General discussion for Elite Forces: Conquest

[Vesper]

well, there's some point in doing everything at once in here... how do I go forth, now in Florida, beating everything with EASE. First, if you achieve light power of 57 (or 60), your earth-4 and fire-3 towers start hitting 1 frame attack speed, which is enough for everything, given you place them at least in a joint, one in each. Next, if you achieve light power of 100, then your level 5 fire towers start hitting 1 frame attack speed, and having splash of 80, they rip everything apart, except bosses which take longer, and that's where the hero helps. I take skills 'pathologist', 'light advantage', 'marauder', 'bounty hunter', 'armor piercing', 'damage dealer', 'berserker' (there's a typo, the word is spelling like I said, in the game it's written 'berseker'), and first 5-6 rounds are being killed solo by hero, earn me extra money and let me place any towers I need. Pulse emitters are useless later in the game, I used them to boost low-level towers and hero at early levels, but what need is there to boost 1 frame attack?

There are several minor bugs I have encountered. First and most annoying, when you send all in (last time in Florida, 100/600 monsters) and try to move diagonally, the game freezes until you release WASD keys. The freezing effect seems to depend on the actual gamespeed only. Next, in my very first mission I was able to place damage boosters anywhere, while they are being unlocked only in the second location. Next, sometimes the mob counter goes awry when there are lots of actions on screen, and the final wave has already been sent, but since it's informational, it is not so crucial to the gameplay. Next, there appears to be some visual message when you 'send next wave' by pressing the timer, it appears right below the timer and is therefore unreadable. I'd make it instead appear either below the timer, or in status line. Next, I do not understand the law by which the future roads are occasionally visible to the player, so it is possible to foresee where next roads will appear. That might be not a bug, but still that needs some explanation. And finally, sometimes hero kill counter is less than 'max killed in a row' value, always by 1, looks like a hero killed himself in a row after everything's cleared.

About how to earn 60-100 light power. Whatever money you can put into them, should be used in the following pattern: First place towers until their cost would exceed $20. Then, upgrade each tower once ($40 upgrade), each upgrade yields +2 to power. Next, upgrade each tower twice ($50 and $60, these yield +5 to power first upgrade +2 and second +3). Then add towers and upgrade them to level 4 as necessary. Note that 'Berserker' skill gives [s]+18[/s] +16 to light power. After you reach 100 light power, you're perfectly set. I believe that every 'very fast' tower will reach 1fpa when you have 100 light power.

[Vesper]

so, the game is finally passed with the third score all time. Whew. First, thank you authors for creating this pearl and EFTD as well Second, the game is somewhat unbalanced, after you learn how to quickly advance to lightpower 57 and to withstand double to triple waves of monsters, it becomes a cakewalk, but until then it's somewhat hard. The start levels are easy enough to get the knack of the game's principles, at the third location it started to be somewhat difficult, and next is easy.

One note about game balance: Epic bosses should not be affected by death strikes, it's too easy to first drop their HP 3-4 times and then just eat them whole. If you will make them so, they will be impossible to kill unless something will stun them, that would encourage building hero towers Life towers are slow, too slow to get sped up to compare with others, so I have never used them. I still think that no tower should be able to reach 1fpa, not even 'dam* fast', or maybe these can, but they will need a tremendous light power to do so, but the slower towers should receive better benefits from the light. I have managed to raise the 'fast' towers to 1fpa by pumping light power to 225, I expect 'medium' towers will top 1fpa at 500 (dear me, a 200+ splash at 1fpa... OW, and OW), still a 500 is way too high to achieve without speed-building, or pausing the game just to spend lots and lots of money.

Still, this game reminded me of the great phrase 'Speed is King'. Thanks

[Vesper]

oof... well, one more addition to all this many-lettered blah-blah. I have run a test skirmish on 'Coal Mine' with attempts to go super-power at every component. Well, I must say that the game code is written with good polishing, the game never attempted to hang or misbehave even with 300+ creeps and 60+ towers at once, but it slowed to 1 frame a 10-15 seconds. This had a positive side for me, becaise I have gained a better insight on what is going on behind the picture. I have uncovered several not so obvious nitpicks and 'mini-bugs' that might be considered to be fixed. And also I think that 'death' towers are far too powerful and should not be added at all, because once you have 6 of them (5% death strike) and cover all entrances with 10 fast light towers (225 light power or more), nothing can ever get through.

Well, to the treasures. First, I have detected that splash towers either hit all ground or all air, but not both of them at once. I was tracking a flying mob (to-hero type, 938562 hp) which was travelling across numerous fire-5 and fire-6 towers which all were attempting to incinerate spiders and some normal creeps running past them, and despite their 250+ splash range and complete coverage of the air line the selected creep only received damage from a single 'cloud cooler' tower located forward, which can only target air and was able to fire.

Splash-slow and splash-poison towers, however, seem to place poison and slow on any enemy in splash range, regardless of whether they target air or ground creeps, and whether they can damage air or ground creeps. At least ground creeps get slowed by the only slowing tower I had, the 'cloud cooler' which can only target air. The test with poison might be inaccurate, I have not tried to place a 'disease wagon' and used 'acid spitter' instead.

