Well, I'm certainly entertained, but I have a few gripes, if I may voice them!
-Leveling feels arbitrary and, frankly, a bit detrimental, since everything levels up with you exactly as you do. You're not getting stronger, you're just getting along, there's no real focal points for "this is where I was before and this is where I am now and I can do the things I did before better because I'm here now." You don't get to choose what you're stronger than, y'know? You'd grind in RPGs to make future things easier or more manageable, that doesn't feel this way here. I get that critters are supposed to get more dangerous the deeper you plunge into a realm, but they start at-par at floor one. I'm not really sure what scales better when you go deeper, since floor one feels like challenge enough.
-Will there always be as many monsters against you as you can field at once? It's a four-on-four every time now, it seems, sort of building on the previous idea that leveling isn't particularly helping me at this point. Battles get longer, but since you're after plasma and you get gobs of it for completing duties, it's looking more like avoiding battle would be ideal.
-Battle messages. If my Red Storm kills a monster with an attack, do I really need to know the monster was staggered by the attack? Heck, the monster is removed from the action queue before any message pops up, there's no mystery about when you slay something. That, or, say, reading that your iron golem gains 25% attack after you've beat down the last opponent. The information's a bit useless at this point, no?
-Maybe it's attack and defense types at play, this is only a loose observation, but that 25% attack boost the iron golem gets per attack feels like a lot more than 25% sometimes, it'll be like going from 33 damage up to 77 up to 105.
-What does stagger do?
-Telescopes never, ever stop being fascinating. This is only a half-serious complaint, haha. Will there be other technogizmos for monarchs to ogle?
That's mostly it from this point. I'm looking forward to seeing how the game develops and maybe a little bit of your plans with each design decision. Do you intend to give the player some choice in where they're playing against their scaling? Or something like One-Way Heroics, where there's a particular realm seed that all players get to play in for a day for fun/discoveries/bonuses?
Thanks for playing! I'll just respond to everything you said in order.
You actually do get more powerful in relation to your enemies as you level up - just maybe not in the way you might expect. Each time your creatures gain a level, they gain +20% on all of their base stats. Since the growth rate is constant, that means the disparity between your creatures' stats and your enemies' stats decreases as you get to higher levels. For example, there's a difference of 10 levels between level 20 and 30, and a difference of 10 levels between level 200 and 210, but your creatures are obviously going to be much more similar in strength when the levels are 200 vs 210 as opposed to 20 vs 30. This means that you will be able to climb to higher Realm levels, which means better loot, which means you can create more Nether Creatures, get better items, and ultimately perform better.
The game is balanced around 6v6 battles. The only reason you can't have 6 creatures right from the beginning is because that would be overwhelming, so this way it eases you into it a bit more smoothly. After you acquire 6 creatures, you still might occasionally run into smaller packs, but after your character reaches a certain level it'll always be 6.
If I removed the battle message details, it would be pretty confusing if you randomly started dealing more damage, or if your creatures started skipping turns for no reasons, wouldn't it? If you want to progress through battle more quickly, you can change the message speed in the options menu.
When damage is calculated, it uses your creatures' attack relative to the defender's defense. It doesn't outright subtract one from the other or anything - defense is used to calculate a percentage of the incoming attack that should be mitigated. So after a certain point, your attack stat might be high enough to completely topple over the enemy's defense.
Stagger increases damage taken by the afflicted creature. You can read about all the buffs/debuffs in the game in the library - but don't check out "Splinters" - it'll crash the game right now. This was a brand new feature, hence the unfortunate crash.
You can visit Daily Realms once you reach level 20 and complete the necessary upgrade. They're very difficult, but they're exactly what you're asking for.
So far Siralim is pretty fun. It's been a while since I've played a party-based dungeon crawler of this still and it really scratches the itch. My one criticism is that the combination of creatures not really being able to do anything other than attack and defend, and the heavy focus on passive abilities sometimes makes it feel like my monsters aren't party members but rather equipment slots on a single person.
I have to say that I take back my previous criticism of the graphics. They're more endearing that your average mobile/flash/Facebook game, and the primary issues are just that some tiles/sprites need shading and the dungeon floors/walls can be a bit monotonous. All of those are things that can be easily rectified by the upcoming graphics overhaul.
Glad you're enjoying it! Thanks for playing.
The reason why each creature's doesn't have one or more active abilities is because that's what spells are meant to be. Way back before the game was released, each creature had a set of abilities they could use, but it felt really weird when you compared those abilities to spells. It also made battles take an unnecessarily long time, and I concluded that it was way more fun if battles were more fast-paced. Now there are two layers of strategy: 1) planning a party of creatures that have passive abilities that work together (for a "greater than the sum of their parts" effect) and 2) determining what to attack, how to attack, whether it's best to defend/provoke, or cast one of over a hundred different spells you might have found on your journey. As you'll likely see when you progress into the later stages of the game, there's plenty enough to occupy your mind in battle without having to worry about managing any other abilities.
Author
Topic: Siralim: Monster-raising random-dungeon RPG (Read 4824 times)