Some feedback from a no-life gamer…
1 - I recently hit Voltage 15 and decided to go try to get the first relic. With my attack multiplier so high and most of my other coilworks upgrades pretty well off as well, I figured it would just be a waiting game.
I went to the grocery store and bought about $300 worth of groceries, hauled it back, put everything away and checked back on the game roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours later - It had gone up from wave 340 to about 680~690. Exactly how many days/weeks do you intend for players to continuously run this game to obtain the relics? Are they even worth it? There’s no indication as to what kind of gains you actually get from them aside from the stat they affect (seemingly) but is it a 5% increase? A 50% increase? A 500% increase? There’s no way to know without obtaining them… which seems unfeasible. Considering the multipliers at V11+, I really don’t see a reason to even worry about them, either. With each new Voltage increasing the difficulty (and gains) by a few orders of magnitude. (V13: 77.27T; V14: 309.06Qa; V15: 1.24Sx) Literally one wave on V15 is better than 100 waves on the previous voltage… which is fine, but this also means the multipliers you get to Scrap are kind of meaningless.
That aside, the issue of ridiculously slow progression is something that needs to be addressed, if you want the relics to actually be obtainable in a realistic amount of time. There are a few different ways to potentially address the issue, so I’ll list them here:
1a - Wave Skip - Instead of skipping one wave, it skips (highestWave - currentWave) / 10 or 10% of the difference between your current wave and highest wave. (If highest wave was 500, it could skip up to 49 waves, if triggered at the end of the first wave) and if you are at or above your highest ever wave, then it skips the minimum of 1 wave. This would make the chip actually viable both for farming and for progression, without dramatically increasing the difficulty.
1b - Intro Sprint - Lock the speed at 2x/3x and with upgrades increase the wave counter instead of the speed. Level 1: 10 waves; Level 2: 20 waves; Level 3: 40 waves: Level 4: 60 waves; Level 5: 80 waves; Level 6: 100 waves; Level 7: 200 waves; Considering the gem cost of obtaining duplicates (and the relatively low chance to get this specific rare chip) getting past level 3 or 4 is basically unthinkable without considerable grinding. (Dozens or hundreds of hours; depending on how much you neglect other gem purchases)
1c - Game Speed multi (Blueprints) - Increase the cap (and have the price scale pretty hard after level 3 or 4); pretty simple solution, but also runs the risk of increasing lag. See #4 below.
2 - Chips UI is kind of weird. After you obtain the 4th chip slot, the fifth shows up off to the right, and you have to use a scrollbar to access it. This feels chaotic and strange. Would it not make more sense to move it to the next line?
3 - Enemy Balance chip - When equipped, adds a bit of text to it’s label reading “[Locked In]” which doesn’t show up on other chips when equipped. What is the reason for this?
4 - Lag - Holy crap. Around wave 200 or so, the sheer volume of enemies spawning in slows the game down and each wave ends up taking more than twice as long as normal. Around wave 700 it was taking more than 45 seconds per wave, and around wave 825 it was taking over a minute per wave. I have a few suggestions to reduce the lag, so please take them under consideration:
4a - Hide Loot Numbers - Add a setting to hide/disable the charge and scrap loot popups when killing enemies.
4b - Rebalance - Reduce the swarm size and increase their stats more on higher waves. A previous update caused this, and it seemed a bit short-sighted to me as I was reading the update notes. Hopefully more tweaking can solve the issue without destroying the enjoyment.
4c - Frame Skip - I don’t know if the game utilizes frameskip at present, but if not… then please consider adding it.
4d - Repair Kit (Rebalance) - Great gods of gaming, how many repair kits can you fit on one screen? Too many, apparently. The cost of the rewire is kind of insane, considering you can effectively only get gems via active play… and 500 is just too much imo. I need to save up though so I can get the repair kit upgrades permanently out of my build. I don’t take damage, so they serve no purpose. (Glass cannon build) Also, there should be a strict limit to how many can be on screen at once. Maybe 10?
4da - Side note: Maybe make the first rewire free after unlocking it?
5 - Scrap Per Wave upgrade is utterly useless beyond a certain point - Right now my Scrap per wave is 31.2k and the multiplier for the current Voltage is 122.36Sx. Meaning I am getting literally a few sextillion scrap per kill on Wave 1, and hundreds of sextillions per kill on higher waves. 31.2k per wave is honestly not even enough to consider it a drop in the bucket. Potential solutions:
5a - Scrap Per Wave scales with Scrap multiplier(s) - Not a 1:1 ratio, because then it would be ridiculously overpowered, but maybe at a square root scale? With an overall multiplier of 1m you would get Scrap Per Wave x 1000 instead. Just a thought I had while typing this comment. It would still end up scaled out of use but it would last dramatically longer instead of being utterly useless around Voltage 7 or 8.
