Quoted from J85M:
I can’t see how combos would unbalance the game. Maybe it’s because I’m not as good a player as you but I’ve never found combos unbalance, ST, TWD, Maiden they are just another reward (combo champ) and layer to the gameplay that gives me something to aim for.
And Ironman needs a proper skill shot and super skill shot, soft plunge to the left orbit spinner would be great and fit the game nicely as you would get a super fast return out the right orbit, starting the game as you mean to go on
A double super skillshot to war machine would also be rewarding as that’s always a super satisfying shot to make, making it off a soft plunge for a nice points reward would be super sweet.
I, uhm...
I don't know anyone has called me a good player before... Thanks
But seriously, the issue is all those other games that you mentioned had combos built in to their code when they were made. Adding combos later means that they will need to go back through the code and either nerf the points that come from other modes, or else the combos won't count for much. The problem that I have is that how it stands *right now*, the game is nearly perfectly balanced - Whether you start the game and shoot for Monger, or try to activate War Machine first, or start Whiplash, or Bogey, or Fast Scoring... no matter which strategy you're using, the reward for these is only so much and the modes progress to be more difficult the more that you do them. Additionally, with the Mark suit build up lights, you have a specific goal to run through all 6 in the same game to unlock the potential for bigger points.
If combos are implemented, and it results in Bogey being worth a significant advantage because you can just loop those shots, it throws so much of the diverse, "you gotta play it all" strategy of Iron Man out the window, and that is what sucks.
As it is, Bogey already does double it's values if you are comboing the shots between the left and the right ramp.
I wouldn't mind the machine *counting* the Bogey combo officially, but in a game where often your final score isn't that much, if there is a further combo benefit that increases the Bogey shots in particular beyond what they are, looping the left and right ramp become more lucrative than they already are, which would make it the dominant strategy that you need to go off when playing the machine.
And that's my problem with this idea, personally. If you want to add the orbits to a combo count, that's fine - but I don't think that it should be worth big points. Really though, the only shots you can reliably loop are the ramp shots, which already have an adjustment.
For a perfect example of why this shouldn't be done, in the early code for SWE1 from Williams, if you looped the left and right ramps over and over again, you would get an # way combo for each ramp that you looped. In the original games, it would award you the number of combos x100,000. Since those shots were easy, you could sit there looping it over and over and end up with combos worth millions of points relatively easily (only took 10 shots, and they aren't that hard to do.. 10 shots was actually worth 5,500,000 points, which is about the same as a mode. Add another 5 shots to that, and you're now at 12 million points. 20 shots in, you're at 21 million points. And, as you can see it keeps accelerating. If you hit 30 ramp shots in a row, you're at 46,500,000 points, which seems like it is a crazy number of ramp shots, but once you dial in that ramp shot... I don't actually think I'm very good and I've managed it about 30 times in a row.
It completely unbalanced the game and made it so that - until the software was fixed - if you were playing for points, the only relevant strategy was to shoot and combo the ramps over and over and over and over.
Having said all this, if Lyman is playing with the code, he's well aware of this and doesn't need to read my input on it, but then I definitely wouldn't expect it to become a thing.