I finally played my first game. I think overall it was pretty fun.
When confirming the squad this frustrated me because I initially had a hard time finding the "confirm" button, I understand what you guys were trying to do, but it's probably better to have a static button in a normal location.
As the game play progressed I found myself hammering on my number keys thinking that I created control groups. It was a bit confusing because I wasn't sure if you could or couldn't create control groups (I suppose you can't because there's no indicator for control groups). It's also awkward because you can't hotkey your main buildings so you can quickly upgrade without scrolling back to the building.
I like the focus on smaller personal army size because it makes it easier on someone not very competitive in rts games. One thing that had me frustrated though was the unit collision when trying to cross paths with another friendly army or standing still and another army walking through mine and it just pushing my units out of the way or trapping them in the middle of a ball of units i couldn't escape from easily.
Hero Select: Location of 'confirm?' dialogue confusing. Intuitively looking on RHS to accept.
First game: 43 minutes with bots. Kind of a grind. No fast paced back and forth to force a finish.
Overall enjoyed the gameplay.
1) Early game growth feels slow. Highly restricted by crystal mechanic. Early on, my bot friends colelcted all of the crystals, and I could not find any... While this might be strategic, it can be frustrating.
2) Late game crystals seem overly abundant
3) Turret ranges feel ridiculous. Way too long. Expansions hard to hold.
4) Gold mining: unclear how much until a site runs out.
Generally I enjoyed the not-so-quiet transformation of the traditional RTS and am feeling good about the game and its rather impressive alpha state.
some quick negatives //
UI/UX negative: I had a hard time finding my units on my mini map these first games and it hasn't gotten much easier to glance down in the corner and understand where the hero and armies are. This was definitely due to a combination of the color and shape choices for the objects/nodes/units on the map. I suggest diverting from existing scheme and find some alternative colors and shapes.
UI/UX negative: When selecting units, I had a hard time parsing and filtering information quickly. I believe this is due to the concentric half-circles that denote different things at the bottom of the units. A more intuitive interface for each of the units/hero would be nice for quickly bringing me up to speed on what is happening, who I have selected, what their health is and so on..
Gameplay negative: I also found myself wanting more control of my resources. The gems = coins = units = gems cycle led to a partially apathetic portion to my game play experience. I believe some adjacent and ADDITIONAL approach should be made in regards to coin so as the capture and sit on your thumbs feeling is lost.
Positive feedback: Okay so this one is more of a conceptual feedback /: There is a moment when your economy becomes strong and you've got T1, T2, and some T3 when players begin to evolve their styles and the true Real Time Strategy components come to the surface. This is a very fun and powerful part of the game. I believe that this mark is the best and most rewarding aspect of playing the game. The hybrid game Artillery has built is in full swing and my hero and army composition are in harmony for the first time. What a good feeling! How fun!
Those are some slap in the face first impressions and I'll be throwing some more of my two cents in as I play more and more.
So far I have played 4 games against the bots. Enough to feel like I have got a decent understanding of the basics. One thing that I am having a hard time with is as a new player is gauging the importance of expansions. I think this issue is coming from I am not feeling a noticeable difference in my output capabilities after taking a second. For example in starcraft 2 when I take a second base I get a noticeable surge in economy. I find my self taking a second, but never taking a third throughout the entire game. This comes from me not being able to find a time when I weigh attacking the neutrals guarding the expansions more important then pressuring my opponents.
So my first impressions on expanding is: I know its critical to expand, and I know that my economy is growing when I expand, but as a new player with limited knowledge of the math behind the game I am not getting that feeling of growth when I expand.
One suggestion I have is to make economy more of a game focus. Right now I feel the main thing I am focused on the entire game is micro/fighting the enemy. I know it was a design decision to not have macroing in the game. I think having to worry about your economy throughout the game could add another dynamic to the game.
So I just finished my first game and wanted to provide first impressions while it was still fresh. I found a couple things:
I played the sniper class, Vela. It was nice, and I enjoyed it. But it did feel a bit... clunky with regards to some of the combo fair warning/take aim/peaceful resolution. I had some difficulty getting them to all go off with synergy.
