View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0014277 | The Last Federation | Balance Issue | Apr 19, 2014 8:24 pm | Jan 23, 2015 1:27 pm | |
| Reporter | Professor Paul1290 | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | resolved | Resolution | fixed | ||
| Product Version | 1.001 (Bugfixes, Large Screen Resolution Support) | ||||
| Summary | 0014277: Burlust duels still exploitable. --Collated Feedback | ||||
| Description | Burlust duels are still easy to out-range and cheese. They really need longer ranged and more weapons in general instead of more health. Perhaps they need to be faster as well. Sources: http://steamcommunity.com/app/273070/discussions/0/558753803977018218/ http://steamcommunity.com/app/273070/discussions/0/558753803932558061/ | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | New | ||||
| related to | 0014416 | new | Burlust leverage needs to be improved | |
| related to | 0014957 | resolved | Chris_McElligottPark | Dueling Burlust Warlords could be more fun |
| related to | 0014366 | resolved | Chris_McElligottPark | Burlust Duel Feedback |
|
|
I personally ran into this as well, and it was the only way I could conquer the Burlust warlord. I like the idea of giving them a lot of strength and shields but feel that it might be a little overdone if the players powers are taken away, at least on normal. If you reduce the health of the opponent but increase speed of guns / speed of ship, that should probably help. |
|
|
I think it's best to make each warlord duel to be challenging in a way that requires player to be skilled in the tactical battle, such as more bullets on-screen, in more interesting intervals and patterns, much like Japanese SHMUPs. |
|
|
It would help if the shots would move relative to the craft that fired it. The warlords are outrunning their own bullets on higher difficulties. |
|
|
I did one pretty early in the game, and I thought it was fairly well balanced. A head on attack would have ripped me to shreds. So, I weaved around and was able to whittle him down. It took some time, but not too much. I had to plan ahead to avoid his shots. I thought it was a good fight. |
|
|
Burlust duels are dull and were even a grindfest before 1.3. (now they're a tri-annual grindfest). There is absolutely NO strategy, look what I've done at the START of a game just after taking the station in the 1st battle. It was vs a non-prime warlord on harder difficulty, and I only switched weapon to burst from energy bolt when his shields were down. Takes about 70turns, or few minutes "game time". http://i.snag.gy/7B7KZ.jpg At insane you can still kite by turning every few turns, the prime warlord is a different beast having twice your speed and able to one shoot you with his laser. But since the two other warlords still gives you tons of benefits and the leverage can be "transferred", it's not a big deal. Also duel 1st after a burlust/station start gives you a big advantage, giving you a 0 relation with them and the ability to start a war with any race you want (the one you elevate 1st to space fearing). |
|
|
i think a combat arena - limited combat space - would perhaps help with this issue... could be set up by stationing other burlust turrets/ships in an square around the fight (the audience), and they would shoot the player only if the player moved through the ships, i.e. outside the arena. could give an opportunity for this fight to be better balanced and less drawn out in the sense that the warlord could be less powerful (much less health) but much more complicated to defeat in a smaller space.... and that arena could be reduced in size on higher difficulties rather than simply buffing him up to his current crazy status on misery setting... i feel like i could potentially beat him now on misery but the extent of his health and the need to keep my engines powered up means if i'm going to do this its going to be the most drawn out fight in the game and in reality pretty dull/frustrating now if he was more fragile like me, but the duel would be in a confined space, requiring a short display of skilled combat ... then i reckon this would be a much more interesting mission. |
|
|
I just did it on INSANE vs one of the secondary warlord just after the start. In fact the 1st battle is the worse since you need either ships, trash of cloak to dock to the station. It took me few time since at 3 on guns, all the rest on engine you can only take ONE shot from anything and loose all your shield, then either one laser, three bullet or one missile for your hull. I did an average on 10k dmg per turn on his shields, less on his hull because I though longer range was safer and continued using the energy blaster. Although most of the turn I didn't do any dmg because targeting the space gave me only few hits and "auto targeting" often shot behind his ship. The slow turn rate and slow bullet travel time allowed me few passes "side-to-side" where I could crank my weapons and do over 60k on a turn. Also work on the prime warlord, but going through 1.8M hull and 7.8M shields seems daunting. Note that the fight wasn't trivial and had to restart few time, mostly because of the less predictable missiles. The problem isn't that the battle is very exploitative (yes 0 relation with starting race and free war vs any faction is nice), but the relation boost can only be "farmed" every three years and it isn't a big deal since more often the prisoners and resources exchanges (and battles) gives you more than enough during that time. It's that the warlord fights are BORING, TEDIOUS (grind) and REPETITIVE. To help vs boring, do like jonasan suggest, adjust the arene to have hazards, a limite, maybe "special pickups" that both can get. VS tedious, you could also give his shield a little recharge, forcing you to fight him well or have to withdraw dishonorably if you can't fight (loosing all leverage and relation). For the repetitive aspect, maybe created 4-5 more ship types, so at least we'd have some variety. Also re balance it for lower difficulties. If I can win at the second highest with only moving to the left (kitting) full throttle, I can also win at the second easiest without moving once, by boosting firepower and switching weapon type when his shields are down. Takes less than 10 turns, in fact takes how long it takes the warlord to reach your ship. I still think a good duel might be hard to do well withing TLF since the combat is fairly simplistic, eg so ship module to damage, ammo do not gain ship's velocity, heel you do not have ammo. A title like "space ranger" had way more depth thus making 1v1 more interesting. |
|
|
The duels need to be removed. This isn't the kind of game where hiding something cool behind a tough, optional boss fight is fun, and the extra leverage isn't really so much cool and optional as opposed to "saves your money for something else." Instead of a ship-to-ship confrontation, your character should use his immense physical strength to either humiliate the warlord in front of his subordinates, or threaten to, and make him heed him that way. Of course the Burlusts need to be made more involved, otherwise this is simply avoiding the nuisance of a kite-fest and not adding in the strategic tradeoffs I really want out of it. |
|
|
When I described the combat in TLF to friends I basically called it a Turn Based Bullet Hell. I think that a good move to improve the Burlust Warlord duels would be to actually take a couple pages from the well refined SHMUP/Bullet Hell handbook for boss fights. Rather than high movement speed, what the Burlust Warlords need is range, reams and reams of range! Im talking an unbearable wall of bullets that can hit you pretty much anywhere and force the player to get in close where they have to deal with higher damage but slower moving close range shots with more predictable arcs. The way I could see this working is; at long range the Warlord fires irritating swarm missile that force the player to either die at range through attrition or close the gap, at Medium range they fire the traditional 'spiral bullet pattern' + aimed shots that the player needs to dodge that is kind of annoying but basically forces you to think through the fight, and at Close Range he has the 'Awful OP Laser Thingy' that basically exists solely to remind you to not get too close. This way the player needs to keep their ship at optimal engagement range while actually having to think and dodge projectiles. Other SHMUP style boss archetypes could also be used. Every Warlord has his own random Combat Style chosen from a list of pre-programmed behaviors/weapon types. |
|
|
I like the idea of an "arena" or obstical course of (nearly?) indestructable turrets. But they need to be hostile to both parties (yourself AND the warlord), so strategies like dragging the warlord into a turret cluster, or using buildings for cover, or lining up and dodging bullets so they hit the warlord, etc would be much more awesome and interactive. The warlord should still be slow and have tremendous health (so that there's incentive to draw him to the high damage turrets - in fact the turrets should be MUCH more capable of defeating the warlord than player weapons), but give him a variety of homing projectlies with VERY long life (of various damage/speed, ie some slow but hard hitting and some fast but not too damaging) that need to be dragged into turrets/barriers to escape, etc. Thus the battle becomes a much more epic game of cat and mouse, and feels more like the asymetric situation that it should be (with brains defeating brawn). |
|
|
We completely redid the warlord battles for 2.0, so marking this one completed since it's referring to a waaaay old version of the battle. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apr 19, 2014 8:24 pm | Professor Paul1290 | New Issue | |
| Apr 20, 2014 11:29 am | pepboy | Note Added: 0036326 | |
| Apr 21, 2014 11:56 am | Raide | Note Added: 0036363 | |
| Apr 21, 2014 11:58 am | Ljas | Note Added: 0036364 | |
| Apr 21, 2014 10:15 pm | mrhanman | Note Added: 0036402 | |
| Apr 21, 2014 10:15 pm | mrhanman | Note Edited: 0036402 | |
| Apr 27, 2014 2:30 pm | varsovie | Note Added: 0036892 | |
| Apr 27, 2014 2:40 pm | GC13 | Relationship added | related to 0014416 |
| Apr 28, 2014 3:38 am | jonasan | Note Added: 0036896 | |
| Apr 28, 2014 7:54 pm | varsovie | Note Added: 0036948 | |
| Apr 28, 2014 8:10 pm | GC13 | Note Added: 0036949 | |
| Apr 28, 2014 10:02 pm | Platypus | Note Added: 0036954 | |
| Apr 30, 2014 5:49 pm | Drak | Note Added: 0037077 | |
| May 18, 2014 5:44 am | Drak | Relationship added | related to 0014366 |
| May 18, 2014 11:00 am | timfortress | Relationship added | related to 0014957 |
| Jan 23, 2015 1:27 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | => New |
| Jan 23, 2015 1:27 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0039884 | |
| Jan 23, 2015 1:27 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => resolved |
| Jan 23, 2015 1:27 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => fixed |
| Jan 23, 2015 1:27 pm | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
