I am enjoying this game, you've done an awesome job.
Over the last two days, I've been attempting to complete 2.1 on Insane. 1.1 and 1.2 were very challenging, but I've hit a wall with 2.1. Since I've spent ~20 hours attempting it, I thought I would provide my feedback to you, as I saw in another post (where someone had said they completed this) that you were looking for details to help with balance.
General Strategies I've Tried:
For the first day/night, I rotated through building all melee, all ranged (mortar and rapid), and all worker.
Player Unit Type/role:
-melee ant-
I found that worker ants are not as good at tanking as the melee, but at nearly 1/3 the cost, workers seem to do a better job overall of tanking. Melee units damage (at level 1) is not worth discussing. By way of example, the 4 larva to the left of the queen wiped my colony, when I tried using a group of 5 melee units. (They managed to take down 2 before I ran out of food).
When focusing on melee ants at the start of the mission, I've found there's too much time wasted. More ants to gather more food faster is essential (workers). Also, the lack of DPS of the melee ant means that you are also required to create ranged ants as well. When battling the enemy melee ants on the beach, these melee ants cannot win. It takes about 3 melee ants to defeat 1 enemy melee ant. (perhaps the enemy melee units are level3?). With ranged ants, they are evenly matched. So something is different with the melee.
-ranged ant-
There doesn't seem to be a noticeable difference between mortar/rapid. I can see that mortar shots miss if the target moves, but I'm unable to confirm if rapid fire shots miss or not. Damage output seems well balanced. (mortar/rapid duels with the other ants on the beach are almost always ended with the ants killing each other at the same time). Mortar would be far better once leveled up, however, leveling ants up is not very effective (more later). When building exclusively ranged ants, I fared better than with the melee, however, it is still too slow to get rolling. 2 ranged ants are required to defeat an enemy melee ant. So, again, I think the enemy melee unit must be a higher rank, or otherwise buffed/different.
-worker ant-
Using this ant almost exclusively for the first day became my ultimate method of starting 2.1 (more on that later). While they do no damage, and cannot take a hit, many of the critters will kill a melee ant in 2-3 hits. So since 2-3 of these can be spawned for the cost of a single melee ant, the swarm/zerg benefit these offer seems to be superior to the melee unit. The base waves demonstrate that these ants provide a great barrier of ends resurrected ants (if you build enough of them) and allow you to turn food into shield power (more on that later).
Swarm size vs. upgrade:
I am unable to provide any accurate data on how well this mission plays out with upgrades, as I was never able to accumulate enough food to attempt this the first night. Playing the mission on EASY I was able to upgrade my units after building a group of 5, and they became quite effective. However, doing this on Insane mode would mean that I would be extremely lucky to have 5 level 2 units, and while they are no doubt much more effective, they are simply overwhelmed by numbers.
Enemy Units:
-Enemy melee(worker?) ant-
This unit is quite powerful. I would equate it to a level3 of the player ant. Even if your workers are set to "no attack" these units can lock up ~3 of your worker ants. They eventually start to pile up in a cluster and cause massive food loss/slowdown for your gathering. For this reason, I proceed down the hill to the right and left, and in-between each section, I pull all ants inside to lose aggro on the workers. I also let the ants bulk up in a safe spot before sending them after the food, so as much of the food as possible can be cleaned in a single pass and avoid log-jams.
-Enemy ranged-
The opposing ants will have the opposite of whatever type you choose (rapid/mortar). They are identical to your own ants as far as I can tell (level1).
-Tiger Beetles-
For the first night, I try to dash-grab the top row cluster of food, timing it in-between their patrols. On EASY mode, I was able to play with them a bit testing level3 ants against them. 3 ranged ants can take out a single small one (if they are spread out). At level1 though, you should wait until day2 when your swarm size is larger.
-Snails-
They have a neat little trick, they go in their shell and heal. How fun! On Insane mode, It seems they can do 2-3 hits on a melee ant to kill it, workers are dead in 1. On easy mode, I tried level3 workers, they seem to be able to take 2-3 hits. A level 3 worker is likely very close to a level1 melee.
-Spiders-
Above ground, they target your ants. In your nest, they target your brood tiles/random ants and then your queen. They also absolutely melt anything. I made it to the spiders a few times on Insane mode, one of them was with melee ants as tanks instead of workers. They melted the melee ants just as fast as workers, only there were so many less of them, that the colony was wiped out in seconds.
