Ah jeeze. I apologize for the delay here... life has been pretty busy lately (I technically have three jobs!! Woo!!) so this kind of took a back seat for a little while. Now without further adieu...
[spoiler='Ivan's Post @ 03-02-2015 12:12 AM']
Ivan wrote:
Mr. Repo wrote:
Ah shoot you're right about that. It's not being used and it should be. I'll fix that guy too.
Still I'm appreciative of you finding all these bugs no one would have otherwise noticed. Definitely helps out a lot.
The only reason I am able to find is we going "oh that unit is useless" on TS, and I'm like "hmm wonder why" and trying to find some actual data to back it up. Another weak upgrade that comes to my mind is the Heretic's mummy upgrade. It's randomly spread and it does very little damage to be of any use IMO, for it's price that is.
You might also want to decrease the turret retrofit cost by 1 mana as it ends up costing the same, 8/1 + 3 => 11/1.
My other question is, why does the virus ground upgrade actually increase their units' cost? The upgrade adds some health, thats good, but the units are already very costly and mostly very situational. I don't get the balance reasons behind this. (Perhaps the treadmill gets stronger very much, I can relate to this, but the meshwalker is very crappy regardless at melee/mid range) A similar complaint I have is for the Leader. This time I've seen it being used. I don't know where you brought up that DPS fact the other day, but he sure as hell does not use that yellow stream attack as often. I can compare this unit to a unit of similar task: Death Wyvern. Cheaper and more consistent compared to the Leader. IMO, the whole red blaster attack it has is pathetic, I saw the damage value on that. I think the average value is less than 50, which is quite horrible and it retorts to this attack quite often for some reason. Now, I won't deny, that yellow projectile stream attack is actually VERY good, but it doesn't even use this attack very often to make a difference. I think Leader could use some treatment. Maybe it could use the red projectile attack if and only if it's target is a player, as well as making the projectile very fast?
An ages old complaint of mine, Heresiarch. Why is his useless flame head attack still useless? :P It just runs up to walls or gets stuck on the floor to make that awful bounce noise non-stop. I know his attacks are hard-coded, but surely something can be done about it.
And finally, I suggest you take a look at certain projectiles in Virus' units, mainly the explosive ones. They have these weird "2.1, 2.4" etc numbers that are the multipliers for damage values. Those are not only redundant, but look weird too. 2.1 only differs from 2.0 at certain values, which makes them bigger by only 1 (and 2 on some cases). IMO, they should be rounded or changed altogether. An 0.1 is not enough to give you any sort of advantage on the battlefield.
Also there seems to be a mistake on Suppression and Suppression2 types. The latter has damagefactors on normal LMS but the former has some only in TLMS modes. Some monsters like Chaingunguy and Mancubus use the former, but they have no effect on anything in LMS. Can you correct this?
Programmer also seems to be much rarely attack now compared to before, it seems to be mostly on just pure retreat instead of attacking even enemies surrounding it. Might change stances more often perhaps?
Disagree about the Mummy upgrade. For the cost, and in melee swarms it's I feel it's useful to some degree.
Good point about the Turrets. Will adjust the cost.
Virus monsters that are affected by the ground upgrade get health for level 2, and even more health plus '+MISSILEMORE' for level 3. Honestly I agree about the cost increase being weird compared to other upgrades and it should be edited to be consistent.
About the Leader... I don't use DPS to measure these things, but if anything I said it was more useful overall. I know for a fact the leader can hold its own against a Wyvern now plus the cost difference is negligible at this point. I believe the Wyvern is 70/55 and the Leader is 75/50. The chance for the stream or blaster is half and half at this point, but I did see the blaster shot and that is pitifully low and should be reworked. Doing this will require me to rebalance the Leader so consider that done.
Wellll for the Cubesiarch's flame head, it's screwed up because as you said the native 'A_SorcFX1Seek.' I have no idea how to tackle this, but if you have any ideas please let me know.
Actually the damage values for projectiles are all over the place because I never directly changed them from the old releases. I only adjusted the values of certain monsters and moved on where as the melee values were actually worked out from the ground up and completely rebalanced. This is just an example of this not being changed and is long overdue to be made a lot more cohesive.
I actually was informed of the strange suppression 2 and 3 damagetypes about a week AFTER 3.0 was released conveniently. This is a leftover from TZDWars and the old 302 release and will be fixed.
Thanks for the feedback on the Programmer. This is exactly what I wanted and I'll keep trying to figure out what to do from here.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler='Grymmoire's Post @ 03-02-2015 08:31 AM']
Grymmoire wrote:
I've been looking at the DECORATE recently and I noticed that the ghost mummy is actually cheaper if you use the altfire from the normal mummy summoner. It checks for 4 mana but then only takes 3. If you use the regular ghost mummy summoner you spend the full 4 mana.
In addition, I dunno if this issue has been addressed or brought to attention yet, but dual pain elementals only summon 1 lost soul missile. They are frozen in place for the duration of time that they would fire a second lost soul, but they don't actually fire it. That makes dual pain elementals completely useless.
