I’ll keep this short but could we see an Additional game speed modifier added after the 4x one, either 6x or 8x? It’s not too hard to get your setup just right and become more then enough to finish the stage easily early in and it would be nice to be able to speed the game up even further to complete the map quicker. Secondly could we get more save slots, pretty self explanatory here 3 just isn’t enough I feel.
Additional game speed + More save slots
Hey there!
I’d love to add more speed slots, in fact I experimented with a x8 speed multiplier once, but unfortunately because of the way the game is coded the battle engine becomes unstable at high enough speeds. I’ll be doing some major surgery to the game engine’s guts for any sequels or follow-ups, and I’ll see if I can fix things so 8x becomes possible, or whether we can do something like add “checkpoints” every dozen waves or so to speed things up by other means.
As for save slots, that’s not too hard, I’ve just got a long list of things to do 
I’ll throw it on the list at a low priority for now and get to it when I can.
How about the possibility to save battle in progress? I know it could be a serious pain, but then, it’s a serious pain to redo some of the longer battles when after 10 minutes of targetting micromanagement in 1/4 speed you make a wrong decision
Saving a battle in progress is a daunting task and would be virtually impossible without implementing a straight-up RAM dump, a la emulator savestates, and that’s a bit beyond my ken at the moment. The problem is an in-progress battle is a veritable soup of objects all with very complicated properties, states, data structures, and pointers flying every which way. Even if I were to get it to work, it’d be a nightmare to test and maintain, and any new feature or minor change to the code could wreck its stability. The fundamental problem is I didn’t design the battle system from the start with reliable saving in mind.
The only real solution to this is mid-battle checkpoints. Every 25 waves or so let all the enemies clear out before the next one starts, clearing the battle of all complicated stuff (enemies, projectiles, etc), then save the current defender information (position, targeting info, boost level, health, attack cooldowns, etc). That’s much less information and could be recorded and restored from reliably.
So, I’m afraid true mid-battle saving is going to have to wait for the next major engine upgrade, which probably won’t happen before a sequel.
I can’t imagine trying to serialize the projectiles generated by 3 or 4 rangers at boost 5 :shock:
WRT battle checkpoints it’s a nice idea and very convenient but it also represents a breather mid-battle that most high level battles don’t get much of. It would seriously affect pacing allowing skills and especially spells to reset before the creeps get from the start to your rear positions. I’m not saying they’re not worthwhile but they’re something that should probably be used very sparingly.
Indeed - it would fundamentally change the design of the battle, so it’s not something I’d really want to add to the existing game. I think the natural place to put “catch your breath” zones like this would be in long levels with lots of difficulty ramping, whenever we detect that the “hard bit” is much later and you use the same strategy for the first X waves or so.
Of course, if we’re detecting that, perhaps that’s an argument for just chopping off the first dozen “no-brainer” waves alltogether. Decisions, decisions…
— Begin quote from "larsiusprime"
Of course, if we’re detecting that, perhaps that’s an argument for just chopping off the first dozen “no-brainer” waves alltogether. Decisions, decisions…
— End quote
Then again, that may be necessary to allow lower levels to accumulate enough psi to reach high boosts prior to the hard bits.