“Earthlings! Some of you are still attempting to thwart our awesome might using your puny version 1.0 turrets! Perhaps you would fare better if you downloaded the new 1.1 release and installed it over the top of your old and busted version!”
Things which have Changed
- Mouse scroll speed is now fixed
- Slightly more useful mouse speed adjustment range (default position 3 of 10)
- The gidrahs do not start their advance until you place your first refinery. Go and make a cup of tea, look around, maybe place a few defences in strategical locations!
- Going back a few levels to try a different tactic now works as you’d expect it to
- You now get a bonus for recycling at the end of a level: your buildings are all sold for 40% of their original purchase price, scaled by their remaining hit points, to the nearest 50$. This is paving the way for the SELL BUILDING button which will appear with the Mars update at the end of June.
- …but now the integrity bonus of the Moon base is smaller to compensate
- The earlier levels will be ever so slightly harder than they were before
- The game now ends at the end of the Moon (registered or not) because it’s a bit pointless playing any further at this stage, as Mars and so forth are completely unfinished placeholders!
- Hopefully the Mac crash when you place a refinery is fixed. But without a Mac to test it on I won’t know until you bug me.
We’ve been carefully listening to all the feedback we can find on the whole internet and subtly planning modifications of various sorts that will come with the Mars levels.
Quick Tips
A fair few people have commented on the amount of clicking you’ve got to do in the game. You should know the following things:
- You can click and drag when harvesting refineries, reloading, and building! Mouse down, wiggle all over factories, release, done. Likewise you can paint a line of turrets or reload them all.
- Every button on the UI has a shortcut key. The three most useful ones are R, to go to the next empty turret; E, to go to the next full refinery; and Q, to take you straight to your base. TAB will fast forward the action in dull moments.
- Right-click on a building to select that sort of building in build mode. No need to hunt around in the little icons if you can see another such building already on the screen.
- The game evolves over time. It will eventually become impossible for you to manually deal with harvesting all your refineries and reloading your turrets. Certain avenues of research will glean you buildings that will do the job for you. The game evolves from a micromanagement cross between Cake Mania and tower defence into a macro management and strategical game.
Another few tips you might want to know, if you’re struggling with the difficulty sometimes:
- Build as many refineries as can possibly fit around all the crystals you can find. It only takes two full harvests to make $100 profit!
- If you get owned, replay the level. It will be a bit easier next time around. If you’re really at a dead end, go back a level or two by going back to the title screen – your progress is preserved at each level (until you go back levels)
- Level 18 is hard. Be prepared! Make sure you’ve got plenty of money before you start it. Maybe skip a level of research.
“Build as many refineries as can possibly fit around all the crystals you can find. It only takes two full harvests to make $100 profit!”
This doesn’t seem to be my experience — I always felt like the crystals went away pretty quickly, so dropping about one refinery per crystal pack worked well. On the earliest levels, I’d throw a concrete wall or two on the last Girdah to give me more time to harvest. Later on, the harvesters were done early enough.
I am unable to try out the new 1.1 version of the Revenge of the Titans demo. The demo launches fine, but every time I click the ‘Play’ button at the main menu, a pre-order screen appears along with the ‘Maybe Later’ button. Either option closes the client and brings me to the Puppygames website.
If it helps any, I had uninstalled the 1.0 version first before installing this latest build. Also, creating a new profile does not seem to help. I am currently running Vista 64 and installed the 1.0 and 1.1 demo using Admin privileges.
I don’t think the windows version is uploaded yet, or I’m somehow re-downloading a cached build. The title screen still says 1.0, and the installer is the same size as the last one.
Mac refinery crash fixed!
😀 Yay!
“Build as many refineries as can possibly fit around all the crystals you can find. It only takes two full harvests to make $100 profit!”
I have been limiting myself to 2 or 3 refineries per crystal cluster… but here I have a direct recommendation from the game designers to splurge! Maybe I will… it felt too easy when I did this before. Also, hurray for a sell button!
