Siege of Centauri Dev Journal: Strategy & Mayhem - Dichotomy of Design
Strategy and Mayhem are two principles at the core of what makes a Tower Defense game fun!
Check out our latest Siege of Centauri Dev Journal to learn more about what's gone into making the game fun and exciting to play.
https://www.stardock.com/games/article/495177/
Dev Journal: Scenario Workshop Sneak Peek
Ever wonder how scenarios and missions come together in Siege of Centauri?
Get a sneak peek into the Scenario Workshop in this week's dev journal from lead designer Derek Paxton!
https://www.stardock.com/games/article/496370/
Siege of Centauri Dev Journal: Plutus
Plutus offers a very defensive position for your colony. Multiple long plateaus provide the perfect place for turrets. But there are multiple locations outside of this defensive ring that you will need to make hard choices about. That Fission Reactor provides valuable energy. There was a Metal Refinery on the map, it was destroyed by the transport dropping scarabs beside it. And an Outpost in a vulnerable position.
You don't have to defend them all to win, you only need your colony to survive. But you will need to make some hard decisions. Should you upgrade that Metal Refinery to increase its output? Can you keep it alive long enough to make that investment worthwhile? Are you willing to spread out your anti-air to protect your resources, or do you consolidate them around your colony? Do you deploy Milton to guard your Fission Reactor, or keep him to block a choke point and maximize the damage the surrounding towers do?
That's all part of what makes it interesting and I am always surprised when I see players approaching it with different strategy, towers and upgrades than I have (often they are much more successful than me).
It's also worth noting that we have updated the icons and particle effects for the next beta and you can see some of that here. Lot's of great stuff is on its way.
Dev Journal: The Hive
We have a long list of new units, towers, upgrades and missions coming for you. But I wanted to talk about one of my favorite enemies that we have been playing with, the Hive.
The Hive is a heavy unit with formidable defenses and shields. But what sets it apart is that it produces flying "Wasp" units that take off and head toward your colony. Since they are flying, they ignore the terrain and had directly for you while the Hive follows the path.
The most strategically interesting part of the design is that the Wasps flight paths change based on how far you let the Hive get. You either need to take out the Hive quickly, or build air defenses along their changing path.
Flak cannons are great at destroying the individually weak air units they produce, but in the next update we have differentiated the Icarus Missiles and Flak Cannons from each other by dropping the cost and range of the Flak cannons and giving Icarus Missiles greater range and cost. I tend to go with Icarus Missiles because the greater range helps against the changing paths, but that only works as long as there aren't enough Hive's to overwhelm them.
I'm going to be posting more about other new units, towers, upgrades and missions. But for now I could use some feedback from you. We added a new unit, the Hooded Turbine. It is a fast shielded unit that rushes toward your colony. I love the art and the mechanic, but I kinda hate the name. Any suggestions?
Beta 2 is now available for the massive-scale tower defense game
Newest update adds weapon customization, new missions, and new towers
Set in the Ashes of the Singularity™ universe, Siege of Centauri places the player in the role of commander of the defense of Earth's first colony on Proxima Centauri. Beta 2’s new equip screen allows players to customize the towers they bring into every mission, allowing for more meaningful strategic choices.
“The enemy has a wide range of units seeking to destroy your colony,” said Derek Paxton, lead designer. “Players have access to a wide array of towers, each with unique capabilities, to choose from. Beta 2 allows players to pick the towers they want to use, rather than the game deciding for them.”
Beta 2 also adds new missions for players to explore, including one that introduces large and powerful war machines called Dreadnoughts for the first time. They will need to overcome this powerful new challenge as they deal with the swarms of enemies already attacking their base.
The Early Access program is designed to allow fans to have input into game mechanics, pacing, and balance. Stardock has been releasing frequent updates based on player feedback.
“Weekly digital updates based on player feedback well before release lets us get to a level of balance and polish that traditionally had to wait for post-release updates,” said Paxton. “We’ve been really happy with how the fans have helped shape this game so far.”
Siege of Centauri is currently in Early Access on Steam for $9.99. The final version is expected to sell for $14.99.
New Mission: Gaol. Gaol is a huge region with low paths building up to the Colony at the top. And it features a new opponent, the Hooded Turbine, a ship that combines a high speed with strong shields. They will try to rush through your defenses to get at your Colony.
Added upgrades to the Scavenger Modules. They are cheap and increased the range of the building.
Added a bunch of new music and sfx.
Balance
Milton- reduced the cooldown slightly.
