Ankylosaur

There are two devices that come to mind with the Mender. What i typically do is use an escort. You get a whole extra line of dialogue, as they say something when they arrive. Escorts come with some other benefits and drawbacks though - so may or may not work for you. So rescue them, they say something like "Rikti are from the future! Let's destroy their portal." You also have some space in a clue, maybe the Mender hands them something, about the Rikti or the portal. "Mender X tells you..." and then they say something when they arrive, "The Rikti want the Japanese to win. Let's stop their plot." - or whatever. If you need more space I saw one arc where the author asked players to right-click the character to get their details. They used the boss description for a longer exposition. It worked for me better than I expected it would. As to maps, you are playing with the exciting unpredictability of outdoor maps! Very few allow you to position a contact in front or back so you have to work around that. The very few that also have interiors do, but they don't fit your scenario at all as described. So your choice is to just use an interior map that serves as the whole research station, or change your location to fit a map like the Croatoa Winter map (maybe northern Japan?) With the winter map - do all the bomb destruction and non rikti stuff outside the caves, with some required objectives which gives them a chance to find the Mender. The nice thing about using the Mender as an escort in a case like this is that if he is outside the winter caves, his destination can be inside the caves, helping you guide your player to the location, and it helps get around the issue of finding the escort's destination before you find the escort. Ice caves make for a pretty undesirable research location - but maybe rikti and a few rikti props like computers or portal stabilizers make it feel more rikti-lived-in. Bonus tip - if you want a tech-based alternative to the typical portal options, I often use the "Reinforced Door" you can find in the Longbow mob. Create a Boss, add the Reinforced door from the Longbow mob and surround it with Rikti. It is the cell door you would find in a Longbow base if you died and went to the Hospital there, and i think it being in the mob is why only the Longbow prison cells work on maps with cells (they don't work for council, 5th column, or cot maps)

Went ahead and applied your feedback - ty! Calling it final now - though is anything ever really? (At the very least - when they fix that Rikti Space Station map - this may get some changes to take advantage of it.)

That’s great feedback, thank you! Getting the Shivans to spawn at that level does make them all bosses, as they are all EBs really. That’s a good call out on the Dark Watchers tone. I will take a pass to make it feel more authentic. I was not as careful with his voice in this rewrite, so I will try to tighten it up. M1 and M2 are meant to be investigation/discovery missions where you uncover things to pursue/resolve but by the nature of the surprise attack and urgent response, they are meant to set the tone in a “show, don’t tell” sort of way. M1 was a map I felt compelled to use for obvious reasons, but there is not much you can do there. M2, on the other hand, is really large and better shows the chaos. I did get a little indulgent with including all the Hearts of Darkness, but as you say, it’s M3 where you really form a plan on how to retaliate. I will think about how I can make them feel more purposeful, and part of including the Shining Stars was to at least bridge them with something that connects them. Also, will look for that high perception and tune down some of the custom Skulls. (I think I overcorrected there - everything they fought in battles wiped the floor with them.). Likely will boost the low end of the missions to 40, also, or even 45 to account for those Shivans. It’s an endgame kind of story after all. As to the typos and other issues, I will get on those, and I appreciate you capturing them. Thanks for all the feedback! That’s a lot to go on and to refine.

I managed to work with it, but it has other issues too - namely involving Allies. They follow you through the portal to the back room, but get stuck there. They can also easily wander into the pits of doom. They did say that there will be fixes to the map in page 3.

If, at the same time, something could help prevent the AI of allies from wandering into the green pit at the entry or middle, that would be a nice refinement too. Also - allies who enter the back room never advance from the portal - they are just stuck there

Going to put in some design notes here soon - spoilers though, and it all kind of presumes you played it before or read the thread linked above.. It all began with the new Rikti Space Station map. I figured it would make a great replacement for M5. But as soon as I started to tinker a little, I realized I wanted to tinker a lot to address some of the above...

