Feedback from "chlue":

Originally posted by chlue:

Hello

I played the map alone in v5 before and found it quite nice. Finding ways to snipe out the reactors was a lot of fun. But now I tried the v6 beta (as of 13.12) with a friend and unfortunately we quickly got bored. We only proceeded till the oil field and then stopped playing as it felt like a sandbox game.

The issues were basically:
- no pressure at all from the enemy (I guess it is impossible to proper balance this with ground units)
- Our T1 and T2 unit evaporated once they got within fire range of the defenses, so we didn't really invested into units
- building artillery wiped out the defenses effortlessly

This meant we quickly started playing turret creep with Hail and Ripple. Unfortunately this means it does not matter how beautiful the base is. You just place them barely out of enemy hail/ripple range and move forward when they stop firing...

I wonder it the map would be much more fun if:
1) manageable waves of air units (T1..T3) would spawn
--> This would mean some defenses are required while still posing no real danger of loosing the core (assuming the waves stay small enough that something like 5 Scatter turrets can take them out)

2) Breaking walls into new areas should unleash a surge of ground units (Maybe something like one unit type supported by a single factory per area could work)
--> Would add some danger when braking into a new area

3) ban all player long range turrets (Hail, Ripple and Foreshadow)
--> forces to build units and avoid falling into the initially much easier (but long term boring) turret creep. I suspect T3 units like the 'Fortress' will easily be able to break the defenses but we simply lost interest before we got to that point.

First of all, thank you for taking the time to provide this detailed feedback :) and sorry that it had to be because you weren't enjoying the map :(. I'll try and answer as best as I can.

I send a suggestion to the developer of Mindustry to ask if he can add a "Unit Production Cost Multiplier" setting to custom maps.

This would allow players to build T1 and T2 much more easily and also it would allow the enemy counter attacks to be beefed up.

You can find the suggestion here if you want to support me:
https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry-Suggestions/issues/1580

If the suggestion is not accepted then I'll probably add some Thorium "earlier" in the map to allow players to switch to Tier 3 and above more quickly as Tier 1 and 2 units are indeed ♥♥♥♥ (except for Naval Tier 1 and Tier 2).

I may also break open the map and add a lot of water as T1 and T2 water units are good, especially compared to the land variants.

Some other feedback:

Originally posted by chlue:

- no pressure at all from the enemy (I guess it is impossible to proper balance this with ground units)

There are 2-6 counter mechanisms between the start and the oil, so I assume they were too weak?
It's also possible that your ripples disabled them before they could spawn.

Originally posted by chlue:

2) Breaking walls into new areas should unleash a surge of ground units (Maybe something like one unit type supported by a single factory per area could work)

There are "counter attack" mechanisms that activate and send units. I'll see if I can make them stronger. I'm a huge fan of having a "clear radar" where players know they are about to get attacked when they suddenly see a red marker pop up.

Originally posted by chlue:

1) manageable waves of air units (T1..T3) would spawn

There are enemy 20 cores on the map. So every time I spawn a unit in a wave, it spawns 20 of them instead.

Because the cores are so spread out, they would be attacking you from every single direction with no real warning and it would be a nightmare even if I just add 1 Tier 1 air unit.

The map would also get easier as more and more cores get destroyed so for balancing purposes it's not a viable option.

Originally posted by chlue:

3) ban all player long range turrets (Hail, Ripple and Foreshadow)

Banning Ripples and Foreshadows is definitely something I'll consider once I get the unit problems fixed. Banning Ripples without buffing the units somehow would give players no good way to attack the base so I can't do it right away.

So once again thank you for your feedback, they are all issues and suggestions that I will look into one way or another :).

Hello,

Thanks for the long response.

I wasn't aware that waves spawn on every core. This definitely rules out spawning one or two Zenith's to harass the player :-)
Sounds like a possible feature request to have a map setting that defines if waves shall spawn on every core, a randomly selected one or distributed over all active ones.

With respect to the early unit building. Maybe a small beach would ease the start. Units need crazy amounts of Silicon and on this map the sand mostly needs to be created indirectly from scrap which takes more time to build due to the additional investments in Pulverizer and power supply. Irrelevant later, but slows the start.

For the "counter attack" mechanisms. We saw the enemy sending some units at us after we broke trough the walls, but basically only one or two at a time so we barely noticed and indeed the ripples took out the factories quickly (and likely most of the units too without us even noticing). Not sure why there were so few. Maybe it's caused by having the same unit produced in many places so they can't stack up.

Wondering why we didn't really felt any of the "counter attack" mechanisms I just analyzed what you did with the unit factories north or the start (left of the 'first' reactor). So the idea is that they only get silicon if the Fuse turrets below are fireing thorium ammunition and clear the belt to allow the silicon to flow because they share a belt section. Surely a clever idea, but that only works if someone floods the base with units. Well we took out the fuses from a safe distance so that factories never produced any units.

In the end I guess we killed the fun ourself by falling into ‘turret creep’ behavior instead of investing in some better unit production lines.

Thanks again for your feedback :)

I just uploaded a new version of the map. I buffed the Units by a LOT:
- Unit Damage from 1.0 to 2.5
- Unit Health from 1.0 to 2.0
- Unit Production Speed from 1.0 to 2.0
(There were also some changes to the enemy base near the player starting position.)

These unit changes should make units a lot more viable on the map. They will also cause the enemy counter attacks to be a lot stronger.

I see that you also discovered and exposed one of my counter attack mechanisms :). I'm aware that they are vulnerable to turrets but there are other counter attack mechanisms on the map that work differently and do not require a firing Fuse.
(Also because the units have more health now, they are more likely to reach the Fuse, which will shoot it and activate the counter attack mechanism, but don't tell anyone ;) ).

I'm expecting there to still be some changes to the map before it exits beta so except if you like testing a map multiple times when it is not yet fine tuned, I would suggest to wait until the map exits beta. I expect this to be in about 1.5-3 weeks. I'll definitely post something int this Discussion so if you (or someone else) subscribes to it then that person will get a notification :).

Hello,
Just want to inform I played the map (version as of 20.12 or so). I deliberately build no long range turrets, ramped up the no-build area around enemy cores to 50 or so and as such solely used units to attack. Due to no pressure at all I decided to try out all T4 and T5 units. Needless to say that the enemy has no change if faced with T5 units but it was interesting to learn what the units are capable of. The enemy units where still a joke because they need to pile up to form a threath. As a constant flow they are just a nuisance.

Based on my experience I think to get the most out of the map a player should:
- build no artillery turrets
- limit himself to T3 units
- ramp up the no-build area

In the end the interesting part is to find ways to drain the cryo-fluid of the reactors :-)

My design tip for new maps is to add more progression. The player gets way stronger the bigger his base gets. So flow may be better if the end game turrets are kept out of the front line outposts. This makes T1 units more viable earlier.

In a recent patch, Anuke (the developer of Mindustry) has removed "Unit Health Multiplier" from the map settings.

Because of this, I don't want to ban Ripples/Foreshadows/Tier 5 units as I initially planned.
Why exactly? The enemy defenses on this map are quite powerful and units that can't have 2.0x health just die too fast for my liking so I don't want to force the player to use Tier 1 to Tier 4 units and allow other abilities to defeat the map.

I know that it's possible to artificially increase the unit health by reducing block damage and block health but that causes the shields to become twice as powerful against turrets which I don't want.

So yeah the map is not exactly how I wanted it to become but I'm limited to the tools I can use and I try to make the best out of it so hopefully you will enjoy it.

The map that made it out of beta still has increased unit damage and unit production multiplier. It also has some early base nerfs so units can still push through it quite well.