Fruit Changes

[WindStrike]

(This is actually already decided, I'm just tossing it here for discussion as well as having it written down somewhere).

For the next patch, fruit will instead scale purely in HP and damage reduction. Normally, wouldn't have to deal with damage reduction issues except for... that dumb 500k HP cap that shouldn't exist but does. Anyhow, attached below is the list of changes (one for Solo, one for Team). Fruit scales in HP by 15% per level, regardless of difficulty. Depending on the difficulty, the damage reduction scales up (by multiplication). It's not the same per difficulty, or else (as tested in Excel) Very Hard might end up being twice as hard as Hard. Not to mention running into 100% damage reduction cap on team.

A little note - this is untested. This will be updated after testing, which I'm sure it will. Whether this will be enough for mazing or not, I really don't know. The game is balanced around non-mazing after all, so if this turns out to be too easy for maze, then that just means maze will need its own buff. It actually may end up harder for mazing due to technically higher regeneration.

Suggested Fruit Points:

• Very Easy - 1
• Easy - 2
• Normal - 4
• Hard - 6
• Very Hard - 8 (currently at 7)

Thoughts?

Solo Difficulty Scaling.xlsx

Team Difficulty Scaling.xlsx

[ender]

are those number the new numbers for witch difficulty?

i doubt that maze will be harder i managed to run infinite fruits in team, so that is 2x protection or translated in hp 2x the hp or maze VH solo, or you need 2x dmg on VH team compared to dmg needed for VH solo, and we still run the fruits up to max 500k hp, and after 5 waves to be sure we sold and ended the game.

i have another opinion VE, E, normal should get buffed in fruit points. i don;t know how new fruit system will work, but with old system in VE compared to VH you have 1 point vs 7 points, dmg wise in VE you need 55 dmg and in VH 200 dmg(this are number to show the difference in dmg needed when taking into account the hp and dmg reduction mods) so is like 1 to 3.6, money wise VE can get you around 135k(maybe more but i think 150k is a hard cap) vs VH at least 100k(you can get even close to 125k considering you get more money than VE).

so the mods are VE is 3.6x times easier, you get 1.5x more money, and 7 times less points, so 1.5x3.6= 5.4, nowhere near 7 witch makes the mod really not worth it, considering that even very hard is not that hard if you pay attention, anyone can clear it, the easiest tact is spend all money asap up to wave 40-45, when the big money come in and is worth to make economy for interest, and your money spend up to that wave in towers is enough on VH to clear up to wave 61.

i'm no saying make VE and other close to the 7 of VH but 5.4 vs 7 is too big of a gap. i tried to calculate how many points you will get on VE considering you have less fruit hp, less dmg mitigation, you got more money due to economy(you don;t need same tower power for first 60 waves, lots of interest), but way way lower points per kill.

[WindStrike]

It's the reward for running on a higher difficulty. Ideally, the highest difficulty setting should reward the most points, given any well built defense. Now, on VE and E, it should be possible to go infinitely even on non-mazing. Those two difficulties are meant for people learning the game and for casual players. Normal, Hard, and VH, definitely shouldn't be possible to go infinite.

While you or I may say that Very Hard is too easy... that's not true for everyone. In fact, it's only true for... maybe 10-15 people? Out of thousands? Granted, that number would increase if people actually checked out this site more often and went through some of the guides and tips and whatnot, but overall, there's a TON to learn to this game. Only the people that have spent probably 30+ hours on this game are usually the people that can beat VH, and that's before Extreme and/or Chaos is added.

I just did the math for the totals of all the bounty bases without interest. Here's the result:

• Very Easy - 66535, base of 1.091
• Easy - 72840, base of 1.093
• Normal - 83467, base of 1.096
• Hard - 91421, base of 1.098
• Very Hard - 100149, base of 1.100

Obviously, at earlier levels, the differences are lower, both in amount and percentage difference between one level and another. However, I do think they need to be widened... just slightly though. Here's the new results:

• Very Easy - 58108, base of 1.088
• Easy - 66535, base of 1.091
• Normal - 76219, base of 1.094
• Hard - 87351, base of 1.097
• Very Hard - 100149, base of 1.100

The numbers are slightly off from what it is actually in-game due to that it automatically rounds up in-game. Anyhow, an increase in the difference of gold gotten should offset the interest a bit and help make it so that VH gives you the most gold, if you know what you're doing.

