It seems you have played the wrong version of the mission! (check that off the list)

In the next version, I fixed the tanks, beginning segment with the giant soldiers, and some other stuff like the broke subwave at the end.

I will make another version shortly, stay tuned for 0.4.8 !

Waterfront : Acidic Offensive : V0.3.8 : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bSq6OwlbVZHSZaVdwdMKVPQrEACIh-Ow

Testing Restrictions:
No sniper.
No shield.

Goals:

Fix the bugs!

W1:

Fixed Giant Soldier spawning.
Raised FoS respawn, total, and maxactive.

Increased the number of robots spawning, and increased MaxActive and TotalCount

W2:

Removed several spawns of Caustic Trios.

Nerfed tank HP 1k

W3:

Decreased Direct Hit soldier maxactive, but decreased respawn.

Reduced the number of Demomen in the Giant Demo Squad.
Nerfed Soldier AI

Reduced the ratio of FoS in the Heavy support.
Increased Burst Demoman respawn.

W4:

Delayed shotgun heavies slightly.

Removed battalions soldiers.
Merged wavespawns.
Reduced the number of Demoknights.

Reduced subwave length.
Made Continuous demos spawn more.. continuously?
Removed Quickuber Medics.

W5:

Reworked FoS spawning to stack up less and spawn more consistiently.

Added a second tank, and split the HP between the 2.

Fixed the Giant Caustic Pyros not spawning correctly due to overly high MaxActive on support.

W6:

Extended support.

Extended support.

Fixed heavy spawning.

Isolation : Holdout Scrap-Out : V0.1.1 : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eJNc4eVBPIpvTxZ7co1R9ciyowSjcQ09

Testing Restrictions:
No heavy or sniper.
No sheild.

Goals:

Fix the unbeatable-ness.

General:

Fixed Bazooka soldier HP.
Experimentally increased the DesiredCount on the Engineers.
Raised sentry buster respawn time.

W1:

Lengthened support.
Added variety to the bot spawns and types.

Significantly reduced the number of Pyros active and spawning.
Replaced AlwaysFireWeapon with CannotAirblast.
Made the tanks speedy, but have a lot less HP.

Removed quick-fix medics.
Increased giant soldier respawn.
Replaced Flaregunners with Detonator pyros.

W2:

Raised MaxActive and lowered Respawn of Soldiers.
Reworked Bat Scouts spawning.
Steel gauntlets now spawn with the Soldiers.

Heavily reduced the number of Pyros spawning.
Spaced out Giant Pyros slightly.

Meltdown : Irradiated Automatons : V0.3.5 : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1jmy1FfTvlfkxjfTaDXAwjXHKPjnv2drf

Testing Requests:

Please do not hunt Engineers. They have been nerfed, hunting them will only make the mission stale and boring.
No projectile sheild.
No sniper.

Goals:

Polish and fixes, as usual.

General:

Replaced the Bazooka icon with the correct icon.
Removed engineers from the final wave.
Buffed Gatling Heavy move speed.
Nerfed Artillery Soldier damage.

W1:

Delayed Giant Demomen slightly.
Removed delays from support.
Buffed the respawn of the Bat Scouts.

Reworked the ratios of enemies.
Lowered support respawn.

W2:

Nerfed Tank HP 2k
Buffed tank support volume.

W3:

Buffed support length.

Nerfed support length.
Nerfed tank HP 3k

Reworked Gatling heavy spawning to be more consistent.
Added Shortstop scouts to the support.

W4:

Replaced Battalions with Concheror.

W5:

Removed Uber Medics.
Re-squadded Giant Burst Fire soldiers.
Increased support respawn.

W6:

Boss rework:
Boss now has much less HP.
Boss now does much more damage.
Boss support max nerfed.
Boss's HoK is now 5K
Boss range buffed.

Waterfront: Acidic Offensive : V0.3.7 : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bSq6OwlbVZHSZaVdwdMKVPQrEACIh-Ow

Testing Restrictions:
No sniper.
No shield.