The problem was mostly that if I used fair warning, it would give me about 6 seconds to then use take aim before it wore off. I would try to use take aim as soon as possible after, but It took a second or two for my dead eyes to twirl and then lock on. And then a few more seconds before the shot went off. Meaning that fair warning usually wore off before the take aim hit.
I tried using take aim first, then launching fair warning, but then the opposite problem happened where take aim went off before fair warning landed.
Some suggestions for improvement:
Make fair warning last longer, or make take aim faster. That allows for fair warning, followed by taking aim. Or conversely, give take aim more wiggle room by allowing the bonus damage by checking for fair warning while starting, rather than 3 seconds later when the shot is taken.
That being said, it was my first game, and I probably will improve with practice. So, maybe get some more opinions from people who have played more than 1 game.
Other than that, the squad handled well.
Other thoughts:
The 'on unit' UI didn't do a great job of conveying the important information easily. The health bar and reload bar were right on top of each other and the same color. It was hard to tell at a glance if my hero was almost dead, or just reloading. Putting the health bar on top, or side, or making it a different color would help.
Also, status effects were hard to see. It might have been a graphical glitch on my end, but I had a hard time seeing who was marked, or slowed, or whatnot. I am not sure what would help. Maybe a bigger red circle for marked? Or a little star next to them? I don't know, but it needs to be more obvious than it was. At least when the players are new and may miss the more subtle signs. If you are worried about the game aesthetic, perhaps you can have it as an option on the graphics menu to turn on 'oversized status markers' than can be turned off once you know what to look for and don't want your screen cluttered.
The aiming and targeting was very clear though. I really liked the tracers and tower beams to show who was targeting what. Very well done there.
I felt as though the universal hero T button delay was not really needed and just led to me wandering around a field of gems I couldn't collect because of cool down. I don't know why the delay is in there or what purpose it served, but I felt it slowed me down a lot when it came to picking up the spoils.
Presumably that feature was added so that when grouped each player gets a chance to grab a gem rather than the person up front getting everything? If that is the case, perhaps the timer could be dependent on how close the nearest allied hero is?
I really liked the hero and unit respawn. It felt fairly friendly and didn't lead to a lost game even if you over committed and got killed. I think that the time delay penalty is more than sufficient in creating the incentive to avoid getting killed though.
As you are aware, pathing needs some work. I had a hard time getting my army into the orientation that I wanted it some times. This is especially the case when I would tell my hero to build something only to find him stuck inside my army with my units just looking at him like he is crazy.
Other little bugs. I found that control groups got removed when I unit died and didn't come back when they respawned. Not sure if that was intentional, but I found myself being unable to really use control groups well because of it. I mostly just switched to using ` and double clicking a group.
I have more thoughts, but I will save those until I have played more game so that I can see if they hold true for more than just 1 match
I've now played at least 1 game with every hero, and I'm gonna do a revised day two thoughts now that I have some more experience with the game.
From around the 10 minute mark to the 15 minute mark when I'm developing my tier two and into tier three units, I feel like I have a harder time supporting the production of those units. It feels like I get taken out of the flow of the game. However, this could entirely be down to playing with bots which makes it harder to take your 2nd expansion with the neutral mobs. I'll have to check it out tomorrow when PvP goes live to see how it works there.
I really enjoy how unique the play-styles of each heroes are.
The game I feel is easy to pick up and get sufficiently good at where you can have fun and not worry so much about mechanics. But there is still enough room for player growth that you won't get bored after a few games. That last aspect has me hooked, I can't put this game down!
