[Squad] Iron Legion

[tosx]

Constructed from Old Earth war machines, these Mechs deploy drones to swarm the enemy.



Carrier Mech
Launch Fighter: Deploy a Fighter to help in combat. Destroys existing Fighters.
- 1 core: When launching, existing fighters explode, damaging adjacent non-building tiles (1 damage).
- 2 cores: Fighters gain a long-range, high damage secondary weapon (Shatter Missile).

Guard Mech
Remote Shield: Shield a tile from damage, pushing adjacent tiles.
- 2 cores: Shield the tile behind the Mech.
- 2 cores: Damages enemies instead of Shielding them (2 damage).

Quake Mech
Seismic Wave: Fire a seismic pulse at a target, pushing it. Pulse can travel through 1 obstacle.
- 1 core: Targets the pulse travels through have their attacks flipped.
- 3 cores: Pulse can travel through up to 4 obstacles.

Fighter
Interceptor Missile: Fires a short-range missile that damages and pushes its target (1 damage, range 3).
(Upgrade) Shatter Missile: Fires a powerful long-range missile (2 damage, no push, infinite range).

Download modpack version of all my mods - requires mod loader 2.6.1 or later to function.
Mod Loader - originally made by Cyberboy2000 and continued by kartoFlane.

Code: Select all

v0.11 (modpack v0.02 and later)
- Fixed Achievement secret rewards and made them forward compatible with hopeful future modloader updates.
- Going forward, I'll only upload mods in modpack form; if you don't want all my mods, it's easy to extract only the ones you want and delete the rest, or disable them.

v0.10
- Update for modloader 2.6.0 (achievement UI update) and modApiExt 1.14 (fixes Psion Tyrant viewing bug)

v0.09
- Upgraded Fighters should now match their Carrier's color in all cases, and TipImage fighter colors won't be affected by alternate palettes.

v0.08
- Added KnightMiner's palette library.

v0.07
- Fixed a secret reward text string that broke with 1.2 patch.

v0.06
- Fixed upgrade names for patch 1.2 compatibility.

v0.05
- Update to latest modApiExt to improve compatibility with other mods.

v0.04
- Added squad achievements and a secret unlockable.

v0.03
- Weapons are now properly added to the shop when the shop mod option is enabled.

v0.02
- Reduced Fighter's movement to 3.
- Increased Remote Shield's damage upgrade to deal 2 damage.

[veritas427]

Feedback from a Hard/4 Island run (which failed, just barely; it came down to rolling a 1 power resist at 34%)

Gear/pilots:
Carrier mech - explosive fighter upgrade, Lily Reed pilot (turn 1 carrier deployment to block spawns across the map is pretty amusing); Force Amp (largely why this run got so far). I chose not to use the "Shatter Missile" upgrade because frankly losing the push is too harsh even without force amp, especially for an upgrade that costs 2 power. Largely the beef was with not spending many cores in late game on this, because upgrading the carrier extensively isn't really that good, and you want to be using the primary as often as possible so really only passives fit in its second slot.

Guard Mech - I didn't actually get to use this one much for pushing, mostly just shielding. Just kept a generic pilot since they rolled mech move and reactor and Ralph wasn't an appealing exchange. No upgrades on the Remote Shield, they weren't all that useful compared to the Heavy Artillery (+ 1 use and +1 damage) that saved Island 3/4. Before I got this from a pod drop on island 3, I was taking a TON of grid damage because the team really doesn't scale to do damage. Again, this is a case of spending too much for too little for its base kit.

Quake Mech - Abe as the pilot for armor (starting pick); Seismic Wave only had the upgrade that changes enemies' attack direction. It was immensely useful but very awkward to get to work consistently. Never felt the need for the obstacle upgrade, though. The second piece of gear on it was just Stabilizers to prevent taking damage from blocking vek spawns

Overall this squad is pretty fun, and they do well enough in early game but man the lack of scaling damage hurts them.

[tosx]

Awesome, thanks for the feedback!

There are some tricks to get the Carrier churning out decent damage, and some other stuff I mentioned on Discord. I might eventually tweak the Guard Mech's damage upgrade to 2 damage, since you give up a crucial shield whenever you go for it, although I'm worried it would make the weapon a little too flexible.

I'll probably give it a few weeks and try another few 4-island Hard runs of my own before I start changing things.

[Everglass]

The versatility of the squad is actually pretty amazing. They make up for their lack of raw damage with a ton of utility.

Once again, well done!

[tosx]

I updated the squad to v0.02; nothing major, but tried to shift the balance a bit so the Carrier is doing a little less of the work.

[ijocks]

I just tested the squad, and the carrier mech is kinda nuts when piloted by silica. Endless explosive drones that can respond to multiple targets and do massive aoe damage.

[tosx]

Yeah, that's a bit of a known...issue? Feature?

Trying to design a deployable squad presented some tricky balance considerations. Normally, limited uses would make deployables + Silica not an issue, but that wasn't the squad I wanted.

The way I currently see it, while it's a ton of flexibility, it's still not much more firepower than putting Silica in a good ranged mech, and it costs enough cores that the early game shouldn't be trivial.

It was a contributing factor to the fighter nerf in the last update, but that's about all I plan to do about it.

(You could force fighters to be deployed at exactly range 2, but I like the "launch" feel, and that would nerf the squad's late-game while not necessarily stopping Silica.)

[ijocks]

That run was a great deal of fun anyway, so I would consider it more of a feature

[BlumKram1]

it was more of a feature I guess, but anyway I enjoyed it

[narD]

The first time I saw these cool guys, I thought they were too powerful to be able to summon reinforcements.

However, I think that's not the case after playing. If we talk about the overall balance of the squad, I think it's definitely balanced.

I think our stylish friend's reinforcements are definitely powerful, but I think the other two are pretty well balanced in terms of the fact that it's hard to harm the enemy in its basic state.

I wrote it down using a translator.
There may be some awkward sentences.
Thank you very much for making a good squared.

Thanks to you, I had a lot of fun playing.
It was such a great squad that it could be 30K with just basic weapons!

30K play video. (Default Weapons Only)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gd5YpJHX-Y