Extended Edition Content Feedback

I have been a big fan of this game, always finding out new capabilities and strategies. I have however been rather disappointed with the extended edition however. It does have a LOT of new content, but the content is designed to "suck".
Thusly, the game balance is thrown quite a bit off because of so much suck piling on top of each other, with very little things to actually aid the player or balance the scales.

Lets look...

1) Caches - Mostly trapped now. A new feature that only sucks for the player. Rewards are the same as before.

2) New terrain. Sucks for the player. Causes trouble advancing due to inability to repair. Incurs repair bills needlessly. Blows up your fighters, drains shields, thus causing more losses due to lack of readiness. Halts you so enemies can dogpile you.
Really causes problems escaping from failed fights.

3) Weapon balance. Mostly sucks for player. No more turbo-particle cannon spam for a relatively cheap way to get up and going. No more burst megaplasma fun.

4) Enemies run away. Sucks cuz you have to chase them, lose out on turns, or just lose out on cash.

5) Space stations have random items for sale which is more realistic and interesting. But it sucks because before you were guaranteed MegaPlasma guns. Now you get mediocre junk usually.

6) Smarter AI = sucks for player.

7) Crazy spawning fighter madness where enemy spits out like 20 of them. wtf? Sucks.

8) Roving bands of nemesis that warp in right on top of you. Ok, this is about same as last time but is the most common way to die lategame.

9) More factories = more roving warships earlier. Much less time to plink at fighter groups to scavenge cash and explore before running into ships you LITERALLY cannot damage (on hard due to no money).

10) Tougher bases = good opportunity to lose. Lost vs the nemesis bases. Despite screens of fighters, etc, they simply blasted my main ship with long range energy weapons and I lose in 4 seconds. Yay.

11) Harder quests. They are more intricate and yet pay the same. This sucks.


This adds up to a very frustrating game. I CANNOT IMAGINE trying to play this game as a level 1 noob with Nightengale!!
I can BARELy put up a winning game with a freaking Capitol ship or heavy carrier. Even on easy. Something ALWAYS seems to come up.
On medium I usually dont make it to the 3rd map.

Here are a few ideas to mitigate this:

1) Difficulty should NOT have such a huge impact on cash initially. Hard is just ridiculous as you have to find a cache or you cant even hurt enemy big ships. Medium is fairly bad.

2) More ways to get to select advanced weapons. I would add a new friendly Merchant ship that has 3 slots filled and offers money-quests instead of mercenary rewards.
Stations could be 9 slots instead of 4, with a weapon for each category. INCLUDING decent POINT DEFENSE options.
It is too annoying to find great weapons that dont fit your current strategy but would have been great last game, etc.

3) The "reward item" at the end of a map is kind of a joke. It is only marginally better than a stock weapon. Needs much better stats.

This is a little harsh, but it does get the point across. You are right too, many of the (fantastic) new mechanics and features do make the game more complicated for the player. I wouldn't say that they suck, just that the player needs to have the tools to counter them instead of feeling beaten by them.

Early game does feel off, especially on hard. It is very tough to get going. Hopefully this can be addressed, but I think it really is a separate issue.

The rest of your point is valid, the game feels harder and more complicated and there are fewer really strong modules that are regularly available. Try to look at the bright side though. As those outlying modules and imbalanced mechanics are brought under control, the devs will have the chance to buff and rebalance until the difficulty is just right. I'm hopeful that as all the bugs and mechanics from the new release get worked out, balance and player experience will start to get more attention. Remember, this is just the first part of the content update. Strong new ships should be out soon too!

Thank you for the feedback!

The new updates were meant to bring more depth to the game, make it more complicated, force the player to think more about the strategies. Much of it revolves around the star-map, because that is where the possibilites lie. Now that we have just launched the game has been too unfair to the player, but it is updated now on Android. And will be next week on iOS. Try out the newest version, changes are mentioned in the next paragraph.

It is much about what the goal of the game is. We have a goal to make Harbinger deep. We want to give the player a feeling that if he dies, he can feel that there could have been something he could have done differently. And then he wants to try again because of that. We don't want it to be totally unfair and frustrating, so as @Draikan said we are still tweaking. The game has so many random elements, that these are really hard to balance and takes time. We are always listening to the feedback and we will make changes. (The newest update on Android is already tweaked difficulty wise, the "easy" difficulty now has more Battlestations in the galaxies, and "normal" has doubled starting money. "Hard" is still hard, it is meant for the players who have beaten it all before that. Some want even something more challenging than "hard")

The way Harbinger launched it was a game where you packed your ship with a projectile cannon and energy cannon, upgraded recharge rate and rolled through the game. That was an error that clearly escaped our grasp. The two starting cannons were never meant to be the most powerful turrets in the game, yet they were. Actually dps-wise, they were stronger than any turret in the game. Wow!

Yet despite of our errors, our players still loved the game. But looking at the feedback, the majority wanted more content. More depth. More to think about, because there wasn't that much of that in the original Harbinger.

This adds up to a very frustrating game. I CANNOT IMAGINE trying to play this game as a level 1 noob with Nightengale!!

Well you are absolutely right about this, that is why we made the changes in the newest update. Hopefully it is better now on easy and normal.

Hope this new version grows on you with time! We will keep tweaking and listening to you.

I do want to clarify that by "suck" I do NOT mean the features themselves are poor or bad. I am saying that it is something that adversely affects the player relative to the older version. This gives the player new challenges and such to work with which by itself is a good thing.

Ditto with removing unbalanced weapon elements. It is a good thing gameplay wise.

I am simply trying to point out that the majority of the new elements make life harder for the player, without enough corresponding benefits to balance things out.

I LOVE the game itself and feel like you added a lot of depth which is awesome. It is so well done that it is kind of painful for it to be so frustratingly difficult. This is by far the best such game I have ever seen, and works perfectly for the phone platform, or small tablet.

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I do believe that increasing weapon selection with expanded Starbase slots and merchant is a pretty good idea that helps the player customize their strategy somewhat. So many times, you find some weapons but just not enough to implement a particular strategy.
It is also very difficult to find the really good weapons, even in the 3rd and 4th maps.


I also believe that making the starting money less variable would be helpful too. Having 1000 in hard, 1500 medium, 2000 easy seems more reasonable to getting off to a usable start, but still forces careful selection of items and does not allow a full loadout. There are two other ways to effectively increase starting funds to consider below:

First, I recommend having the enemy large ship Factories delayed about 5 extra turns on the first map only. Right now there is not enough time to start exploring on Hard before you can get shut down hard by a roving large ship. Being able to explore, find caches, plink out fighters and clear early sectors would also go a long way towards making medium and hard a lot more playable, without needing to hugely increase the starting money.

Secondly, seeding the first map with extra caches within the first few sectors of the start would also be beneficial and effectively increase starting capability while retaining the "go find stuff" feel.

Anyways, keep up the great work and I did not mean for this to feel so harsh.

No offense to Joe but the rebalance and new features don't "suck" for the player. The game increasing in difficulty is great for the player. I love the new depth to the game. Unfortunately, I think Joe wants this game to be a mindless shoot em' up game. Players that can adapt are called noobs or "joe's" in this case. Don't change a thing guys! Lovin all the updates so far.

"Unfortunately, I think Joe wants this game to be a mindless shoot em’ up game. "

Crud, I have been found out and my sinister plot revealed!

Devs, plz add ability to tap on enemy ships repeatedly until they blow up. K, thx.