The stun, slow and probably poison duration seems to be calculated in seconds, not frames, this means the flash seems to check system time to determine whether stun, slow or poison is expired. I had a creep that was under attack from more than 10 stun towers, had a 'stun' message all across it each frame, but was still moving forward. The slow color was disappearing from creeps each 3-4 frames (which last a minute of real time) and reappearing instantly after that, since the slow tower was shooting at 1fpa. I cannot say the same about poison, since I had the entire battlefield overlapped by 'giant fungus' towers along with poison towers with huge splash radius, so every creep was poisoned every frame just because of splash.

The 'medium' speed towers start shooting at 1fpa when you reach 400 light power, I was very excited seeing a volcanic fissure placing really huge red circles across the bigger half of screen each frame, however after the HP of mobs climb over 1M, the splash became redundant at all. But that was a surprise for me to see death-2 towers fire at the same speed, delivering halving strikes to creeps with tremendous speeds. After I have sent too many creeps forward, and they start to threaten the base, I have built about a dozen impulse towers (fast) and 6 death-2 towers (medium), and immediately the number of mobs on screen (the counter) starts dropping with average speed of 1 mob per frame. I dare say that's too fast, hum...

When you watch a mob with 'Resists: Splash' ability, and that mob gets hit by a splash, its hit points become fractional, like '570127.23828750154/938562' and the line gets wrapped and part of it hides behind the 'Resists: Splash', which makes problems in reading of max HP of the wave. But if the selected creep receives a deathblow, the HPs become normal, without fractional part. I don't think any of the mobs should have fractional HP at any time, so maybe the resisting shuold be fixed, or perhaps the display should show only integer part of HP.

No tower with splash radius can deliver a death strike. Well, that's normal I think, for to deliver a deathblow the strike must be precise, not spread over a square mile. Still, that should be a useful bit of information.

The game runs really slowly when there are lots of towers on screen, even when there is nothing at all to shoot at. That shouldn't be like that, nothing to target, nothing should slow the game. There's a considerable delay whenever a next bunch of mobs appear on screen, I think that's because a massive number of towers attempt to acquire a target. Perhaps you should only retarget the towers close to entrance(s), or those that reach these points by range (like 'power plant' with its 3500 range) instead of running the whole bunch.

The biggest lag appeared at the time I have decided to concede the game and whacked my hero over incoming mobs until I ran ot of lives, and while the game was collecting statistics, it wasn't updating the screen or releasing the browser for a whole minute (and that's just 128k score, I have seen a 500k at the top all time, I can't imagine how long it took for them to run the game somewhere, and I expect them to concede as well). I really wonder what did it do, because all the statistics was already collected by the towers and hero in due course, it's too easy to just accumulate the final statistics in some 40 variables in background and just display it after the game ends.

Perhaps I have forgotten something, well nobody's perfect. Hope this will help making the game better. I have some screenshots of this test, please make me know if you would like to see them.

[Badim]

tnx a lot! i just read it all. i will came back from conference, and make changesbased on your feedback. i will leave note, and changelist as well. tnx again for feddbacks!

[Masamune]

One kind of tower that I think is currently not in the game is water; towers of water would generally be extremely fast-firing towers, but balanced with very low damage and short range. Their effect on other towers would be to give a splash radius to towers without a native splash ability, but the bonuses to splash for non-splash towers would most probably be lower than the bonuses to splash radius given to towers with the splash ability by Fire towers. Possible stats for Towers of Water could be;

Water Gun (lvl1)
Damage: 3-3
Range: 450
Fire Rate: Bl**dy Fast
Attack Target: All
Effect: None
Cost: $15

Liquid Surge (lvl2)
Damage: 8-9
Range: 460
Fire Rate: Bl**dy Fast
Attack Target: All
Effect: None
Cost: $40

Cascading Burst (lvl3)
Damage: 20-22
Range: 480
Fire Rate: Bl**dy Fast
Attack Target: All
Effect: None
Cost: $50

Typhoon (lvl4)
Damage: 48-52
Range: 500
Fire Rate: Bl**dy Fast
Attack Target: All
Effect: None
Cost: $90

Tsunami (lvl5)
Damage: 90-102
Range: 550
Fire Rate: Bl**dy Fast
Attack Target: All
Effect: None
Cost: $140

Monsoon (lvl6a)
Damage: 178-196
Range: 600
Fire Rate: Bl**dy Fast
Attack Target: All
Effect: None
Cost: $280

Hydro Bomb (lvl6b)
Damage: 315-343
Range: 600 (40)
Fire Rate: Fast
Attack Target: Ground
Effect: None
Cost: $250

Aqua Storm (lvl6c)
Damage: 248-268
Range: 600
Fire Rate: Bl**dy Fast
Attack Target: Air
Effect: None
Cost: $190

[darn 42]

The automatic movement is getting really annoying (the move to the edge of the screen). Why does it happen, and how do I stop it from happening.