Hi, galbatorix here and today I want to talk about something different than weapon balance and heavy bomber.
From time to time I see that people on forum complain about the fact that there is no goal in game and that weekly & daily challenges become boring after a while, because it feels like playing the same thing over and over again. I think that I have pretty solid solution for making weekly challenges at least a bit more interesting and diverse.
Right now weekly challenge is basically a very long mission with chickens and standard bosses on every stage. And to be honest it kinda is a bit boring, because the only thing that changes between different stages of weekly challenge is increasing difficulty. In previous CI games we had long missions too, but they had more variety thanks to special stages such as “comet chase” in CI3, "feather fields"in CI4 and planetary missions in CI5. They not only added more variety, but also gave the player sort of “take a break” time between fighting tones of chickens.
So my idea is to simply include those special stages in weekly challenges. I see it like this:
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Weekly challenge consists of 12 stages (9 waves and 1 boss each)
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1-3 of those 12 are “special stages”
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“special stages” cannot appear as the final stage of the weekly challenge.
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“special stages” have at least one “normal” stage between each other.
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Each type of “special stage” can appear only once per weekly challenge, with exception of meteor storms(I think that multiple meteor storms can work, especially when one has red meteors and other has grey. Of course this exception isn’t mandatory.)
So yea, that’s pretty simple concept, but I belive it could really improve the player experience, because each weekly challenge would be more unique and diverse. Now let’s talk about what can and what cannot be such “special stage”
Candidates for “special stages”:
- Meteor storms (9 waves of asteroids and Magnetic Manipulator as the boss)
- Comet chase (9 waves of comets and Hennley’s Comet as the boss)
- Food Droid Raid (9 waves of food droids and Iron Chef as the boss)
- Supernova(9 waves of supernova debris and Bossa Nova as the boss)
- Retro Invaders (9 waves of retro stuff and Alien Mothership as the boss)
- Feather Fields (If they ever get added to CIU)
- Planetary segments (If they ever get added to CIU)
- Any other possible special segment that may be added to CIU in the future, that doesn’t alter core gameplay mechanics. (So spaceship glued to the bottom edge of the screen is not an option.)
And what definitelly cannot be a “special stage”:
- Sqawk blocks(because it alters players movement and could cause confusion for new players)
- Any other possible special mission, that alters any gameplay mechanic in a similar fashion to the squawk blocks.
That’s basically what I have in mind for improving weekly challenges. And if what I already said was implemented, I belive it would really make “weeklies” more fun to play in the long term. However, I think even more can be done.
Right now in game we have mission background variations. For example missions that are available on suns and hot planets, have reddish background and aurora. We also have lightnings in electric missions and we have “darkness” missions. So what if every stage had a chance for having such background variation? Including “special stages” (Except supernova and red meteor storm that should always have “hot” background and Retro Invaders that have exclusive green background.)
This would mean, that it would be possible to get “darkness comet chase” segment, or Food Droid Raid with electric background. (If darkness + special stage was too much, darkness could be implement as standalone “special stage”) It’s definitelly very simple change, but I think it might make a huge difference during the actual gameplay. Having diverse backgrounds may give player a bit of “long travel” vibe and make him forget the fact that he is playing the same thing over and over again.
So yea, that’s it. Tell me folks what you think about this.