Big Balance patch and some important fixes - V1.0.7

BALANCE & BUGFIXES - UPDATE 1

This is our first big patch post 1.0 launch. It addresses some of the more annoying bugs you have sent us and shifts the balance on a lot of things.

• Balance: the goal was to address outliers. We like that the game has quite a big variance, but there were some things that we could see very clearly as being a bit problematic. Thanks to everyone who shared their feedback with us and who enabled the data analytics. We will keep an eye on this and keep tuning.

• Bugs: there were some instances of the units not attacking correctly when standing still, which was due to a conflict with the idle state. This should be completely fixed now.

Both of these are also the main push of what we are currently working on, before we will set our eyes on rolling out the next specialist.

FOG PROBLEMS:

The volumetric fog solution we are using has some unfortunate inconsistencies. Some levels have very thick fog, but only on certain machines, or GPUs, or driver versions... we still do not know exactly. As far as I know this is mainly an issue in the "Auburn Borealis" biome. The problem with this one is, that we just can not reproduce the behavior we see on screenshots/videos that some of you have share with us. So we only know if it is fixed when the change it out in the wild. We think this is still present in this version, but also think it will be fixed in the next version.

Version 1.0.7 FULL PATCH NOTES

GENERAL CHANGES:

• Added an element that shows the loading screen tooltips when you pause a battle, so people with fast PCs can still have time to read them. 

• Added a notification that shows the game saves between runs, to ensure you will know you can continue a run later on. 

• Show base difficulty in battle preview widget

• Show run info bar on run results screen including used archive tokens and base difficulty

• Tweaked the tree spawning rules on some Biomes to be a little less prone to overgrowths

• We also rolled out a change on the core extractor objective, that was adding delay to the invicibility, but we had to roll that back, because it could lead to a state where the level was not winnable. We will add that again once we fixed that problem (I only include that, because I had communicated this to some people already).

BALANCE:

The goal with these changes is to address extreme outliers. These could be Enemy variants that show up as runkillers, like the PCX Elite Bore Division. Or they could be blueprints that result in extremely high win rates, like the Weather Tower. I try to not be heavy handed with the changes, because I think overall we are already in a pretty good place balance wise.

Another secondary goal is addressing a state where the factory cap leaves you in a situation where you can not really increase your capability to put out combat forces.

PCX Changes:

• Adjusted costs for some enemy units and buildings

• reduced attack range of PCX Launcher and Light artillery slightly

• CF Transporter basis unit spawn reduced by one CF3, attack range slightly reduced

• Adjusted starting setup for some enemy variants. 

• slightly decreased HP and damage of Small slimes. 

Player Changes

I will separate these into Nerfs & Buffs, sometimes it is not that clear cut though. Sometimes it is a shift in the role of the things. I like using cost increases since I still feel like overall our economy is a little to generous.

Nerfs:

• Castle: Active skill size and damage reduced. Attack rate decreased. Construction and skill cost increased. Castle is a clear outlier

• Weather Tower: reduced attack range and attack rate.Increased cost and MP cost of the active skill and increased active skill damage. Probably still insanely strong due to the special way this thing can attack, but I want to deemphasize the turret part a little.

• Raised price of the Energy Sniper Mech

• Boulder Cannon Turret reduced cap by 1, raised price and slightly reduced range

• Crystal Matrix Reader: now starts at MP at 50% and crystal per target is reduced from 100 to 80

• Laser Cannon Turret: increased cost and reduced attack rate slightly

• Shotgun Turret: decreased salvo size from 12 to 10 bullets. Decreased range by 1. Increased HP.  

• Railgun Turret: reduced range. Increased cost.

• Heavy Rocket Launcher: increased cost and MP cost of skill. Slightly reduced the size of the explosion but increased its damage.

• Ranger Turret: increased cost, decreased MP and base attack damage.

• Double Cannon Turret: increased cost. HP and area of splash damage increased.

• Panic Turret: Increased cost, increased sight and HP, reduced attack speed and duration of the panic. Massively increased damage. This is another one I am unsure about. Maybe the panic should need an active skill instead of being a passive. The changes are supposed to make it actually do some damage and have staying power as a turret.

• Precision Artillery: increased cost

• Spy Tower: increased cost  

• Energy Transfer Turret: decreased slow time to 1. increased damage from 3 to 8 but increased attack cooldown from 1 to 3.5. Slightly increased cost.

• Rocket Swarmer: decreased unit cap by 1. Decreased burn duration but increased attack damage. Increased factory cost.

• WallBlock: increased cost, increased HP, decreased armor

• Homing Missile Turret: Increased cost and increased Max HP

• Armored Harvester: decreased base harvest rate from 2,5 to 2,4

• Core Harvester, cost increased

• Robo Bombs factory and unit cost raised slightly

• Robo Bomb Battery cost +30 and MP cost +5

• Marine Blast Tower, cost +60, skill cost +5 MP

Buffs

• Mantis: ah my dear Mantis…it is by far the negative outlier for lost runs. I think that mostly comes from the fact, that it needs a completely different playstyle. I will still give it a nice starting HP bump.

• Incinerator: increased HP, reduced skill cost, increased damage of direct hits from the active skill and attack damage.

• Energy Hunters: reduced build time and factory cost, slightly increased damage, shield and unit cost

• Robo Micro: HP and attack range raised slightly

• Little Lighter: Factory cost reduced, HP increased, range slightly increased.

• Energo Saurus: Increased attack rate and damage of Energy Spirits (this also benefits other things that can spawn them). Increased move speed and HP. Raised unit cap by 1. 

• Firebooster: decreased factory cost, slightly increased unit cost. Increased attack rate, damage and HP

• Siege Bomb: unit and factory cost reduced. Explosion radius slightly increased.

• Claw Bot: Increased HP, slightly increased factory cost.

• Hover Collector: Crystal capacity increased by 5.

• Sniper Racer: removed solo passive, increased damage and range, increased Spy Cam sight range, raised cap slightly. 

• Repair Trike: HP increased, cost increased, damage and attack rate increased. Area of active ability increased.

• Robo Grenadier: doubled sight range, slightly decreased attack range making them a lot more self reliant. cost +10. attack cooldown -1s. HP +20

• Swarmer: Increased cost, raised HP from 50 to 75

• Stun Walker: Damage and attack range increased, cap increased, unit & factory cost decreased

• Bomb Bike: increased factory cap 4 to 6, slightly increased cost, increased damage 

• Buckler Mech: HP +60. Factory cost +100, unit cost +20. Factory cap +2, unit cap -1, so overall unit cap 12 instead of 5.

• Lightning Tank: increased the width of the attack beam 

• Tick Walker: Factory cost -20. Skill damage +10. Attack damage +0,4.

• Flame Walker: factory cost -80.

Hacks

• Underdog: lower cap raised to 180

Battle Archive:

• Refinery cap node: only affects the harvester factories now.

BUGFIXES:

• Better position defending and auto-attack behaviour: units should not come to stop in a state where they ignore enemies in range, idle animation should now set in properly when idle and auto attack targets that are non-attackers now will be switched to attackers if they come into range

• Fixed loudness distance curves, so shot sounds should still be audible when the cam is zoomed out. Some of these audio sources are buried deep in some unit, so if you notice a sound not being audible when you zoom the cam out, please let us know. 

• HEAT: fixed scaling on production time bonus for enemies on high heat, so it should no longer reach negative values.

•  F4 now only selects non-building harvesters

• Fixed missing healer tag on Recon Forward Base spawn

• Fixed Robo Timeouter attack and changed it so only the ones that hit their target get destroyed. 

• Fixed CF transporter sound being non locational.