Early Access version 40.2

I ſtill think that automatic weapon balancing ſhould be implemented.

And I still think that it wouldn’t help with anything and people would be just using the strongest weapon in the week. WPB is much better because it actually makes weapons good to use in any case that you want - and that opens the way for you to pick any weapons you prefer without losing advantage.

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My response to Automatic Balancing can pretty much be summed up in this post I made a few months back: (wow, have I been on CIU for a few months now? Doesn’t feel that long aha)

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So, as i experienced my self:
IB is good for EZ missions.
UP is good for hard missions.

If there’s big chickens, how about a big chick? A bigger size of a normal chick but smaller than a big chicken

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I agree that Ions aren’t perfect even now, but I think they are “good enough” to be able to move on to something else. Even if Galbatorix gets all of his suggestions approved and implemented into the game until he runs out of criticisms on weapon balance, there might still be a large gap between the most used weapon and the second most used weapon.

In the end, all of my tables or his tables aren’t worth a damn, they’re a sludge of numbers very few players will be bothered to read and understand. If you make all the numbers equal, you have a game that’s balanced only on paper.

^ It’s more difficult to quantify all these with numbers and how they are reflected in real gameplay than plain DPS.

Utensil Poker needs to stop being a litmus test on whether a weapon is good or bad, but time and time again, people compare everything else with it. Right now, ask 5 random CIU players what’s the best weapon and 4 of them will say Utensil Poker, while the 5th will say Plasma Rifle or Vulcan Chaingun. I think the ultimate goal of weapon “balancing” is to get 5 different answers in a survey like that.

This is why I argued in favor of automatic weapon balancing when the opportunity presented itself.

It would be good to bring the weapons to the point where they perform similar to one another, but Automatic Balancing would probably serve its purpose even if it was implemented right now. I know I’ll get yelled at:

But I, too, will say it again. With weapons that are only balanced on paper and never touched again, favored and unfavored weapons will still emerge nonetheless. Players who have already purchased Utensil Poker have no reason to move away from it if the only thing you do is buff the other weapons until they nearly match its DPS.

In the end, I think the weapons having equal popularity is more important than having them mathematically balanced. Because popularity is the manifestation of those raw values. I wish for people to talk to one another and be unable decide on a best weapon. And even if they compute which is the best in that day, it will change after some time. I think that’s a wonderful mechanic to have instead of the same rigid situation we’ve been mostly stuck with since CI3. Yes, the WBP does many things in that direction, but WBP would eventually reach an end. Automatic Weapon Balancing (AWB) would keep the damage tables constantly changing forever.

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It’s not a game mechanic. By “burst” I refer to certain technique of using your wepon.
You do burst by starting shooting on the bottom of the screen and then move your spaceship together with projectiles you fired, constantly adding more of them. This way you can make an enemy get a single very powerful blow for all those projectiles stacked together. Very useful technique during supernova missions. Especially against the boss. It’s not possible to use Ion Blaster for this, because its projectiles accelerate and you can’t stack them together.

I think so. I really don’t want Utensil Poker to be nerfed. It’s good as it is. It still kinda struggles against stronger missions. I think however, that we should give other weapons enough kick to compete with it. (If we really want to keep UP as the highest DPS weapon, buffing its damage output and introducing something like fast overheat you mentioned, is also an option.)

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Make Green Ion Bullets For Anniversary Mission (Or make Them a Weaker version of Ion Blaster like the Moron Railgun, This could be a starter weapon too maybe)

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It mainly comes down to the overuse of tougher enemy types, even if you get spared from mini boss spam, chances are you’re still going to fight metal suit chickens which are still significantly stronger than regular chickens. Waves can still be made difficult without spamming mini bosses. As much as I hate the cowards for unbalancing the weapons even more towards the favor of Plasma Rifle and Absolver Beam, they are a decent example of an enemy which isn’t tanky and yet still provides a good challenge to the player. Still hate slobs tho due to their RNG.

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I disagreed, with, like, every other point in your post, but I still wanted to like it a bunch because this is ultimately the crux of the issue and I couldn’t agree more.

I just feel like automatic balancing would not give us five different answers in that survey, but instead the same answer that changes every five weeks.

