Level 18 is the latest level to have me wanting to frisbee my iPod out a window. Once again it's desperate attempt after desperate attempt at bottlenecking 20 necromancers praying they won't decimate my whole army in one round.
After beating the first 16 story missions, the game is showing some flaws that slightly dilutes my enjoyment. Difficulty per se isn't not my issue here, it's pretty clear that the levels are worked to be challenging but not impossible. My gripe is some design decisions that limit Lost Frontier's potential for so much more. Warning: wall of text rant and impression Foremost is stat communication. For a game that has Advance Wars as a predecessor, unit and terrain stats are almost non-existent to the player. With terrain, you don't know exactly how much one buffs or debuffs damage taken. With units, you don't know exactly how strong a certain unit is against another. For Legends, you won't see the full list of buffs each unit gets. For a game that requires high precision in unit positioning and movement, I'm disappointed by the lack of data to see how much advantage (and disadvantage) each unit has against another. Advance Wars had everything readily accessible for you! The next thing that put me off was the mission objectives. All of them so far involves exclusively killing all enemies to win. There's no "survive x turns", "destroy main target x", etc. to change it up every now and then. Almost all maps have you outnumbered by enemies that are placed to reach you in certain waves. This limits gameplay strategy and movement to basically bottleneck each wave and simultaneously advancing to capture buildings to make more units. With the singular mission objective in mind, new unit introduction boils the excitement down to "how do I position this new unit I gained to survive the turns longer?" Worse, new units are on the side of the enemy. This becomes "how do I take down this new enemy?" What I really hated is the fact that the level designs don't make them the focus of the mission, instead just reinforcing one or two of them to your staple units that make them blend to the already monotonous mission objective. The units should feel like new toys that you can use to widen your options, not be lost to the level design. As something that I view as supposed to be the motivation factor for the game, the Legend system is very disappointing. The Legends themselves start off and develop as better basic units and give stat boosts to their unit choice. With each mission giving you mostly one or two of a specific unit, the buffed units usually make up a third or less of the team. It could be more interesting if other legends are available on a few missions as you progress the story, considering they're just basic units with different colors and stats. Finally, what all ties my disappointment together is the three-star system. With one-track challenge objectives, I look at the three stars as a tacked-on nagging middle finger to me. You see, an individual star means nothing in this game. You won't count the total number of stars you have to unlock anything. So, getting one or two stars makes absolutely no difference at all. It's Three or Bust!!! It gets more annoying when, with the stated problems above, you need to perfect them with a limited number of turns and minimal casualties. This severely limits your playstyle to making more of those position and movements with a lot less error, discouraging any form of experimentation. To minimize turns, most of us are forced to build cheaper units to attack a turn faster. I've perfected some chapters mainly because I didn't wait to get more funds to build a tank or cannon. Personally, I think the stars don't belong in this game, since counting them means nothing. I prefer to having the challenges as a separate (sorta like a GameCenter) achievement. This way, we don't have to be reminded that we sucked at some chapters. I'm still playing at least a mission a day and still enjoy it, as I have always been two weeks since I bought the game. I have three-starred the first 10 chapters with McGraw and stopped caring too much after the 11th and surprisingly perfected the 16th chapter. Regardless of my complaints I'm still having fun, and losing a chapter is a good learning experience for my next run. I guess my expectations for a Mika title is way higher than from any other dev because of my experience with both Zombieville USA titles and BH Legacy.
Finally beat level 18. Trick is to head west straight away. Carefully take out all the units that are waiting there and then pull back further west which will cause some units to try and snipe from above and below. This will mean less units approaching at one time and make it easier to pick them off. Block with your chuck wagon and the biplane. Attack ghouls with slayers. Necros with your zeppelin and keep your artillery safe and with clear lines of sight. Also make sure to keep everything in good condition. Losing your mechanic or slayers will screw you.
Tips for stage 18? You're trapped in a crossroads with enemies coming from 3 directions. No saloon/factory, and you only have 1 tank, 1 healer and 1 engineer, along with some slayers that are only effective on zombies. I can beat this stage without losing more than 1 unit (limit is losing no more than 5 units or something), but I can't beat it under 9 turns. There are simply too many enemies, how do you do this in 9 turns or less? My best try was 10 turns. In order to even survive this stage you have to push all units out of the crossroads so you only face enemies coming from 1 direction instead of 3.
I faced them from all 3 directions at once in the narrow pathways. Slayers and Zepplin North, tank, gattling, and engineer south, humans and legend west. I have 3 starred it with 4 legends so far, Nadia was the easiest.
I wound up getting this a couple days ago, and haven't stopped playing since. It has completely blown me away, and made its way onto my 2016 GOTY list. It's always great when a strategy game wears the title 'strategy' as a badge of honor. Minimal hand holding early on (just to show you the basics...), then you're free to screw up over and over again. So glad I didn't listen to iTunes reviews about difficulty... What is with people expecting to be able to three star every stage in every game they play the first time they play it? [rhetorical] Great, GREAT stuff! THANK YOU MIKA MOBILE!!! **I guess I should note, when I hit stage 7 the first time, I changed characters and worked my way back through to stage 7... Then jumped over to the challenge stages and passnplay. My nephew recently got into FFT, and is now wanting to play more and more strategy games... This is the first time I've really enjoyed a pass n play mode...
I wonder if you'll feel the same way around levels 15-18. I love the game, too. A lot. I definitely got very frustrated at points on the above levels, though. I also felt like I beat them pretty much by fluke. Not a good thing if you ask me.
Nadia 3 starred all 24 story chapters. Did the gif move so fast it missed showing 14? I'm now trying the challenge maps. So far she's 3 starred the first 5.
Possibly. Looks like the frame is missing but could just be too fast. Nice work though! Red money is your money. You are the red team. Blue money is enemy money. The enemy is the blue team. Earn more money by capturing buildings. You earn money each turn, so wait around for more money if you have to.
I actually think they mgiht mean when they choose the tank to build it, the money is red instead of light yellow. This just simply means you don't have enough money to purchase the tank yet. Once you have enough, this will turn yellow. There is only one currency system to this game (aside from 'boosting' a legend with real money of course). One understated item for this game that usually amounts to greater difficulty - not all the legends are equal in terms of basic function. Some attacking, capture buildings, etc normally while others (like wilcox and crazy jack) don't. This can put some legends at a severe disadvantage in challenge mode when capturing buildings early on or in story mode when your legend is key to an attack strategy for completing the level. This doesn't necessarily mean they are weaker since some really shine later in the game, but i thought it was fair to note.
