Astral Ascension is the most boring rogue like I've ever played and how to fix it.

Astral has no qualities of a good RL.

Slow pace, all the way through. You just spend few hours slowly circling aliens and nothing else.

No interesting decisions to make. You just take damage damage damage (be it lasers or modules), some speed gens some ammo and that's it.

No high risk and reward. It's all low risk and no reward. You just bleed hp slowly because most enemies have close to your range and you must be a AI to not lose any HP there. There's no way to win big or lose big. The only thing there is is going through resource gate, but that has no effect on your gameplay in astral, other than the fact you're skipping a reward. Dumb.

Takes a lot of time. Most rouge likes take way less time for a full run, especially that there's nothing else to do here than do wave after wave, other games in the genre have exploration, looking for secrets, etc.

You can't get overpowered. You're underpowered all the way through. Every RL allows you to get stupidly overpowered in a way that makes you oneshot most enemies, clear a room in a second, defeat bosses in seconds instead of few minutes. There's nothing like that here, it's all boring. You don't even have any kind of power spike, any upgrade you get is small and not that significant on it's own.


How to fix it.

Pick up the pace. Make it faster. Boost speed of the ship, boost the aliens, you have the treacherous domain boss technology now, make enemies interesting, add instakill fields, add attack indicators, attack patterns, etc. Boost all damage across the board. Both for players and enemies so at least you win and lose fast, instead of it being slow painful agonizing death.

Add interesting items, instead of using 1:1 stats of current items change them to insane values. And do it with brain, make interesting modules serve as stat boost items, they shouldn't be randomly generated, instead prepare a set of 100 or so interesting stat alterations that appear randomly. Few examples of modules (I haven't put much thought to numbers, they're extreme to visualize the concept).

Speed -99%, Damage +1000%

Range -50%, Damage +200%

Laser damage -90%, Rocket damage +900%, Rocket Range +100%, Rocket cooldown reduction 50%

Shield -100%, HP -90%, Speed +30%, Range +30%, Laser damage +1000%, Rockets disabled

Every 3rd shot deals triple damage, -5% hp

Every rocket hit applies 50% damage increase on the enemy for 3 seconds, rocket range -30%, rocket cooldown increase 10%

HP -50%, Dodge +50%

You gain damage increase in proportion to your missing HP, where 1% missing hp=0,5% damage increase

You gain speed increase in proportion to your missing shield where 1% missing shield=0,3% speed

Your lasers now gain critical chance of 1% for 1000% damage critical hit

Your lasers now have damage spread of from -99% damage to +500% damage

You now have a 1% chance to restore 50% of laser damage on hit

And so on, get creative, ask community for ideas.


Make each ship interesting enough with completely different kits and starter items. For example make pusat extremely fast and fragile, make zephyr fragile but with better base range on top of skill, make sentinel have insane shield absorption and value but not a lot of hp, and so on.

Just make it less boring, I don't even care about leaderboards and rewards. It's so boring I don't want to play it ever again without improvements.

 

i only agree that astral gate is boring, the rest of your idea seems awful especially since it's a gate meant to have one life and if you can beat it without regenerations.

the best thing about astral is the loadout system that i hope they can rework it for UBA, there's also the 4 zones gate thingy that we had in december that could be used for astral as well, you need to like kill all aliens on each zone and first time visiting a quadrant heals your health by like 5% or so, about the ships themselves they need a change because between zephyr or pusat it's pretty much picking it for "the challenge", last astral gate all boss aliens had the same range as a max stack zephyr, i lost many lives due to boredom and downright stopped playing after figuring that out, ain't burning these cpu's with the silly limited polychromium distribution thing.

 

It's boring, yeah. If it's to gain any kind of popularity like EBG it'll need better rewards for a start.

GGEUs are almost useless
Permits are aplenty
Modules can't be crafted more than once per season ...that sucks
Regular keys give complete garbage drops (Edit: ok they give B03s very rarely apparently. Useless for endgame compared to EBG's rinusk & uri)
and the gate doesn't give a good enough amount of resources to craft prime keys. The rank rewards are also trash when compared the equivalent Eternal gate rank event.

Of course this is just half the problem.

 

How about just letting us use our own ships we spent years upgrading etc