ARIA high rank gameplay testing
ok did some testing and decided to record it. I recorded a lot more but would hit some game breaking bugs, or it being being seemingly impossible to progress with a certain character so I deleted those. I actually still need to play with Phia but I don’t have her charisma high enough to deal with high rank battles yet. Also I wanted to make a few more changes as describe below. So for these reasons mentioned it is not quite read for external testing yet. But Hopefully I can get all this done today when I get back home but we’ll see.
Notable changes:
I did various bug fixes to the main game in getting to the end game. There is a bug in this video where the support agent appears at the end of the battles instead of the agent is saying is unlocked. That has since been fixed.
Added rank battles, doing these battle resets any destroyed ship during a raid. so you might want to do it before of after you main the main person in that area. I would recommend doing this in the last area so you can gain the max amount of resources.
Added a extra passive bonus ability to the harder to find support Agent characters. They are specifically designed for rank stuff but some of the abilities wok outside of rank also.
Moiji
+100 node unit increase rate
Begin with +1000 x Rank units in your main node.
Purin
Reduces the number of nodes at the start of a battle by 10
removes Striker support ship in Rank Battle
Jaina
enemy EMP time reduction
removes barrier support ship.
Added a new item that cost 6k Reseouces, Khalei Crystal Reserve. This resets the cooldown on all your abilities and also allows you to do something about being EMP chained. Some characters have a really difficult time dealing with EMP chain in rank. it is basically because once it starts it will never wear off since the length of it is based on the rank difficulty.
you can now save Jeo’s max value, and add to that with Agents so I probably won’t have Luma be able to pump him up. Maybe only once the first time on unlock. you can still exploit and pump Jeo up with the same agent I think if you want to keep saving and loading the game, but it’s w/e if that’s how you want to play the game. Plus Jeo is supposed to be kind OP anyway storywise.
Gave Bri some hard nerfs. Now before Brigma complains, I used Bri a lot in he video to show it is not the end of the world, she is still imo a little OP and best to use in ranked battles. Her Weaken now slows down enemy laser speed by only half instead of setting the speed to 1. Her Disaster no longer removes enemy lock-on ability, so you might want bring Matrix. And I fixed a bug where her Weaken would cause the enemy to not shoot single lasers at all. Bri still causes shotgun laser not to shoot either thoguh, I still need to fix that also.
All scenes in Holodeck should unlock once you are past I think area 7 or 8 and at rank 8 or so. I can’t remember. Plus I will add any more that are tricky to unlock.
Jaina passively remove the barrier ship but I wanted to leave it in there overall, at least for his version. it is annoying as hell, but causes the gamepaly strategy to suddenly shift while that barrier is active.
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other changes I’m thinking about for 2.3
Nova reduces unit count down to 25% instead of a flat 500. maybe even 15% or 10%.
Adding additional effects to Remi’s abilities since you can’t add ship mods. Probably some strategical like when you capture a node with a assault ship it resets her seduce ability or something. and when she damages a enemy node she gains units in the main node.
Jeo might have a little neat little trick also that synergizes well with support characters. where if a laser hit a already captured node it adds units to it.
I need to buff the laser mod ability to capture nodes with lasers. It needs to add a few units to the node when captured. probably rank x 100 or something. and his lasers remove several hit points from enemy shields.
I reduced enemy shoot rate to half of what it was, but I might reduce it even more to match some of the laser mods of ARIA girls.
The main enemy lasers will be randomly decided at the start of battle. Assault ship will probably still be the same but shoot less frequently in exchange for increased damage and shied busting power. All this is in a effort to help deal with some potential lag issues.