So I played my 3rd game of Atlas with a fellow Technical Alpha tester, and he just rushed 4 expansions at the start of them game. All in all I was on 1 base for 15 min then only got a 2nd after we both decided to kill a camp of neutral monsters. He came to a conclusion there is only so much coin can get you, but in the end he was x10 more powerful then me and I FELT USELSS player base crystal capturing nodes rather than team based nodes is a simple fix. That way It's not a race against my teammate for the first 5 min rather a race for resources to destroy my enemy
As a more-or-less objectively bad player, I'd like to be able to rally my units to my hero. I understand that this causes new design issues (what happens when the hero dies?), but often times I felt overwhelmed trying to make sure I had all my duders with me.
edit: moved 90% of this comment since I realized it wasn't in the appropriate thread
First impressions after watching tutorials but before actually starting a game:
I felt surprised by how much I liked the Atlas logo/font and how the task tray icon looks pretty neat.
I felt bad when I saw the game looks similar to Dota 2 mainly (with the towers, nexus) but that seems so ingrained I wouldn't know where to begin to make a suggestion. Dota 2 simply isn't fun for me.
I felt like the game flavor is unoriginal when I saw some hero names: Vex & Eris. They remind me of destiny- the Vex are an enemy race of time traveling robots and Eris is an overly-serious failed-raid-survivor NPC. Not that Destiny came up with those names, it just seems a lot of games or using the same terms and names.
I felt like the game was dumb when I couldn't find the video/display settings or any settings really.
There may be a bug trying to go full screen with the client. It just stays the same size. When I try to make it full screen it goes in the top left corner as expected- only it's off screen too far in that corner.
First impressions after playing against bots as Vela, Elegant Assassin (long range dudes):
Game 1-
Video settings popped up - hooray! Still weird how the game is separate from the client but I assume there are design reasons.
I felt pretty overpowered when I won with siege titan spam (biggest neutral weapon) on the nexus at about the 30 minute mark. I snuck two siege titans in to take out half the nexus earlier so maybe its luck. I like to think the power level is a design decision to make sure the game ends at some point, and that's good.
I felt a good back and forth during the mid game, almost like tug of war SC2 arcade games like Desert Strike. ))<>((
I felt weirded out that I couldn't see info or stats on my hero in game, not even the name. This goes for selecting buildings, enemy units, or gems spots. Perhaps a separate selection info cursor thing could work because accidentally clicking off of your army could ruin the game at a critical moment.
I felt annoyed at unit collision/path-finding when units try to move past each other and they hit like a wall that takes forever to move around. It's almost like they're too bubbly and it'd be weird if that was on purpose as some sort of challenge for micro. How about the units climb over each other? Seems like a cool, dynamic solution to a boring problem.
Game 2-
UI bug: some neutral weapon hotkeys are not visible completely. Is the following info relevant to this?- I'm playing full screen 1080p 60z monitor no v-ysnc getting around 96 FPS.
I felt nostalgia for SC2 when I forgot upgrades and forgot an entire expo location all the way to the 20 minute mark. (note: I'm a silver league Zerg in SC2)
I had mixed feelings about the AI not trying to punish me for taking what I believe to be the gem expansion in the top left corner pretty early. It's good that I didn't have to worry about it and was rewarded for a supposedly risky play. On the other hand I wasn't challenged on it so was it really a risk? Maybe the AI is bad right now on purpose to keep the games from getting too frustrating.
Speaking of which, I felt frustrated at the UI. It's hard to distinguish the army and the gem nodes on the mini-map. The colors are almost too close to the friendly green units as well (is it worse for someone who's color blind? is there a color blind mode?). More importantly, I didn't see a way to select all army. Am I spoiled from SC2? It has those buttons above the mini-map for all army and idle workers.
I felt surprised I was able to win earlier than game 1, at about 25 minutes. I had 100 gems, bought some neutral weapons, and won handily. Idling resources is, of course, bad but it made me think I should have won way earlier and that's good because I'd love it if average game time was around 10 to 15 minutes. Ideally it'd be like 7 minutes but that's unrealistic for this kind of RTS I imagine.
Final thoughts:
Atlas is not as much like Dota 2 as I expected, which is fantastic. However, I didn't get that "this is awesome" feeling like I did when I first played Rocket League, for example. Atlas was fun and I'm curious to see if it's still fun when I lose, especially against other players, because that's a rare aspect for making a great game.
