#[AEV] The Mercenary [177]

33 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

faint caveBOT
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#177 : [AEV] The Mercenary

The anti creeper has hired you to help them achieve victory in the arduous civil war in which they've found themselves embroiled.

Tags

APEXEVOLUTION, IRPL

keen lodge
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New AEV map, and a new ship. It's a pretty bland one though since it doesn't bring any brand new modules with it. The new ship (The Lancer) is equipped with 4 blasters, 4 heavy spirits, 2 lathes, and a darkling. The Lancer's special artifact boosts the move speed of the Lancer, as well as the speed of the heavy spirits and the darkling.

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I tested with a few different ships but my submission time was done using the soulkeeper with a pure loki build. That thing is absolutely busted if you focus it.

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Oh, also might be worth mentioning that the Lancer's darkling is slightly longer and narrower compared to the one on the Guardian, mainly to compensate for the size of the ship.

mighty nimbus
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Using Lancer There is a movement bug, If your blasters get into the red around the edges you are frozen in place. This has happened 3 times to me on the upper right corner.

woven tapir
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yes, this happened to me too. Tried to teleport out of it using 1 and insta lost the map 😦

keen lodge
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Yeah, unfortunately the teleport bug from map 172 is still in play. I think I'll have to try to rework the design of the ship somewhat to prevent it getting stuck like that. Moving the blasters away from the points should hopefully fix that issue, and I might need to round out the points as well.

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At least it's easy to reproduce. I'm surprised it never happened to me when I was testing the ship

drifting latch
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It got buried in the discussion thread for the level, but I uploaded a version that fixes the teleport bug to GitHub.

lusty stream
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the carebear ship

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light cipher
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on my playthrough of the map the new ship just stopped using the blaster - pausing/unpausing,saving/loading doesn't help to fix that, anyone got an idea?

candid locust
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This map may be a tad bit unbalanced, but I like it.

mighty nimbus
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If the cartographers were to add a tag for each ship that is available in the map, It would (possibly) give us a way to see what ships we have completed a map with. I do realize that there will be those that will down vote a ship just because they don't like it and eventually if the downvotes win the ship tag might disappear unless there is a mechanism that allows for non-removable tags. Anyway just a thought.

pale jacinth
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that starts to become very interesting again

mighty nimbus
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That would be another change I would like, To be able to turn down the fluorescent pink or make a more friendly shade for those of us that have normal color vision

rotund ember
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Minor issue with Lancer is that the corner-cannons tend to get stuck in terrain if they brush along it while while firing.

Anywho, overall really like the ship:

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clever pike
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Got a really good Odin City endless run

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I think that you could maybe survive indefinitely if you reached 2128 (or whatever the creeper height limit is) bertha damage with the max fire rate bertha but I didn't scale fast enough to reach it

rotund ember
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I accidentally left the game running after finishing endless yesterday, and noticed that after about an hour, the map stabilized on 100% anticreeper coverage, I think after hitting the 'too much creaper in this cell mechanic' inflection point.

It makes me wonder if it is possible to survive until that point.

I'm thinking The Lancer could do it if it had:

  • A heavyspirit with artifacts: Target close, deposite creeper, speed * 5 but duration reduced. Along with high damage, speed, and maxed reload.
  • A darkling with long-range beams, 4 beams, high damage and okay spin speed.
  • Blasters with high penetration, plus the rainbow + explosive artifacts, maybe the narrow beam for damage.
  • The artifact that makes Lancer weapons faster.

You'd have to deliberately grind to above normally expected level, and spend a fair amount of time between clearing the map and starting endless preparing the level.

But I wonder if it is possible.

drifting latch
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It may be possible. The creeper strength after an hour, if I've done my math right, would be 282,475,249, so it'd be a tough journey to get there.

waxen mica
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The Soulkeeper had me thinking that given good save practices, the respawns have seemed like pretty minimal impact artifacts (or even negative since it takes up an artifact choice). Maybe I quicksave more than usual though

drifting latch
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The respawns can also be used offensively, since they convert all creeper to ac around you when you come back.

waxen mica
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Ah, I guess I should've expected something like that was added to keep you safe from respawning back in creeper. I usually end up having AC production in some way already around so I never noticed

mighty nimbus
mighty nimbus
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Why does the circles appear for a tool/weapon that is not attached to the ship yet? As you can see here the terraform selected land appears to be in range but since I have only 1 lathe at the moment the land is not in range.

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waxen mica
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I thought that's because we technically have all the attachments, but they aren't active/visible until actually acquired. So IXE is showing the range of the invisible tools

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I might be remembering incorrectly

mighty nimbus
red ermine
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I'm starting to notice that the more of these maps that are made, every emitter destroyed gives next to 0 chance for a weapon artifact

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I went through 3 playthroughs, one with the new ship, one with Odin City, and one with Swordfish. Every single one I only get 1 weapon artifact, the rest I got to scavenge from Luck of the Draw and Set in Stone. Its crazy

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I don't understand why I get speed upgrade every choice but not a weapon artifact considering there's so many artifacts?

waxen mica
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Ended up making AC heavy spirits way too powerful and they basically betrayed me by constantly dropping creeper instead due to overflow