Going to check out 1.1 straight away… can the designers shed some light on the research tree? Anything I should avoid researching for now? To explain: I went down the research path to lasers (2500 + 5000 + 9000) and purchased something with no explanation, no indication of how much damage it will do, that costs 2500 per unit, and has the same shooting radius as a blaster. This was quite frustrating. Combined with the research expenditure bug it was intensely frustrating.
Just as you said “don’t play past the Moon, yet” it would be nice to hear “don’t research X,Y, and Z, they aren’t ready yet.
Anyway, great game just the same. Love the style. Bought a copy, and will recommend to friends!
Doesn’t seem like the download link has been changed, it’s still just giving me version 1.0
Loving the game so far though : )
Seems to be working fine now on Mac. Thanks for the quick bugfix 🙂
“The gidrahs do not start their advance until you place your first refinery.” – This isn’t the only change I adore here, but I just wanted to thank you: this is an excellent tweak. I’ll have to use willpower not to try this out before I finish my degree (2 days!)…
I downloaded the installer but it’s still version 1.0. Maybe it’s because the mirror at simplecdn.net hasn’t been updated? I’m trying your local download now (http://www.puppygames.net/downloads/?game=revenge-of-the-titans&os=win).
Great! One more question: will you include skirmish-mode into future releases?
Some more tips:
* Sensors is *evrything*. Get those as fast as you can, as they increase the fire range of your turrets!
(the description mislead me into thinking that sensors just warned in general that monsters were comming, so I skipped researching them)
* Each improvement also has a shortcut key. ‘1’ is for building refineries. ‘K’ for building sensors.
(this was especially usefull in the 1.0 version where you couldnt prepare before the monsters began comming)
Sorry, they are calles ‘scanners’. Get those as fast as you can, as they increase the fire range of your turrets!
I’m still only getting 1.0 as well. It was rather anticlimactic when I installed again and realized nothing had changed yet >.<
I have the same problem – I download, I install and still get v.1.0
I have to agree on the sensors.
I did not realize they stack, and went totally into a dead end until researching them.
They DO stack, and if you have a defense cluster (one missile launcher, some smaller stuff) with 4-5 scanners can hit enemies outside of the visible screen. Add a few batteries and cooling towers and that might be all you need until lvl 18.
This allows to cover huge gaps and multiple paths with single defenses.
Normal turrets are a bit over powered, I found that just spamming a ton of them is the cheapest way (or at least the easiest way) to win most levels. Just place a ton of them without much thought or care.
Argh – seems that the cdn mirrors are still serving 1.0 up, even though we’ve cleared the caches (apparently). Use the direct links for now:
http://www.puppygames.net/downloads/SetupRevengeOfTheTitansDemo.exe
http://www.puppygames.net/downloads/RevengeOfTheTitans_MacOSX.zip
Quickly answering a few other questions –
the full game will have a “endless” mode in it which will basically be a series of randomly generated maps that goes on getting harder and harder until you are finally destroyed. Possibly we’ll do a “survival” mode as well, which will be set in one giant randomly generated map with crystals popping up at random intervals, and ever-increasingly nasty aliens.
In the research tree – *everything* is ultimately useful. My advice is to go for the scanners, batteries, and cooling towers first, and anatomy. Beyond that, even I don’t really know. I enjoy laying mines along roads 🙂
Good work.
(wow, the attack droids are cool!)
However, its too easy.
I played it thru from the beginning and ended up with 41000 $ at the end of the moon.
Consider a “hard” setting, or making it harder in general.
BTW the attack droids (which you get by researching ‘robotics’) gets produced from the moment you plant a droid factory.
So, an easy way to win is to set a droid factory, wait 5 minutes, and THEN put a crystan harvester factory, which will trigger the enemy attack.
I suggest that droid factories should also trigger that the enemy attack.
Or, actually, a logical moment would be to do it simply when you put the first building.
I agree on scanners (and obviously batteries) but I like the first level of automation too. Autoloaders help immensely on levels you are attacked from all sides especially when placing the heavier weapons with less ammo. You might have the best micro in the world but with Autoloaders you won’t miss a millisecond of reload time and you just need to place one for a huge turret cluster (placing the first Autoloader costs only $1000).
