The Tech Tree

Diary

Some kind soul on the ever-lovely RockPaperShotgun made a lovely tech-tree graphic. I’ve not checked it for accuracy thoroughly but I thought it’d be worth sharing with you all.

You will be horrified and dismayed to discover that the really cool exotic weapons, the laser, rocket, and disruptor, will now cost a staggering $15,000 to research in the Saturn release. They are the pinnacle of offensive technology! They’re supposed to be really hard to get. At least, early in the game.

Lasers and rockets have also been nerfed very slightly in the forthcoming release. Lasers will do a teeny bit less damage, and rockets only explode when they hit their actual target location (as opposed to anything in their path). Also, rockets will cause splash damage to any nearby buildings! This means you will have to be very careful to place them such that gidrahs won’t slip behind them and amongst your valuable buildings, causing it to start raining rockets down on your own base! The sword has two edges, etc, etc.

All three exotic weapons now cost a huge $5000 to buy as well, reflecting the fact that with two of them you can pretty much defeat any level with relative ease. You still can, of course; you just need to be rich enough to afford to 🙂

Droids and turrets had a “big” AI overhaul; they now select new targets every 2 seconds, which means if something more suitable to shoot comes along, they’ll switch to it. Droids fire a bit more rapidly now, and move a smidgen more quickly as well.

And lastly autoloaders are somewhat cheaper at just $750. You know you want them! Sit back and watch the battle take care of itself 🙂

In other news, Chaz has been hard at work on Saturn, and he’s got Saturn wraiths done, and is currently finishing off suicide bombers. These little critters start off slowly, then accelerate towards their target, whereupon instead of biting, they explode causing splash damage to all buildings nearby! Better shoot them from a great distance. Fortunately being explody they are quite easy to pop.

41 thoughts on 'The Tech Tree'

  1. The tree is good and perfect, also I dont think ill have a problem with the 15000 for the big guns, as in my game I have 40 k right now, but considering that I needed rockets to get there I might have a problem.

  2. Im at a loss at what to buy atm ive got everything a guy needs to prevent an onlaught of aliens

  3. um I don’t know about anyone else but lasers, rockets and disruptors are not worth 20 blasters each.
    Disruptors are already not great verses bosses with 20 blasters you can cover any gap. Please reconsider or otherwise we will be stuck with blasters or pay for “vanity” weapons.

    Research costs are a bit much but it doesn’t matter anymore as placing the vanity weapon is a money losing proposition so if you can afford to waste 10k every level wasting 15k doesn’t seem that bad.

    1. 20 blasters are useful only against aliens that can be harmed by blasters… by Mars you’ll have discovered blasters aren’t so useful against ticks, or the giant Mars tick boss. There comes a point where you’ll simply be needing bigger guns than plain blasters.

      1. the problem here is the advanced work against so well against easy enemies.
        You are forced to jack up the price to ridiculous heights but then the player if forced into a situation where they are losing money because the cost of placing the guns is so much more than the guns will earn. You are already having us research and use certain expensive things already. Its like the question when would you use a collector or autoloader? The advantage they give you is minimal and a detriment to later stages.

        The player needs to be able to defend them self at more than just one point and doubling the cost of heavy weapons. If you want to have people use the heavy blasters make them cheaper so we can use them like blasters so we don’t have to have just one line of defense to hope to make money.

        1. The collector does boost the overall speed at which you can harvest crystals because there’s no split second pause it takes you to zoom in and drag click, even if you collected before the refineries were full you’re still wasting time because you only collect in increments of 10 so if the refinery was half way done on the next 10 you’d waste that time.

          I think the autoloader should give some other benefit as well like +1 loading speed or similar. Power generator can be changed to +1 damage instead.

          1. Me again with my hardcore mode meh
            Cas I think you should save doubleing the price for a hardcore mode, so the more casuals dont have to work to the extreem to get those guns

            1. I don’t think you’ll have to work to the extreme to get them at all… you’re just unlikely to afford 2 or 3 of them is all.

