I was able to get through missions up to this with little difficulty. There was a nice learning curve as I adjusted my tactics a bit to the point where I was able to beat many levels without hardly touching orbital abilities and kept them in reserve to reinforce my towers. Then suddenly Mission XIII happened and the learning curve became bashing my head against the wall of a sheer cliff. I've replayed it multiple times and only made some progress toward acing it, like all previous maps, until I immediately rushed so I could afford to upgrade my command center.
I've tried different tower configurations from spamming weaker towers as fast as I could afford them, to building more powerful towers where they can hit enemies on more than one path, to everything in between that I could think of. I think this level needs to be rebalanced because the 'normal' difficulty does NOT fit with the difficulty of previous maps on normal. I know some would counter with the idea that I just need to find a way to more cleverly use orbital abilities ... but elitist mentalities don't line up with the mentality of most people that would be playing the game. Each level, in my opinion, needs to be winnable by a mixture of strategies to fit the play styles of gamers at large that may not stick to the game so obsessively.
... I cringe at the thought of having to beat the level on easy to ace it ... Through the many tower defense games that I've played, I have only had to do this on a very rare occasion when I still had a large amount of tower buffs to unlock, like in Kingdom Rush, and could then go back to ace the level with well-buffed towers. I don't think that would apply to Siege of Centauri so much as it doesn't have the same kind of 'buff every aspect of every tower' approach.
Thank you for the feedback, I'm forwarding this on to our dev team. We're still polishing levels even as we roll out major updates.
I have a question on this. I've seen a lot of worthwhile feedback on this and I've brought up some things that I consider major issues like the apparent uselessness of the Ion Cannon out of very specific situations. Do the devs view these forums as well or do we simply have to hope that someone will pass on our concerns about the game on our behalf, which seems to be a rare circumstance.
I have been a fan of Stardock and have been playing their games since before Impulse closed down and would like to see their games succeed. I'm just asking on this issue because I haven't seen any steam updates lately or anyone mentioning that they passed on the issues I've had with the Ion Cannon like you have with this level.
I consider both this level and the current state of the Ion Cannon to be deal breakers for me. In it's current state, Mission XIII is broken and was enough to get me to stop playing the game entirely. Likewise, the growing emphasis in later levels of defeating enemies with shields makes the expensive and slow-shooting Ion Cannon broken as well. It just isn't capable of, in its current state, making up for the fact that most other towers have very little to no effect against large numbers of shielded enemies. In terms of balance issues, the Ion Cannon in its current state is also enough to keep me from playing the game and I don't doubt that a great deal of other players would view this issue the same way.
Agreed, Mission XIII is problematic to beat. My high score in defeat is higher in rank than on any previous map, and I have yet to beat it on normal. It highlights that weapons do not fire without line of sight, which can't be determined with a generic ring of range when placing. I'm on my first binge of play, put I can sympathize with @FoxURA that this level discourages further play if it is just going to get frustration to guess on weapon type and line of sight placement.
Easy to beat using single type of turret, pulse cannon, as I learned from this game play: https://youtu.be/5cROEpvkDEE
I added the scavenger as well. Still not crazy about the pulse cannon tracking a target it won't shoot at due to LOS, while another unit it could shoot at is going past in LOS.
Ub3rMayer, did you find the Ion Cannon good for anything or do you share my opinion of it being a slow-firing waste of money?
And since it seems the level is beatable, by spamming a single tower, I may revisit the game to see what lies past the cliff side.
@FoxURA not sure I've used Ion. I went back through all the levels and used fully upgraded shotgun turrets + pulse cannon. All easy to beat with this combo so you can ramp up the difficulty. Throw in the scavenger, and rush lots of waves to have enough metal. Now I don't have to worry about what the other weapons do until this pair gets nerfed.
@FoxURA To answer your question about the devs reading the forums. I can say that they try to interact with the community when they aren't busy working on the games. It's difficult for them to develop the game and respond to all the feedback/suggestions at the same time though. That's why they have us. It's important for us to collect your feedback/suggestions and help them understand what parts of the game the community likes and what parts you don't like. Sometimes that will lead to the devs responding directly or maybe asking for more information on something specific. Other times it involves us organizing the feedback/suggestions so that they get an understanding of what needs to be balanced, tweaked, added, removed, etc.
On another note, we've had a fair amount of feedback on balancing, and I've ran into a lot of the same issues you are reporting as well. The team is continuing to tweak the balance and design of the levels, turrets, etc. to make them challenging, but still fun.
Keep the feedback coming!
I'm sorry if I came across as being a bit critical. When I read the open invitation for early purchasers to provide feedback on the game I was excited. While I'm not doing it now, I have a background in game design. I saw this as a chance to assist Stardock in making a wonderful tower defense game, which is one of my favorite genres. While I don't expect constant responses to everything, it seemed like there was a lack of customer engagement. This left me a bit agitated given how much I effort I put into studying the various mechanics and looking for issues.
Is there any way, even it it means hiring an additional person, to increase Stardock's customer engagement? To be honest, as they are now ... the forums seem pretty much dead.
If you want to contribute more dynamically our discord servers are a better place for that. Forums tend to be used for more long form factor feedback. As for why things might seem "dead" right now everyone was on holiday over the last 1-2 weeks.
We also maintain internal documents and bug reports for issues people raise across the official forums, Steam, Reddit, Discord, and more. Because of the amount of feedback we don't always have time to respond to each instance, especially when issues or topics are repeated.
To get closer to the topic at hand devs are returning from vacation this week, things might be sluggish but you should start to see this feedback incorporated in the next couple of updates.
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