Goals:

Hotfix for unbeatable-ness

W1:

Heavily reduced the number of Pyros.

Reworked subwave:
All enemies now spawn from the same wavespawn, with RandomChoice.
Reworked ratios between enemies.
Added Heavyweight Champs to the subwave.

Nerfed the Scout support.
Nerfed Giant Scout move speed.

W2:

Lowered maxactives across the subwave.
Increased respawns across the subwave.
Nerfed Totals across the subwave.

Reduced the number of Bazooka soldiers.
Increased Giant Rapid Fire Soldier respawn.

Nerfed tank HP 3k.
Reduced DF MaxActive.
Increased DF respawn.

Waterfront : Acidic Offensive : V0.3.6 : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bSq6OwlbVZHSZaVdwdMKVPQrEACIh-Ow

Testing Restrictions:
No sniper.
No shield.

Goals:

Fix more overlaps.
Nerf some of the OP segments.

General:

Replaced Bazooka soldier Icon.

W1:

Buffed maxactive on the Demo subwave.

W2:

Spaced out Giant Caustic Pyros more.

Spaced out Giant Soldiers slightly.

Extended subwave.
Buffed tank HP 2k

W3:

Removed a spawn of Direct Hit soldiers.

Giant Pyros AlwaysFire

Removed 2 spawns of Support.

Everything respawns quicker.
Extended subwave.

W4:

Reduced the number of Battalions/Huntsmen squads.

W5:

Removed a deflector and spaced the remainder out.
Lowered deflector maxactive.

Nerfed the number of Demo squads.

Reworked tank spawning.
Reduced the percentage of Buff Soldiers in the Tank Support.
Made the Tank Support shorter.

W6:

Reduced the quantity of Giant Shotgunners.
Buffed support maxactive and total.

Reworked final subwave.

Meltdown : Irradiated Automatons : V0.3.4 : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1jmy1FfTvlfkxjfTaDXAwjXHKPjnv2drf

Testing Requests:

Please do not hunt Engineers. They have been nerfed, hunting them will only make the mission stale and boring.
No projectile sheild.
No sniper.
To Sntr: Can you please stop skewing my results by instantly going spy-hard and doing nothing more than camping my teleporters and preventing my engineers from doing anything? I think you've acidentally tricked me into engineer escalation because whenever I run a test with you in it my engineers accomplish next to nothing.

Goals:

Experimental removal of the Engineers (or at least nerfing to standard)

General:

Added a testing restrictions section to the changelog!

W1:

THE ENTIRE WAVE respawns more quickly but has low maxactives.

Extended support.

W3:

Removed some spawns of Minigiant Demos.

Nerfed the Gatling Heavy squad size from 5 to 3.

W4:

Extended subwave.

Extended subwave.
Decreased respawn times.

W5:

Gave Giant Burst Fires thier own medics.
Extended subwave.
Increased support volume.

W6:

Support now drops Money.
Nerfed support volume.

Originally posted by Sntr:

Yeah, I can see how Engineerbots seem like a solution to possible pacing problems (Bigrock and Teien are both pretty good examples of this) and Meltdown isn't a very friendly map to work with because of the reset timer on the bomb and the generally flat layout.
But I've seen people pull off properly difficult waves without having to use Engineers to solve pacing issues (Dayal even pulled it off on Teien somehow) and it seems to come down to a few things:

- Having the wave deliver enough "push" to get players to fall back (or have a tough time holding the front)
- Don't have too many Wavespawns active at once (which definitely will cause pacing problems as the wave waits for 3-4 wavespawns to allspawn/alldead rather than just 1-2)

If you have the same level of push that players receive at the front happen across the map, it begins to feel like you can't defend any location as the bots just close any distance they start to get (which is why Engineerbots are such a big target, their teleporters allow the bots to move up and get uber on spawn)

Generally defending teams will begin to move the frontline up as they clear the objective, leaving the Engineer to guard the bomb with their Sentry and this often times will solve pacing problems. But if there's too much push and the players don't feel confident enough to fight the bots, then they'll get defensive and play the waiting game (which easily leads to the wavetime bloating as the players will just wait for the bots to come to them, rather than confronting them farther away from the bomb) and with Meltdown having a return timer it does sort of encourage this behavior.

