[Feedback] Formicarium mission 2.1 insane difficulty feels much easier than 2.2 insane difficulty

HofNerd

Colony
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
For some reason it feels like in mission 2.1 on insane difficulty the difficulty does not keep up as well as it does in mission 2.2. The attack waves could get stronger over time faster than they do now. The player can out-pace the level as it is now, the attack waves still force the player to defend but they do not cause enough casualties late in the mission to be any real danger:
 

Rayalot72

Maximum difficulty
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
This mission was much harder when it first came out, and the challenge still makes it somewhat rough. It's gotten a lot easier over time now that there are underground-centric strategies and good overground routes. It seems like your strategy to hold out against the crabs on the surface N1 is what gave you such an edge, which is pretty cool given it's not something anyone's done before from what I'm aware.

Your choice to use mortars is likely a big reason the waves aren't a threat. N2 W3 and N3 W1 and W3 are normally extremely dangerous. I do think this could be easily fixed if the enemies spawned from multiple places or the entire pack spawns from a random location when heading to your nest, as this would prevent you from camping them.

2.2 I have always found far easier. Mortars simply obliterate ants, and there is a load of resources in your nest. It will be extraordinarily hard without upgraded mortars or with rapid-fire, though.
 

HofNerd

Colony
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
It seems like your strategy to hold out against the crabs on the surface N1 is what gave you such an edge, which is pretty cool given it's not something anyone's done before from what I'm aware.
There was no strategy really, I just made sure I did not idle when I could have gotten more food. There is one big point to improve on, I could have had 2 groups of soldiers so greatly increase my gathering especially during the night. (So one group can lock the door while the other slaughters all creatures so I can harvest them with workers.)
 

Scyobi_Empire

Colony
Extremely Helpful Person
Ecosystem Beta Tester
For some reason it feels like in mission 2.1 on insane difficulty the difficulty does not keep up as well as it does in mission 2.2. The attack waves could get stronger over time faster than they do now. The player can out-pace the level as it is now, the attack waves still force the player to defend but they do not cause enough casualties late in the mission to be any real danger:
Wait you can set the challenge level for the Ereptor Challenge's?
 

Rayalot72

Maximum difficulty
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
Wait you can set the challenge level for the Ereptor Challenge's?
As an aside, we will be getting that feature according to John in a dev stream. Essentially, the "middle-road" for the first two challenges has made them too difficult for the more casual players, so they'll be implementing an easier difficulty, which has motivated them to add a harder difficulty as well.
 

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
The old issue of splash damage rendering certain creatures useless. Its not an easy one to solve. Also these levels essentially work on a timer which is something we tried to move away from in the leafcutter levels. Both of those the players skill can speed up victory and I think they make for more satisfying ends.

We used to have issues with the spiders nuking the queen, so many defences have been built in to stop that now! Mortars may need a re-balance one day, though changing such a unit has impacts all over the game.

I have to say your army size by the end there is mad! Very impressive you can keep pace so well!

And finally yes difficulty setting are coming to the other formicarium challenges, they will be in the beta when we re-introduce the campaign.
 

Rayalot72

Maximum difficulty
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
Mortars may need a re-balance one day, though changing such a unit has impacts all over the game.
AoE in general might need a rework. Something like a chance to miss targets once a threshold of creatures are in range of the attack could reduce its effectiveness against large groups, acting as a soft cap (probably adjustable per creature to avoid the promotion of lvl 1 spamming on some levels).
 

HofNerd

Colony
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
AoE in general might need a rework. Something like a chance to miss targets once a threshold of creatures are in range of the attack could reduce its effectiveness against large groups, acting as a soft cap (probably adjustable per creature to avoid the promotion of lvl 1 spamming on some levels).
The rapidfire woodants appear to be highly against the N3 W3 spiderlings, when you don't have the enemies standing in the same spot their damage per second drops dramatically. This is because every time their target dies it resets their firing cycle. (Meaning the firing animation has to start over again. Greatly lowering the ants' rate of fire.) Mortar wood ants are impacted way less by this in late game, as the high density of targets means shots fired deal more damage and the slow rate of fire means more ants have fired a shot before the target changes. (And the overkill shots generally hit a different enemy.)
 

