Atomicrops - plow, plant, and pow on a farm

Games
#221

I have been unable to dig up patch notes, but the game has once again gotten harder in a broad sense.

E.g. I got to winter on the new guy (year 3) and finally got the nigthtime moon event. This was accompanied by ufos (not worms), and there were 3x as many mini ufos spawning. And they were faster and shot more bullets.

The “more enemies” special difficulty thing seems to be spawning more enemies than before. I had to ditch no invincibility, got tired of losing characters to the worm.

Apparently people bitched a lot about guns breaking. But I think it would have been more interesting to have different characters with different gun mechanics than have eveyrone do the same thing. While tweaking the original system.

#222

The game got harder? I want to pick this up again but just thinking about playing it is raising my blood pressure.

#223

Yes, although I think part of it is based around (1) special events (e.g. moon event) and (2) possibly tweaks to how the special gameplay modifier statues worked. But e.g. the harder enemies I saw in the moon event could not have been tied to #2, because I didn’t have “more enemies” enabled.

I think things might be slightly more difficult out in the fields day to day, but it’s harder to measure that.

#224

Supposedly a fix went out to fix the crop watering bug but I am still getting the issue (sometimes mega crops just can’t be watered. Dunno that I’v seen it with smaller crops).

Overall I feel like this update is a step backwards for the game and I’m pretty disappointed.

#225

Yeah, it’s not enough to ruin the game for me, but it does give me the shitty feeling that a developer screwed with a system that worked, and ended up making something worse.

If you only had a few cashews, you could gamble on getting some good mods on a weapon, and if you had a lot of cashews, you could invest and go raid the Tier 2 maps with a devastating weapon. Rock. Solid. System.

Pigeons were maybe a little underwhelming, but it wasn’t bad enough that I thought they needed to mess with the rest of the game to make them stand out.

Oregacrow is a fun new gimmick, and I would be happy with any amount of new guns and items and characters, or psycho difficulty settings, but I don’t know why they thought it was a good idea to mess with perfectly good core mechanics at this point in time.

That’s some early access, games-as-a-service nonsense.

#226

Yeah, I’ve returned to the game over the last week, just to try a few more year 4 runs.

I’d say I’m getting closer to finishing Year 4 than I was before the game completely changed, so maybe it’s better in that it’s more balanced? I’m not sure. But I’m definitely not having as much fun as I used to.

Mostly it’s just bizarre to be playing a game and have it change so drastically.

#227

I suspected that might be part of the idea, but the stat boosts that come with guns are also important, especially if you want to have enough pigeons to make the boss a walkover. Farming stat = more pigeons.

If you’re playing Oregacrow, the HP on some of the guns can be critical, so you definitely want to be buying a number of guns.

If you don’t buy a number of guns, you should still be somewhat underpowered in the late game. And if you can’t afford guns, then probably you haven’t farmed so much, which means you also don’t get the maximum end of year rewards, so you will be falling behind in the new system too.

That’s what puzzles me. The only major change I can see in terms of balance is farming stat and pigeons, and maybe forcing you to use guns that you might not use otherwise, which to me doesn’t make the game more fun to play.

#228

That’s really the crux. You can get rapid stat boots from switching guns - if you can afford it, and if you are playing the crow you certainly can (crow’s econ is absurd, TBH) - which will certainly help snowball you, if not as much as the “right” gun.

But the fact that pigeon slots are now tied to farming means you really need to switch up as much as you can to help push farming, even if you lucked onto a good 2-4 mod gun early, since lots of scrolls also help snowball big time (and trivialize the last boss).

Also this. Some people apparently like to save up the Oregano upgrades to get late game healing, which is certainly a thing. But being able to grab some healing on a gun switch is really nice.

Since you can’t max guns anymore (unless you get super lucky, I suppose), I think the fighting stat is a little more important relatively speaking (and farming is moderately more important than it was, IMO).

As a “solution” to guns breaking being frustrating. . . well this certainly “fixes” that problem. Also, getting stat boosts from the spheres from camps out in t he fields is now even more unrewarding, despite stats growing in importance, because you can get a lot of stats just swapping guns twice a season. Granted, opportunity may not present itself there, but getting the relics that changed your gameplay was always much more rewarding. I think I would prefer the stats not exist (or be de-emphasized/reduced) and have a separate set of upgrades that boost pigeon slots. And some other sort of mechanic for guns altogether.

#229

I wonder what happens to all the stat boosts I bought for my character to make it less likely that the gun will break after each round? Was that replaced by something else, I wonder? Or does my character just have some useless stat boost now that’s no longer used?

#230

That’s a great question. It looks like they’ve been replaced with this:

Previously was this:

#231

I often die now because I don’t buy a new gun between days in town. Because they’re giving me two shit choices, and my gun that I like didn’t break, so I keep using it, but then I get to the boss, and I have to spend all night firing at the boss to finally kill him, which results in me taking lots of damage in the Fall. So when winter rolls around, I die pretty quick. I don’t know, it’s just all so strange now.

I guess I should always upgrade my gun, even if I don’t like them. Better than sticking with the gun I like that doesn’t do enough damage anymore.

#232

I think the best way to play is always grab a new gun ifd it’s one that looks decent, unless you are fighting a boss and have something very approrpiate/strong.

