Maybe @InterAction_studios could rework it to some kind of “mission modifiers”. Those include skill levels (increase health slightly, faster enemy fire rate etc.) which raise your points and keys, damage amplifiers which lower your score but make it easier, handicaps from ci5 which can raise your points and score again, and special modifiers like “frenetic mode” (everything is 2x faster, imagine speedhack) which is another massive score boost (2x speed is very hard!). What do you think about it?
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The trouble with how it worked before was that at harder levels the only difference really was that it took longer to get anything done. It waſn’t really any more exciting. If you don’t like the harder miſſions, you don’t have to play them (as far as I know there is no penalty whatſoëver), but I don’t think they ſhould juſt be gotten rid of.
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That’s what I’m trying to fix. SSH before the update was exciting, right now it’s more like a test of your patience. I’m not saying to get rid of the hard missions, what I mean is to make the hardest missions available in the galaxy impossible for a new player, but becoming much easier for someone who equips many upgrades. Fighting many threatening enemies at the same time while you yourself being powerful enough to quickly destroy them as they get within range is what I think gives the excitement.
For those who already have all of the upgrades and can beat any mission in the galaxy without breaking a sweat, sure, we can have modifiers that increase enemy health, as well as some new ones that are designed to increase difficulty, with or without handicapping the player further. However, the modifiers that increase difficulty and rewards for playing with them activated should be available to all players, and not purchased from the in-game store. This is so that if a new player is already very skilled, he can progress much faster by adding difficulty modifiers starting from his first missions and profit from the increased rewards. Before they buy it, SSH should encourage people to keep playing and get better at the game, and after they buy it, it should make them feel rewarded for finally being able to get it, instead of having them find out that they’ll have to put even more effort into killing chickens with SSH enabled.
Me and Orandza have already given all the arguments we could possibly think of to support our case in our previous posts. If people are too stubborn to accept the idea that SSH can be something different in CIU from what it was in previous games, then even the best arguments in the world won’t convince them.
Lastly, I’ll try to summarize the guidelines that I would like CIU to follow:
- Purchasing skill levels should offer an upgrade to your capabilities, not a trade-off between difficulty and score; reverting them to how they originally worked accomplishes that goal
- Nothing that needs to be bought from the in-game store (usually with keys) should decrease the player’s performance, regardless of whether it comes with better rewards for equipping it or not
- Modifiers to increase difficulty and rewards should be available by default, so that new players can also rank up faster if they have the skill to play with said modifiers
- The power of your ship should be determined by the upgrades you purchase and equip; the difficulty and rewards given in-game should be determined by the mission you choose to play and modifiers that you choose to turn on
- The base difficulty of the hardest missions, without any modifiers, should be so that fully upgraded players can get 95% kill ratio
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Can you explain your point? Are you saying that people should miss out on missions, just because they are unnecesarilly hard? And what does that have to do with difficulty? If they are to remain, they will stay useless and boring 
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I mean that the miſſions rated as hard when you’re deciding which miſſion to fly ſhould be hard due to having harder waves, i.e. with harder and more chickens. The problem with uſing SSH to make thing harder was that it took forever to kill anything, ſo it’s not as ſatisfyïng. I juſt don’t think they ſhould remove hard (by miſſion difficulty, not rookie-veteran-SSH) miſſions merely becauſe not everyöne can complete them. I like the challenge, even if I end up dying.
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Taking into account the discussion here (and on other threads), we’re planning to make the following changes:
Skills will change from boosting enemy health to boosting mission difficulty (i.e., spawning more difficult enemies). If we assume a mission has a nominal difficulty from 1 to 100, Veteran might add +20%, SSH +40% etc (these percentages will be tweaked). Additionally, harder skills will remove RNG limits that would normally prevent it from spawning all-miniboss waves (similar to the ones seen on other threads). Attack frequency and projectile speed will also be increased.
In return, harder skills will yield more points (driving you up the rankings) and more keys (even more than what they do now).
It’s impossible to remove the random element from a procedural generated universe. The galaxy currently has over 18000 missions, it’s not reasonable to expect that each one will be perfectly balanced as if it were hand-tuned. If a predictable experience is what you’re after, play the previous episodes. So, yes, it will still be possible to be screwed by the RNG, but it’s going to be a much rarer event than what it is now (as explained on another thread, the generator currently has a bug causing excessive difficulty). Favourites were created with this in mind: so that in your explorations you will cherry-pick the missions that you enjoy the most and replay them as many times as you’d like (and also combine them into shared challenges, but that’s another story).
Discuss.
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What!? That difficulty was cauſed by a bug? Leave it in! 
