Markus

@Century Orion I can totally understand. The Sumo Mode only works with fully autonomous Drones, which have a bit of a steep entrance hurdle currently. I would love to make it easier. I think the first step to make an autonomous Sumo Drone is to make a pusher: Create a drone which simply flies forward. You place your thrusters that they are aligned in a way that when you activate them, you fly straight to the right. Then you use the "Button" Logic-Part, which simulates a keypress. Use a key as "Output" and then have all the thrusters use that key as "Input". Now you have a self-flying drone. One of the next steps is, you use "Distance Sensor"-Parts to maneuver your drone. Each Distance-Sensor casts a ray, and if the ray hits something, it outputs a keypress. That keypress can you use, to trigger other thrusters. This is useful to detect either the enemy or the Sumo-Border. More advanced is the Directional Sensor, which you can use to position your Drone relative to the Center of the Ring or towards the enemy drone. If you have any questions, we are happy to help. Also consider joining the Nimbatus-Discord, as there are always active players which love the Sumo Mode

OMG! This is so amazing 😍I really really appreciate your work here ❤️Very detailed and helpful. I hope we can improve the Sumo Tournament soon so more players are motivated to participate and even more strategies are created This thread sparks my imagination like crazy. I'm thinking of creating a drone which creates a field of repelling magnetic satellites, which arrange them self around the border and help you stay inside the circle. Trying to find ideas which are not yet mentioned here

Absolutely! I urged @Micha to do this since quite some time. let's upvote this so he has no chance but to implement it

Good suggestions. I personally would prefer to have less UI and everything would be easily visible and recognizable on the drone itself, but I can totally understand it from a pro-gamer standpoint. Maybe we should have a possibility to turn on certain information via menu, if you want. Hmmmm...

Great Idea with the heat, and I love the idea of the logic shield We sooner or later need something to detect damage. Another Idea, make the shield even stronger, like, absorb almost all possible attacks, even Area Damage effects, but instead use a ton of energy. Like, you would need like 10 Solar Panels for 1 Shield. And the Way to go would be you have to use Batteries instead of shields, but you would deplete them very rapidly. So the solution is, you can't have them turned-on all the time and you can rarely use them. But when you do, they are very effective.

Good suggestions. We definitely want the different Ammo types to have different effects and expanding that to effect the "ground" would be a good solution (we already have the system that certain ammo types have different digging strength depending on the ground type). Not sure what we can add as there are some technical limitations for the terrain, but the idea is very interesting. Thanks

Good suggestion. We're not sure if adding more tech-trees is the right way to go, as we want to minimize complexity/overhead and make things easier to understand - but still offer a lot of customization. Hard problem Only having one big tree is a possible solution. Not sure what's the right thing to do thanks for the suggestion.

Awesome Guide! I can see how much time and effort you put into it. This would be an awesome entry into a Wiki, maybe someday enriched with GIFs. Reading your Guide made me very happy and is motivating to improve this game mode more and more ❤️ Thank you very much There's another type of Drone, but since they are rarely useful, they maybe have no right to be on this list SURPRISE BOMB You stack a lot of heavy drone parts into each other and when you start, the drone explodes into many different parts - in the hope that it confuses, destroys or knocks out the opponent. It is rarely successful, because it's hard to maintain a usable "leftover" and the shrinking ring will most likely be your worst enemy. Counter: Shield/Coward, non-fragile Drones

@GrigorisN I agree that the Upgrades in the Weapon Workshop are not ideally balanced yet. I think we have a system which allows for good balancing, but we haven't but a lot of time into this section yet, only the system. So I can understand your feedback fully What Micha was saying is that there are not necessarily good or bad upgrades - it depends on how you use them. More recoil e.g. might be useful sometimes, in other cases of course not. We try to have a up/down-grade for every variable/setting, so you can choose how you want to configure your weapon. As for having negative effects: I kind of like this suggestion. Are you saying, for example, if you add a "Use less energy", that maybe the "Damage" also gets slightly lessened? And it's very strange that the "Treasure Chest" with the red resource in it did not bring you any money when dropping into the Container. I should work, but I have to check it myself. Maybe we broke something during working. Thank you for the hint.

@TheMad Those electric turrets are a special form of "Particle Weapons". If I remember correctly, we have Projectiles, Laser and Particle Weapons. Currently in the Steam Version / Closed Alpha we only have implemented one type of Particle Weapons, the "Flamethrower" . During the Closed Alpha, we chanced the weapon system, and the old weapons didn't work anymore. So we have to re-implement some of them, including the electric turret They will most likely be back some day, but I can't say a date or range for sure

@Murkusfast Woaaa, these GIFs are so satisfying to watch I hope you have a good time with the Alpha @All: I love the GIFs here, awesome work! Really motivating to see everyone having so much fun experimenting! ❤️❤️❤️