Bootstrap Strategy(Insane):
I played around varying the quantity I would create before I started building ranged ants. somewhere around 14-18 seems to be the best mix, leaving the starting group of 7 at base, or creating a smaller group of 4 to tend the base, and including the original 7 with the raiding party.
The seeds at the beginning are a good place to measure when you should stop building workers. Raiding the beach seems to less rewarding than it should. Due to the attrition of ants along the way, it's challenging to get more than 4-5 ranged unites built (with food tiles being the only other expense) in time for the tide to start coming in. At this point, I typically would have 3, maybe 4. If I skimp on workers, I can get 5, as long as I'm really careful to micromanage my gathering and dodge my ants around to avoid encountering other ants.
When building no ants, I can have around 8 or 9 built when the tide starts coming in. While this is good enough to handle the first two waves of snails, it's no match for the third. And often, the third wave comes while the second is still being fought.
When the tide first comes:
This is usually my queue to make a last grab at the pile of bits on the very top row. Timing the rush of my 20 or so worker ants to avoid the beetles. This food is usually the key component of the next part in my strategy.
With 4-5 ranged ants built, and before the second tide starts, I begin trying to clear the nest area, starting to the left of the queen. The 4 larva bugs are easily taken out with 4 ranged, if you have less than that at this point, you're in a lot of trouble..
Then I clear down at the bottom left. (Note: When I tested using all ranged ants, no workers to tank, I moved them up north of the queen, and let the queen tank them). With this food, I build more ranged. Getting to 8 for the first snail is about average for me.
If I have acted quickly enough, I open up the far left/middle pocket of enemies, and take them out just as the first snail is coming in. This timing is pretty much the deciding factor on whether or not I have a chance of surviving wave 3. I either bulk up a smaller worker group, or create a new worker group to set on collecting the food from the empty enemy nests while the rest of the snail battling continues.
With ~21 workers, wave 3 can be tanked effectively. But you must also have ~300+ food in reserve to keep them respawning, and usually I need to create a second group to back up the 7 starter workers (or have a dedicated group gathering food as you fight).
I wasn't ever able to complete the 3rd wave without at least 12 ranged ants. Even 14-16 is not enough if you don't have a huge food reserve, and at least 21+ workers to act as your shield. In one playthrough, I used melee ants as my tanks. This was effective, and I made it through wave 3 with rather modest numbers (~9ranged/9melee), but the spiders came and proved how useless quality is for this mission. It's all about quantity.
Another thing that causes wave3 failure is if they get to close to the queen. The workers refuse to carry food and respawn your meat shield, so even if you are down to 2 snails, and have plenty of food, it's over.
Of all of my attempts, 9/10 of them ended on the 3rd snail wave of the first night. Of my second night attempts, only 2 of them survived the second spider attack and made it to wave3. Of the attempts where I was able to make it to the second day, I was basically able to scrape the entire ant-side of the beach clean, leaving the bottom layer and left side alone (beetles were too numerous to risk, and too tedious to try to pick off one at a time). This food was converted in to as many as 37 ranged units, and ~50 worker ants to tank (this was my best attempt). Placing the worker ants in the no-marker group to leave them as spread around the colony as possible, I lasted roughly 15 seconds on wave3 of the spiders. (Which was better than the 7 seconds I lasted when trying it with 30 ranged and 20 melee to tank, my second best attempt.
Strategy on HARD mode:
Very similar to Insane, but you have a bit more wiggle room. Wave3/night3 seems to require 70+ ranged/70+ melee/50+workers. I actually played hard mode about half as long as I tried insane (and did hard mode first). I think if I went back to hard now, I would do well there.
Bugs:
Once I decided to give up trying Insane, I switched to easy to feel better. Using the same strategies I used on insane, I ended up continuing my play after beating the mission. This is where I started to find some bugs, one of which broke my playthrough.
-Objective Tracker-
This may/may not be a bug, but when my game became unplayable (details on that in a bit) I noted that the objective tracker was going backwards. It said `-4` as the number of nights to survive.
-Can't harvest spiders-
I have some screenshots to show, but I will describe them here. At some point spiders ceased to be harvestable. This left their corpses behind. It was a bit annoying, but I didn't actually need the food.
