Guard Feedback and Suggestions
I love guards in this game MUCH more than traps, and my bases are usually guard-heavy and trap-lite. As a result, I've noticed that guards have some serious issues in this game right now:
1. Players can "peek" at guards, and guards will SEE them (like aggro animation goes off) but not attack. This seems counter-intuitive and is strangely nullifiying of guards, and feels like it should be changed.
2. Players can FIRE at a guard, and the guard will not aggro or fire back. This one seems a bit wild to me. If a guard is fired at, they should aggro and return fire at the player.
3. Ranged guards will not take line of sight into account when bloodlust aggroing. If they are "in range" they are happy. This means that if you bloodlust a guard on a ramp above where a guard is, that guard will not do down the ramp - the guard will just point their gun at the floor and do nothing. Warmongers will go down the path fine, so I assume it's just a line of sight issue on ranged guards that need to be addressed. Yes, they are stupid, but they should understand that the floor is not their enemy. :)
4. Guards are 100% still between shots, which makes the movement augment pointless. Guards need to pivot around between shots (or maybe even while shooting?). The movement augment would be really spicy on Hornets if they pivoted around while shooting. Or maybe the movement augment, which is largely unused right now, could be changed to make guards more mobile while fighting.
5. Guards can only have 2 mods. It makes sense to limit mods on traps so that we can keep player expectations at a reasonable level, but the guard mods are mostly stat boosts like firing rate, movement, and range. Would it be too strong to let guards have more than 2 mods? I do not think it would be. It would be fun to have some highly invested guards that are hard to battle, frankly. This is especially an issue in that some guards have a semi-necessary augment to be viable, such as armor on Warmongers and short leash on Hornets.
6. We cannot see a guard's effective firing range like we can with traps. Yes, the numbers are known and we can test this, but it would be really nice if we could see what guards are actually "looking at" for their aggro radius from their standing position, like we can with traps.
7. There is no abiity to place guards are a 45 degree angle. It makes sense that cubes can only turn 90 degrees at a time, but there's no reason to have the same restriction on guards. Frankly, it looks weird that guards can only face "forward" when the player will be coming in at an angle. Add more turn angles for guards so we can control their aggro vision. It's not enough to "path" them at an angle, since this raises the base's threat level for no reason.
8. Guard pathing is VERY threat-intensive. While it makes sense that a guard running through the whole base would raise threat level, it's kind of silly that just pathing a guard left-to-right in a small pivot can push a base into the next Danger territory. Is my base really Brutal now because I made an Enforcer hop back and forth?