I know it’s a part of fun of the game, like surrounded by chickenauts or eggships, or hundreds of ufo shooting at you, or gatling guns passing by.
But what about the chickens without any ride? They fly just to be shot without any fight? Back then to CI1 to CI3 almost every enemies are only flying chickens, and they do rain your spaceship with eggs, but now they just don’t.
Playing in SSH there’s a big difficulty difference between chicken only waves and waves with those hard enemies.
Also there’s a lot of occasions that you can’t get clean sweep or even just the half, even with the only viable weapon: Utensil Poker.
So what the hell am I talking about?
Like what written in the title: “Hard doesn’t mean throw off many strong enemies.”
I believe that a wave doesn’t need too many strong enemies. Just like back in CI1-3, difficulty affects attack rate of the enemies. You will feel how creepy is egg rain above your head. And you don’t have to worry that almost all enemies flee before you cook them.
Note: Why I said CI1-3? Because CI4 and CI5 are too easy.
Ci1 and ci2 had the problem with the eggs being so fast,you’d hardly even have time to dodge them,and considering you have no idea when the enemies would attack(excluding most bosses,but not mother-hen ship thanks to its assistance),it would get pretty annoying. Regardless of whether or not this is perfect,it’s better than what it used to be.
Although traveller,you’d be a bit wrong with what you said. Games in questions are ci1-ci3. For ci3,you’d be right,but ci2 also increased projectile speed quite a bit for veteran. But yeah,the health boosts were still just making the game longer and I’m glad it was changed.
What underlied this post was when I played, I saw only advanced enemies do the job (ufo, chickenaut, eggship, gatling gun) while normal chickens stand still and do nothing. Seems like the waves relied too much with advanced enemies. When you got another wave without any of these advanced enemies, the wave become too easy.
That’s why I want to increase their attack rate but decrease the chance of advanced enemies to appear. So you won’t meet all chickenaut waves, but the chickens are even crazier than before (they shoot more).
Clean Sweep is only a bonus for clearing all enemies in a wave. Clearing most of them is enough to yield the highest score. And these waves makes more variation in the scoreboard, imo. Much similar to some waves in CI1.
Well then we can tweak it so that the egg dropping speed isn’t supersonic, I’d make the max speed about 1.35 times as much as a chickenaut’s bolt and the average speed of the eggs would be 0.75 times that of a Chickenaut bolt in SSH.
There should be ninja chickens, which would be the older cousins of those little ninja chicks which dash towards you. They made waves that you were forced to be in closer than usual proximity to the chickens, quite a bit harder but the chicks are too easy to kill, the ninja chickens would be quite a lot tougher, about as much as a pilot chicken which is stated to be twice as tough as a regular chicken in the wiki.
As for a health boost, it should be limited or else hard waves would just take too long. I’d make it so that enemies in tourist are about 1/3rd as tough as their equivalents in SSH.
And finally, you’ve gotta admit that the impact of the mini-bosses is lost when they’re being spammed. I would make the Chickenaut 1.5 times as tough and fire 2 more bolts but there would be a maximum of 8 of them in a single wave. The armored chickenships (that’s what I call them BTW) are sufficiently tough enough but they should have the same cap as the chickenauts. There shouldn’t be more than 5 gatling eggs at once and they also take up the spawn cap of the other mini-bosses. In fact, there shouldn’t be more than 6 of them in total in a normal zoomed wave. Unfortunately, I don’t know how many sizes are there for levels.
Time and time again though I’ve gotten things wrong and I don’t know about game balancing. Tweak with my number as you wish.