The last game I was more comfortable and decided to go with the typical RTS strategy of "expand way more than my opponent and I will crush them with resources". Once I had complete saturation of my side of the map, I felt in fact exactly the same as I had in the previous three games. I had no power surge and it didn't feel like I had an appreciable advantage at any time.
This was the art map, so I DID have a crazy influx of gems and obviously that was more than enough to win the game, but my core army / units themselves didn't feel like they were more powerful / overwhelming in any appreciable way. Maybe it was my own miss management of resources? An example would be my army size was still the same as my opponents, and my upgrades were only barely ahead of them because my coin influx wasn't particularly impressive even with the whole map in my control.
One thought I had to fix this, was that I felt a bit strangled and repressed when I couldn't build on enemy expansions. I feel like being able to do this could further punish opponents with superior expansion control, giving to our team while hurting the other more completely.
Maybe another thought would be an upgrade to unit caps? So if you do control the resources and have the extra coin you could expand your unit caps and create larger and stronger armies than your opponents.
Along the same lines, when the game passes the mid point (15 or so minutes in, everyone is tech 3 and most bases are saturated) I felt a little bored and a feeling of malaise as the game seems to drag a bit. The start of the game is super fast and very fun and hectic! After the mid point it seems to lag in pacing and it feels like it takes a ton of time for any meaningful changes in army, upgrades, etc to take effect, especially compared to the early / mid game. I've never gotten close to any kind of "ultimate power cap", but it feels like it would take over an hour to get there.
I have one more item to pick on with the gameplay. Whenever I would engage in a massive battle (3v3 or 2v2, usually in the center of the map with tons of open space), I felt very frustrated trying to move my units around the battlefield into meaningful positions. Movement feels very clunky when it comes to pathing around other units. Oftentimes the art / map seems deceiving with the size of gaps, where units look like they should be able pass through but can't and end up going on a very goofy path. It feels to me a lot like old Dragoons from Brood War, but sometimes even worse! Unit movement and interaction with other units is definitely the most frustrating aspect of this game currently for me.
Just some thoughts. Love where this game is going so far.
In the start of my first game, I felt a little lost because I forgot how to spawn units. I later found out the buttons are there above the mini-map, but in my first time playing there were so many buttons in the HUD which made it difficult to find. Perhaps when the game starts, the v icon glows?
I think it be nice to be able to rally your units to your other units. It was a little annoying to keep losing units because I would rally them to a place my army was no longer at. I eventually learned to do v, tilde, ctrl+1, so maybe it is just something that people will eventually learn.
I enjoyed the simplicity of being able to have all your units selected and use everyone's abilities, yet still having to individually select units in battle for movement and positioning. Feels like the best of both worlds between difficult micro and easy to pick up.
Placing weapons was a little frustrating, mostly for two reasons:
The hotkeys are so far away (although the entire left side is being used, so I can't think of a good solution to this, maybe I could just switch the hotkeys to alt+something?)
Messing up a weapon feels so punishing. A few times, I would hit the wrong hotkey or place a weapon in the wrong spot. Especially for the tier two weapons, it really hurts. It would be nice if we could cancel a weapon within 3 seconds or something and get some amount of refund back.
The mid-late game felt really slow. These are some reasons why I think it felt that way:
My game was 40 mins long, although I can see from the game feed, that 40 mins is the higher end of game length, a game looks to be an average of 30 mins. I thought that my game was pretty much over within 20 mins. Even though I was pretty sure my team was really ahead in economy and army, it felt like a grind to kill the opponents over and over until we won. Although I do understand that the more time a player gets while being behind, the more he has the chance to catch up due to skill. It's also possible that it took me longer to finish due to inexperience. Also, in a pvp game, the other team would probably have forfeited much earlier.
The map feels too large for the speed of the units. I was playing Vela, who has the fastest units, and still it felt really long traveling from one point to another. Especially in the mid-game, where you're bouncing around collecting gems, placing expansions, defending towers, and harassing bases. I used this time to upgrade and such, but I kind of like the Starcraft feel of having more things to do than time, so having to make priorities. Here it felt like I had enough time to do everything I wanted.
