First, Second, and Third Impressions

TheFoilist

TheFoilist, reporting in! I was once a hardcore (albeit not great) StarCraft player. Now I play whatever games suit my fancy, all pretty casually.

I have played three games of Atlas so far, with and against bots only. Here follow my complete thoughts on the game right now.

Squads

Really cool mechanic! It certainly makes unit compositions much easier to manage. It might help to enforce team play as well, since different squads seem to be geared towards different playstyles. On that note, the squads do seem to have distinct personalities and interactions with each other. I can take one look at Hydros and know that it's a very tanky squad, and so forth. I wonder how squad selection will affect the outcome of the game as a whole. It looks now as if any combination of three different squads is just about as good as any other.

In the game environment itself, I have a pretty good idea of what I should be doing based on which squad I chose. That said, I don't see squads interacting with each other the way I imagined. Vex struck me as a squishy, high-damage sort of squad, but I didn't feel like I was doing much more damage or dying much easier than anyone else in the game. Also, I found it hard to tell which enemy units belonged to which squad, so I couldn't tell how each squad's units interacted with each other's. At any rate, battles always seem to have several squads on each side, so perhaps such small-scale interactions don't mean much.

In short, the Squad system reminds me very strongly of the Magic: The Gathering color wheel, but the differences between squads feel sort of superficial at the moment. I would like to see even more gameplay diversity between squads.

Macromanagement

I am a fan of the resource management mechanics. To earn gems, you are forced to go out onto the map and interact with your opponents. Gems also seem to be the most important resource in the game, as you need them to expand, defend, tech up, and to do meaningful damage to your opponents' base in the later game. If you don't pick up gems, you fall behind very quickly. Gold almost feels secondary by comparison. Taking expansions can be tricky and is definitely rewarding, but it doesn't feel as impactful as fighting for every gem spawn. I'm more inclined to think "I have to keep my opponent from securing those gems, or he'll be able to get a cannon and kill me" than "I need to kill that expansion, or he'll out-upgrade me eventually". Also, allies might find themselves competing with each other for resources, which would probably not be desirable.

I LOVE how all unit production can be done without having to look at your base. The mechanics are incredibly simple and intuitive. I don't understand the need for the V key command to deploy everything instead of units just popping out when they're complete, but it's trivially easy to get used to anyway. The main problem I have with unit production is with the unit cap. Once I have my full squad deployed, all of my macromanagement goes into upgrades. I can never out-produce my opponent. I can never achieve the endgame fantasy of rolling my opponent with wave upon wave of units. Perhaps it is because I am used to fighting with larger numbers of non-respawning units in other games, but my army looks too small to do much, even if it's not.

I really like the upgrade mechanics. The ability to invest heavily in any specific unit stat or to branch out into multiple ones allows for very precise customization. It works amazingly well with the Squad system in particular, since upgrades can easily make up for any quality that your squad lacks by default. I can play a squad whose description reads "fragile", upgrade their defensive stats a bunch, and suddenly be able to tank a surprising amount of damage.

Micromanagement

I'll start small scale. Units appear to move very smoothly, and respond pretty well to all of my commands. And then an allied or enemy unit will wander in, and suddenly everyone becomes a Dragoon. Units get stuck on each other, push each other every which way, and control becomes pretty difficult. I feel like I have to babysit my army at all times, which is actually not a problem at all since the macromanagement is so streamlined. Again, this may just be me not used to staring at an army for long periods of time.

When battles happen, I can sort of intuit when I can keep fighting and win or when I need to pull back, moreso than in any other RTS game I have ever played. I don't know what causes this, but it feels great! Controlling individual units in battle is a bit trickier. Units tend to want to spread out, but fights tend to cover a pretty small area of ground. Units tend to get stuck and block each other quite a bit. Saving low health units is made a bit trickier by the health bars being very hard to see. However, I definitely feel like I can impact the course of the battle by controlling my units well. Good micro is rewarded with improved performance. Moreover, I can feel how much better I could be doing if I had even better control. Finally, however difficult it may be to control my units, I know that my opponent has to deal with the exact same amount of difficulty, so I really don't mind the pathing problems that much.

The main concerns I have for Atlas at the moment deal with large-scale army movement and map design. Once I have my army, there seems to be a very limited number of things I can actually do with it. I can attack my opponents' base, for which there are several avenues of attack; I can secure gem spawns, which usually happen near the middle of the map; or I can defend and build stuff on my team's side of the map. For all of these purposes, it is almost always better to keep my army as close together as possible. Only heroes can secure gems and build stuff, but it feels very unsafe to let my hero wander around alone. Splitting my army to do lots of stuff at once just isn't worth the risk that half of them will die. Also, there is no way I can think of to harrass my opponent's base or economy aside from parking my army in front of their gem spawns.

Killing your opponents' units is useful, as their respawn times can be exploited to take map control, kill the units guarding an expansion, secure more gems, or what have you. Killing one free unit isn't that impactful, but small numbers advantages do matter quite a bit. Killing heroes is only useful if I can force a fight immediately and kill a bunch of hero-less units.

I wouldn't call the game deathball-ish or tug of war-ish, but it certainly seems to promote large-scale, coordinated action as opposed to spread-out action with small numbers of units. I have no problem with this as it is, but I think it would be cool to make room for both types of gameplay.

Final Thoughts aka tl;dr

My favorite thing about Atlas is the feel of it. Most of my decisions have distinct and clear consequences on the game state. I usually have a pretty good idea of what I have to do to win. Battles can be tense, but I am not overworked by the need to multitask at any point. Atlas nails the feeling that I think any RTS should have: that I am a commander whose strategic genius and careful decision making help my army win the battle.

My principal complaint is that there seems to be a lack of strategic diversity in the areas of squad selection and map movement. I would like squads with more personality, so that squad selection has greater impact on both individual and team strategies. And I would like more options for what to do with my army, preferably including some way to make splitting up units more viable.

This game has incredible potential that it is well on its way toward realizing. Props and kudos to Artillery.

Well, there you go. Sorry for the wall o' text.

Day9

Thank you for writing such a clear and elegant post. I'm thrilled to hear that you are enjoying the feel of the units and some of our design decisions!

In short, we pretty much agree internally with virtually all of your points -- there isn't enough multitasking benefit small skirmishes, strategic diversity is not as high in-game, not enough tasks for army to do etc. We have a roadmap to tackle all of these in the next few months, and this playtest is largely to make sure that we ARE headed in the right direction!

If there's any questions or pieces you'd want to discuss more or make sure we're focusing on, lemme know!