So after a few years hiatus, I started working on an update to a story I pulled down ages ago: I always liked the bones of it, but there were a few things lacking to me. I wanted to use "space" maps and aliens, but that meant two very similar asteroids, and no spaceships at the time. I wanted to use both Shivan types, but that meant some level changes, and the reasons were thin. I wanted to use "new stuff," like maps, and powers, and those are not new anymore - e.g. a Khalisti office is hardly novel and was a bit shoehorned in fit the space alien theme. I did not give great motivation to the player - some of the missions were sort of handed out, without a player really discovering the reason to pursue the next one on their own. I tried to follow the AMA Lore too much, even though it did not work super well and the finale kind of sprung a bit out of nowhere I later realized, in any telling of the Shivans/Battalion, Dillo should probably play a role. So, now, I give you a massively rebuilt arc, much on the original theme, but bigger, better (I hope), and more powerful than before. The Coming Storm: Menders' Game. Arc ID 69684 I am sure there are some typos in there, there always are, and I will be running through it all several more times to try to find them all while it is still marked Looking for Feedback. And I am! So please feel free to share feedback, and please be generous with stars in its early days. I will try to incorporate all the feedback I receive to make it the best it can be.

Understandably! Not too far off from my Anky. The original on live was a Spines/Regen Scrapper, and all green, and loads of fun. Simple costume so the Spines could shine in contrast. All tights with the Insect skin. Just happened to be the toon I logged in with when they handed out Globals, and, well, here I am. 🙂 i remade him here, but never took him past level 4 - though I do log in as him to author sometimes. (P.S. So great to see the run-through of All That Glows 2! All That Glows 3 is a Dev's choice believe it or not - more on that later, but a few tidbits added above now that you are done.)

Now that you have been through just about all of the All That G... stuff, I thought it might be handy to have a timeline of "when" you "were" in Praetoria and elsewhere because of time travel. This is all from memory so I may miss something 🙂 All That time Travel and the Praetorian trips timeline (Spoilers but not for anyone who has read Engineria's journeys)

Oh thanks! That is important story context for me too...

I suspect it was a map that they found in development and have been sitting on in they wanted to use it - and finally decided not to use it. Eventually, someone decided to roll it into AE because it was a nice asset not being used anywhere but it may not have gone through a lot of testing though as a result. Would be fun to knwo the real story though of where it came from and how it ended up in AE. It is obviously originally for a TF or Trial or something.

Agreed - and I was planning to explain the lava parts, the cannon parts and work within the quirks/interesting parts of the map - but the final room boss getting teleported to a place you can't fight them is map-breaking. Since the map is a relatively new feature Homecoming introduced, I posted it as a bug. Fingers crossed that something comes from it. For now, I will maybe try to work within the limitations and keep the encounters to the front/middle level, while giving players A LOT of info about how to proceed.

tldr; a boss, placed in the back, is teleported to the "green death pit" of the middle level upon the player entering the back room. This makes the boss unable to be fought. While I love the new Rikti Map's feel, it is a very complicated one, obviously part of a trial or something. I worked out how to use it, what the microreactors do, and more but ran into the game-breaking bug above. Any time I portal into the back room, my main boss is teleported away before the fight begins. The green pit of death in the middle room is problematic in other ways too, in that allies can get trapped there. They don't seem to die, but rather just stand around, like the teleported boss, making me wonder if they are dead and maybe mid-transport to the map's hospital - but the game does not know how to deal with that with allies? Removing all the "floor is lava" spots might make the map a little easier to use too. Have not tested that much in the back room as I encountered this bug, but worth considering if you do take the time to make your new, very cool, map a little more usable.

Has anyone gotten the Rikti Spacestation map to work for them? First, it feels like I need to give a bucket of info on how to navigate the thing, and how the microreactiors work to remove the shields on the cannons. Then i feel like I need to warn about the "floor is lava" spaces, and accommodate for them somehow with allies, who seem to fall into the middle room's pit in particular, with no way out. And I can't jump down to grab em cause I die since, you know, the floor is lava. And those were going to be cumbersome enough, but then, when I enter the back room through the portal, my big bad and her minions all immediately get teleported up to the middle room into the pit above, where again, lava for me, but they got some fancy shoes or something and stand around all unthreatening-like. Is this all just me? My only path forward feels like maybe ditching the allies, or giving them flight and seeing if that works, and putting the boss on the middle floor avoiding the back altogether - which is not great for a few reasons - not the least of which is that she still may end up in the pit.

Ah - the daring tale of Engineria and the energy-beings-that-live-on-stars-and-take-the-shape-of-beings-they-have-cohabited continues! And with such a large serving of boding! Forboding of the dark comet! (And maybe even some backboding because of the ever persnickety time-travel.) Tidbits and spoilers and the like. Will add in more as you share more of your tale!