More tweaking – and it turns out a few fairly serious bugs! I’m proud to announce the v1.80.3 patch of Revenge of the Titans. Get your new versions as per usual from the same place you got your original copy. Yes, Humble Bundlers, I mean you. Especially the ones that keep installing the Puppygames version and then expecting it to be registered. Grr.
Humble Bundlers: please wait until it’s officially announced by Humble Bundle Inc. – Jeffrey’s still uploading things at the moment
Bugs Fixed
- Fixed: strange vertical streaks when barricades blown up
- Fixed: advice to use powerups that you had even when you didn’t have any
- Fixed: ever escalating difficulty when collecting powerups – whooops!
- Fixed: danger around turrets was miscalculated when adding/removing ghosted buildings
- Fixed: danger around turrets was miscalculated when adding/removing scanners
- Fixed: tooltips had a hover active
- Fixed: exotic powerups no longer appearing since 1.80.2!
- Fixed: failing to start audio on Windows
- Fixed: X-ray scanners not picking up wraiths very well
Balance
- Adjust boss hitpoints based on initial distance to base
- Disruptor nerfed back down to 32pts damage
- Laser nerfed back down to 12pts damage
- Survival mode tweaked more
- Increased relative turret danger amounts
- Nerf bosses in survival mode
- General reduction in boss hitpoints
- Angry gidrahs a tiny bit more wary of turrets
- Some Saturnian and Titanian gidrahs got bigger brains
- Heavy blaster and blast cannon now have armour piercing rounds, but do a bit less damage
- All weaponry now costs less
- Reprocessor now $750
- Reactors don’t decrease fire rate any more
- Multiblaster now tiny bit more powerful
- More crystals on later levels
New Features and Enhancements
- Show bullet stun duration in stats screens
- Disruptors now dangerous to own buildings! (Unless you research disruptor shielding) Barricades are unaffected
- Stop plinky beeps after a few seconds
- Increase gidrah speed with danger except on tangleweb
- Gidlets no longer hit by large weapons fire
- Survival mode to only enable those items that are researched at the point the world is completed
- Blasters once again cause a bit of stun now
Internal
- Danger radius of turrets increased by 1 tile radius
- Discovered reason for audio not working – wasn’t MSCVR90.dll after all, was a broken OpenAL32 dll
- Found deeply buried bug in emitters causing the red streaks in barricade explosions
- Flush prefs on options screen closing
- Doubled streaming audio buffer size
Analysis
Quite a lot of balance changes in this version, which are quite subtle, and possibly experimental. If you all mostly like it, they’ll stick,
The most obvious and immediate change you will notice is that turrets are quite a bit cheaper. Revenge is a game about blowing things up with lots of turrets and it’s a bit of a shame if you can’t afford lots of them, so they are now generally a fair bit cheaper than they were. Hopefully this will encourage a little more use of the big guns.
The damage dealt by the heavy blaster and blast cannon is now reduced, and compensated for partly by their being much cheaper than before, but also because they now fire armour piercing rounds. The aim of this change is to make it generally the case that deploying bigger blasters to take out smaller gidrahs with lots of hitpoints is not really the strategy we want you to employ. The big blasters are for armoured targets. To take out targets with lots of hitpoints, you want to be using the multiblaster, which now does a teeny smidgen more damage, or the heavy weapons.
A lot of people noticed that by about Saturn the generally successful survival technique was to make a cluster of maxed out big guns near the base (where all the aliens eventually have to come). This may no longer be the case, as the gidrahs in Saturn had their brains increased a bit and will now generally all go for your refineries first, choking your money supplies. Along with the nerfing of the blast cannon, waiting to see the whites of their malevolent glowing eyes may not be a viable tactic any more. The gidrahs are also a bit smarter about avoiding bigger guns. Obviously, if they have no choice, then they have no choice.
I’ve made a tweak to Survival mode which you may or may not like (apart from further heavy difficulty tweaking): you now play survival mode using only the technology you unlocked on the last level of each world. This makes for some interesting decisions about your research path if you’re attempting to get Survival hiscores. I will possibly be looking into a Sandbox Mode in the future which is basically like Survival but with all technology unlocked.
I’m not massively sure about all the various balance changes, so I’ll just throw it out there to you all and see what you think. Your campaign is compatible still with 1.80.x but you might want to start an experimental new slot to see how it goes.