[WindStrike]

Fyi, as of the new patch, Karawasa found some way to have the fruits pretty much mimic the scaling listed here, so if you're looking at the fruits and wondering why the damage reduction isn't going up but the fruits are taking less damage, that's why.

[Karawasa]

Are they too hard now?

[WindStrike]

I've only been doing multiplayer matches, and I'm getting farther w/ the new fruit change than before, probably because it's not a sudden shutdown with the darn speedups. Yay to single-target towers actually doing stuff now!

I'd say the fruit scaling is just fine. I'mma do some solo runs sometime during the week and see how I fair. Thank you very much for fixing fruit, suddenly able to use a lot more of my builds now viably, lol.

[WindStrike]

are those number the new numbers for witch difficulty?

i doubt that maze will be harder i managed to run infinite fruits in team, so that is 2x protection or translated in hp 2x the hp or maze VH solo, or you need 2x dmg on VH team compared to dmg needed for VH solo, and we still run the fruits up to max 500k hp, and after 5 waves to be sure we sold and ended the game.

i have another opinion VE, E, normal should get buffed in fruit points. i don;t know how new fruit system will work, but with old system in VE compared to VH you have 1 point vs 7 points, dmg wise in VE you need 55 dmg and in VH 200 dmg(this are number to show the difference in dmg needed when taking into account the hp and dmg reduction mods) so is like 1 to 3.6, money wise VE can get you around 135k(maybe more but i think 150k is a hard cap) vs VH at least 100k(you can get even close to 125k considering you get more money than VE).

so the mods are VE is 3.6x times easier, you get 1.5x more money, and 7 times less points, so 1.5x3.6= 5.4, nowhere near 7 witch makes the mod really not worth it, considering that even very hard is not that hard if you pay attention, anyone can clear it, the easiest tact is spend all money asap up to wave 40-45, when the big money come in and is worth to make economy for interest, and your money spend up to that wave in towers is enough on VH to clear up to wave 61.

i'm no saying make VE and other close to the 7 of VH but 5.4 vs 7 is too big of a gap. i tried to calculate how many points you will get on VE considering you have less fruit hp, less dmg mitigation, you got more money due to economy(you don;t need same tower power for first 60 waves, lots of interest), but way way lower points per kill.

With the exception of being able to go infinite on Very Easy (actually, haven't tested if this is possible in non-mazing), it's intended that for the next difficulty, the amount of points you can get utilizing the same defense becomes higher, especially seeing as you get more money on higher difficulties. With a higher level of skill, you're able to utilize this extra money more, despite the difficulty increasing.

There's roughly 10k gold between each difficulty, providing a 10-15% increase in money from one difficulty to the next. There's also a 30-40% increase in difficulty from one to the next. So, with Very Easy being the base difficulty of 1, let's stick all these modifiers next to each other, without the point amounts.

• Very Easy
  • Creep Difficulty Modifier: x1.00 - 50% HP, 10% DMG Reduction
  • Actual HP of 100 HP Creep: 55.50
  • Gold Modifier: x1.00 - 58108, base of 1.088
• Easy
  • Creep Difficulty Modifier: x1.41 - 62.5% HP, 20% DMG Reduction
  • Actual HP of 100 HP Creep: 78.13
  • Gold Modifier: x1.15 - 66535, base of 1.091
• Normal
  • Creep Difficulty Modifier: x1.93 - 75% HP, 30% DMG Reduction
  • Actual HP of 100 HP Creep: 107.14
  • Gold Modifier: x1.31 - 76219, base of 1.094
• Hard
  • Creep Difficulty Modifier: x2.63 - 87.5% HP, 40% DMG Reduction
  • Actual HP of 100 HP Creep: 145.83
  • Gold Modifier: x1.50 - 87351, base of 1.097
• Very Hard
  • Creep Difficulty Modifier: x3.60 - 100% HP, 50% DMG Reduction
  • Actual HP of 100 HP Creep: 200.00
  • Gold Modifier: x1.72 - 100149, base of 1.100