@blackbook7777 I know that those ultra death machines are super fun to do But the problem is, that it's hard to design & balance a game, where normal gameplay and ultra death machines can happily co-exist I think we have to optimize and balance for normal gameplay, and have to find a good solution, to allow ultra death machines and other creative endeavors. Not sure how we'll implement those yet. Maybe with an additional "sandbox" mode, where you can freely configure things, or maybe something entirely else. To Be Discussed... nothing fixed yet. If you have suggestions regarding this topic, feel free to start a thread in the "Discussion & Feedback" with this topic, as it will get more visibility and participating members

Hi everyone! Here's the 5th GIF competition! We're having an OPEN topic this round again. We were very impressed by your creativity last time, so please surprise us again this round The best two GIFs win a Steam key for the Closed Alpha of Nimbatus. Deadline to enter is Wednesday, 11th of July. (Winners will be announced shortly after). Here are the rules: Post your GIF right here in this thread. Multiple entries per person are allowed. Old non-winning GIFs are allowed as well. Only GIFs recorded with the demo version are allowed in this competition. Please only post GIFs here if you participate in the contest. If not participating, please use this thread instead. @Roger, @Markus, @Micha and @Philo will pick 2 favorites. There will be only awarded one key per person. If you won in a previous contest, we won't award you another key. Please note: You can use [F9] to generate an animated GIF of the last 6 seconds gameplay, but feel free to use other tools. Remember that the best GIF wins! Tell an interesting story with your GIF. For this contest the best looking GIF wins. We'll have contests which award pure logic/cleverness at a later time. We maybe show some of these cool gifs on Twitter, Reddit, etc. Please only post here if that's ok with you. Tipp 1: The GIF capture tool hides bad framerates. If you turn off the Bloom because of performance reasons, turn them on before recording the GIF. The game might have a low frame rate, but the resulting GIF should run smoothly and might result in nicer looking GIF because of the effects. Tipp 2: If you press F9, please wait until the "Generate GIF" message disappears, otherwise your recorded GIFs might get corrupted. Press F9 and wait, and then it should result in a 6 seconds long GIF.

Interesting Idea OmegaDeltaZero. Not sure yet if this fits the game, but I'll definitely will bring it up in the gameplay/progression discussion we will soon have. Thx!

Leave the judging up to us and have fun posting GIFs No worries. If we think you win a key, you deserve it, that's it

@lack_ofabettername: @OmegaDeltaZero is posting GIFs outside the competition here, if I get that correctly. He already won a key in the last contest.

Good point @OmegaDeltaZero. I'm not sure how we should balance all upgrades yet, as we only implemented the system but didn't spend a lot of time balancing each upgrade. Also I'm not sure how 4-slot artifacts will work. I hope I get to spend more time on thinking about gameplay soon So much things to do for this heat/cold update 😅 Sorry for letting you hang with this issues for the time being

@OmegaDeltaZero Sorry for posting so late. Yes, I think it is a Bug, because we didn't think all upgrades through. I think there might be cases, where we want to allow for cumulative 0% or 100%, but we have to design it that way - and in the case of the Energy-Upgrades it was simply not designed and by chance So a discussion if this should be allowed or not is a good thing. Maybe we can allow for 0% Energy Usage, but you have to use all 3 slots, e.g. -20%, -30%,-50%?

The GIFS are really cool Hmm, I also had this problem a few times when playtesting, but reliably reproducing it was not possible. I'm not sure where the point of error is, maybe it's in the buffering when you quickly change planets and then load one - this is the best guess currently. This especially might be responsible for breaking the planets. Have to investigate further. Thank you for the GIFs and savegames, helps a lot.

@lack_ofabettername OMG, this is really awesome. Great usage of Direction-Sensor. Unfortunately the demo really has the limitation of using only the keypad. I haven't experimented with how you can circumvent that. The closed alpha has the feature of using tags additional to keys, so there's no limit on how many combinations you can create.

Great suggestion @OmegaDeltaZero. I think doors which retract into the object itself instead of swinging open is a good way to go. The container needs to be redesigned and reanimated for this, so it won't happen in the near future. Maybe we add more functionality to the container a bit later, so then would be a good time to update the graphics and animations. Thank you all for your suggestions and feedback. Highly appreciated

No worries, no ones wastes anyone's time We know that this part is still work in progress and needs to made better

I think this is something which will be balanced/updated/polished in the future. For now I think it stays, because it's somehow funny (and we have to spend our time on other things). There was a old version which was deadly, luckily we changed that Do you have a suggestion how you would like it to be @OmegaDeltaZero?

Almost all of our entertainment in german is "Standardsprache" or "high-german", and in school we mostly have to talk in "hochdeutsch", so it's completely normal for us so understand that. But if it goes more into dialect, for example "bayerisch" or maybe some north-german-dialects, we also have trouble to understand them Just like we have sometimes trouble to understand other swiss-dialects (wallis especially )

Great entries so far. I love your creativity. Quick note: When we say we love "the story" of the GIF, we don't mean the thing you tell us about your GIF, or the backstory. Simply when someone watches the GIF, what happens / is told in the GIF itself. Sometimes there are interesting things done in this way