Update 0.4: Economy and Sandbox

Hi Everyone,

This is going to be the first major update to the game, which is why it's coming a bit later than I planned. Moving forward, I'll still try to release a major update at the beginning of every month, with a smaller one in between.

To celebrate this update, we're participating in a weeklong 15% off deal. You have until 10am PDT, Monday 18th! Get it while you can!

For 0.4 I wanted to really dig into your feedback and do my best to address it. If you haven't yet, I highly recommend you read the Design Principles post, as that will help explain a lot of the thinking behind the game.

[h2]Fog and Energy[/h2]
One very common piece of feedback I get is a dislike for the Fog Creature coming into the board every turn. It serves a purpose, as it prevents you from farming energy indefinitely, but you've also said you don't really like farming energy!

So in this update, I hope to kill two birds with one stone. I've redesigned the energy economy so that Energy Pods now hold a limited amount, and when they're depleted, you can't get any more out of them. Note that parts that give you extra energy (such as the Engineering body and the Harvesting 2.0 expansion) do it for free, i.e. they don't deplete the Pod any faster.

Besides Pods, there were some "tricks" you could use to get extra energy by spamming drones or landmines and scrapping them, and that could again encourage delaying the ending of a battle to farm. In 0.4 those units no longer provide energy when scrapping.



Thanks to these changes there's a ceiling to how much energy you can farm and that allowed me to push the Fog Creature back two turns. I still want to keep it, in part because it's important to the story, but you're not going to feel pressured by it nearly as much in this version: a typical battle is 5 turns, so you get 40% more time before the Fog bothers you.

To compensate the energy restrictions, you now start with 4 extra energy points. Besides, I've made a small tweak to the Basic body so the energy cost doesn't climb as you spawn more. This will let you spawn some Mechs a bit more cheaply especially at the beginning.

[h2]Transformation and easier Blueprints[/h2]
Another common request was the ability to apply Blueprint changes to Mechs. Up until now, you could apply part upgrades, but any Blueprint changes would require you to scrap a Mech and spawn a new one. In 0.4 there is a new option, you can Transform a Mech using a Blueprint, and the energy cost will be only for the parts that are different (also accounting for any upgrades). You can do this before or even during a battle.



This makes it a LOT cheaper to get new parts into the battlefield, makes it possible to spawn expensive Mechs even with low energy caps (you can now do it incrementally) and gives you more flexibility during a run, as you can react more quickly to new parts or other situations.

But wait, there's more. Some people were confused that each part could only be equipped in a single Blueprint. So I've changed it. In 0.4 you can use the same part in multiple Blueprints at the same time.
Previously you could still do this in practice, by spawning your Mechs in between battles as you could go back and reconfigure the Blueprints, but now it's a lot easier. As a result of this change I've also reduced the number of Blueprint slots from 9 to 6, I felt there were too many and it looks cleaner now.



One more quality of life change is that now whenever a Mech has pending upgrades, you can see in the tooltip the changes to the stats and abilities from those upgrades.

[h2]Sandbox[/h2]
With a roguelite and with the previous changes, I felt like there were already enough changes to make it exciting to try a new run, but I didn't want to stop there.

I understand that often, you want to experiment and try new strategies, and that's hard to do when the parts that drop every run are random. This can lead to starting a run, seeing the parts and doing it over and over until you get what you're looking for.

I still feel that having some randomization around the parts is important, but I also think it's valid to want to practice and try combinations. Enter Sandbox mode.

You select Sandbox mode from the Mech Armada Control Center, and it functions like a computer-simulated run. You have full control over which parts you want, the amount of resources (energy and credits) and even which battle you want to start at.







Besides, there are two restrictions that are lifted:

• You can decide whether to allow using the same part in multiple Blueprints simultaneously or not.
  
• You can see the enemies and configuration of the field before the battle starts.
  

[h2]More content[/h2]
With all of these new features I only had time for one new part and one new enemy.



[h2]Other changes[/h2]
And finally, some other changes include:

• Windowed resolutions are forced to a 16:9 aspect ratio. This should help UltraWide screens, until I implement proper UltraWide fullscreen in a future release.
  
• Supercharged has been redesigned: it now gives you 2 energy after your turn if you're not occupying an Energy Pod (for the first 5 turns).
  
• Hoppers no longer have 3 attack range in higher challenge levels.
  
• Cannon fixes to take advantage of negative armor correctly.
  
• Cannon upgrade cost reduced to 10.
  
• Fog Creature animation doesn't speed up when you speed up the game.
  
• Energy cost for Missile Head is now 5, cost for Triple is now 4.
  

As usual, if you want to get your hands on these changes as they are developed, join the Discord and become a playtester to get access to beta builds.

I hope you enjoy this update and keep sending me all your feedback. Also, please leave a review if you haven't yet!

/Sergio

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1389360/Mech_Armada