Reinforcements- increased the cooldown slightly.
Hatchlings- Increased hit points (they weren't much of a challenge after the Clutch of eggs was destroyed).
Masochists- Slowed them down slightly.
Added a new objective to Sord, to generate 500 metal from Scavenger Modules.
Fission Reactors can't be upgraded until the Colony is upgraded.
Modified the intro camera for Circosta so that it starts focused on the Metal Refinery that the dialog is discussing.
Fixes
Fixed an issue with Masochist targeting.
Fixed an issue where the Metal Refinery lost its depth when damaged.
Fixed the Temporal Shift ability.
Fixed overlapping text on the mission launch screen.
Fixed an issue where some objectives weren't awarding score correctly.
Fixed a UI issue with 4:3 ratio displays.
UI
Increased the size of Sparrows slightly.
Objective Complete display no longer overlaps with the dialog text.
Tower names no longer overflow in the selection window.
Added category icons to the archive.
Siege of Centauri: Early Access Version 5 Now Available
Thank you all for your feedback. We are listening and have made some significant changes to the game based on it. Most notably we redid the entire game progression to be smoother. That requires redoing all the maps so we couldn't release new missions as they wouldn't fit in with the old system.
The big change is that we will no longer tie unlocks to score. Instead new towers and orbital abilities will be unlocked by completing missions. This offers us a few advantages.
Features
New Progression System- Tower/orbital unlocks are no longer tied to score. Instead they are unlocked by completing missions. Because of this unlocked tower/orbital popups will no longer interrupt game play and we can have more score variety (it was difficult to balance people unlocking towers in time if someone got a lot less points than a another player because they were playing on a lower difficulty level).
Chronoshift- This replaces the pause mechanic. Pausing now puts the game into "bullet-time" or "matrix" mode where the player can slow down the action to make decisions. But this is a limited resource to keep the pressure on game play. On easier difficult levels we are generous with the time given, but on higher difficulty levels it will be tougher.
Outposts- Some maps have Outposts. These are buildings with no military value, but they give a big score bonus if they survive the mission. It's up to you if you want to spend resources defending them or not.
New Mission: Dule. A large map with multiple choke points and a defensible colony, and hard to defend outposts.
New Mission: Ascent. A mountain with the colony on top and winding paths going higher and higher until they reach the top.
Nightmare- +100% Score, +150% enemy hit points,/n Chronoshift never replenishes
Decoy no longer lasts forever.
Increased the cost of drone bays.
Rail Gun delay between firing increased slightly.
UI
Minimaps give an audio and visual queue whenever a new wave starts, telling you exactly where they are coming from.
Buildings with hit points (metal refineries, fission reactors, etc) now show their hit points when selected.
Towers and orbitals now have a highlight ring if they are available.
UI Animates when a mission starts.
New splash screens images, new campaign screen image.
Replaced all the unit and tower selection images.
New/updated sfx.
Fixes
Fixed an issue where a tower can stick to a lower tier unit when there is a better target in range.
Fixed an issue where Scarabs couldn't attack.
Fixed an issue where Punishers smoked when undamaged instead of when they were damaged.
New Towers, new progression, UI updates and more!
Greetings! We've gotten so much terrific feedback on the recent beta updates that we're going to use this week to focus on implementing your suggestions. This means there won't be any map updates this week.
Last week we added the tower positioning grid which was, by far, the #1 request from players.
Here is a preview of what's in store for next week:
Time Dilation. You can still his ESC and take stock in the situation on the map. The new Time Dialation feature lets you hit SPACEBAR and it slows the game to an utter crawl so you can place towers and react to what's happening. But it's a finite resource (right now, it's super generous and the difficulty level will affect how much of this you get).
10 difficulty levels. Players will be able to tick the difficulty one way or the other with far more granularity.
3 new maps.
A new progression system. Instead of score unlocking the progression the mission will unlock the new towers at the start so that you can be introduced to them more gradually. The progression was the #2 request we focus on to help gradually introduce players to the enemies and different towers. Plus, once you have the tower, you can go back to a previous map to amp up your score.
A couple of new orbital abilities and new towers.
Outposts. These are places you have colonists living. You don't have to save them to finish the level but saving them gives you more points.
Updated Audio tracks. Riku, who did most of the music for Star Control II and Star Control: Origins has joined us on Siege of Centauri and his music will start to show up.
New sound effects. Mason's new sound effects should start to show up.
We are also working on a DirectX 12 version of the game that should further improve performance, even on "lower end" hardware.