I haven’t yet had time to sort out the online hiscores stuff (which also requires Chaz to do a bit of GUI work and he’s busy on Steam stuff and the like) – maybe next version. I bet that’ll be next weekend when you all find tons of bugs. But be warned! I’m due baby #2 on the 28th February and all bets are off if it turns up early 🙂
I never try to download the PG version thinking it will be registered like my HIB version
Looking forward to trying out the new turret balances! Unfortunately, still no sign of the new version on the humble indie bundle page.
Looking forward to the update on HIB, after getting really into Titan Smashing last night, I want to try out the new things too 🙂
By the way, any chance for some good RofT t-shirts? You have just soooo many cool graphics in the game, I really feel like showing it to the world… (e.g. the colonel(?) standing next to / on the fallen giant titan… I can already hear him saying “Boy, I have some stories to tell of what I’ve seen in the war…” 🙂
Or of him trying to mount the thing.
😐
yes thats right
I WENT THERe.
Id love to wear something like this 😀
Overall I like the changes that the 1.8 series brings…
But…
Could you polish the building-placement sound a little? That loud pop at the end doesn’t really give me a feeling of a building being
placed or something coming into existence and it feels delayed to the graphical placement of the building.
nice changes, I’m super impressed with your pace so far, and looking forward to checking it out tomorrow. I’ve also experienced some frustration with having to develop strategies based around having two heavily upgraded guns and using power ups to keep refineries alive while I tried to speed mine crystals. More blasters and better ai will definitely leave me with more options -and possibly force me to explore them…
Just a random idea…I’m guessing that the danger radius relates to mobs avoiding turrets, I notice during levels the mobs learn where my turrets are and how to avoid them. If people use similar strategies all the time, would it be possible to have the mobs adapt between levels to deal with those strategies? So if you mass small weapons for several levels in a row, have more armored enemies after a while. If the player switches to armor piercing blasters for a few rounds, have the enemy adapt with fast enemies…etc. I’m thinking something like that would make the game progression feel very organic and make it even more replayable (though I’m pretty hooked). Thanks again!
Not all people that buy the humble indie bundle can be bothered to figure things out like: Everything that you will ever need will show up on your download page. : )
Researching Lasers crashes the game for me in 1.80.3. It worked fine in 1.80.2. HIB version, Win XP x64.
Lasers meaning the actual laser weapon, not the prereq. Sorry.
Ok,
now this game feels really, reaaaly phenomenal, just like the promised RTS/TD mashup and no longer like Monopoly 😉
Awwwwweesome 😀
Great job guys – I hope your work pays out ^__^
Awesome stuff, congrats on the baby and my regaurds to the Mrs
I just downloaded the 32-bit linux .deb version from HIB, and it looks like there’s a minor packaging problem. The package claims that it’s 1.80.2, but the title screen of the game claims that it’s 1.80.3. It seems that things got out of sync somehow.
I too have the same problem with the 64bit debian file, seems someone forgot to update the version number on the packages, haven’t installed though, bit annoying but it should be safe to install i guess.
Is there any change to get ingame update method, in the future?
Now it’s time for the bugs to roll in:
Mouse in full screen on windows is really chuggy, especially when the text box appears. It’s fine in windowed mode.
Middle mouse on mac in windowed mode brings up the dash board and tabs out of the game, might not be much you can do except allow people to reassign keys (not something you might enjoy doing but would certainly fix a lot of problems for people)
Phantom numbers bug still present (numbers on power ups still visible when the menu bar is lowered)
That’s it for now, gonna go break it some more
Mouse works for fine for me. no problem with mouse speed for me SpinaJack and Cas.
Win 7
Intel i5
ATI 5770.
4GB Ram
My RotT keeps crashing when I try to research the laser turret… Any way to submit a proper bug report?? I could paste the exception here but that’s kind of messy.
Hello, thanks for making this great game!
I’m using HIB 1.80.3 and I get a CRASH:
-Windowed mode
-Campaign Mars, 27: Aeria $18315
-When I click on disruptor tech, game crashes
Here is a screenie of my current tech tree:
http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/6653/techc.png
Wow, you’re really pushing out the updates recently! I really like these changes and they make the game just challenging enough to not be too frustrating. The only real problems I have are that I have to re-install/restart the whole game to fully appreciate the balance changes every time this happens, and you’ve churned out, what, four updates to this game in the past 2-3 weeks? Not that I mind constant updating, but once this game is more stable, I’ll really enjoy it! 😀
Thanks for the hard work!