              On the later levels you might have noticed the nastier gidrahs are worth more and more money when they’re destroyed. This should roughly tally with the size of the gun required to dispatch them. So for example a gidrah only damageable by the heavy blaster is likely to be worth about 5x as much as the rank-and-file.

              I will leave autoloaders / reactors as they are I think. Autoloaders now have a flat cost of $750, which is nice, as you can freely pop a couple down if you’ve got the cash to burn and let them take care of defending fronts off of the screen so you can concentrate on the battle elsewhere. This will be increasingly important in Saturn as the levels begin to get larger and larger and the crystals get more and more spread out.

  4. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE TECH TREE!!! I hope they gets the point across, but is this update ready for downloading now or in the next patch?

  6. 🙁 Not a happy bunny – the mystery is gone! The tech tree has spoiled it; where’s the bloody fun in knowing exactly what tech you need to use to unlock additional tech….. it’s called trail-and-error (or discovery) and was one of the reasons this game was fun. Damn, might as well hand it all on a friggin’ plate!

    1. Yeah, that’s what I kept telling people, but, you know what they’re like :/ Don’t look at the graphic! Un-see it! Actually it’s quite easy to completely forget. I designed the tree in the first place and I don’t exactly know how to get some things. Leaky brain.

    2. It was fun discovering things the first couple times but I’ve played the game to death and pretty much know all the tech tree routes off by heart. Those crazy min-maxers can always make their own fan sites or gamefaqs about tech trees, leave it out of the game I say! It’s pretty good the way it is and the story hints are fun to read.

  7. I think I spotted an error in either that research tree… or the game…

    I got interested in trying to get the disruptor at about the same time the game’s scientists began complaining about lack of nuclear research. So, I got the reactor, and then followed the research tree to get the capacitor.

    However, I have now researched forcefields, but not the shield generator, and the capacitor is nowhere to be found. Yet, I suspect that’s the thing the commander just hinted that I should use on the ghosts that I think will appear on this level…

    Which icon is the capacitor?

    1. beside the blaster to the right if memory serves me to get capasitor you need the nuclear reactor and the battary

  8. Ok, finished the mars levels as well now!

    Wow, I must say that on Mars the complexity and sheer amount of stuff to do becomes extremely engaging, but for me, unfortunately only on the last two levels or so! I’m extremely impressed at the level of depth that suddenly opened up. Too bad it didn’t come earlier though, but that means that the Saturn levels will absolutely rock!

    I find it strange that the messages about needing to develop a droid factory comes before the ghost messages, yet the ghosts appear first for me! And to me, it seems that the droid factory is only needed at the very last level of the game, and I got by that level just fine without one even. What was the point of the droid factory?

    Any and all creeps gets wiped out by the rocket turrets, and a mini creep gets by on the very last level, I can use the capacitors to zap it (I absolutely love the capacitors, by the way. Sheer genius gameplay.)

    I would have thought that the creeps with large heads that bounce laser beams would split open to reveal a few mini critters as well, but no. So, for the current version, power tip: Skip the droid factory and automation altogether! It’s a more hectic game that way, but I finished the last few levels with 30k, 40k and 50k to spare and no creeps ever got even close to me (I had three layers of walls in their way as well, so I guess that won’t work on Saturn with more flying creeps).

    Also, I’m still seeing behavior where the entire creep army backs away when turrets are reloading, and comes to a complete halt if all turrets are reloading…

      1. I’m afraid once again the Great Nerf Bat swingeth, and your current tactics are going to be knocked back somewhat. In 1.5, the droids from the droid factory are getting a little faster and shooting a little more rapidly, so they’ll be a bit more useful. The big ticks do indeed burst open into a huge number of smaller ticks too (8-16 or so – enough to cause you consternation I should think).

        The rocket turrets are rather trickier to use now as well. Apart from being very expensive now at $5k, and being slightly slower to fire, the splash damage from rockets damages your own buildings. If a gidrah slips past the rocket turret and into the midsts of your base, it can turn around and lock on to it and start raining rockets down on your own buildings! They now have to be deployed very, very carefully, probably in wide open spaces.

