often.
- Regen items will be REMOVED to make way for in-battle healing mechanics, such as a repair ship.
- Needless to say, all items anyone has in a run today will be LOST because the new item system is so different
- New EXP system, so that ships get meaningfully more powerful over time from destroying enemy ships over and over again. Ships will gain EXP based on how much damage they did in battle. So ships you spend the most land/metal/crystal on will gain the most EXP. EXP will, for now, lead to a straight multiplier to a ship's mark level. This basically increases all stats, and increases the chance of special effects triggering.
Downstream changes that I feel will be required with such a change:
- What would auto-collect do in such a world? After these changes, there will be new temporary bonuses that will visibly drop during a battle, such as "+10% damage for the rest of the battle", or "+25% exp for this battle".
- Perhaps in a future update there might be new, rare, consumable items it can collect as well (collect now, choose which battle to use it in).
- What would "farm mode" do in such a world? Remember today, farm mode picks the level which gives optimal item drops for you right now. After these changes, farm mode should optimize EXP gained instead.
- Fast forward button, which will be heavily exploitable in such a new item system, will be removed entirely.
- All prestige abilities that offer "start with more of item..." today, will need to be replaced with something new. Some will be +% to exp, others may be something new. I think the "start with more of item..." prestige abilities are sort of boring, anyway.
- OP players can probably reach level 11 very quickly, even without fast forward. Because of this I'm not planning to remove any of the mechanics that discourage fast prestiges, such as the "minimum level to prestige" changes with mark-up with this item system remake, nor am I planning to allow leftover job points to carry over on prestige.