In theory, if we were to divide the Creep Difficulty Modifiers by the Gold Modifiers and then assign exact point values, Very Hard should only deserve to be twice the points of Very Easy, meaning we'd have to raise the point system to accommodate that. However, it would then be the most efficient to get a high score on fruit based on a combination of good gold amounts and not-so-difficult creeps. Normal looks nice for that; half the difficulty of Very Hard, and 76% of the gold amount. But wait, the highest difficulty is supposed to award the most amount of points, assuming same skill level (that is, enough to clear Very Hard without too many issues) and same defense design. See the problem here?

So instead, it's based closer on difference between difficulties, with a minimum of 1 points difference. It's based only roughly on the differences between difficulties, otherwise it'd translate to 1 point difference the whole way up.

That said, I'd like to point out a discrepancy: Hard and Very Hard. You can DEFINITELY get more fruit points on Hard than Very Hard. Not basing this solely off stats; I'm getting more points in Hard than Very Hard in-game by a good amount. I am asking that Very Hard be pushed to 8 points per fruit, which should theoretically fix this issue, or least help things out.

[ender]

i've been playing the new version and tested a few things. i will like to point out and ask for your opinion on them.

- VH is no longer the optimal mode for max fruit points, nor is hard. normal seems to be the optimal one for high score. anything under or over in difficulty won't make up in money gain or creeps strength reduction. i've tested with different budgets and same build (max budget for each difficulty, but total budget N< H <VH) and fruit scores N>H>VH.

- towers still have an awful targeting mechanic or rather glitch. is true they attack closest target, and most of the time stay on that target, but if the creeps get OOR for 1 second then come back in range the tower re-targets closest target, leaving the low hp creeps run around. still big difference between spam click attack vs let towers attack on they're own. when i was suggesting laser tower targeting mechanic, i was pointing out that that towers has 3 modes(random from my tests seems to be normal mech not actually "random") aoe/hit all equally, normal/random, target lowest target, all witch seem to work perfectly compared to other towers that can't seem to have a decent dps when left on auto attack.

-clone towers have a wired mechanic of placement algorithm, they tend to place the towers they clone in the worst position possible.

to be continued... can't remember now all the things i tested.

[WindStrike]

Is it really that bad? I don't doubt you, twill give a shot at it later, but if that's the case, I'm going to suggest two scoring amounts:

- 1, 2, 3, 5, 7

- 1, 2, 4, 7, 10

I'll get something more concrete out later after some tests.

regarding the targeting system, that is the default targeting system for SC2. It doesn't recognize that it was shooting the other target once it's changed. The way around this is tower positioning and manual targeting.

[WindStrike]

Currently, AoE defenses are completely dominating the fruit wave. It made me think - how come single-target defenses suck on the fruit round but are pretty much a necessity during the waves?

• Elemental bosses
  
• Healing/Mechanical creeps
  

Essentially, if the game were plain and had no creep abilities, AoE defenses would completely dominate, and single-target would lose by a longshot, currently like how it is in the fruit setup.

I suggest having the fruit alternate creep abilities, not randomly, but in a set order of undead, mechanical, image, healing, fast (actually, order doesn't really matter). Essentially, it would repeat this set of 5 fruits, so 6 of each creep every wave total. It's still waves of 30 fruit, and they still scale, but by bringing the abilities back in an even setup, single-target towers would become a lot more useful during the fruit wave. Whether pure AoE, pure single-target, or a balanced mix of both would win, I don't know, but I do know this - Element Tower Defense is balanced around those creep abilities being present, and currently, any build banking on single-target is losing to the AoE builds by a longshot.

Alternatively, a slight edit to the set of fruits repeated would be a normal fruit in there without abilities, so it's a set of 6 fruits being repeated 5 times per wave.