You could discourage this behavior by having a bomb with no return timer, so you wouldn't have to use inf support so much to bring the bomb back to the field but you'd still have to compromise by letting the Engineers stay dead longer so players don't get into a perpetual push as the Engineers aren't allowed to die

I see your point. And it is true, most missions don't contain engineers. The problem comes in when I try and determine the methods for making the wave have "more punch". You've seen this mission as it already is, laden with giants and stuffed with overwhelming amounts of spam and support. I don't want to push that even farther of the direction of a Broken Parts hell by adding even more giants, even more unkillable uber medics, even more walls of steel gauntlets and monster squads of crit enemies. Condensing enemies into bigger and more brutal baddies just starts to break down when you're giving players enough money where they can reasonably afford resistances. As some point, it becomes kill or be killed, and fighting enemies with that mentality introduces a sort of desparation Broken Parts is all too known for.

By the way, the bomb resetting is 100% intentional, and I'm suprised you are against it. I feel it's a direct upgrade to a non-resetting bomb by A: ending the endless boredom of engineers kind enough to prevent an inevitable loss by backcapping, and B: Giving the robots (and the defenders) a more clear centerpoint to the fight that follows the carnage more closely, and when separated will return there in due time. How does the bomb having a return timer ENCOURAGE players to stay defensive? When I know that the bomb will reset in time, I feel much more confident to leave it and instead go back to why I'm in the server: shooting robots!

Isn't the feeling of "If we don't hold them here they will push us back" what MVM was designed to feel like? For players playing MVM, surely this is the feeling they got, watching towering monstrosities batter standard PvP defenses to dust and continue thier grim march to the hatch? I get that's not really how it goes now, with it being more of a checklist of "kill these enemies" than an actual fight for survival, but generally I'm aiming for a mission that makes you think "How in the *$*!@#*!@* am I gonna beat this?, then after a well-fought fight being "I can't believe we survived!" Of course, it's only intended to look that difficult, not actually be hard. I try and avoid situations that can escalate out of the player's control or that force the player to bite off more than they can chew. Speaking of that, it's the bottleneck on why I feel uncomfortable massing enemies into battering rams. Because if they manage to break through, not only is the pacing in for a nosedive, but the difficulty spikes, and more and more robots could potentially get the opportunity to mass up and make a truly unbeatable subwave.

I'm going to study more missions that don't contain engineers, and see what makes them fun, if at all. I find I'm a bit of a hipster, I'm still trying to grasp why people play MVM if it's not to destroy an armada.

Originally posted by Sntr:

I really dislike the fact that the Engineer-bots have a cooldowntime of 5 seconds.

When you have multiple Engineerbots and they can't all teleport in, they will wait until a new hint becomes available (or the one using the nearest 'valid' one dies), which means that the Engineer either only stays dead for 5sec or another one pops immediately in their place when they die!
And it basically denies you from ever trying to stop the Engineers from doing anything apart from making sure that they can never build anything (which is why I went Spy, for the sheer purpose of not letting the Engineer ever build a teleporter)

I could've always just killed the Engineer but there's no point to killing him when he comes back almost immediately.
Just something like Cooldowntime of 25-30 would be nice because it would at least give us a break when the Engineer dies, because right now the mission is basically "Stop killing the Engineers"

The engineers are annoying, gimmicky, and generally the worst part of this mission. But "Stop killing the Engineers" is more or less exactly what I'm trying to get across.

I have thought a lot about trying to get rid of the enginers, but the problem is I can't figure it out. How do I maintain any semblance of difficulty without using engineers?

If I simply removed engineers from the mission (or prevented them from rebuilding quickly, same thing), the entire mission would go from being moment-to-moment to an endless slog where you spend an eternity waiting for the enemies to come to you, with no chance of the robots winning. You sit and wait with your finger on the M1 key waiting for the bomb to reset, and then you go back to the robot's spawn and actually get back to having fun, by pushing the robots back to a point where they stand a chance of defeating you. The problem now is that if the robots manage to at all break (or even outmanuver) that defence, you go back to the purgatory that is waiting for the robots to cross the map to get to you.

