Custom Map #11508: S03-0A - Voural. By: LappySheep

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This topic is for discussion of map #11508: S03-0A - Voural


Author: LappySheep
Size: 99x99

Desc:
A longer map, with a much harder starting point. Also, another hive unit to deal with. Feedback as always is appreciated.

[Johnny Haywire]

Wow, what a crazy start - excellent work on this one, dude.

I gotta admit, I totally didn't get what was going on, even though I realized later that I suggested something kinda like what's going on here - but you executed it much better than I'd imagined.

I reloaded a few saves along the way then decided to restart, and did much better power-wise the second time. So I was very confused why my defenses were actually worse, no matter what I did. That's when I realized that I hadn't built the roach-whackers early enough and was relying on the pea shooters to kill everything but it was much less efficient, so even though I was producing nearly 20% more power, I was using much more than that to kill everything.

So the variety is super-cool. What's also great is that once you build a defensible base, you don't need to save/pause anymore and progress is pretty smooth and relatively quick after that. It's not a really long slog after that, and some of the attack approaches are slightly tricky - bonus cool!

Admittedly, it was a bit frustrating to have such limited aether, but if you increased it significantly it wouldn't be very challenging. So you'd likely have to incorporate something like a % increase in the enemies' HP for every 100 aether harvested or whatever. That might just be more of a headache than it's worth, I dunno. As it is, aether's not really necessary in order to win so it's basically like a bonus option.

Really enjoyed this battle - imo, this is your best map yet, and each one is better than the last so that's a great pattern which I'm hoping you maintain!

Thanks for the map!! =)

[LappySheep]

I reloaded a few saves along the way then decided to restart, and did much better power-wise the second time. So I was very confused why my defenses were actually worse, no matter what I did. That's when I realized that I hadn't built the roach-whackers early enough and was relying on the pea shooters to kill everything but it was much less efficient, so even though I was producing nearly 20% more power, I was using much more than that to kill everything.

So the variety is super-cool. What's also great is that once you build a defensible base, you don't need to save/pause anymore and progress is pretty smooth and relatively quick after that. It's not a really long slog after that, and some of the attack approaches are slightly tricky - bonus cool!

I expect that part about the save/pausing thing will likely change later, at the moment there are still concepts being developed and introduced first, and I'm expecting the difficulty to go up across the later maps as well. It shouldn't be excessive though, and I've decided on some thresholds of how accessible maps should be for later.

Admittedly, it was a bit frustrating to have such limited aether, but if you increased it significantly it wouldn't be very challenging. So you'd likely have to incorporate something like a % increase in the enemies' HP for every 100 aether harvested or whatever. That might just be more of a headache than it's worth, I dunno. As it is, aether's not really necessary in order to win so it's basically like a bonus option.

At the moment I'm playtesting my maps and tweaking them to be more-than-doable with only a few quality-of-life upgrades. The aether generator is uncapped such that if you really wanted to turtle, I guess you could, but it should be reasonably accessible without needing to AFK overnight to max out upgrades.

That being said, similar to hive units, unit costs, and

Spoiler

modifier artifacts

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being in the style of map-by-map progression, I plan on having the aether generator scale (very slightly, to remove any kind of dependencies on them) in a similar way in later maps as well.

Really enjoyed this battle - imo, this is your best map yet, and each one is better than the last so that's a great pattern which I'm hoping you maintain!

Thanks for the map!! =)

Thank you! The next one will be a bit of a breather, probably not all that exciting on its own, just because I want to use it as a means of introducing another (potentially significant) gimmick for the rest of the planetary system, and in its current state the player can more easily understand how to utlise it. Hopefully the vision is seen.