Random missions: Infestation & Balancing

I created a new area for the infestation missions, and hit some balancing issues… a lot of them, to be honest!

The solution ended up being simple, basically the beam cannon was way underpowered, but figuring out what was wrong was not easy…

What happens in this “intuitive balancing” I’m using is that you get an expectation (for example, this area has a difficulty of about 1.2, where 1 is starting difficulty, and 4 is the last areas of the game, so it should be fairly easy), and I have a good weapon (beam cannon, level 3) and good protection (shield, level 1), so this should have been a breeze, but it was just the other way around… I couldn’t get by it…

First I thought it was the health pools, or the shields of the enemies, but I finally decided to use a level 3 machine gun instead of the beam cannon, and that fulfilled my expectations: an easy enough fight!

I should probably do some more “scientific balancing”, which is when I use the formulas for the weapons and check them for their relative damage per second, overheat time, etc, etc, but that’s very boring and some of it is tricky to give a good math basis: for example, the shotgun’s dispersion make it very complex to evaluate exactly what is it’s damage.

Anyway, I still need to finish about 10 areas for this type of mission (other types are also using these areas), and the “Clear” type of mission, besides balancing this up correctly… The spawn numbers, for example, need to be crunched down (these mechanoids spawn in groups of 4, for example, while the corporate forces spawn one at a time, from each spawn point).

Now listening to “The Path of Totality” by “Korn”

Link of the Day: This game looks beautiful and it seems to be going for something different in terms of gameplay and “feel”… Will definitely check this one out!