Hi Andy
First off, thanks for a great and proper game, although my social life does not quite agree with it. I have a ton of questions about lots of stuff, but Ill separate them into proper threads if I dont find out the answers myself, so Ill stick to the topic.
It would be nice if you could speed up the game a bit, I dont mind long games, but its getting a bit out of hand when you need to set off 10-15-20 hours to do a proper 500 wave bonus-round run, or 2-3 days atleast with playing "in-between" stuff. Not to mention at my noob stage, I have to spend those hours just to figure out if the currently tested tactic works at all, and then start all over again. Im currently kind of stuck at 15000ish seconds and cant really figure out how to properly scale over that bit. I got lots of ideas but cant be bothered to test them as of now, as it takes me forever each time.
The scepter helps a bit ofcourse, but you cant really use that all the time if you want to micromanage/optimize hang time. Also on that note, I feel that when using the scepter the towers seems to be slightly less effective? The only places Ive gotten to actually "check" this is when I get 2 identical waves after each other, then I run the scepter on the first, and no scepter on the second, with no changes to any towers. The second wave, even with one wave count higher, always gets killed earlier than the first wave. Ill admit Ive only tested this about 5-6 times and got no data what so ever to back it up...
Anyways, a slight speed up on the game as a whole would not hurt in my opinion. The game is great as it is, just very very very very very very very time consuming :)
Ontrose
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Hello Kyrandia!
Welcome to the forums ;) if this is your first post.
I did not test it personally, but some others had a topic about it. It was maybe about 2 weeks ago, they discussed different framerates and their impact and that coupled with the use of scepter etc...
Did not really read it all, just flew over but i think, there was something with attack speeds and hit ratio etc, and a conclusion, that if your close to maximum hit amount (maximum hits/second) that speeding up you lose an attack or something... Might be totally wrong, you have to search it yourself =)
About other questions: Feel free to ask. Maybe we can extend it to some kind of FAQ? I guess there are many people out there with the same question, and i probably can answere a few of them ,) and if not, others can.
Romeo
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Nah Ontrose, you're pretty much spot on.
By the time you get to such an obscene hit-per-second ratio that you're almost maxed out, doubling the amount of time in between frames essentially axes off one of the two frames you could've used. It's not a huge deal at lower hit-per-second attacks, but if you've got a Shadow belting out over ten attacks per second, using the Scepter will cost you.
As for the speed thing, part of me wants to agree, but on the other hand, I love the long game aspect of it (I come from primarily 4X games, which can take days of dedicated playing to complete). That said, the rewards for playing so long always feel so low as well, which means I often end up dropping back down to 200 rounds (Which I dislike having to do). Maybe scaled rewards could be nice?
Hi Romeo and Ontrose
Thanks for the replies :)
I can see the "maxed out" speed argument, but most of my tests are done in the 1-50 rounds. Just starting a game with the sole intention to find out and waited for 2 "equal" waves to check the result (i do that with alot of stuff in the game). The result have been pretty much one-sided to less damage and/or speed with scepter than without. Typically this has to do with rounding to a fixed set of decimals (or worse no decimals) in programming, the lesser decimals the more of a difference it will make, but I cant really see that beeing the case here as Ive had shadows with close to 3000 speed and they seem to keep up. Im assuming the game does calculations on "ticks" and not frames, ie. 120 ticks per second would give every 4th tick rendered on 30 fps, and every 2nd tick rendered on 60 fps. Meaning that your fps setting should not interfere with actual game operations, it just controls the rendering workload. Just guesswork from my side tho...
Its just strange, im pretty sure it shouldnt be like this, but in my case atleast it seems to be close to evident. Ill do some more tests once im done with this 500 wave bonus run...should be in a few days....if only the game was speed up a bit ;)
Romeo
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Rank: -
I don't mean to come across as condescending, so please don't take offence, but you are considering both Hero stats (If you're not getting the Sceptor, are you putting those points in to something else?) and Armor type (Which can mean the difference between 70% effectiveness and 130% effectiveness)? Because two seemingly identical waves can have a huge amount of variation from those two things.
As for the arguments, I don't know if its a processor limit or what then, but almost everyone here reports the same thing - at a ridiculous attack-per-second rate you begin to "lose" attacks with the Sceptor/30FPS. I've never had any issues with the Sceptor at low speed though, just for what its worth (Though I do wish it had some kind of beneficial effect besides the time-speed bonus).
No offence taken, I see what you mean. When I say identical waves, I mean 2 waves after one another in the same game (same hero, same stats), like wave 35 Mass Vex Armor and wave 36 Mass Vex Armor. I still havent figured out if the creep model means anything to health or armor though, is there a difference on spiders and the humanoid/troll creep or is it just the model to mix things up a bit?
There really is no way of testing this properly anyways, since there are no towers with the same min/max base damage, or atleast I think so? It could be just random coincidence, but it doesnt "feel" that way. Ive stopped using the scepter on the scary wave 60-120ish part of the game, something always slips thru when I do that, and almost never if im not, and at that time you have to use pretty much the best stuff you got on inventory so no adjustments to make. Or atleast thats my experience...
Anyways, I guess Andy can test it in a better controled environment, and the topic was more about game speed in general than the scepter :)
Ontrose
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Rank: -
Yeah i know it was about gamespeed in general, but thats all i could come up with, considering other posts I've read.
As far as i know, the look of the unit does not mean anything at all.
All that matters is wavecounter, armor type and the armor/fast and whatnot stuff.
But if you were able to get 3k speed bonus on round 70 with the recent patch, kudos to your dropluck xD
And you mentioned other questions, that you would put into different topics? Go ahead and ask, like i said as far as i can answer, i will.
Hehe no, 3k speed is usually what I aim for at wave 500, but I seem to end up around 2500ish on most games. That was just an example of what the game seems to keep up with on normal gamespeed, which makes it weird that it doesnt seem to handle 2x gamespeed with much lower tower speed.
Ive thought a bit about it tho, and maybe its not tower damage/speed thats affected at all, it could be creep/projectile movement, or both for that matter. Anyways, Im going to put the scepter discussion to rest now, if Andy desides to investigate it or not :)
