Changes made in revision 7980:
- Poison now causes temporary damage instead of slowing down movement
- Added Camp Grandinis
- Added Camp Iridum
- Fixed battle screen showing incorrect reward summary under rare circumstances
Watching some gameplay footage on YouTube made me realize that poison causing intoxication (slowing down movement) made the learning curve way too steep. When you're struggling with the controls, it doesn't take long for you to step into a poison puddle. The intoxication effect makes movement harder, so you'll inevitably end up in another poison puddle. It's a negative feedback loop and pretty much the worst first impression you can have in a game. I needed to fix this.
I decided to drastically change the way the game handles poison. I got rid of the intoxication effect completely and replaced it with a new system that causes temporary damage. There's a poison meter that shows how much of your health has been consumed. Additionally, your health bar indicates this amount in grey. Slowly but surely you'll get all of it back—unless you die, of course. When you suffer a staggering poison attack, you may need to carefully avoid any further damage for a while, but that's much easier now.
When you finish a wave, you'll get back the greyed out health instantly. Using a dialysis units (where available) does the same. However, the nanocure skill no longer removes poisoning, since it made the skill way too OP with the new system. I've adjusted its icon and tooltip infos to refelect this change.
Also, to make it easier for players to figure out these mechanics, I've made the health bar show changes (losing or gaining health) in a much more obvious way.
Camp Grandinis is surrounded by light Sequoia forest. The sparse vegetation causes hardly any problems in combat, yet is still dense enough to noticeably slow down the onslaught of spiders. I decided to focus entirely on this property and litter the area with traps.
They're triggered by timers based on prime numbers to ensure a chaotic activation pattern. The pattern is deterministic though and resets each time a new wave starts, so in theory you could learn it by heart. However, that's not how I recommend this camp to be played.
Rather, it's best to just go with the flow, taking advantage of opportunities wherever they emerge, constantly improvising plans and adjusting tactics. It's much easier and more fun that way.
Camp Iridum introduces a new mechanic: linked defense units. There're three frost shocks, all paired up with a jump pad. To trigger the frost shocks, you need to use the adjacent jump pad. Since the frost shocks have a cooldown of 20 seconds, the best tactic is to collect a couple of enemies in the frost shock area, then leave via the jump pad. This way, the blast from the pad hits the ice from the frost shock with devastating effect.
Also, the jump pads are conveniently placed such that, when you enter them from the frost shock, you'll be catapulted in the direction of another frost shock.
