Yeah, but if I have to item-use every time a boss monster shows up, something is wrong.bruiserdaemon wrote: Well that happens if only parias is playing the game, against the strongest bosses you just need to use another one of your ( many ) items, like the quadded terminator, the smart bomb, the flying drones, or the quadded AXE ( parias axe does something like 800 per hit when quadded, you can axe down a terminator with just 9-10 hits! ). So much about parias.
Now to the guard spheres, when coupled with 400 health and 200 armor it acts like a sort of invulnerability, i hope you can figure out what to do in order to make it less worth than an actual invulnerability ( which frankly i rarely use, i just need the guard spheres! ).
There's something inerhently wrong about the money too... rich players with all the items get even richer and restock, players who didn't get much money will get poorer because they don't kill enough demons.... again, you should do something for this ( but do not increase the amount of money for everyone, that'll make the game so much easier... you should make people carry less items instead, so that a player without money has a fair chance to make some ). The difference between a rich player and a poor player is WAY too much i hope you understand ).
Remember that the best solutions are often the simpler ones, there's absolutely no need to strain yourself with complicated solutions!
While you are right that Stronghold suffers from "Rich get richer" problems (and that programmatically is really really hard to avoid), 2/3rds of the money, on average, comes from things that aren't killing demons: The mission completion bonuses and then the mission bonuses (such as Godlike (no damage taken, worth $5000) or team bonuses such as Core Perfector (core doesn't take any damage)).
Also, if you're good enough, you can catch up - as long as the richest guy isn't also the best player (in which case he's up top from earning it), you can actually out-race him; unless he's been on server for 4 straight tiers, accumulating cash (which he might have; but it's unlikely), you most likely can catch up.
Oh right, that's another thing: You lose all cash when you leave the server or even when you switch classes, so most of the time people don't accumulate that much; because most of the people aren't playing to win - they're playing to enjoy themselves, and if they aren't good enough to take up they're 0.95 of the monster quota, I don't want to shut them down because of that.
The Max Health Bonus and Max Armor Bonus are two items I've wanted to plain nuke out of the game entirely - because they are
A: POTENTIALLY unbalanced,
B: Have bad interactions with the game in multiplayer, and most importantly,
C: Are buggy in multiplayer.
In multiplayer, half the time the thing gives you 5%, then you enter the battlefield and it becomes 1% - 200% becomes 120%
And I can't even tell you how it works because ******* strife native functions.
And actually, I was talking with dekw (brother, tester, and other half of the dev team), and here's one of the things we've found is that the ideology of being able to cheese any mission through item use, while somewhat cheap, does have a plus side: It means that if the team (which is, again, usually composed of both good players and not-so-good ones) gets stuck, they can actually still get through via farming a few missions first, then trying the hard one:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... onFeatures