Earth Defence

Love and hate this game, addictive but merciless and incredibly frustrating. Final level has no ending. Which is a shame because I set up an unbeatable defense.

Assuming the "goal" is to create a defense strong enough to survive the final level, this is virtually impossible to do on normal speed. I shouldn't have to slow the game down every 10 seconds just to make it to the last level, much less "win" it.

Too much depends on luck when it comes to level generation. On the first level, with 100% evacuation, I sometimes start the next level with as much as 13k credits, other times as few as 8k. I have never succeeded in evacuating more than 50% of the second level when I started with less than 12k, so obviously this is just bad design.

You need to do way too much micromanaging with the evacuation vehicles. Also, waaay too often, a ship will sit just outside a pod. Especially when you select a group of evacuation ships and move them to a pod (because for some f#$king reason, the ships form an utterly useless 'fleet' shape, which I have literally never wanted, instead of converging on a point).A special pain in the @$# is when you finish evacuating a pod and all the ships cluster at the drop zone, then when you try to select the ships that are just sitting there doing nothing, you have to go around other ships full of passengers. 

I have lost several times because of the idiotic mechanic where the ship auto scoots up to engage with enemies. Sure, there are a few times where it's convenient. But with the agonizingly slow turn around speed of everything except the basic fighter, it's an instant death sentence for ships that were otherwise 100% safe. This is especially soulcrushing when it happens to a battleship, because unless you can kill all the enemies before the next wave, it is impossible to turn the battleship around before it dies even at full health. 

A highly effective strategy is to hide ships inside pods. But, I don't think you designed the game with this strategy in mind because: 1. it's incredibly difficult to get even the fighters to fit because of the terrible controls (the ships will veer *just* far enough off from where you actually click for them to peek just outside the pod) 2. again, the group selection sends your ships in a useless 'fleet' formation 3. There's no cycle-click feature for a stack of ships, so for multiple ships you either need to use the terrible group select "feature" or space them out to where you can individually select them, while praying that the ship doesn't do some goofy maneuver that places it too far away from where you clicked. 

Fighter swarms are perfectly balanced, powerful offense but need careful timing with their use (otherwise all your fighters will be destroyed). Cruisers suck. Destroyers are decent but cost too much. Battleships are necessary but suck, the flavor text really hypes them up but they're slow, get bodied by swarms and the enemy battleship, and have less attack power than a fighter swarm. Small turrets are decently balanced.
Large turrets are *incredibly* OP. 

The evacuation units are all perfectly balanced except when you account for the absolutely atrocious micromanaging you need to do for everything except for the biggest transport. But when the game is on the slowest speed (which you need in order to win) they're a pain to use. 

5 stars.

Amazing game!! Love this kind of defense game!!

This was a fun challenging game. Loved it.

awesome stuff