-Ants bugged out-
Again, I have a screenshot but I'll describe it. The 'spawn tunnel' where the wave critters come out of at night can be entered by ants. I camped them in there to bottleneck the thousands of spiders that come out (hyperbole) and some of them became stuck in there (I believe they were trapped by spider corpses, but cannot see to be sure). I also noticed an ant trapped in the base, which looks like it might be the same ant, if the location matches the z-level of the 'spawn cave'.
-Queen bugged out-
The queen was surrounded by so many spider corpses that no more ants could be spawned (screenshot shows this) I ended up drowning them all to see if there was any way to undo the damage (Assuming unit count is likely where things went out of spec, and caused some sort of program glitch). Not only could no more worker ants be spawned, but when the waves of enemies came, they were unable to attack the queen. At some point, the spiders killed an ant that was trapped under the queen, and opened up a path to attack/kill her. But those spiders ended up stuck inside the spot.
Player Ant Suggestions:
-control groups-
I would like to see an option like 'do not attack' for 'do not defend yourself' to completely disable an ant from stopping to fight.
I would also like to see the default group have an option that is similar. This way units will still carry food to the eggs, even when the enemies are close to the queen.
-Targetting-
On insane mode, with the snails, I noticed that one of the biggest "I want to break something" issues was that all of the snails were being targetted randomly/evenly. One of my attempts, all of the snails were down to ~10% health, and I finally crumbled under the food pressure and the colony was lost. Some sort of preference to target things based on health would be great here. Unless this is exactly how you guy want targetting to work, in which case, lower the number of snails. :-0
-Balance-
My thoughts here may be skewed by my experiences with Insane mode (which may not be balanced the way you like) but overall I think most of the player ants are reasonable well balanced, except for the melee ant. Maybe it should just cost less? It's barely more effective (until leveled) than a worker in actual play, and that doesn't seem like what I saw with the black ants in the earlier missions. Those melee ants were pretty tough.
In conclusion:
Your game has captured my interest so effectively that I spent my whole weekend playing this one mission. I'm eager for more levels, and you have created a helluva game here. Great work everyone! *claps*
Images:
-Spiders stuck in/on queens corpse- (other spiders moved, these stayed still/stuck)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1235175604
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1235175658
-Lost Ant-
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1235175685
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1235175709
Over the last two days, I've been attempting to complete 2.1 on Insane. 1.1 and 1.2 were very challenging, but I've hit a wall with 2.1. Since I've spent ~20 hours attempting it, I thought I would provide my feedback to you, as I saw in another post (where someone had said they completed this) that you were looking for details to help with balance.
General Strategies I've Tried:
For the first day/night, I rotated through building all melee, all ranged (mortar and rapid), and all worker.
Player Unit Type/role:
-melee ant-
I found that worker ants are not as good at tanking as the melee, but at nearly 1/3 the cost, workers seem to do a better job overall of tanking. Melee units damage (at level 1) is not worth discussing. By way of example, the 4 larva to the left of the queen wiped my colony, when I tried using a group of 5 melee units. (They managed to take down 2 before I ran out of food).
When focusing on melee ants at the start of the mission, I've found there's too much time wasted. More ants to gather more food faster is essential (workers). Also, the lack of DPS of the melee ant means that you are also required to create ranged ants as well. When battling the enemy melee ants on the beach, these melee ants cannot win. It takes about 3 melee ants to defeat 1 enemy melee ant. (perhaps the enemy melee units are level3?). With ranged ants, they are evenly matched. So something is different with the melee.
-ranged ant-
There doesn't seem to be a noticeable difference between mortar/rapid. I can see that mortar shots miss if the target moves, but I'm unable to confirm if rapid fire shots miss or not. Damage output seems well balanced. (mortar/rapid duels with the other ants on the beach are almost always ended with the ants killing each other at the same time). Mortar would be far better once leveled up, however, leveling ants up is not very effective (more later). When building exclusively ranged ants, I fared better than with the melee, however, it is still too slow to get rolling. 2 ranged ants are required to defeat an enemy melee ant. So, again, I think the enemy melee unit must be a higher rank, or otherwise buffed/different.
-worker ant-
Using this ant almost exclusively for the first day became my ultimate method of starting 2.1 (more on that later). While they do no damage, and cannot take a hit, many of the critters will kill a melee ant in 2-3 hits. So since 2-3 of these can be spawned for the cost of a single melee ant, the swarm/zerg benefit these offer seems to be superior to the melee unit. The base waves demonstrate that these ants provide a great barrier of ends resurrected ants (if you build enough of them) and allow you to turn food into shield power (more on that later).