5b - Scrap Per Wave gains scale with wave/voltage - This would be a bit of a pain to balance, but basically each wave would give you Scrap Per Wave x (1 + 0.01 x waveNumber) x voltage; so voltage 1 wave 100 would give you Scrap Per Wave x 2 and voltage 3 wave 250 would give you Scrap Per Wave x 3.5 x 3 or Scrap Per Wave x 10.5; this would (in theory) extend the utility of Scrap Per Wave without tying it to pre-existing multipliers.
6 - Need. More. Gems. - Good golly, Miss Molly… The costs get pretty ridiculous later, and the amount of grinding required to buy stuff is equally ridiculous. My 5th chip slot will be over 400 gems, and each rewire costs 500 gems. You get, at best, 2 gems per 10 waves (give or take) plus one time rewards… it’s like the game was balanced in such a way as to suggest you can buy gems but there’s no option to buy them. Some suggestions:
6a - Free Gem (singular) every 10 waves, all voltages - Plain and simple: you get 1 gem (collected automatically) every 10 waves completed regardless of voltage or previous progress. It ain’t much, as it would still require FIVE THOUSAND waves to rewire ONCE, but it is something and it helps.
6b - More frequent random quests - 2 quests every… 8 hours?! And with a possible total of less than 50 per 24 hours? Are you serious..? That’s literally 10 days for a single rewire! I’m baffled at the choices having been made here, given how expensive things are in this game. How about 1 quest ever hour with half the rewards at present, and the weekly goals gets roughly doubled so the max tier is 100 random quests instead? And increase the max quests you can ‘stock’ at once from 6(?) to 10 while you’re at it. Please and thanks.
6c - Auto-collect Gems chip/blueprints - A chip that automatically collects gems that drop during normal gameplay. Alternatively, you could make it a blueprint instead, with the unlock on Voltage 13 wave 50 (There’s nothing on Voltage 13 at the moment, except the unlock for V14, the skin, and the relic) and a price that puts it firmly at the end of V14 or start of V15. (10 Sp)
6d - More Gem Enemies - A new coilworks upgrade that increases the spawn chance for gem-type enemies which drop a gem on death.
Side note: The various gem costs in game might need to be rebalanced instead or in addition to the suggestions/notes above. I still find it weird that chips which offer at minimum 15% value cost the same amount as components, which offer at minimum 10% (and honestly kind of suck in general, unless you get insanely lucky with the rolls)
Side note 2: The 4th blueprint slot costs 1.4k gems ffs…
7 - Auto-blueprints - Plain and simple… if I have enough Scrap to grab the next level then the next level of a blueprint should automatically start so I can actually get some value out of the blueprints even during longer runs. (Any run that lasts over 3-4 hours basically means you are wasting a ton of time that could be spent obtaining more blueprint levels)
8 - Range - I got range coilworks upgrade maxed before I entered Voltage 2. Many days later, I unlocked Overclock and bought a somewhat expensive upgrade to multiply my range from 1x to 4x… and there’s literally no difference. A few of the other Overclock purchases are similarly useless due to maxed out stats. Crit chance, it seems, has a small purpose of going over 100%, thanks to a chip that I got somewhat recently, but I don’t know if there’s any point in using it considering damage is really not a concern in the current version. (time is the much greater concern, considering how long each run takes and I have to get to wave 300 to unlock Voltage 16)
9 - Enemy Stats - I really wish there was a way to view enemy stats. Maybe by clicking on an enemy, or by clicking on the wave counter? Even if it’s just the base enemy’s stats, something to indicate how much health they have and how much damage they can do would be greatly appreciated.
10 - Overclock upgrades (buy max) cause the game to effectively freeze for upwards of 15-30 seconds - So far as I can tell, this was an issue that presented elsewhere in the game and was addressed, but apparently the Overclock screen didn’t get the update. It seems to be redrawing on every single level that is being bought, despite buying in bulk. I hope this one proves to be a quick fix, since a very similar issue (I assume) was already fixed elsewhere a couple months ago.
11 - Deflection does… what? - Deflection is maxed out, at 100%, which according to the tooltip means I am invincible? Of course, I can still be killed in the run, so something isn’t right here. Some kind of miscommunication is occurring here and I’d really appreciate some clarity lol.
12 - Defense stats do basically nothing for me - With high enough damage, and maxed out attack speed (and range) the defensive upgrades are completely meaningless. If there were builds that actually took advantage of the defensive stats, such as reflect or knockback-on-hit type builds, this would simply be a question of playstyle and build, but since those effects do not exist, the defensive stats are basically just a useless collection of Scrap dumps.
I think that’s it for now. I’ll comment again if I find anything else that stands out to me.
For the sake of clarity, I want to emphasize one important point: I am very much enjoying this game!
I provided the above feedback (some of which may seem somewhat toxic or venomous) because I genuinely want to help improve the game. But at the end of the day this is your project and you are the one who will make the choices that matter most.
Much respect. And keep up the great work.
EDIT: I play on browser, in case that information is needed. (I don’t know if there’s another way to play this game or not, but I saw someone else make the comment, so I figured I might as well add the info here)