Here's an idea for how I might change the weapons and damage upgrade to take the relevant breakpoints into account: rebalance weapons to add 5 damage per tier, then replace the damage upgrade with an attack upgrade that increases your melee attack speed and/or range.
Simple but fun gameplay, wish it were longer and had some more interesting upgrades. I think the content that's there could also be rebalanced a bit. The middle tiers of armor and weapons seem like an utter waste of gold, makes more sense to pump upgrades till you're ready to save for the top tier items. I'd like to see the game rebalanced around not having the drops upgrade - pumping it first seems almost mandatory, there's a bit of decision making in taking other cheap upgrades before the last couple levels of extra drops but it mostly just pads out the start of the game. The attack upgrades feel a bit awkward too, I found only the breakpoints 15 and 20 really mattered until endgame, at which point you max out everything anyway, so having so many tiers of upgrade on top of multiple tiers of weapon seems like overkill.
Fun, albeit simplistic game. It would be nice to get more info on how the combat stats/formulas work - I'm really not sure how to figure out whether attack or defense will have a bigger impact in combat. It would also be nice if I could see my base stats vs stats from gear on mouseover.
@sonicfan: you can mute, just click the gear icon in the bottom right corner. Separate volume sliders for music and sound effects.
Two initial thoughts on starting the game: 1. The 'move or attack' mouse controls are a terrible idea. I kept bum rushing zombies when I wanted to shoot them. 2. I'm being asked to choose between sending a civ "to the camp" or "to the team" but haven't been told anything about what that decision means. Basic rule of game design: tell players what they need to know to make a choice rationally before prompting them to make it!
Meh. Laggy even on my high end gaming PC when in the car, very repetitive, quickly becomes an easy but tedious grind, spread out squad makes bullet dodging kinda pointless. A game with no unique or interesting mechanics needs to be more polished than this to be any good. Generic and mediocre is a bad place to be.
Great game! The growth mechanic is really clever - a simple, original, intuitive mechanic that actually adds some strategic depth. I would love to see a sequel that builds on what is here - a longer campaign, perhaps a more complex upgrade/progression mechanic or just more upgrades, more variety in spells... Having a couple different types of plants, with different stats (perhaps even additional special modes beyond attack/defend/grow), would be awesome. 5/5 for a unique idea that was executed well, and I'll keep my fingers crossed for an epic follow-up.
Overall it's a great game and the actual combat gameplay has been nicely improved, but I feel like the mechanics for unlocking and upgrading units and spells took a step back from EW4. Upgrades max out too fast, per-unit experience for all the upgrades instead of a global pool to spend means less trade-off decisions for the player to make, and you have no control over the order in which you unlock units so every playthrough is the same.
Other comments have covered the UI features I'd like to see, so instead I'll talk about three annoying balance/difficulty curve issues: 1, bosses mid-late game are almost unkillable due to Regeneration, unless you spam a silence spell every round. 2, as soon as you unlock shrines, the game becomes way too easy, I killed the end boss in 2 hits and everything else in 1. 3, sieges are stupid. Once you unlock catapults, you can basically auto-win by focus firing the castle and ignoring the enemy army.
Overall love it, 5/5, but some gripes:
1. HC is really hard unless you idle for the 'played x minute' achievements. Maybe those should carry between saves and grant the armor points at the start of the game if you already have them? Or just replace those achievements.
2. Builds are 100% about number crunching, and since the % bonuses scale better than flat bonuses, the only optimal builds are to dump everything in one stat minus a couple points in the others to survive the early game. Maybe you could unlock different skills based on the perk points (e.g., 5 points in +health gives you Leech, 5 in +damage gives you the 200% attack, etc.)? That would also add a lot of replay value. Each class could have a unique starting ability or two as well.
I have a simple idea to help a bit with the unfair benefit to going first, at least in Conquest mode: have the last person to pick a territory get the first 'real' turn, then proceed in reverse order. It wouldn't completely solve the problem, but it would make things a bit more fair.
I love the core gameplay mechanics and would love to see you expand on it in a larger game project. Keep the mechanics fairly simple and streamlined, add things like upgrades, a campaign, etc., and put a lot of focus on keeping the user interface and gameplay experience polished and straightforward. You have a tendency to produce impressively complex game mechanics, then wind up with a somewhat crowded/unintuitive UI. I think scaling back mechanical complexity, focusing on the end-user experience for a bit, then start building on more of that complexity. Your previous titles are already some of my favorite Flash games, but I think with a little polish they could be some of my favorite *games*, period.
Endless mode is great and all, but I'm left wanting more of the campaign! I'd love a "reset campaign" option. I'd love a sequel / new content even more, of course, but I suspect the reset option is a bit quicker to implement ;)
General tips and tricks: you can move or repair the car while reloading. Getting +cash and +exp skills up as early as possible helps a ton. Repair the car when you can, but don't worry too much about that until you have one of the last few guns. Jump on the car only as a last resort, the damage takes forever to repair. The skill that gives more healing from first aid kits is crazy good - $100 is nothing to you lategame, and 150hp is a lot. Skip weapon upgrade when you can to save up for later ones faster.
Very cool little time waster. I'd love to see more difficult obstacles later on, and more upgrades to work toward, to make the game longer, but there's nothing wrong with short and sweet. 5/5
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