News17.June:

Defense Rate Changes
Before we get into everything else, we want to talk about Defense Rate changes. Through our development with the Switch, and throughout our certification process, our game was not able to perform with the speed at which towers were attacking, effectively making releasing on the Switch impossible (due to how towers calculate enemy positions, priorities, tons of AI tracking, VFX being played, damage calculations, etc.) because of how many resources they took to make those processes work. As a result, we’ve provided a cap for Defense Rate that caps most towers at 0.50 shots a second.

This brings in Defense Rate overflow. Basically what this means is when you pump Defense Rate into a tower, that stat is rolled over into Defense Power instead. This means that while some towers will be attacking slower than before, they will be hitting harder to compensate for the Defense Rate cap (so the stat is not wasted). This includes any Defense Rate increase that you would get from boosting a tower using Overcharge or Speedy Gemstone for example.

We had to act pretty fast on this to ensure we can release it on Nintendo Switch. We discussed having two different versions (a Switch version with the lowered rates), but that just isn’t possible for us to maintain with a team of our size. Balancing it and making it fair would be impossible, and there might be metas where playing certain content on one platform may be easier than others, which is something we want to avoid entirely.

We’re looking to get as much feedback as possible here to make sure this change feels good while allowing us to fulfill our promise of releasing on Nintendo Switch.