I have discovered a grievous issue! Upon researching the laser turret, I get kicked back to the desktop! O noes! This problem happens in a repeatable fashion every time I start the game, choose campaign, choose moon mission 14 (Cheddarium), and choose the laser as my research choice for the level.
Windows 7 64-bit, Revenge 1.80.3 (HIB)
Started a new slot, tried researched the laser a bit later on this time – still a crash to desktop with no error message upon clicking the laser in the research UI.
I played 1.8.2 and .3 to end of moon.
What I don’t like so far is: Refineries… I have to build tons of them, even with all the upgrades. It just doesn’t feel right.
Before, when you researched optics or laser (not sure which) all turrents got a range boost. I really miss that…
Also, in mission 19 I tried to research the Laser turret, as soon as i klick on the research icon the game crashes to desktop.
I find it increasingly hard to choose what to research, and the extra research to get weapons, or exotic weapons makes it tough to survive somtimes
I think im going to go back a couple levels…
I’ve got a crash on the mac version when I click to research Laser on Moon Lvl 13.
🙁
I need my Lasers
I get a crash when I try to research Laser as well (Windows, Moon, Level 19)
> I’ve got a crash on the mac version when I click to research Laser on Moon Lvl 13.
I quick-teched to lasers and disruptors and when i try to research either one it crashes (been trying since the end of earth, now on mars). I’m running Ubuntu 10.10 x86-64.
wwaaaaahh! like a baby, about the distributor. not a big thing now that i’ve dried my eyes, just one more step to research. i’ve been trying to setup a distributor max out by shileds’n’company strategy, and i just thought you crumbled my dreams. the distributor was just so powerful before.
i don’t see how you can get too far away from the base cluster strategy, for many reasons. one is that sharing upgrades is HELLA economical (yes i’m from the bay area). if you put too much money into protecting your money you’ll also have to multiply your upgrade usage (i’m assuming that to protect multiple locations, in each spot you’ll need scanners and what not.)
and putting down guns to defend your money source can’t be more economical than using four collector things ($1000) per cluster of crystals to mine those suckers in 20 seconds or less. i know you’ve reduced the price of the guns so many that’s not as true.
thank you for the reactor not reducing the firing rate, that was stressing me out.
reading these posts and hearing about peoples gameplay it would be cool to not have to rely to so heavily on just turrets. it would be awesome if each tech tree led us to a fully functional defense strategy (for example after researching the droids: droids, super droids, shielded droids, iron man droids, you could if rely mostly on the droid factory for defense). you’d have to make the tech trees a little longer to make them less accessible in the early levels, but if you did this for all the different technologies that would provide so many more different styles of game play.
easy as pie right? i’m just asking for you to exponentially grow the tech tree. it would be cool though.
I don’t know about the new versions, but with the 1.7 basically I either built one cluster to defend at the base, or a few on the map If there was a way to make sure the titans would pass it. If they come from all around and evade scanners it doesnt make much sense to build far away from the base imo.
I think titans should not be able to avoid the scanners. It renders them useless unless there is no other way for them to go – in which case you wouldn’t really need them anyway.
Evasion means that they can walk around the back of your defences and get you sneakily. If they absolutely have to run straight at your turrets then you at least can be happy knowing you’re going to be shooting at them for a lot longer if you’ve got extra range on those guns.
The planned new buildings are the tank factory, scarecrow, cloaking device, and repair drone factory. The tank factory creates large (Titan-sized) units that trundle off and shoot gidrahs. Like a sort of mobile blaster turret; however, each tank will cost you $50 to produce. The scarecrow is nice and cheap extra scary to gidrahs and can be used to frighten them away from valuable stuff, or corral them into the path of less scary but far more deadly guns. The cloaking device makes nearby buildings invisible, which means the gidrahs can’t target them deliberately. And the repair drone factory produces a constant stream of little robots that trundle off towards the nearest damaged building, and repair it by one hit point when they arrive.
Naturally, the repair drones won’t work on the base, and nor will the cloaking device.
The new buildings won’t be out for a few months though.
O_O
So, you let the cat out of the bag!!!
