[game balance] Later updates should be more powerful

[den1251]

Updates that are farther in the game are harder to use (and they actually should be!), but they should deal more damage than early ones. I find myself starting with the first 2 spaceships as they are easier to use and provide more damage. For example flak cannon is almost the exact same as self-navigating rockets, but not self-navigating. It probably should have A LOT bigger explosion radius and bigger damage. Energy saw (as well as ion orbiters) make you loose all your health in the long term. So it should be high risk high reward (bigger damage for the weapons, but also make shield health less and shield recovey faster by default (so you can use it long term)). Shotgun-like weapon is almost useless due to its extremely low damage.
Nova blast is a worse version of ion orbiters (can't hit same meteor twice at once and is not a stable protection from meteors) (it probably should be more frequent and have bigger radius by default). Space mines are just not fun (highly passive meteor-for-money destroyer, while being a weapon). I don't even know how to improve them, but I think changing them to timed bombs with large explosion radius that also deal damage to self (if within range) would be better.

Btw the game is amazing!

[Noodlemire]

I just finished testing every single evolved weapon in the game, so I'll add in some of my own thoughts as well.

The Scatter Shot is useless. Somehow I had a harder time starting runs with it than the stationary landmines. The spread is far too wide and random for the really weak and slow pellets to do things most of the time. Only adding 2 pellets per upgrade also does very little for it. I think it needs a pretty decent damage buff, and it'd be best to just remove the RNG from its spread.
On top of its own issues, it's really weird that Scatter Shot is what uses the Vampiric passive to combine for its evo. These two effects, on their own, have nothing in common, except for how bad they are. It's a weapon that requires both luck and effort to aim, with the passive that requires a lot of concentration to dodge things properly if you ever want to use its benefit, which is seemingly never stronger than the basic regen passive. You can't aim and dodge at the same time. The singular saving grace is that if you do complete the gruelling task of maxing Scatter Shot to get the Evo, Leech Burst immediately wins the game for you. I could just stand still and directly face-tank all the asteroids, and I was never once close to dying until somehow a single hit took me from 100 HP to 0 in a single frame. Other than that, I always healed to full before my I-frames ended.

I'm actually almost fine with how Nova Blaster is now. It has just enough range that I can pretty consistently kill meteors without taking damage even at level 1, and since levels increase its range, it's a perfectly fine starting weapon. It falls off a bit because of how infrequent it is, but having a giant AOE around the player is never bad. That being said, its Evo is pretty useless. Having a lingering second burst doesn't do anything if it triggers at the exact moment the next burst triggers.
With that in mind, it's weird that you obtain it long after the Orbs, which are much harder to start with, but only ever grow more useful as the game progresses. Especially paired with the Cryo Field, which is both a very natural synergy, and an instant-win Evo because asteroids basically never make it past both orb rings if you simply sit still. It would probably be better if the radius of the inner/main orb ring was increased at least enough that asteroid chunks can't spawn on top of you when an orb breaks a big asteroid.

The Energy Saw should have its overall size doubled, It's supposed to be paired with Momentum Drive for its Evo, yet you can never get the saw big enough to avoid taking damage from running the saw full-speed into large meteors. It also has the only Evo in the game that might be a straight downgrade. It's not good to completely remove the saw from the front of the ship, to have it move around you, while also being slower than the ship's top speed. Warp Saw should provide an additional saw that moves, instead of overriding the stationary saw, and the moving blade should be way faster.

Space Mines are so annoying to try to start with, especially at the start of the game when meteors are super slow, and just never become useful. This is another case where they really need their base size increased. The current upgrades you get for it are also barely noticeable, it'd be way better if you could set mines much more frequently. I think ideally, mines the late game should be able to work as consistent back protection, as a compliment to other forward-facing weapons.
Oh and, for the amount of effort it takes to get maxed mines and Lucky Star of all things, and also not die of RNG, the Evo mines should practically be able to wipe half the screen when they explode. It's so hard to even notice when the current Evo does, it's so useless, easily worst in the game.

The Needle Gun feels like the only aim-based weapon that's actually, properly worth the added effort, even by itself, compared to the weapons that auto-aim or just apply AOE damage surrounding the ship. It even far outclasses the Rail Gun that you unlock immediately after it. It's long range, it has spread that increases with upgrades, and its fire rate is always really high. In other words, it's the only aimed weapon that actually counters the main threat of the game, highly intense asteroid spam. Even before you Evo it, all you need is a few levels, Glass Cannon, and at least one level of Cryo Field, and you can just hold forwards forever and win. Nothing can catch up to you (especially if the ship's speed is maxed from the shop), and nothing ahead of you survives the damage-boosted river of needles.