From there, you should favor stat upgrades (or healing, for Crow) as circumstances dictate. I wouldn’t choose a gun I hated/had only a few upgrades just to get a stat I needed.

But this is a very weird sort of mechanic for a game that’s vaguely rogue-lite, and relies heavily on randomness. Because now instead of “here’s a gun, can you upgrade it and if so how much should you?”. There are guns that aren’t very good untul mostly upograded but then they can be very good. But you don’t have that option anymore. Guns breaking was always sort of an odd implementation of a pretty easy to understand mechanic. But at least you could get a strong economy and reap the benefits of that by upgrading a gun a lot (even if it’s one you aren’t crazy about).

Now it’s “here’s a gun with a random # of mods and a random stat boost”. Your economy is no longer as relevant (it still matters, but you can’t look at the squirrel gun/cleaver choice and say “well at least I can upgrade it to max or near max”, in a later season you could conceivably get that choice with only 2-3 mods on the gun. That’s awful for late game). Guns don’t break (a problem a lot of people hated and the dev decided to fix) but this actually works against you since “frequent” gun purchases now run up your stats significantly, and stats affect raw damage (and all sorts of farming stuff + pigeons). And note that those stat gains replace the ones you used to get from the end of season harvest rewards (and potentially then some). So you really have to go after them.

I think this is worse than the system we had before, and seems like an odd fit for what the game is doing otherwise.

#233

I have different guns that I like for different biomes, so I’ll skip a round or two if I don’t like what I see, unless I’m feeling underpowered.

I still feel like Fighting is premium, so I have no problem skimping on farming stat, and I’m still prioritizing Fighting spouses.

The thing about Oregacrow is that it’s so dependent on build. It takes a ridiculous amount of water and fertilizer, which is kinda cool because it means the woodchipper and the water tractor are genuinely useful now. Same with the leech gun.

The downside is when you don’t get water and fertilizer items or animals, because then you’re really hitting a wall.

The items and cauldron upgrades that extend the days are also really important. Time is great for any character, but Oregacrow has a lot less time than Thyme, and it essentially has to do more things in terms of hunting for items and farming efficiently. It really pushes you, which is cool.

I suppose the “smart” way to play crow is to just skip the seed and pickaxe camps, and purely go for the item and animal camps. Crow doesn’t get trees from Tier 1 tree bosses, and having enough seeds hasn’t been a problem for me at any point.

Is that why they did it? Was guns breaking really that bad? I felt like it pushed me to farm and clear more, but I can see how it’s daunting at first.

I thought it worked. Especially because the difficulty progresses the way it does. I had the early years to learn the game, and then I kinda knew what I was doing towards the end, so while fighting and farming became more challenging, managing the economy wasn’t too difficult at that point.

#234

There were vocal people - I won’t say how many, because I simply have no basis to do so - on the reddit and discord who hated it and complained about it a lot, as best I understand it. One of the original devs left to go do his own thing, I can’t say if that impacted the change or not.

I think it was an imperfect mechanic but it did work. There was a very tight balance between economics and upgrading/purchasing, with some quality “should I or shouldn’t I” decision making. Occasionally it was frustrating when several days in a row yielded poor weapon choices.

#235

It’s crazy that I almost never have enough money to buy a new weapon.

Every time, it’s like, oh, I see, 1480 to buy that sweet weapon, but I only have 1260. Well, I’ll get it next day.

Next day the cheapest weapon is 2280, and I only have 1980. Oh man, I wish I could buy that. Well, I’ll have enough money next day.

Next day there’s a shitty weapon that I can afford, the good weapon is 400 more peanuts than I can afford.

Sigh.

#236

Ok, I thought I’d lost this game forever to this latest update, but on a lark I started the Xbox version of the game yesterday, and it’s still on the previous update before everything was overhauled!

So I was able to buy guns and upgrade them, and kick ass. It was wonderful.

I’m hoping they forget about the Xbox version and never break it like they broke the PC version.

#237

It’s not enough to break the game for me, the gameplay loop is still intact and it’s still great, but it’s definitely a bad fix for something I didn’t know was a problem.

I hope they go back and rethink it. It also annoys me that Rye is now a lot less useful. If people were having problems with guns breaking, you would tell 'em to play Rye.

Now he’s reduced to giving an extra mod, which is a total crapshoot. I assume that means he has room for one more mod, which means we can get an even more powerful gun in the late game, but it’s really not as good as it was before.

#238

I played this for another hour or so last night on Xbox. So good! I really hope they keep this version at 1.4.

I wasn’t able to beat the Winter boss. In the Xbox version I’ve only unlocked Rye so far, and I haven’t ever beaten Winter yet. So I don’t have any of the bonuses you can start unlocking using the bonus thingies yet.

I hadn’t really paid attention to the Farming/Fighting Stats in the old version before they made them super important in the new version, but in the old version, every time you beat a boss, and go to the town mayor, a lot of the rewards you get for harvesting enough that season are increases to your stats. I wonder what Farming/Fighting stats used to do in the old version that’s on Xbox?

#239

The changes are part of an update and not tied to the DLC? I haven’t played since it released.

#240

That’s right, they completely overhauled the base game on PC. If you have an Xbox though, you’re all good! :) I’m betting it’s the same on Playstation.