Do you remember what we said in our last minor updates some weeks ago, that we still have quite some possibilities for further development in the pipeline? Well, party people, here we are now with a few feature updates, in order of increasing dramatic intensity:
Feature updates
- Vertical Rocket has been renamed and is now called Vertical Strike or simply V-Strike. That’s all there is to say about this.
- The Homing Missile no longer drags your shell towards the target like a gravity well, it now actually steers it. The guidance turns the missile instead of accelerating it, so it corrects your aim without whipping the shell around the target at the last moment. The correction is strongest early in the flight, while there is still time to act, and fades out as the missile closes in. That makes the missile do what it always promised: it takes a shot that is slightly off and puts it on target, saving you the turn you would otherwise spend zeroing in. A shot that is way off still misses, but it now misses for reasons you can see. Terrain still blocks the guidance a bit, so you can keep lobbing missiles out of a valley and over a ridge without them diving into the slope, they pick the target back up once they crest it. The price is unchanged. It now buys something you can plan around.
- Previously, the Goo Shot caused an affected tank's barrel to become "sticky", meaning it couldn't be moved for the very next turn. That has now changed: it’s no longer just one turn, but ... Hold your breath! ... two turns. Ba-dum tss! Seriously: The idea behind this weapon is awesome, but tactically it didn't offer much value, despite its relatively low price, so it rarely was used at all so far. One turn just isn't enough to create quite a meaningful tactical impact that would make it preferable to, say, a simple "ping" from the free Incinerator or whatever. Nope. In addition, you can almost always find a way to bridge a single turn, whether by using a weapon that doesn't require pivoting the barrel (like an Airstrike), using weapon add-ons for assisted targeting (Homing Missile, V-Strike), or simply by offering a draw. Plus, it’s not uncommon to simply repeat your last shot effectively. There you go! It’s a different story when you have to bridge two turns, though: You can't offer a second draw. Airstrikes, Homing Missiles, and V-Strikes aren't exactly cheap; using two of them just to bypass a "sticky" cannon is costly and really kinda hurts your purse. And while repeating the last shot might work once, the odds of pulling off a third nearly identical shot are significantly lower. And so on. Sure, you could combine these approaches to bridge two turns, maybe, but the goal is not to leave no way out at all. It's simply to make the Goo Shot a bit more viable and attractive. I hope that makes sense. Whether two turns are truly "enough" remains to be seen, and also, what the general balancing looks like, because, on the other hand, we hope the weapon hasn't been over-boosted as a result now. Thus, the price has been raised from 100 to 300 because the weapon is no longer just a gimmick for trolling, but now has genuine tactical value. And to further emphasize that tactical aspect, the damage per goo clod has been reduced from a range of 1–2 to a fixed 1. Have fun "gooing"!
- Now! Napalm Bomb and Atomic Nuke are finally getting a damage-over-time effect! Why did it take so long? Seriously, a Napalm Bomb without fire? Who came up with that? Some game designer who isn't actually a game designer, presumably. But during one of our recent sessions, a friend who wasn't yet very familiar with the game wondered why the Napalm Bomb didn't deal damage over time (DoT). And right he was! In fact, this was something we had always intended to address. Now we have. The Napalm Bomb is also one of those weapons that hadn't seen much use so far. Perhaps that will change now that a tactical effect has been added. We’ll have to see how the balancing plays out. Based on our research, we tried to structure the split between direct damage and damage over time so that it doesn't significantly impact the balancing regarding expected average damage, allowing players to focus more on the tactical effect instead. That’s also why we haven't changed the price for the time being. It all sounds simple enough at first, but there is so much more to say about it: It highlights other weapons and items that tend to be (tactical) outliers as well, such as the Dirt Ball/Blast for (temporarily) "extinguishing" a fire now (despite the potential side effects of being "buried"), or a Teleporter (ideally combined with a Parachute) for simply making a quick escape (since a DoT effect is tied to the terrain, not to a tank that was hit). Since we really love the DoT concept, we felt it would be a shame to limit it to just the Napalm Bomb. So, we took the Atomic Nuke and gave it a DoT effect as well, even though it was already a frequently used weapon. With the Atomic Nuke, of course, it’s not about blazing fire, but ionizing radiation. Awesome! We left the Hydrogen Nuke unchanged, however, because we wanted it to remain a potential one-shot kill weapon, provided the circumstances are right. Besides, thermonuclear fusion bombs actually produce significantly less radiation than nuclear fission bombs, even though they are triggered by a fission reaction. Not that I want to start a technical physics debate here. Ultimately, this is a video game, so it’s not about realism, but about what makes sense for gameplay and is fun. For the visual effects, we once again tried to walk a tightrope between pixelated old-school graphics and more modern-ish effects, just as we did in the rest of the game. We think it turned out quite well.
Visual updates
- Lighting effects now feature a bit more local variation.
Bugfixes
- There was some potential "vector subscript out of range" error hidden somewhere when counting weapons in a player's arsenal. But actually, this error only existed in the debug build, not the release build. So it’s not really worth mentioning, but let’s pat ourselves on the back anyway.
We are so excited! As always, please let us know if you find any bugs. And right now, please also get in touch if anything about the game balancing bothers you. The changes weren't actually supposed to be all that drastic. However, we realize that we may well have introduced some instability into the game's balancing as a result. Unfortunately, given our limited resources of such a small hobby project, we can't play thousands of matches to perfectly fine-tune the balancing. Even having AI players run through many rounds in "fast-forward" mode yields only limited information. We rely on Steam statistics (these are non-personalized, no worries), though they don't tell us much beyond which weapons are used and how often, or more importantly, on your feedback. Thank you! And have fun!