Post by Lievven in DungeonTactics comments

Viewing post in DungeonTactics comments

This is a lovely game that managed to enthrall me for multiple hours. It's very fun to experiment with different character combos and upgrades and see what works best for each dungeon.

I've also apparently found some memory leak-ish behaviour, over the time of a dungeon the RAM usage drastically increases (Firefox on Linux). Only at the end of a dungeon it's cleared.

As far as gameplay is concerned, there's really only 2 issues:

1) Mind control is too strong. 3 Witch Doctors with +1 speed and mind control upgrades are basically invulnerable. Meanwhile the most damage I ever took in a turn was when a Mind Flayer mind controlled my Mercenary from a mile away with no counterplay.

2) Most main attacks are too weak. The delay hurts too bad until only 1 or 2 enemies are left. Even the "strongest" ones like an upgraded Wizard's or Priest's are actually just as likely to hurt your own units as the enemy due to all the control available. It's much more efficient to use other moves to make enemies hit one another or drop into traps. So most of them need a little more oomph or utility at a baseline or on an upgrade to grant more incentives to use them.

I like the difficulty scaling. It's fun to get more upgrades in a harder game (and honestly, I'd love to see even longer dungeons).

Some of my favourite characters were the Barbarian with its great crowd control, an attack without delay and the ability to skip Recovery; the Priest with the potentially massive lightning AOE and an amazing support ability; and the Mercenary with the only main attack that doesn't have a delay.

eldidou1 year ago

Glad you liked it!

For the memory leak I can't reproduce it (Firefox 102.0 on Linux). Is it always happening or only on some levels?

For the Witch-Doctor mind control, I could definitely reduce the number of uses and/or the range.

For the Mind-Flayer mind control, (or the charm abilities of some monsters), usually it feels "fair", it's only allowed to use the skills of your character that have an unlimited number of uses. Without this restriction it would do very nasty things likes bombs, potions, inspire, etc. With it, it's often restricted to main attack, and gives you the opportunity to counter it because they are delayed, (except for the Mercenary!).

For the main attack, I agree that the delay makes is risky (especially for AOE), and one needs to check possible counter-moves from the AI before a delayed attack. But it can be extremely efficient if always aimed at a target that won't be able to dodge it, either because it's on recovery, or because multiple characters are targeted at the same time. Maybe the un-upgraded damage is not impressive but it's usually easy to just target a monster on recovery (while other skills require the right conditions for AI friendly fire and traps). In my games, I used main attacks more than other skills, even more so when I invest upgrades in these skills.

For balancing characters, you are not the only one telling me that the Barbarian is very powerful, upgraded grapple with no recovery is maybe OP. I'm not sure yet how to balance it.

But for the Priest and Mercenary I'm actually very happy you liked them, I was feeling these one were underpowered, maybe we have different playstyles.

Thanks for these feedbacks!

Lievven1 year ago

On second glance, the memory leak just seems to be very situational garbage collection. The RAM usage goes up to about 1.5 GB over the course of a dungeon, but apparently gets cleared if RAM runs out. Plus it's definitely cleared at the end of the dungeon. So all good there.

For everything else, I'll try my best to give some productive playtest feedback:

Witch Doctor's mind control ability should definitely be limited in the amount of uses. Everything else feels fine about it. I've noticed that about 3 uses is the break point where you actually run out sometimes, but not all the time. However 4 uses makes it hard to run out and 1 use would make the ability worthless to upgrade. So my recommendation would be to keep 2 uses, and instead of increasing the amount of uses, that upgrade could increase the range (since range is not that strong if you only have 2 uses anyway).

The Priest's extra turn eliminates Recovery, that alone makes it an incredible support ability. You can even chain it on consecutive turns (if you skip your Priest's extra turn), basically eliminating its downsides. The rest of the Priest kit is very meh though. The lightning attack is by far the coolest attack if it hits, but sucks in practice since it's just too easy for the enemy to make it hit yourself.

Mercenary's secondary abilities are meh. The bomb is just a basic attack with limited uses and the net is an average CC option. But its main attack is the gold standard if you ask me. Would be cool to see other characters with a reliable primary.

Barbarian is probably the strongest character in the game. A limited use instant 2-damage attack is better than most primaries. It should probably be more limited in range & uses. The grapple is great, since you can move enemies 2 tiles in an unorthodox way, but not broken. The part that makes it really strong is eliminating recovery. Here's a suggestion for an alternative: whenever the Barbarian kills a unit, it heals 1hp.

As for the base attacks: maybe I'm simply too obsessed with them because I try to take as little damage as possible and they become a lot better if you accept that you'll take damage here and there. I definitely like the underlying tactical idea though and once there's only 2-3 enemies left, they're pretty enjoyable. More enemies means that there's always someone in range to thwart you, with multiple abilities that can mess you up in different ways. Especially the AOE attacks suffer since it's actually really easy for the enemy to make them hit yourself. On most characters it also generally feels like I'm just 1 upgrade down to make good use of them. Either the damage, or the movespeed, or the utility of the attack is lacking, and that's also while not having upgraded any of the secondary abilities.

I'll hopefully get to play the game a bit more some of these days, and maybe get to pay some attention to how strong each character's primary really is when making best use of it.

itch.io

Viewing post in DungeonTactics comments