I was going to recommend flying enemies too for variety. You could also have long range enemies that can attack from outside the basic towers range. I’m imagining a slime that catapults smaller slime over walls.
In response to SRP last 2 points, you can always hold the up key to discharge.
Also I like the steam generator as a intermediate progression step. My last playthrough I build all my research right next to it so I could get to the late game and the fusion generator faster. I basically built one solar generator then immediately switched to steam.
All the talk about slimes dinging your energy but fattening you up anyways gave me an idea for a failure state, if you wanna go with that.
Essentially, your slime penalty pushes out energy to keep you from exceeding your suit’s elastic capabilities. But if your slime penalty exceeds your max energy…suit breaks, and either it’s game over or just scraps that can still store some energy but not nearly enough to do much of anything. You have to expel the slime somehow and rebuild your suit, starting from scratch as far as upgrading it goes. Puts some more stakes on going out to build another outpost too, other than just having to rebuild if it’s overrun.
Yeah, it was causing a lot of problems having basically anything interact with the other half of the buildings, so I ended up just making it so the only thing it does is block other structures.
New build! The most significant part of this one is the addition of the pause menu and saving, the only thing that should be breaking is messing around with the around with the sound settings, so probably best to leave those alone for now.
-added more slime types
-updated slime sprites
-right half of buildings now destroyed when left half is destroyed
-enemies do not target the right half of buildings anymore
-pause menu added
-saving added
-removed slowing down when at 0 energy (not really applicable anymore)
-dialog now shows portraits for player (higher weight value portraits/expressions have not been added, so the player portrait will be blank most of the time)
-dialog box now has different voices/text colors depending on who’s speaking
-enabled the dialog
-updated background
-updated walls
-added ship
-enemies are now drawn in front of buildings
-the types of enemies that can show up is now dependent on how long you have been playing
-mines can now be boosted by venting energy into them to triple their production rate
Ok yeah I’m getting rolled now- these giant slimes just roll over my walls and turrets and I can’t kill them and repair on both sides of the map before the next wave shows up and wrecks the rest of my base. That’s unfortunate.
Edit- I was complacent because the game was easy. Now I just had to skip the Steam Phase outright because I couldn’t defend the turbine and just kinda brute forced defenses.
I can’t believe everything is going quite well so far, and I may expect to find out more of this game, and Im glad I got to play through the versions, and enjoy it so much. and this is my current progress in the most current version.
Definitely loving what’s going on so far! The beginning kinda feels a bit tricky, mostly balancing resources and getting defenses set up, but the dialogue is great, the gameplay loop is pretty fun, only getting a bit grindy at higher crystal counts. Definitely can’t wait for more progress!
There’s still no use for steam or wind energy, other than when you’ve first unlocked steam; it’s the best power gen for a very short amount of time. Wind is so inconsistent it’s not worth it, and solar isn’t much worse than the best output wind can give, so you’re better off doing solar until steam, then drop both for fusion.
Once you’ve put down two towers and a wall on both sides of the map, you can literally ignore the concept of combat entirely, outside of stopping by every now and then to check up on the wall
I still wish two-block buildings did things from both blocks, like standing on the right side of a fusion reactor giving you power, etc.
The right side of the map has one less space to work with because the mining building sticks out to the right and takes up an extra tile.
Early progress is too fast, endgame is too slow.
Suggestions:
The ability to flip which way a two-tile building gets built
Expand the map outward a bit so we’re not squeezing two turrets and a wall in that little gap, maybe incentivizing going out and finding more stuff to work with. More places to go? Things to find?
Randomized steam/crystal placement + more deposits?
More turret types, including an anti-air one for taking out a new flying enemy, so that walls aren’t the be-all, end-all of defense.
Raise the cost of fusion reactors, or make us have to deposit crystals into them to make them work, so there’s an actual use for the other power gen buildings
Maybe make the steam generator just be an upgrade building that we can dump currency into to upgrade our passive energy generation for when we’re away from solar/wind/fusion generators?
Maybe drop the suit power transfer distance system and add a wiring system that lets us draw power to one location? …or keep the distance system and nerf overall generation, IDK. There’s not enough of a reason to build more power generators than the bare minimum, I mean the only strategy is to place a power gen building of your choice next to your research and suit buildings, and one next to the crystal miner, and that’s it. The fact the steam generator is all the way over there to the left is 99.9% the reason why it’s such a worthless building.
Honestly I don’t even know how to balance wind turbines, other than maybe buffing the high-wind output even further, or adding an elevation system to the game and having wind turbines more powerful when you’re higher up.
…or go full Space Engineers by having wind be the low-tier power generation that works equally everywhere, but add a day/night cycle so solar is only useful during the day