The music. Although I liked the music, it made the game feel slower due to it's pace. Don't really know if this matters, but it was just a thought I had.
I think it would also be nice to have the standard upgrades and neutral weapons in the Atlaspedia (which I think could have a better name: Atlas Almanac? Atlexicon? Give it a map UI and just call it The Atlas?).
All in all, it's too early for me to have any strong opinions about the game, but I think there are some really cool concepts in play and there is some potential here. Atlas feels a bit like what Heroes of the Storm is trying to do to the MOBA genre for the RTS genre (although I don't think HotS executed it quite well enough); trying to keep the core, fun elements of the genre, while removing all the bite: the things that could turn a player away from the genre.
It's entirely possible that doing such a thing is negative, because it takes the low emotional swings for a player to really enjoy the high emotional swings, and removing the low dilutes the experience. In any case, we have no idea until we try.
Won a game with just about every squad. Probably about 4 hours logged in so far
First impressions
Economy:
The way this was implemented is awesome. I like how you have 2 resources where one if for your units/upgrades while the other is used for structures and siege units.
I also loved how one resource was constantly being defended (coin) while the crystals appear periodically, forcing engagements out in the middle of the map. For me, this is the key part of the game. This crystal spawning mechanic is what determines the flow of the game.
I find great joy in literally fighting for resources out on the map like this, rather than your typical resource gathering in other RTS games.
Another thing i loved about the economy is how the coin deposits were laid out. I like how it gets harder and harder to defend coin deposits as the game progresses. Im sure this will be different for each map that gets made, but having this general formula for map layout would be awesome.
One thing i wasnt sure if i liked was the crystal deposit locations on the corners of the maps. I understand the purpose of them is to increase the pace of the game passeed the mid-late game, however i can see some meta-like issues arising from this.
Another thing that i think would help alot, is if there was a bar or something that indicated when the crystal nodes were going to appear. Like a count-down or something.
Overall i love the economy.. its creates purpose for fighting.. and purpose for defending.
Macro:
Ah, the 'macro' of this game
The macro is super simple, which i love, i love that you only need to make a unit one time, and thats it.
I love the re-spawn system, and how easy it is to get units back out on the field. Im not gonna lie, when i first heard of this re-spawn mechanic i was strongly against it. However it is implemented beautifully here, because you pretty much always want to be out on the map.
I love that each specific unit has a cap. You always know what your composition is gonna look like, and your not spending time thinking about what you need in order to win..... needless to say this is a VERY micro heavy game.
I was worried going into this game and not having something like a Build Order that you would have in a game like sc2. However i realized that the build you do in this game just as important.. You can spend your starting resources just building units.. or you can upgrade and tech first and use the left over money for units. This creates a nice dynamic of "do i want quantity or do i want quality"; which, depending on the which squad youre playing, has its benefits either way.
Micro:
Man oh man... the micro
Just awesome.. I love everything about every squad to the point where its impossible for me to pick a favorite. I love how diverse all the abilities are and i love how each squad has a very specific play style.
The only thing i didnt like about the micro was how the units collided with eachother, there would be times when two units would endless run into eachother in the same spot. Im sure something like this will get fleshed out in the final release.
I had fun with every squad, mostly because each squad prompted me to go through different routes of tech and upgrades.
I loved that your army position in relation to your teammates matters a HUGE amount. Concaves are huge in this game.. and making sure your army is in the correct position during the engagements is of utmost importance. WHICH I LOOOVE!!
I especially love how all the squads fire a different ranges, you have your melee type who want to be in the front, and your long range squads who want to be near the back.. etc. Its just a great way to have awesome/flashy micro wars. Massive props.
Final Thoughts
This is the RTS that ive been waiting for.. perfect combination of MOBA and RTS.. please do not deviate too far from this structure of gameplay because it truly is something special.
First off, sorry that I didn't make the time to play more often. The holiday season got me a little tied up at the office. That being said, I will still give you my impressions based on the 2 games that I played.