        Automation makes life a bit easier it has to be said but it’s not really strictly necessary to win. By Saturn the levels start to get rather large and lengthy, and you need the automation to keep on top of things a bit. It’s a lot cheaper in 1.5 too, to encourage people to use it a bit.

        And yes, the flying gidrahs are going to cause you to rethink a bit too 🙂

        There’s a new AI as well in 1.5. You’ll find the gidrahs start to notice when they’re being funnelled into choke points for a massacre and eventually they’ll change tactics…

        1. Will the autoloaders have increasing costs in the next patch? I’d like to plonk them down at every outpost I build I find it really helps with management. Also I keep running out of walls, can we have more walls please?

          1. They’re fixed price now. Not sure about getting more barricades. Best thing to do is research more types to give you more in total. Won’t be any use against the flying gidrahs on Saturn anyway 🙂

        2. Hmm… I wonder if I have a weird bug then, or if killing the large headed creeps (ticks) with rockets also wipes out the mini creeps… I never saw the mini ticks until the very last level on Mars. Not a single one.

          1. Haha, not so much a bug as a feature 🙂 You’re dead right, the explosion from the rocket kills all the gidlets the moment they spawn. I suppose I’d better fix it.

  9. Hope you’re still watching the comments here for bug reports. I am very much enjoying the game; loved your earlier games too. The Mars levels are terrific fun and quite challenging. I’m getting some funny behavior with the mouse cursor. I sometimes accidentally build a building directly on top of another turret, if the cursor is set to (eg) place a refinery, and then I go to click on a turret to reload, instead the refinery gets placed right on top of the turret. There’s also some irregular behavior with the capacitor-aiming cursor, again with turrets not reloading when you click on an empty turret is in a capacitor firing zone. I’m finding the click-and-drag to collect from multiple refineries is also a little inconsistent too. But that might just be my lack of fine mousing skills, or my particular mouse & my tracking settings. I’m on a Mac (10.6.4) with apple’s optical “Magic Mouse.”

    Looking forward to seeing the rest of the game. Make 50 levels!

    1. I find that the capacitors don’t fire on ghosts when they’re over some wall segments which is pretty annoying because they’re always over wall segments in my games because they’re so hard to spot against the red background! I think clicking priority should be changed so that placing buildings doesn’t let you reload or anything (to fix another bug) and capacitors always fire unless reloading a building or placing a building.

    3. I would like to add that you’re able to place buildings on walls, which wipes out the walls… since walls are limited, I’d rather have an explicit option to demantle buildings instead.

      1. It is deliberate that you can build buildings on top of barricades (and stronger barricades on top of weaker ones, too) – nothing more annoying than drawing your wall too close and not being able to put a turret behind it.

    4. I just found an annoying little problem in 1.4. Money doesn’t seem to calculate correctly at the end of missions! I ended with $4500 with $1000 in Base Integrity and $1000 in Recycling (I know it’s weird it was so exact) yet instead of going to the tech menu with 6500 I had 6100 (about). I know it’s very slight, but that’s four refineries I can’t have now.

    5. There is a typo in the Ballistics tech. The “Egghead” said that he blew up a lab safely from 400 “metres” shouldn’t that be “meters”? Oh and sorry for the double post, but I have just been having so much fun playing this game 😀

      1. Nope, here in England we have metres. A meter is something that measures the supply of something 🙂

        1. no cas, its meter,
          atleast here in canada and the usa uses feet
          a meter in canada is 100 cm’s 1000 meters makes a kilometer measureing lenth, to measure supply (water) we use liters and volume (weight) is grams and kilograms
          I dunno what you have in england but thats how it is here

          1. In England, where we have colours and such, it’s spelled metre. We measure water and electricity using meters. Bloody yoofs!

            2. I can attest that it is indeed metres in the u.k. although I still don’t understand the difference between ‘labor’ and ‘labour’??? 🙂

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