The Droid Factory I found a little bit less useful since getting it is expensive and placing one is too, although if you get one early you will have a pretty large swarm of droids that don’t need to be micromanaged at all and will catch any Gidrahs who might breach your line of defense.
Just a heads up, the bug from 1.0 where 7 activates smartbomb if you have it instead of letting you build blasters is still in. Not sure if anyone else gets that, but T doesn’t activate smartbomb at all for me.
why the hell is the game only playable till lvl 20 (the moon) on v1.1 and in v1.0 it was playable beyond that (friend of mine reached lvl 31 this morning).
when will the full game and more planets be released? especially the endless-mode? any deadline set?
this way i’m bored now, cause it will quit the game after lvl 20.
btw: i pre-ordered already, so i dont care about playing the demo.
Thanks Diji – well spotted. My bad – I’d added shortcut button graphics for the powerups but forgot to actually set the shortcut keys. XML is fixed and will make it into next update.
… and the upgrade powerups too, they don’t actually have shortcut keys, but they’re all showing the shortcut key graphic for ‘8’… oops.
Something’s wrong with the mouse in 1.1. Did you add some kind of mouse acceleration/smoothing? It’s almost unplayable for me now. Yes, I tried adjusting the mouse speed slider. No matter what I set it to the mouse feels odd. In 1.0 it corresponded 1:1 with my Windows mouse speed and behavior.
Just ran through the game again with the patch; some comments:
Much <3 for giving us some breathing room for scouting and setup at the start of each map; makes the game much more strategic and generally enjoyable.
However, I found the game *far* too easy on this playthrough. Without restarting a single level, I managed to have over $50,000 in the bank by the time I reached the final boss on the moon. This seems largely due to the new recycling mechanic, but also due to a pattern I’ve observed since v1.0: the game’s difficulty just doesn’t keep pace with you right now. If you’re any good at the game at all, you’ll soon exponentially race light years ahead of the difficulty curve and find yourself with more cash than ExxonMobil and more firepower than Zeus. Even if the game automatically compensated for this by scaling up the number and density of the gidrahs, along with the ratio of large gidrahs to small ones, this would also increase the amount of money that can potentially be made from killing them, compounding the issue further. A solution could be to greatly reduce the cash bonus gleaned from kills, or even totally remove it, having kills be tracked by a separate scoring system instead.
Bugs:
The battery/ammo bug I mentioned in the last blog post is still there, but I think I know approximately what’s causing it now: if, for example, you build a turret with a capacity of 10 rounds, and then increase it’s capacity to 20 rounds using batteries, the turret will still, initially, only have 10 rounds in it, but it’s ammo gauge will register as full, and can’t be filled to it’s newly expanded capacity of 20 until after it’s started firing. Attempting to do so beforehand will cause the reload sound effect to loop rapidly, but the turret will still stay at 10 rounds. This puts you at a considerable disadvantage in the opening moments of a battle, and I’m surprised no-one else has mentioned it yet.
Refineries will immediately register full and require collecting when they totally deplete a crystal patch, even when they aren’t actually full and there’s another patch within range that still has crystals in it, leading to a lot of unnecessary clicking when a cluster of almost-dry patches are being mopped up by a bunch of refineries.
You can still reload turrets when in build mode. I can’t tell if this is a bug or a feature, but it certainly feels more like the former, as it leads to a lot of accidental and untimely reloading in the middle of a battle when I’m trying to build cooling towers near a firebase that’s under attack.
That’s all for now; keep up the excellent work, and I hope this game finally makes you the untold trillions of £s you deserve!
Edit:
Another bug I noticed: When the laser has it’s firing rate heavily boosted by cooling towers, it will keep trying to fire before the last shot has finished it’s sweep. The second shot won’t actually fire, but the firing sound will play, a round of ammo will be wasted, and there’ll be an extra delay before a third shot is fired.
Little bug with droids from droid factory:
On bosses they approaching the boss, fight it then go little further and after that they chasing it from back. It seems like droids have some kind of static checkpoint behind the boss (his position in the past) and this checkpoint doesn’t update when boss moving. It looks like a bug.