I second Ivan's suppression mention. I noticed it some time ago but I wasn't sure if there were actually two different forms of suppression damage going around, but as it turns out there is only one. Monsters that would take additional damage from suppression take it from "suppression2" though - of which I can't seem to find. Even if there are two forms going around, it doesn't make sense to advertise suppression monsters as doing extra damage that isn't consistent across all suppression dealing monsters.
Oof, thanks for pointing that out. I'd never notice the cost being off and it'll be fixed for the next release.
It looks like the Elementals had the tics doubled instead of the 'F' frame on the soul missiles. Again, thanks for pointing this out as well.
I can relate to not being 100% sure because when I combined and redid all the decorate, I didn't really check specifics for Suppression 1 & 2 and made the same assumption that it might be useful. As stated above, this will be fixed too.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler='fr blood's post @ 03-02-2015, 03:09 PM']
fr blood wrote:
BTW I still don't understand the goal of the defense drone.
Me either. I think it's the only useless monster in the game and is long overdue to be redone. I do have plans for redoing this guy though and will take a crack at it soon.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler='Ivan's post @ 03-05-2015, 05:49 AM']
Ivan wrote:
Another complaint: Why are treadmills resurrectable? AFAIK no other blue mana unit is resurrectable. This can give the upperhand quite easily. Oh and virus teleport projectile can hurt monsters, I've seen this abused to distract projectile suppression units that constantly attack to distract them or even hurt/kite melee units. This might need some attention.
The truth? Treadmills have always been able to be resurrected so I never touched it for that reason. Mana color aside, it's cost still isn't outrageously out of place compared to monsters that can be revived... even while they're level 3. Sniper Templars and Homing Serpents are within it's price range and yes, it can be argued that preretrofitted monsters are a different beast here, but they are also pretty lethal themselves. I just don't agree this needs to be changed is all.
The same goes for all monster removers and teleporters actually. They're all in desperate need to be damagetyped off. Thanks for the reminder.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler='Ru5tK1ng's post @ 03-05-2015, 08:38 AM']
Ru5tK1ng wrote:
Another note after playing a few games, the Programmer seems to be really passive. I understand this was done to keep him from having a deathwish and charging into an army solo, however it seems he went from one extremity to another. The Programmer now retreats faster than a Frenchman when confronted by even single units. I would suggest either making it so he attacks while retreating or making him slightly more aggressive. Additionally, his lightning attack is a bit weak compared to other Strife Heroes and could use a little buff. The only other option would be to make him a normal unit and adjust mana costs appropriately if his current behavior is to remain the same.
I like the retreat analogy. As I said in a post above, yeah I'm definitely going to consider all this and definitely appreciate the feedback here because that is exactly what I wanted. This will come in handy for sure.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler='Ivan's post @ 03-05-2015, 09:00 AM']
Ivan wrote:
Also why does the super cyclops not hit ghosts from far? This isn't mentioned on tooltips.
The Super Cyclops has always had +THRUGHOST -THRUGHOST on the projectile every 8 tics so I wouldn't say it doesn't hit ghosts from afar. This is noted on the fullscreen hud cost, but not on the HUD messages so I'll definitely fix it. Thanks for pointing it out.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler='Ivan's post @ 03-07-2015, 03:54 PM']
Ivan wrote:
A little problem I noticed: You should not use RANDOMIZE AT ANY TIME on ANY actor that is NOT CLIENTSIDE. That shit fucks up things! It's always fucked in many projectiles or actors, so don't use it. (I know it from RoTT TC port to Zandronum, it's unstable here.) Same with A_BishopMissileWeave, although it's not too bad; it was combined with RANDOMIZED and it can turn horrible. This makes the missiles "warp" randomly for some people. Please also take the time to remove this flag from your projectiles.
Has this been confirmed on the tracker? I only ask because I'm pretty sure the Doom projectiles by default have +RANDOMIZED so I'm admittedly kinda skeptical on this. If you can show me confirmation then I'll definitely take the time to remove the flag from the projectiles.
[/spoiler]
[spoiler='ARGENTVM's post @ 03-11-2015, 11:57 AM']
ARGENTVM wrote:
I've been having an issue with ZDooM Wars where the game will occasionally crash after the client being open without an error report generating:
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]
Basically, this has been happening with the client being open for long periods of time and usually when I am in-game. It seems to happen towards the climax of games and occurs upon an item pickup / summoning / et cetera without any sort of warning except for a three second pause upon the final action.
I can supply a demo upon request of a game where it happened (the demo does not captures that actual crash, but shows the final action that occurred when the game crashed), but it will be a large download.
I'm actually interested in this. This used to sometimes happen to me randomly a long time ago, but it's been eons since I've experienced it. Please upload the demo because I'm curious to see if the mods causing it and if it would be possible to fix on my end.
[/spoiler]
Oh and expect there to be a huge announcement regarding 3.1 next week. That's all for now folks!