Game Speed?
Playing my first few rounds of the game, first thing that I noticed was that when alerts came on screen I was actively trying to not click in the shaded area because in my brain space I thought that I wouldnt be able to click through the transparent box which had appeared. Being as this is most likely just placeholder art and completely irrelevant to my topic, I'll move along.
Game speed feels like it has been held back. the mouse movements feel fantastic, I noticed that every time I wanted to move my mouse to a place, it felt clean and smooth and accurate. Pathing of units is a bit rough but will be ironed out. but the one thing that felt restrictive more than most was unit movement speed doesnt quite fit a game speed I feel comfortable with.
In testing, I grabbed a group of units, put them at the resources on the left corner and made them run the length of the map, corner to corner, to see how long it takes. it was about a minute which means that from my resources to enemy resources is probably in the 45-50 second range.
not knowing what that means, I opened up BroodWar and LotV and compared.
Zerg Drone in BW
on fast (2nd from highest tick) in BW on the ladder map Fading Realm (128x96) took 1:03 to go from the bottom left spawning corner to the opposite resources in the upper right, bumping the game up to fastest (the standard play speed) it took 47 seconds to return to the original location.
Zerg Drone in LotV:
Ruins of Seras, one of the largest in the map pool took 56 seconds to move to cross spawn locations mineral line to mineral line
Ulrena, one of the shortest rush distances, takes 36 seconds to move from my resources to my opponents.
Undead acolyte In Warcraft 3:
took 50 seconds to find the middle of the map and die... so this one took a while to get right
Mystic Isles with an undead acolyte on game speed fast took 1:38
So looking at some of these numbers, comparatively speaking it may not be a different timing, but the unit size to map size might make it feel slow. it could be pathing making it feel slower, or a lack of unit speed diversity (outside of abilities, all units seem to have identical movement speed, but i'll keep testing to see if i agree with this statement by tomorrow) Maybe some differing movement speeds between my units might make for more interesting control, or just increasing the movement speed universally might be a suggestion.
LAST NOTE
this may only be something against AI, but about 20 minutes into a very long and drawn out match I seemed to have run into a point where I have no more upgrades to spend on and a maxed out army. there seems to be very little downside to losing my army other than "guess I wont have them for this fight coming up" so maybe a monetary penalty for warping in every time? might make use of the economy i have built up for the last 15 minutes
what say you?
Comments
Unit speed connects to a few other systems in game -- unit range (if units move too fast, you can close range gaps really easily!), terrain features (ration of speed to terrain feature size / map size), AoE sizes (we want abilities to feel powerful and big! But if you can run out of them easily it's not as fun!).
I like the ratios that we have to everything, but we have been seeing quite a few people on these forums comment that the game just "feels a bit slow." We'll begin investigating this post pre-alpha, and might do something as simple as "zoom the camera in slightly."
Re "having too much money in the end" -- Let me know how this feels in PvP! As its'a much different experience :D
really funny that you said that. the first thing that i did when i got in game was roll the scroll wheel to check out the unit detail on the little worker mining my gold.
also, with game speed. it will have to be another thing that I reserve some judgement on til I see what PvP feels like. because playing against AI, I felt a lot of down time between important "pay attention" plays, a lot of small engagements farming for gems but a lot of mexican standoffs almost like warcraft 3 early game. when we get into PvP I assume there will be more diving and more room for multitasking. its really easy to say "it felt slow" when the AI spent most of its time ignoring me and driving down the middle letting me set up an economy on the side
I imagine that its much like playing starcraft against an easy AI and mining out all 30 bases and having a maxed army as opposed to being early game harassed and low on money.
I guess I just feel like there is a maximum cap of money you would ever need to have in the game, and with the bases not "mining out" and with units respawning with "only" a time penalty. I guess with every RTS (which, definitely not saying make this like everything else) there is a monetary and time penalty for losing a unit. From Total War to Command and Conquer we have to rebuild and pay for units. I mention this because im worried that there is an actual hard cap on the amount of money that any player could conceivably need for an army. but that said, i dont even know if a real match could make it to that length. I'll see tomorrow.
I do love the fact that this takes an approach of "listen, if youre new, we wont murder you for it, you dont have to learn 1000 new terms and work on 400 actions a minute to feel like you can survive" so its like chess. you learn the units and how they work and you can use them all, but knowing how to perfect it takes time and skill. i like that concept.
one thing that feels limiting, however, is that I (think) I am capped at very small numbers of the various units. and while having a low supply cap is awesome and makes it so it can be more focused on smaller numbers of units and being highly skilled with them, I felt boxed in not being able to decide to have Five 3rd tier units and no 1st tier units or 10 2nd tier units and no 3rd tier. iirc I had 10/5/2? if the auto respawn were a "repurchase at a discount" type system which encourages you to stay in one comp so that other people can counter you more easily?
spitballing I like how the current system makes it very easy for a player to get in, understand whats going on, and feel good about it. this is the opposite of something like starcraft where you have to be a bit of a masochist to really want to realize you still suck at the game years later. I really feel like the intention was "easy to learn lifetime to master" and i'll spend some time in PvP and form a less shallow rooted opinion.