Found a typo: http://flak.dotq.org/skitch/Revenge_of_the_Titans-20100527-093843.png
Damn those blasted typo’s! 🙂
In 1.1 those little buggers seem much more determined to avoid my positions… this is great! In 1.0 it felt like lambs to the slaughter. Also, I love the second round of dialogue that comes with some of the research- example: concrete barriers don’t grow on trees… adds a nice touch of humor 🙂
Keep up the good work!
I found a strange bug – I don’t know precisely how to reproduce it but I stumbled upon it in several playthroughs. When the Titans tried circling around indestructible obstacles like moon craters they simple got killed for no apparent reason – they just a-sploded without me getting any money out of it. 0_o
I think that now with the reselling system there’s a heavy snowballing effect too – harvesting everything you can on the first few levels gives you an almost exponential advantage in future levels while failing to do so just means you’ll never win.
I.e. getting spreader cannons and assault cannons early with some scanners and batteries will make you finish each level after acquiring them with like 10K+ money and merely two or three of them placed at an intersection with lots of scanners and batteries will mean no Titan will ever get to you – I started level 20 with 50K money, hardly a menacing situation. -.-
You guys should also put a lot of focus on rebalancing research upgrades and boost structures. Investing in robotics at this point is almost entirely wasted money. If you invest only on boost structures for your turrets to give them more ammo/range/fire rate (especially range, to cover more ground and not be held back by titans that like to stray off the beaten path), and the heaviest turrets, you can do infinitely better than nearly any other avenue of research. If I were to play the full game I’d focus on stuff like that first, then on some of the more exotic upgrades only later on. It seems like the choice of research avenues would have a far too obvious solution, instead of alowing for different play-styles and chalenging the player to use what he has creatively. This is something that some heavy rebalancing should probably fix.
Other than that the game’s shaping up really well. Already considering pre-purchasing. I’m amazing what a charming presentation can do to a gameplay concept.
Needs a way to start automatically if you don’t spend any cash on refineries and don’t have enough to buy one anymore. 🙂 Also I want a BIGGER windowed mode.
I’m a big fan of Puppygames products – this is looking like its shaping up to be a great game and I’m happy to have pre-ordered and to have played the beta.
Here’s something I was thinking about that could perhaps improve the gameplay a bit:
Change the crystals that are mined as resources to miscellaneous SUPPLIES that are processed. There are both cosmetic/narrative and more substantive gameplay mechanics reasons for this.
1) Cosmetic/narrative reasons: I know the crystals to be mined as resources are following a RTS convention/cliche (from Dune to the Command & Conquer series to StarCraft) but they don’t make much sense here – relatively small amounts of vital and precious crystal mines (That are extractable at hyperspeed!) being found at every major base on every planet where the Titans are attacking? Hmmm… stretches the logic even in within the game universe. Supplies – miscellaneous resources brought from all corners for the emergency construction of military defense structures, which are supply-dropped in new quantities at each new base/mission area- make more sense. They can still be processed (refined) and stored in depots (silos). And if the crystal resources are so precious and so speedily extractable, why are the Earth forces only taking what they can mine while under attack and then leaving the rest in the ground before moving to the next level? Yes, I realize that’s a gameplay mechanic but that leads me to…
2) Supplies as an improved gameplay mechanic: Currently with the crystals, the player optimizing strategy is to mine as much crystal as possible during an attack. You might place one or two many refineries too many by accident but that’s no biggie as they are so cheap – generally you plonk down a whole bunch and make sure you click them to collect as often as you can. And that’s basically it. With supplies, you can introduce a mechanism where ALL supplies on a level are transferred as processed resources to the next (makes logical sense). BUT, supplies that were processed into usable resources DURING the level’s battle are subject to an “emergency under-attack” inefficiency penalty. So, say supplies that are left unprocessed at the end of a mission battle are worth double (could change with an efficiency research advance) in resource credits at the beginning of the next mission what they would if processed during the heat of battle.
*This creates a new optimizing challenge for the player*. It isn’t just about processing/refining as many resources as possible during a battle any more. To maximize supplies across levels (i.e the whole war effort), players must seek an optimal balance between inefficient processing of supplies into resources during a battle and saving supplies for bonus resource credits at the end of the battle (with new unprocessed supplies being introduced at the beginning of every mission.
anyway, that’s the idea for whatever its worth.
thanks for making the fabulous games!
