Random waves

[Simmonds91]

Because of balance issues the amount and strength of enemies in each wave is not random. This kind of takes away the replayability of the game once you find the solution to each mission and aquire every achievement if you ask me, I mean an endless mode was made (partly at least) because of the vast amount of requests for randomisation, so heres my idea:

Multiple sets of enemies, balanced for the level as always but appearing randomly. Example - You are at level 6, the next wave will spawn either etins, spiders or gnolls, if etins spawn itd only be 1 or 2 that appear, if spiders spawn there will be 6 and if gnolls spawn then there will be 10. That was just a rough example but basically I want the campaign and endless mode to merge together... an abomination just like the spider queen

[kevin32]

I like this idea, would definitely add replayablity. I've been working on a thread that talks about this and would like your feedback when it comes online.

[Polymorpher]

I wager most of the waves have been made manually for the most part. For them to put random waves - there has to be a dynamic calculation of dps and health - which is very grindy to develop. Otherwise you'd be randomly overwhelmed or too underwhelmed to be interesting. The series has been good so far at keeping you at the edge and having you really work for it. If you get unbalanced random waves it would be disappointing which would defeat the purpose of them deploying such a thing. Its not impossible its just very grindy and few people can afford to be that thorough in development. Its no accident many games struggle on balance issues and those who don't usually have carved out a solid market for themselves.

[Big Bad Bug]

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[Simmonds91]

I wager most of the waves have been made manually for the most part. For them to put random waves - there has to be a dynamic calculation of dps and health - which is very grindy to develop. Otherwise you'd be randomly overwhelmed or too underwhelmed to be interesting. The series has been good so far at keeping you at the edge and having you really work for it. If you get unbalanced random waves it would be disappointing which would defeat the purpose of them deploying such a thing. Its not impossible its just very grindy and few people can afford to be that thorough in development. Its no accident many games struggle on balance issues and those who don't usually have carved out a solid market for themselves.

I did explain that these waves WOULD be manually made, basically the devs putting in like 3 maps worth of work into one. Did you seriously not read my post? I made balancing being very important to me very clear in it.

Edit: ok, maybe not that clear... But i did mention balancing!...

[Polymorpher]

In the absence of automation the variety has to be put through a lot of work. If they had that kind of manhours available to both make it and made sure it works correctly, the game would scale to a whole new level instead of such a narrow luxury that bares a high risk of overhead and is hard to sell to execs. The idea increases the variables exponentially, so does the work needed for such a thing. And I'm not bashing you, rather giving you the typical business mindset in gamedev. I don't like it either but it is about the money in the end.

Just the other day had to convince the company director not to EYE-BALL the price figures in the game, the argument nearly got 2 people fired. The game designers and the math capable folks had barely started work on the economy, but for the ui presentations they just made descent placeholder costs for everything that were based on a simple scale formula. The director saw it and said "Why bother working more months it seems done." 4 People from separate departments had to convince him that leaving these numbers as the final product would be disastrous. So basically however an idea may seem to you on the outside, making it a reality can take absolutely crazy turns of events.