Swarm size vs. upgrade:
I am unable to provide any accurate data on how well this mission plays out with upgrades, as I was never able to accumulate enough food to attempt this the first night. Playing the mission on EASY I was able to upgrade my units after building a group of 5, and they became quite effective. However, doing this on Insane mode would mean that I would be extremely lucky to have 5 level 2 units, and while they are no doubt much more effective, they are simply overwhelmed by numbers.
Enemy Units:
-Enemy melee(worker?) ant-
This unit is quite powerful. I would equate it to a level3 of the player ant. Even if your workers are set to "no attack" these units can lock up ~3 of your worker ants. They eventually start to pile up in a cluster and cause massive food loss/slowdown for your gathering. For this reason, I proceed down the hill to the right and left, and in-between each section, I pull all ants inside to lose aggro on the workers. I also let the ants bulk up in a safe spot before sending them after the food, so as much of the food as possible can be cleaned in a single pass and avoid log-jams.
-Enemy ranged-
The opposing ants will have the opposite of whatever type you choose (rapid/mortar). They are identical to your own ants as far as I can tell (level1).
-Tiger Beetles-
For the first night, I try to dash-grab the top row cluster of food, timing it in-between their patrols. On EASY mode, I was able to play with them a bit testing level3 ants against them. 3 ranged ants can take out a single small one (if they are spread out). At level1 though, you should wait until day2 when your swarm size is larger.
-Snails-
They have a neat little trick, they go in their shell and heal. How fun! On Insane mode, It seems they can do 2-3 hits on a melee ant to kill it, workers are dead in 1. On easy mode, I tried level3 workers, they seem to be able to take 2-3 hits. A level 3 worker is likely very close to a level1 melee.
-Spiders-
Above ground, they target your ants. In your nest, they target your brood tiles/random ants and then your queen. They also absolutely melt anything. I made it to the spiders a few times on Insane mode, one of them was with melee ants as tanks instead of workers. They melted the melee ants just as fast as workers, only there were so many less of them, that the colony was wiped out in seconds.
Bootstrap Strategy(Insane):
I played around varying the quantity I would create before I started building ranged ants. somewhere around 14-18 seems to be the best mix, leaving the starting group of 7 at base, or creating a smaller group of 4 to tend the base, and including the original 7 with the raiding party.
The seeds at the beginning are a good place to measure when you should stop building workers. Raiding the beach seems to less rewarding than it should. Due to the attrition of ants along the way, it's challenging to get more than 4-5 ranged unites built (with food tiles being the only other expense) in time for the tide to start coming in. At this point, I typically would have 3, maybe 4. If I skimp on workers, I can get 5, as long as I'm really careful to micromanage my gathering and dodge my ants around to avoid encountering other ants.
When building no ants, I can have around 8 or 9 built when the tide starts coming in. While this is good enough to handle the first two waves of snails, it's no match for the third. And often, the third wave comes while the second is still being fought.
When the tide first comes:
This is usually my queue to make a last grab at the pile of bits on the very top row. Timing the rush of my 20 or so worker ants to avoid the beetles. This food is usually the key component of the next part in my strategy.
With 4-5 ranged ants built, and before the second tide starts, I begin trying to clear the nest area, starting to the left of the queen. The 4 larva bugs are easily taken out with 4 ranged, if you have less than that at this point, you're in a lot of trouble..
Then I clear down at the bottom left. (Note: When I tested using all ranged ants, no workers to tank, I moved them up north of the queen, and let the queen tank them). With this food, I build more ranged. Getting to 8 for the first snail is about average for me.
If I have acted quickly enough, I open up the far left/middle pocket of enemies, and take them out just as the first snail is coming in. This timing is pretty much the deciding factor on whether or not I have a chance of surviving wave 3. I either bulk up a smaller worker group, or create a new worker group to set on collecting the food from the empty enemy nests while the rest of the snail battling continues.
With ~21 workers, wave 3 can be tanked effectively. But you must also have ~300+ food in reserve to keep them respawning, and usually I need to create a second group to back up the 7 starter workers (or have a dedicated group gathering food as you fight).