I just love you guys, have bought and played the Beta, it’s going to be another classic!
BTW, you guys might consider starting a very basic forum when the game is finished. This way we could all share strategies, comments, feedback and troubleshoot problems in organized easy to read fashion!
Keep up the phenomenal work!
Just want to say thanks for making the game available for Linux 🙂
Regarding, the Droid factory producing droids while you havn’t deployed Refineries. The best way in my opinion is set the factory to produce droids when the enimies entering the battlefield. But again the game doesn’t start if you don’t can afford or buy a Refinery. Perhaps a “start” button to push when you’re ready.
Also as other mentioned, the Droid Factory is to expensive vs. its usefullness. vs. turret boosts upgrades
Lim-Dul mention this earlier about the aliens dies for no reason. It happens a lot if touch a rock obsticles, crystals etc.
Concretes vs. Aliens; I think it would be a good idea to make the aliens a little smarter when it comes to concretes. It’s too easy to just hold the hordes of aliens abay by dropping one pierce of concretes on the roads.
Now that I’m on my second serious playthrough, I think this game needs an option to not dumb down the difficulty. sometimes I retry a level just to see if a different strategy would work better… and of course it does, because it gets easier each time. 🙁
@Scunthorpe – yep, we’ve got 100+ comments and 100 or so emails in the last few day, we’ll try and reply to as many as possible, but its all a bit overwhelming 🙂 It would be good to get something set up in a more ‘organized easy to read fashion’, and sooner rather than later, however…
From previous experience of forums they can require a fair amount of work to moderate and keep spam free if their open, and I’d rather be working on the game 🙂 … unless the forums were open to view but posting restricted to registered game users, how’s that sound?
And anyone got any recommendations, recent experience of setting up (vBulletin, phpBB, SMF)?
For the moderation part, you could just appoint volunteer moderators.
Allowing registered users (of any of your games) to post would be a smart move IMHO – basically a customer support forum and free users can still e-mail you or post on the blog if they have serious issues.
When it comes to forum software – I have experience with setting up IPB, phpBB and loads of punBB installations – the last of which is suitable for very small and quick communities and if you have a lot of spare time to install all the additional modules you might need, since it lacks a lot of functionality in its default incarnation (by design).
IPB is commercial when it comes to the latest releases but also the most comprehensive forum software I know of. This, however, comes at the price of LOTS of settings you have to go through or at least consider. If you have a community with thousands or tens of thousands of users it would be a safe bet and probably even worth buying but it doesn’t scale down too well.
phpBB is a relatively nice compromise but has become a bit bloated recently too. It has good open support but you’d have to see if its suitable for you.
I have a bit less experience with SMF but tried it out a couple of times and participated in communities that are using it. It has less techno-babble than other forums and seems to focus more on pure usability/functionality but that makes altering some settings a bit less intuitive for experienced admins.
I think you might take a quick glance at this site:
http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=5&category=Forums
It’s a good overview of what the forums look like and gives you a “behind-the-scenes” look at the administration interface, which is very important, since the results from a user perspective are usually very similar.
P.S. vBulletin is non-free and similar arguments can be made that I provided for IPB. However, I still think IPB is more powerful than vBulletin overall.
Nice one, cheers Lim-Dul… I think we’d go with a free one for now, and I’m thinking maybe SMF having used phpBB a while back, just for a change – I know that makes no sense 🙂
And yes paid-up registered users only – I’m guessing this would massively cut down the amount of work required to moderate? I’m thinking volunteer moderators.
I ‘might’ look into getting this done next week. I’m not sure if Cas is so keen, but while the Cas is away the mice will play! ho ho
This game would be great for my Netbook, but for some reason I am not allowed to turn the intensive particle/lighting effects off!! For such a nice game, that’s so minimal, it sucks that a (pretty) cloud of smoke stands between and enjoying it when the same effect could proably be achieved with a few simple sprite.
PLEASE consider adding settings to trim the overall requirements of the game so it can run more comfortably on an atom/gma combo! I know this hardware is paltry, but it’s so close, you know?