I wholeheartedly agree, thinking back to 2014/2015 when players almost always used bots that they had created themselves and how each one was specialised to the point where the announcer had lines that described them quite accurately showed how balanced the game was. Each version inevitably developed its own metas but back then it was see how much redundancy you can pack into the limited CPU coming in the form of more guns which you had to tier so that they could peak over one another rather than placing one giant gun and calling it a day. The absence of camera assist meant you had to have the mechanical skill to pilot a thruster stick instead of the game doing the hard work for you. Before the PSK and LOML there was an emphasis on aiming which naturally created skill gaps which was healthy as newer players had something to strive for. The building also had a more impactful skill gap before the CRF was added since you either created a bot from scratch or had to manually copy from a video tutorial which meant you got a better look at the internals and how it was engineered, going through the motions yourself helped players get used to certain advanced build techniques that might have otherwise gone undiscovered for some people. The movement parts felt robust and satisfying to pilot, half the fun of playing was from flying a smooth bomber or crawling up giant cliff faces which had previously been unreachable with the starter bot. The UI was clean and kept tucked to the sides of the screen as to not block vision, little things like this go a long way in making a game feel polished. Whilst the graphics may have been slightly low resolution at times it had a cool sci-fi aesthetic which is no longer the case. It still has a variety of planets but the style became diluted with bright neon colours and cartoony environments. It's a shame so much went wrong over the years and what might surprise some is that it wasn't a big screw up or series of mistakes, the plan was to abandon the current audience in hopes that an imaginary bigger group of casual players would suddenly pick up the game and stay long term. The baffling part is that they committed so hard to this vision of where they were taking this game that it went through years of update after update causing community backlash and no sign of the desired results before they took a step back and realised that they had ruined a once top ranking game on steam that used to have a dedicated fanbase before all the sweeping changes resulted in an experience too different from the original to the point where those players stopped enjoying it and had to reluctantly say goodbye to something that had once brought them entertainment and good memories. The issue then became that with fewer players the game was no longer turning a profit and so development ceased, that meant there was no time or money to undo the years of bad updates and regain the core experience that many more people enjoyed, that leaves us with what's left today only a few balance tweaks which can never fix the fundamental issues this game has. RC 2 might be a step in the right direction but it is missing the blocky aesthetic which removes a good bit of nostalgia, I'm sceptical that the devs will be able to balance a game that is much more complex than RC 1 when the history shows they did not manage that simpler game well enough to retain players.

Glad you enjoyed it!

t4 ion tank thread spider zzz

Yes, they were fun to play and make

@@archidamus2483 What do you mean 'were'?

Indeed

Depths' voice

@@deegobooster gigachadspartan voice

From what I can figure out, helium spam might be able to soft counter this type of bot through area denial and being plain tanky, and only then, on some game modes