Freedom Force and Spartacus...

[thorfinn]

Uhh, no, not together. Separately. I hope.

Finished Freedom Force at 6:30 am on Sunday morning. I have a feeling that I should go through and do the missions again with the standard campaign characters, rather than recruiting my own custom horridly minmaxed beastie (called Zap)
("light speed", Spd6, Agl6, End5, Str3, Eng10, fast and high accuracy energy beam with cost 50 damage 15 (that's without the x2 for light speed!) "penetrating" energy beam) - that whacks anything the campaign game comes up with in about zero time) at about the point when the missions got difficult.

Basically, the minmaxed custom superhero made things just a little too easy, especially once I bought up some passive resistances to the nastier effects, and grabbed "cyber brain", for the accuracy bonus.
Sure, it meant a little bit of dithering around and making sure beam-angles to targets didn't cross any friends or friendly structures... but that wasn't hard, given that the character was fast... I wound up completing most missions by having Zap doing all the running around blowing things up, with three other built-in characters standing around "supervising", for the most part. Bit too easy. Fun, but too easy.

Anyway... That aside, I went to see Spartacus (yes, the ballet), last night. Quite entertaining. Lots of pooncing about... and I must admit, although the female ballerinas are often a bit too skinny, the boys are most emphatically not. And, being Spartacus, half the cast is boys, unlike most ballets... And ballerinas really know how to move their bodies in the most maximally efficient way possible... it's very nice to watch a large group of people engaged in highly efficient motion.

Comments

[mmmetta.livejournal.com]

mmmm ballet.

i want to go see the ballet at some stage, but i think i'll wait until i see the sydney dance company tour down here (which i guess means i'll have to pay attention a bit more next time i'm in the city :-).

[entrippy.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

Known balance issue, that one. The problem being, that the character selection was either brutally simple and thereby easy to balance for single player, or brutally complex (as in deep, not hard to work out) and balancable for multiplayer but potentially seriously broken for single player...

With enough time, it probably could have been balanced for single play too, but we just didn't quite get there...

None the less, glad you had fun - that was the aim!

[thorfinn]

*nodnod* I've not got around to trying out multiplayer... And I think it's not that anything was fundamentally broken with the chargen, I just suspect that there needed to be some more tweaking to the cost numbers for stuff. Lightspeed, in particular, is ridiculously cheap in comparison to what it does. I think most of the numbers were right or close to it. Lightspeed is the only item that my minmaxer brain grabbed immediately as severely undercosted... and a couple of the "penalties" don't really have a significant effect on gameplay (like the not being able to pick up things one), and maybe cyberbrain and accuracy are a little bit undercosted too. It's not a serious complaint. :) It *is* difficult to balance something like that without leaving at least one or two loopholes that diehard minmaxers (like moi) are going to spot. But there comes a time when you have to ship it, holes and all. :) C'est la vie.