I wasn't ever able to complete the 3rd wave without at least 12 ranged ants. Even 14-16 is not enough if you don't have a huge food reserve, and at least 21+ workers to act as your shield. In one playthrough, I used melee ants as my tanks. This was effective, and I made it through wave 3 with rather modest numbers (~9ranged/9melee), but the spiders came and proved how useless quality is for this mission. It's all about quantity.
Another thing that causes wave3 failure is if they get to close to the queen. The workers refuse to carry food and respawn your meat shield, so even if you are down to 2 snails, and have plenty of food, it's over.
Of all of my attempts, 9/10 of them ended on the 3rd snail wave of the first night. Of my second night attempts, only 2 of them survived the second spider attack and made it to wave3. Of the attempts where I was able to make it to the second day, I was basically able to scrape the entire ant-side of the beach clean, leaving the bottom layer and left side alone (beetles were too numerous to risk, and too tedious to try to pick off one at a time). This food was converted in to as many as 37 ranged units, and ~50 worker ants to tank (this was my best attempt). Placing the worker ants in the no-marker group to leave them as spread around the colony as possible, I lasted roughly 15 seconds on wave3 of the spiders. (Which was better than the 7 seconds I lasted when trying it with 30 ranged and 20 melee to tank, my second best attempt.
Strategy on HARD mode:
Very similar to Insane, but you have a bit more wiggle room. Wave3/night3 seems to require 70+ ranged/70+ melee/50+workers. I actually played hard mode about half as long as I tried insane (and did hard mode first). I think if I went back to hard now, I would do well there.
Bugs:
Once I decided to give up trying Insane, I switched to easy to feel better. Using the same strategies I used on insane, I ended up continuing my play after beating the mission. This is where I started to find some bugs, one of which broke my playthrough.
-Objective Tracker-
This may/may not be a bug, but when my game became unplayable (details on that in a bit) I noted that the objective tracker was going backwards. It said `-4` as the number of nights to survive.
-Can't harvest spiders-
I have some screenshots to show, but I will describe them here. At some point spiders ceased to be harvestable. This left their corpses behind. It was a bit annoying, but I didn't actually need the food.
-Ants bugged out-
Again, I have a screenshot but I'll describe it. The 'spawn tunnel' where the wave critters come out of at night can be entered by ants. I camped them in there to bottleneck the thousands of spiders that come out (hyperbole) and some of them became stuck in there (I believe they were trapped by spider corpses, but cannot see to be sure). I also noticed an ant trapped in the base, which looks like it might be the same ant, if the location matches the z-level of the 'spawn cave'.
-Queen bugged out-
The queen was surrounded by so many spider corpses that no more ants could be spawned (screenshot shows this) I ended up drowning them all to see if there was any way to undo the damage (Assuming unit count is likely where things went out of spec, and caused some sort of program glitch). Not only could no more worker ants be spawned, but when the waves of enemies came, they were unable to attack the queen. At some point, the spiders killed an ant that was trapped under the queen, and opened up a path to attack/kill her. But those spiders ended up stuck inside the spot.
Player Ant Suggestions:
-control groups-
I would like to see an option like 'do not attack' for 'do not defend yourself' to completely disable an ant from stopping to fight.
I would also like to see the default group have an option that is similar. This way units will still carry food to the eggs, even when the enemies are close to the queen.
-Targetting-
On insane mode, with the snails, I noticed that one of the biggest "I want to break something" issues was that all of the snails were being targetted randomly/evenly. One of my attempts, all of the snails were down to ~10% health, and I finally crumbled under the food pressure and the colony was lost. Some sort of preference to target things based on health would be great here. Unless this is exactly how you guy want targetting to work, in which case, lower the number of snails. :-0
-Balance-
My thoughts here may be skewed by my experiences with Insane mode (which may not be balanced the way you like) but overall I think most of the player ants are reasonable well balanced, except for the melee ant. Maybe it should just cost less? It's barely more effective (until leveled) than a worker in actual play, and that doesn't seem like what I saw with the black ants in the earlier missions. Those melee ants were pretty tough.
In conclusion:
Your game has captured my interest so effectively that I spent my whole weekend playing this one mission. I'm eager for more levels, and you have created a helluva game here. Great work everyone! *claps*
Images:
-Spiders stuck in/on queens corpse- (other spiders moved, these stayed still/stuck)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1235175604
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1235175658
-Lost Ant-
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1235175685
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1235175709