Now, I could theoretically balance around this. Large groups of enemies that stick together, and attempt to bash through the defence. Since they're designed to pack a punch even without support (already bad game design), they can manage to be threatening long after they've left spawn. The downside is that these groups are a royal pain to balance, and tend to be "lol ram your head against a brick wall untill it breaks".

In summary, my testers, you, and to an extent me hate the engies. But I see no other way to balance something fun to play against without resorting to gimmicky, trollish "haha beat this skrub" tactics that ultimatley leave players feeling tricked, unsatisfied, and wishing they weren't playing MVM.

Still, I'd love to see how you solve this conundrum!

Isolation : Holdout Scrap-Out : V0.1.0 : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eJNc4eVBPIpvTxZ7co1R9ciyowSjcQ09

Goals:

Subdue the mission overall to more Intermediate levels.
Fix all the strange spawning patterns.
Rework rough and unforgiving segments.

General:

Lowered Bazooka soldier HP.
Buffed starting money from 550 to 1000.
Reduced sentry buster respawn by 66%
Replaced Dumpster icon with MM-friendly icon.
Varied spawns across the mission
Mission now contains Engineer support with a comical name.
Continous Demomen now actually rapid-fire.

W1:

Shortened subwave.
SMG snipers now spawn in packs of 2 instead of 3
Spawning ajusted accordingly.

Made the Pyros AlwaysFire
Pyros spawn in packs of 3.
Buffed tank HP 3K
Halved pyro TotalCount

Increased distance between Giant Soldiers by 3 seconds.
Buffed flare pyro maxactive.
Halved flare pyro respawn.

W2:

Decreased Soldier maxactive.
Halved the number of Steel Gauntlets spawning.

Fixed Giant Pyro spawning.
Increased respawn between Giant Pyros.
Reworked support spawns to spawn 2 pyros and 1 scorch in a squad every 3 seconds.
Halved support total.

Replaced Battalions soldiers with Concheror soldiers.
Gatling Heavies now spawn in pairs.
Increased the ratio of Soldiers to Scouts.
Buffed scout AI.

W3:

Delayed tanks to make them mesh together better.
Decreased the number of Heavies & Heavyweight Champs
Buffed tank HP.

Gave pyros Crits.
Extended subwave.
Pyros now AllwaysFire.
Support volume buffed.

W4:

Buffed support maxactive and volume.
Increased ratio of Demos to Scouts.
Buffed support AI.

Significantly reduced the number of Direct Hit soldiers.
Increased respawn between giant scorch pyros.

Fixed Giant Powerjack Pyro not holding his hammer.
Buffed support volume and maxactive

W5:

Replaced some Heavies with SMG snipers.
Removed a spawn of Deflectors, and spaced the remainder out.
Buffed support maxactive.
Increased deflector squadsize.
Reduced support total.

Increased the number of Tanks by 2.
Moved tanks slightly closer together.
Nerfed tank HP 1k
Nerfed support total.

Pyros cannot airblast.
Massivley buffed support maxactive
Doubled Giant Rapid Fire soldier respawn.
Reduced Giant Soldiers by 2.

Made last subwave support infinite.
Significantly nerfed Difficulty on all enemies in the subwave.
Lowered the squadsize of the Buff Soldiers.
Made a bunch of small changed to the ways the enemies spawn.
Reduced subwave length.

W6:

Removed scorch shot pyros.
Removed a spawn of Giants.

Fixed Giant Shotgunner icon stacking.
Removed gatling heavies.
FoS now spawn with Shotgun squads.
Increased Giant Shotgunner respawn.

Reduced Giant Burst Fire Soldier squad size.
Increased MaxActive and Respawn on Giant Soldier Squads.
Reduced subwave length.

Fixed incorrect Burst Fire Demo template.
Added Heavies and SMG snipers to the subwave.