Seriöuſly though, will the miſſion difficulties in the galaxy view ſtill be there? And would it be poſſible to have a level where it throws abſolutely everything at you? I mean like normal (but hard-iſh) levels where abſolutely everything’s replaced by chickenauts &c.
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This is exactly what I want 
If you do it like that, don’t hestitate to add something above SSH. I want a challenge!
I am thinking of mission modifers, maybe there could be more in the future (skill levels, damage modifiers, frenetic mode, handicaps, …, they would be seperate so you could add a skill level and frenetic mode for example)? Really looking forward to this skill level rework though!
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So no more bullet hell fun and challenging waves? Wonderful…
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You mean RNG hell “fun”?
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Well… it was kinda funny how the screen got filled with chickenauts, but I guess theuy are changing it, I just hope we won’t end up with another kid friendly CI5/4 clone
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Yeah…it won’t be so funny once you end up dying several times to those waves. Then again,maybe deaths are funny to you. I wouldn’t know.
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Umm, you got missiles, or mines, I don’t even use those unless it’s that kind of wave
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Neither do I,but I don’t think that the game should force you to use them. IMO,every wave should be beatable by a regular weapon(with no deaths,of course).
If the next update(or any update,at all) is going to fix waves like this,then I’ll be looking forward to that. Of course,I’m not expecting the game to have 0% RNG,would just be nice if it had a bit less of it.
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@InterAction_studios maybe you can make skill levels unlock by achieving certain tiers instead of buying them with keys? I am at tier 30 but tier 17 already unlocked the hardest missions. Are you planning skill levels above SSH? The Graphics indicate that there could be 3 more skill levels.
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Ooookay, so the waves which spawned 10-20 Chickenauts or Armored Chickens or Chick Gatling Guns at a time during 8 orange square difficulty missions were also caused by a bug. I am surprised, because they didn’t seem entirely unintended, they were a nice, although extreme, variation of the original waves and some of them were more or less unobtrusive, especially if you knew the wave from before and made sure to kill the enemies in a way to not allow the game to spawn too many of the difficult ones at a time. But others, like the Chicken Roulette with Chick Gatling Guns, are already notorious among us.
I’ll have to see in-game how the changes to game balance will be implemented before I can give feedback on them, but I have to say that in the first public build, the bug that made missions more difficult was canceled by the bug that made skills increase your damage, such that although the waves had many powerful enemies, you were able to kill them very quickly until the wave ran out of replacements. In short, what happened was that the players’ ability to boost their damage was removed first, leaving the mini-boss waves only accessible with low or no skill level and SSH turning them into meat grinders, and now what’s about to happen is that the Henpire will be nerfed so they won’t be able to send as many Spartan-grade chickens your way anymore. That still goes in the direction of reducing available power for both the player and the enemies. It’s not what I was hoping for, but I’ll come to terms now with the fact that I won’t get to play that extremely fun powered-up SSH mode ever again.
If there’s one good thing that I see coming out of all this, is that we might have already seen the worst the game had to throw at us and afterwards we’ll find that the base game is easy enough to start ramping up the difficulty. Without any skill level equipped, a full orange square mission feels reasonably playable at the moment, usually not as hard as previous games’ SSH, so if that is what Veteran or Hero will be in the future, I guess everything will be fine.
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(that laſt one is from Ideas about balancing waves, bosses and weapon upgrades - #17 by InterAction_studios)
Before complaining bitterly, why don’t you firſt make ſure that there actuälly is a problem, and then ſuggeſt a ſolution if there is?
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Well, I can’t deny that I am bitter, yes, because I only got to play around with the empowered SSH for a very short time and really missed it when it was gone. If it had lasted for a week or more, I might have got enough of the experience to more easily accept the change to the current status. I’m not just trying to whine, I put a lot of effort into this thread trying to explain the reasons why I think that what we have now didn’t make things better. Right now, Orandza is getting waves like these
in a tier 11 mission, so I withdraw what I said earlier, even without decreasing your damage by equipping skill levels, these waves are harder than anything we’ve had before. When playing a mission like this with SSH equipped… God help your soul. Now see, if SSH offered a damage boost like it did initially, even waves like these would become reasonably doable with no deaths because you’d be able to destroy enemies quickly enough. And that was exactly what I wanted to play more of. It was a rare case of the bugs actually making the game better than their intended features.
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SSH ſhould never increaſe your damage output. That’s what other upgrades are for. SSH is to make things more exciting.
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Exciting? You’re literally just spending more time on the same stuff you’d get with other skill levels! How is that exciting? And it doesn’t help when literally everyone in this thread(except for those of us who are defending our idea,of course) keeps using the conservative “ssh was always the hardest and it should be like that in this game,too.”. Is it really that hard to handle a change like that?
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