Subset Games Forum

Added another boss, the Burrower Leader; as well as a link to a small mod which can make the final island into a boss rush depending on which difficulty and how many islands you have completed.

Hi L,

Can you DM on Twitter for a story about ITB modding?

https://twitter.com/GarstProduction?lang=en

Thanks for the mod! Having more enemy variety is always great and Boss Rush made the final mission scary again: hard is now hard and impossible seems truly impossible (couldn't even survive the first part of the final battle on impossible even tough I had a crack team).

I think I have encountered all of these in the game now. The balance seems ok. Sure the blobber is by far the scariest of the bunch, but it's still beatable. Maybe reduce its HP by one or two, but keep the attack as devastating as it is.

Would it be difficult to have random bosses spawn every now and then during normal missions? The difficulty is maybe too much concentrated to the final battle now, when it should be more like "the journey is more important than the destination" kind of thing. Also, these beautiful pink monsters don't currently get enough screen time.

Hi Karsta, Sorry for the late reply.

I'm glad you're enjoying the mods.

Making bosses appear randomly on normal missions is not very difficult. I have had thoughts on doing it in the past, but it just seems like some reward should come with it as well. Problem has been that any reward outside of cores/rep/grid is quite difficult to do.
If a harder game would be interesting for some, maybe a mod that added random bosses for very hard and impossible difficulty could be an option. I'm still undecided though.

As far as I know normal game is not affected in any way by very hard and impossible difficulty. Boss Rush seems to be the only mod that actually adds something to those difficulty levels. More content for very hard and impossible would be very much appreciated!

Noted.

Any thoughts on what you'd like to see other than the occational random boss popping up?

Do you want higher number of Vek spawns, harder Vek, or something else entirely?

perhaps a mission type specific to each boss?

I did spend some time thinking what "something else entirely" might be, but didn't come up with anything really good. I guess just adding some extra Vek spawns would be a great improvement. Sometimes it would be a random boss, but most of them could just be normal Vek. It would be great if this would include Vek not in the island's pool, because this would increase the amount of times you encounter fancy new enemies, such as your Roach or the things in cannonfodder's Evolved Vek.

I'm not sure any actual reward in addition to survival is really needed. Players can try to balance risk and reward when choosing what sort of missions to take. Random things happening during those missions don't really effect that decision. Some days in the office are just harder than others.

Took your ideas and put it into this mod: Difficulty Modifiers
I don't know what is the correct balance for each person, so I made it all customizable and independent from the selected difficulty level (easy, normal, hard, etc)

Modifiers this mod allows you to change:

Starting spawns: Modify missions' starting enemy count. (Values: -1, +0, +1, +2, +3)
Spawns per turn: Modify spawn count per turn. (Values: -1, +0, +1, +2, +3)
Max Vek on board: Modify max simultaneous enemy count. (Values: -1, +0, +1, +2 , +3)
Random Bosses: Percentage of Alphas upgraded to Bosses. (Values: 0%, 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%)
Spice up Island Pool: Convert a percentage of Vek into Vek not in island's enemy pool. (Values: 0%, 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%)
Don't touch Psions: Keep Psions as Island standard. (enabled/disabled)

The ranges of the values are just a starting point.
We would need more testing to figure out what the ranges should be to provide interesting gameplay.

The percentage of alphas converted into bosses will be lower than the listed amount if the vek about to be upgraded does not have an available Boss for it's type (Roach/Viper/Termite/Cobra/Bots/etc). Bot Boss has not been included, at least for now.

Wow, thank you, that was some blitzkrieg modding!

I started a new game with hard, +1 starting spawns, +1 spawns per turn (that's potentially quite a lot during battle), +2 max vek, +5% bosses, +10% spice. The very first battle featured a firefly leader so I can confirm the mod is certainly doing something! I'll try to do proper testing asap, although I'm afraid I have very limited time this week.