These new techs sound awesome, particularly liking the sound of the repair drones & the tank factory, will be a great accompaniment to my droid armies (as long as the tanks don’t squash them!) …but now comes the wait! 🙁
Have just been playing the update and having an absolute blast, first time in a while I’ve been able to hoard $160,000 in the bank thanks to some risky early research choices, although I still think it’s a bit of a concern that its pretty difficult to get away from that whole ‘all defenses around the base’ style of play due to not enough funds, depending on the level layout – I personally prefer the levels that aren’t just wide open as it creates more strategic opportunities.
Anyway, back to masses of robots spewing hot death….
Well you know I gotta try the “nothing repair drones and shield generators” strategy at least once when those come out.
What happens if you do nothing but place four Scarecrows around your base? Will the Gids attack it because there’s nothing else to attack, or will they attack it because their hunger for the base is insatiable?
Also, when I collected a powerup with the display down, the numbers appeared in mid-air.
I get crash to desktop when I click on the Disruptor icon (to research). I don’t have Disruptor Shielding.
Debian Linux (Squeeze) 64 bit
2GB RAM, Core2Duo E6750
GeForce 8800 GTS
By the way, how do you imagine using Disruptor without shields ?! What’s the point of it ? Place lone disruptors away from reactors, away from scanners, etc ?
Reactors’ description now says they increase damage of blasters. It makes no mention of anything else. Yet when you place a droid factory next to a reactor, it displays a line as if it was getting a bonus from reactor. Do reactors still affect droid factories ?
Disruptors without shields are a bit cheeky aren’t they 🙂 Basically yes you can’t upgrade them very easily at all. However you can surround them with barricades and they won’t damage each other. An ideal situation would be a narrow-ish tunnel with a road through it; plonk a disruptor either side of the tunnel and the gidrahs will be forced to walk through and get zapped in their droves. Of course they become vastly more powerful as soon as you can upgrade them so disruptor shielding is pretty critical to their properly effective use.
AA definite bug here (under X, on x86-64 Linux). If you switch screen resolutions, the game-drawn mouse pointer moves, but the X mouse pointer does not. The game continues to try to suppress mouse movement outside the window, but this is done on the basis of game-drawn pointer positions and thus is similarly askew. As such, the X mouse pointer goes outside the window very soon, another window gains focus, my desktop draws a tooltip atop the game window, and then the unfixed bug I reported long ago and forgot about kicks in: the game window instantly vanishes and all you can do is a Ctrl-C to kill it. The only way to change screen resolutions is to change them and then esc your way out of the game and restart it. Annoying, but survivable…
i’ve had similar switching resolution issues with mac os x for awhile now.
Hang in there folks… looks like I forgot a null check in lasers and disruptors… I’m just uploading 1.80.4 which will fix it. I’m also toying with the following tweaks:
please leave the prices down! I need lots of them 😉
I dont know if cooling towers are useful enough to warrant $500 out of all the tower-add ons they seem least critical (and now reactor towers dont warrant them).
And if your gonna up the collecter price are you making refineries free?
Um, what does that survival research tweak do?
I hope it’s not going to make it harder for me to go and research missed tech post game >:(
Yes I’m afraid it’s exactly that. But that’s because I’m going to start collecting online hiscores soon and your specific research combinations will have quite a significant effect on how you do 🙂 There will be reputations at stake!
humble suggestion: after you beat the campaign mode, all research is unlocked for the other game modes; going back through the campaign and trying to win with all combinations of research would be tedious.
I think that particular request will be dealt with in Sandbox mode when I get around to it.
In the end I settled on just a few minor tweaks – I didn’t change how refineries worked after all, it’s still limited to 4 per crystal. Cooling towers and collectors have indeed become slightly more expensive (I’ll explain why in the release blog post tomorrow). I tweaked the difficulty calculator as well as an experiment, and after a pretty lengthy playtest I decided I liked it, so that’s gone in. Uploading now…. takes ages…. will sleep in the meantime.
Hey guys. Just got some weird quirks here.
+ Finished level 28, when all the baddies were gone, the stage wouldn’t end. I just sat there, scrolling around.
+ Prior to finishing 28, some baddies would freeze in place for a few moments.
+ Capacitors are wonky, especially when you’re trying to click on a ghost just about directly above a turret/capacitor.
Can’t tell if I’m actually activating or even hitting the ghost. The feedback is quite odd.
So… I haven’t been able to get past 28 because the game won’t let me, basically.