HofNerd

Colony
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
The old issue of splash damage rendering certain creatures useless.
Just an idea:
An area attack could get a limit to the number of creatures it can hit at once, for example:

Mortor wood ant acid splash hits in a group of spiderlings,
from the spiderlings that are in range randomly select x spiderlings, (x being any whole number)
apply the damage to each selected spiderling.

What I meant would look a bit like this, I think?:


int maxHitsAtOnce;//The maximum number of creatures this attack can hit in one hit

getHitCreaturesInArea(ArrayList<Creature> creaturesInArea) {//creaturesInArea is a list of all the creatures that are candidates to get hit
ArrayList<Creature> hitCreatures;//hitCreatures is a list of the creatures that damage and hit effects will apply to
if(creaturesInArea.size() > maxHitsAtOnce) {//If there are more creatures in the attack area than we can hit
hitCreatures = new ArrayList<Creature>();//hitCreatures is a new empty list
while(hitCreatures.size() < maxHitsAtOnce) {//As long as we have not hit enough enemies with the attack
int chosenIndex = Math.round(Math.random() * creaturesInArea.size() + 0.5;//Get a random enemy from the hit candidates
hitCreatures.add(creaturesInArea.get(chosenIndex);//Add the randomly chosen creature to the hit list
creaturesInArea.remove(chosenIndex);//Remove the hit creature from the hit candidates list
}
} else {//In case there are fewer creatures in the attack area than we can hit
hitCreatures = creaturesInArea//Use the creatures in area as hit creatures, hit all creatures in the area
}
for(Creature c: hitCreatures) {//Iterate over all creatures that are hit and apply attack damage and effects on them
c.takeDamage(this.attackDamage);
c.takeEffect(this.attackEffect);
}

}

I love watching the dev streams, watching them inspired me to learn to program, over the last few weeks I am trying to learn some Java. (I am really grateful, as I find programming can feel really rewarding.)

Edit:
The forum text editor did not save spaces...
 
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JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
Limiting the number of creatures hit was actually I thought I have had, more like a cleave than splash. Currently we are using unreals code from AOE damage though it would be simple enough to apply our own. I do think some sort of cap would be beneficial
 

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
Something interesting has come to light! Mortars have no damage fall off (same as ubers actually) ant I thought they did. I am going to try and get the damage falloff properly working for AOE attacks game wide. this will have implications all over the game but what is a beta test for eh? Basically this will case full damage at the epicentre of the attack, and zero at the edge moving linearly across, maybe it will be enough?
 

HofNerd

Colony
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
It seems like your strategy to hold out against the crabs on the surface N1 is what gave you such an edge, which is pretty cool given it's not something anyone's done before from what I'm aware.
I took a slightly different start on day 1 and played at max agression:
Rushing 7 melee 7 ranged woodants and exavating enemies for food was my day 1.
Holding out at N1 against the crabs and hunting other crabs between waves.
And the rest is in the video.
 
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HofNerd

Colony
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
I took a slightly different start on day 1 and played at max agression:
Rushing 7 melee 7 ranged woodants and exavating enemies for food was my day 1.
Holding out at N1 against the crabs and hunting other crabs between waves.
And the rest is in the video.
And now I also have a new pace for Formicarium mission 2.2:
 

HofNerd

Colony
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
I could not help it, I did yet another run of mission 2.1. I think the only danger I felt was from the 3rd wave of night 1. On the map there's lots of food, making the ceiling for exponential growth very high.
 

Durburz

Worker
My run on 2.1 Insane (with or w/o challenge) is to take all the easy food around base entrance and the 2nd ring, then start clearing out the underground. Before the 3 wave in the first night hits, the underground must be empty so you can move out immediatly after killing wave 3 and you can still hunt some creatures before the waterline recedes + your entire army is ready to move out and collect food. You can choose to go full worker + ranged and not invest in soldiers in the first day without difficulties. Reason why I go full worker + ranged is so on day 2 I take all food the on the beach before the night hits. At this point you have so much food you dont even know what to spend it on, so I spend it on soldiers also. Starting from night 2 I fight the waves aboveground and continue taking all food on the beach during the days.
 

Mr_Ced

Colony
With the right build order, all of these levels on Insane require little effort. The only problem with 3.X levels is that they are new and also are fairly random, though I expect that will be accounted for in some build orders.
 
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