Similarly, balance continues to be a focus as we make changes to the maps, progression and map designs.
Since this is a beta, we are trying to take more steps to make sure new players understand that this isn't a demo. The point is to listen to player feedback and put their ideas into the game.
Once we are satisfied with the pacing and balance, we'll start recording the voice overs and unspool the story elements that give you a background on who the Substrate are and why they are attacking humanity's first interstellar colony.
Cheers!
Siege of Centauri: Early Access Version 4 Now Available
Features
New Mission: Ciacco, home of the spiders. And where a new enemy arrives, the Falling Star. When a Falling Star is destroyed it temporarily disables all towers around it. Be careful relying on a single death trap, you could lose it.
New Tower: Stasis Hammer, can only target large enemies and has an incredibly slow fire rate. But it stuns those enemies for a brief time.
Added the ability to wipe campaign/unlock progress in the options screen (for those helping us test progression).
Balance
New Line of Sight calculation that is more forgiving.
Made Limbo slightly easier.
Decreased hit points of the Gliding Crane.
Gallehault rebalanced.
Chariah rebalanced.
Caluck rebalanced.
Added energy cells to Nahant with a bonus objective to destroy 400 enemies with energy cells.
Added a bonus objective to Caluck to defend the fission reactor.
UI
Grid display when placing towers
Updated a lot of the hologram displays for selected towers/units with an updated version
Mission wave panel shows the colors and descriptions for each of the units.
Switched "Radioactives" to "Energy".
Added a new difficulty slider.
Updated Corrosive Mortar models for each tier.
New missions arrive
This week we rolled out two new missions for Siege of Centauri. The goal is to get your feedback on these early missions to determine what balance, content and feature additions should be made as we go on.
If we're going to make the ultimate tower defense game, we will need all the help we can get!
The discussion forums has our April and May mission schedule if you're interested in seeing what's coming.
Nahant introduces shielded swarms.
A given unit can have hitpoints as well as shields. The default defenses like your railgun and particle cannon do normal damage which means they first have to take down the shields. But some weapons, like the ion cannon, can take down shields instantly while other weapons, like the pulse cannon, will bypass shields entirely.
The second new mission this week, Chariah, has a couple of new twists to it.
First, it demonstrates the benefit of in-direct fire weapons like the Corrosion mortar as they can fire over obstacles.
Second, it introduces players to sparrows, which are masses of flying units that help make the case as to why flak cannons are useful.
Feedback Even though early access just got started, we've already gotten some really good feedback that we hope to start showing off to you in the next week or so.
Here are some highlights:
## Bullet Time ##
You can pause the game any time you want by hitting SPACEBAR. Right now, we're pretty generous with this because we don't have the placement grid in yet (it's not always obvious where you can place a tower).
The problem with unlimited pausing is that it just kills any sense of urgency. Bullet time will change this. You can still pause any time you want but not for as long as you want. Bullet time charges up over time and is consumed during pausing.
This way, we don't have to force players to do all their planning between waves but instead give them the power while still rewarding players for good placement.
## Particle Cannon vs. Rail Gun ##
The particle cannon doesn't do quite enough damage right now while the rail gun probably does a bit too much damage. We'll be taking a close look at this next week.
## General UI ##
It's not obvious enough how much health and metal you have. You will see some UI changes soon in that area.
In addition, we don't currently make it obvious enough where the enemy comes from. We'll either make that obvious on the mini map or in some other way. Right now, you can mouse over a given wave (at the top of the screen) to see where it's coming in but we want to make clear where those entrances are.
## Bigger Missions ##
The first big mission will show up next week. It's called Gallehault and it has over a dozen waves and is a much bigger map than what's come before.
It will, of course, require several balance passes before we nail it down.
## Other Stuff ##
Our first audio pass should show next week. We have a lot of place holder sounds.
Another area we want to work on is providing interesting information to the player so that they can see where a given weapon is in its process of reloading or cooling down or what have you. The important thing will be to communicate to the player what a given weapon is doing when you click on it.
Now, you might ask, why does weapon status matter? The answer is that while the early basic weapons are straight forward, eventually, we will be introducing units and weapons and missions that are pretty sophisticated and you will need to have information communicated to you so that you can decide whether a given weapon is useful on that mission (eventually, you will have an equip screen to pick the 10 defenses you want to use on a given mission).
So that's all for now! Thank you so much for your feedback and support! We're really excited to start getting you guys some meaty stuff.