By comparison, the Rail Gun is really bad at countering the game's main threat. Nothing in the game is really worth sniping, and it's nice that it has piercing, but it fires so infrequently it hardly ever matters. Fundamentally, nothing in the game actually calls for this type of attack. Because of that, and because it's the last weapon you unlock, I think it should be way more distinct from the other weapons, even in its base level 1 form.
Instead of just firing sniper rounds, it should shoot a short-range version of its Evo's laser beam, lasting for about a second or so before having to stop for the next second. While firing, the sheer force of the laser should push the ship back some ways, with upgrades reducing the recoil until it's hardly noticeable. The current upgrades increase the Rail Gun's width so little that they don't matter. The Evo itself can remain unchanged, having an infinite range, constant, zero-recoil version of the laser would still be worthwhile even with the buffed version of the base weapon.

Oh and, as a bonus, a couple of the Evo descriptions are broken. The Gambers Mines' description only says "mines with random" without specifying what. Warp Saw's description is literally just "the".

[PubDeer]

Hi! This is a lot of valuable feedback @den1251 and @Noodlemire thank you for that. I did have some trouble designing some weapons and evolutions, and it clearly shows. I've considered making scatter shot pierce, but honestly, I think it's a fun weapon to use as is. I'm making the cone a bit tighter in 1.2 though, that might make scatter shot a little better, and actually nerf its evolution just a bit.

One thing to consider, the big AoE weapons first hit a lot more (they could also hit the fragments that spawn from destroying the asteroids), but that caused the game to slow down considerably, it was just too much to compute, so that's why the big blasts don't obliterate as much as you might expect.

Regarding the railgun, it has seen a lot of iterations in my own playtesting, and I don't like the way it behaves right now (I find the L2-L5 no fun), but this is the best I could come up with. Funny @Noodlemire that you mention making it a short-range version of its evo, as in really early builds that was a weapon in game (called the void ray), but I ultimately nixed it as it just looked kinda weird. I kept the evolution though, and the saw became the spiritual successor to the void ray.

Anyway. I don't want to over correct anything, so my proposal would be to collect more data on the weapon and evolution balance, and crowdsource fixes. The idea is that I want each weapon to be viable (but not necessarily equally powerful) , and that players can have a bit of leeway in their playstyle, but there's no denying that certain combinations right now are plainly best and others are not viable.

Right now I've got my hands full with 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 are on the roadmap, but let's look into making a future build (maybe 1.5) a big balance patch! I hope the game is still fun in the meantime, if a bit lopsided balance-wise :).

Regarding the broken descriptions, I see that there's an issue with truncation. It's fixed in 1.2, thanks for letting me know. I'll be honest, I missed it, as in my debug builds I can just add weapons without picking them up, so I'm skipping the screen that's presented.

[thymaro]

Just to add my two cents: I used Tracer ship with Dash all the time until Dreadnought with Unit-7 which was fun, and then Hedgehog with Unit-7, with which I was able to get to the spaceship that just comes to destroy you. The Specter ship was pretty weak in comparison. It's got a powerful shot, yes, but aiming is hard, so ships with a lesser aiming requirement are more powerful for noobs like me. I'm not a very good gamer, I admit.

On the other hand, if you make later ships more powerful, then the game might just get too easy in midgame. It's quite ok to be so easy towards the end, because then it's not such a grind and it's motivating to progress quickly to get to some kind of ending.

After that, it's just pure fun to try different combinations to progress to the destroyer enemy quicklier or on a more interesting path.

[drjaska]

Hey,

I have found Vampiric Core to have way too low of a range and rate compared to Medic's risk free and static HP regen from Nano Repair. It also feels to have inverse synergy with Glass Cannon as shields are now gone as a health buffer AND it's far harder to even get close enough to anything to have even the smallest amount of healing, at least with most auto-aim weapons.

What weapons does Dash's Momentum Drive enable to cross a specific damage threshold? In my experience it still made every two-shot still be a two-shot, making it just absolutely useless. Is it balanced around being fully upgraded alongside with having full damage upgrades and only then being able to cross some damage thresholds to enable oneshots?

Personally I steered away from every single weapon which required me to aim it as none of them felt strong enough to be a bulldozer and attempting to dodge the faster meteorites just makes the aimed weapons miss. But perhaps I would need several of the aimed weapons to have a bulldozer, I haven't tested that as I have wanted to avoid them with weapons which don't require aiming.