I feel like when the weapons are truly balanced, the one a player chooses should say less about the weapon and more about the player. If I pick Ion, it shouldn’t be because it’s better or worse than the other weapons - it should be because maybe I like to sit and spam bullets mindlessly, or maybe I like to fly supernova often, or maybe I just like the colour red.

As a personal example: Even though Utensil Poker is objectively still a bit better, I play Absolver currently because it’s viable enough to use and I prefer the style of it - charged, sniper-like blasts that require timing and planning while also playing as much of a defensive role as they do attacking. Eventually I hope all weapons reach that place of being “viable”.

And honestly, I’d like if we reached a place where to score optimally in a daily challenge, grabbing a gift box for the points was more important than what’s inside 90% of the time. But that might be asking too much :joy:

I would be content for choosing a weapon to feel like, well, choosing, I suppose.

Yeah, maybe this. Utensil Poker was always the “secret weapon” from CI3 to me - and even if it’s not objectively better, it still ought to feel like the comically ultimate foil of anything that resembles a chicken.
Maybe a buff against chicken based enemies and a nerf against non-chickens, but that could be opening a massive can of worms. :joy:

While I won’t argue that coward’s don’t horrendously skew the weapon roster (I accidentally grabbed a boron the other day and it was a death sentence), I wouldn’t go so far as to say things are at all skewed toward Absolver at the moment. I play with it regularly - and though it can destroy literally ten armoured chickenauts at once, it really struggles with plenty of other things that most weapons would eat for breakfast and honestly feels within the realm of (what I at least would consider to be) balanced, where by comparison my other preferred weapon (photon swarm) does not at all.

In a game about killer chickens from space, is a little bit of RNG and chaos that bad of a thing? As long as you feel like you can overcome it.

Sometimes, simple ideas are the best. I’d like to see this too, aha

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I’ve established before that I like the new Ion Blaster, quite a lot even, and even though the DPS gap is around 3000, it’s still a pretty good weapon to use in missions. But now that I look into what Galbatorix said, maybe it’s true that it needs a slight buff. And if we’re dissatisfied, tweaking the numbers is a matter of pressing backspace 3 times and typing 3 new digits.

But I’d have to agree that comparing every weapon with Utensil Poker’s performance, as if it’s a template, is a strong indicator that it’s OP compared to the rest of the weapons, and that’s never good. What (I believe) WBP wants to rather achieve is this - no more “Is this as good as Utensil?”, but instead “Is this good?”

That doesn’t mean they’re not worth a damn. Personally, I read them thoroughly and I find it rather exciting, to be fair. But what’s important is that IA is one of those developers who takes the time to notice his community’s efforts, isn’t that what really matters? And these numbers will affect everyone later, regardless of whether they have read your tables or not.

Honestly it would be nice to have weapons that require more skill to be used. A great example is your reworked Boron Railgun. Every weapon must have its advantages and disadvantages, and I don’t find dodging a few pieces of bird garbage problematic… at least with my Scout. It’s a pain in the butt with the bomber, but that’s just how bombers are at present.

That’s a great goal to have in mind, I actually happened to say something in a similar spirit earlier in my post, but like always I read after I have started writing. Nice.

Like Kylo and Sopho said, Automatic Balancing is a big no-no in our book and it must not be the solution. Never seek a lazy solution because no one will be happy about it. Automatic Balancing will only make weapons even more confusing to use, especially for newbies and non-English speakers who have no idea what’s going on. And no, translations shouldn’t be an excuse to include that anyway, either.

EDIT: It seems I have misunderstood Sopho and he’s apparently rooting for AWB. Sorry. But my point still stands.

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I forget, in the image, i dont in the orbit, When you reaches orbit it disappears and is no more

We verified And i didn’t see any green point

Upd: ok, i forget to disable “View contacts only” I will check again later

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Oh, I do that sometimes

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Today i comfirmed, i didnt see any ghost bomber, either a Green point

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Maybe the bomber travel to somewhere?

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I checked everywhere he can be, and nothing

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lol, i imagined Apple Core boss fight but in Egg Billards

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Quadruple Apple Core?

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I think everyone noticed this: Magnetic Manipulator boss with grey asteroids spawns red meteor storms and vice versa

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Would it be possible to make Terminators lean to the side that they are moving, like they did in CI3? That was very helpful when keeping track of their movements at a glance.

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