The broad strokes of the client made me feel very welcomed. Though the tabs aren't entirely functional, I felt as though the overall ideas conveyed were very reminiscient of battle.net 1.0 (which is the client that introduced me to PC gaming in the first place). At the moment, I can't think of many ways to improve it specifically.
In the game, I would feel very frustrated when I would send my units back to base and they would be removed from my control groups. Simple fix, I'd presume :P
I felt like the acquisition of safe bases on the test map were a little bit too easy, which would lead to a bit of clashing on the allied side of things. If an ally just took all of the bases right away, it was tough to go out and secure additional bases with your limited resources. This is probably not necessary to change, though.
I've played a few games against the bots on both the artistic and gameplay maps. Unfortunately, I missed the PvP portion. Anyway, here are my thoughts.
I felt like I was often times racing my allies (bots) to the gem and gold sources in order to get the gems before they did. Maybe it would be better if there was something asynchronous about this where those on the same team could mine from the same sources.
I wasn't able to see unit health when the health was obstructed by a building or other object on the map. It would be nice to see an optional numeric value of HP that you can watch decrease over time. From a visual perspective I find that easier for determining how much damage I am doing over time and allows me to more quickly decide if I should retreat or continue to push.
Macro. Overall, I felt the macro potion was a bit too simplistic. In one way, that's great because it means the learning curve is minimal for understanding the economy. The flip side is that the macro can start to feel boring once an optimal strategy is found. I feel like in its current iteration, the optimal strategy is to build your army numbers as quickly as possible and then upgrade the tech. That decision making process here needs to be a bit more grey.
Micro. The micro is quite fun. I like that I can cast any of my army compositions unique abilities without have to tab through them. It seems to be a very good balance of complexity and ease to learn/remember.
Overall, I've quite enjoyed testing this game. I look forward to playing it more in future!
First game. I played with a friend, in voice chat, against bots, on (1/13/2016). I went a Green guy with seeds, named something A. My friend went a flowery-looking girl who started with a C. I'm not sure who our robot ally went; I think it's hero was some thin red demon with a bow. I tried to attack it a couple times, because my cursor (or maybe his highlight? Not sure) turned red, and he looked similar in color to the enemy units I had encountered.
I built some units, and pressed v at the beginning of the match. I think I pressed it too early, but whatever my failing, I didn't have any units. I wasn't sure where my base was, or where they'd spawn, so I spammed all the normal Moba "Center Camera on units" buttons. Eventually I realized the first press of V did not go through, and after pressing it again, I was able to find my units.
I kept jumping to an ally's blob on the minimap. I kept thinking green = me, blue = allies. I'm not sure what game taught me that convention.
Near the end of the round, my friend told me about the gold harvesting structures. I didn't build one the entire game. Once I knew about them, every time I attempted to build one, I was too slow, and my ally built theirs on the spots first.
Certain enemies (the neutrals and enemy towers) shoot red lasers at me. I'm not sure if the lasers hurt me or not?
Towers have range indicators, big orange circles. But, they start shooting me before I enter the circle, and after I leave it. It feels like its not indicative of the actual range.
Some of my large E-mutated plants would die essentially instantly. Felt bad.
I felt really good when I realized the Goliath plant can eat the immobile plants, and get their benefits. That's cool.
I realized now that I never tried to eat the explosive plant with the Goliath. I should have tried that.
Aside from the Goliath and the Seedbot, none of the unit names are very memorable. They feel very generic.
Building a healing wall with plants over my ally's battle felt awesome. Same with blocking a chokepoint with a barrage of upgraded plants.
I'm not sure where I should go on the map? One spot or another doesn't seem very profitable gem-wise over the others.
I felt like a weakling alone. I sort of fell into a Moba support rhythm, following my friend around defensively dropping spells.
I used the seige weapons once earlier in the game (an ion cannon), and watched them be generally ineffective against a tower, and be swiftly killed by that enemie's blob. I didn't remember to use them again until we went for the enemy's "Mega Core."
The use of an Ion Cannon is pretty obvious, an emplacement that does ranged damage. But, the... big, cubes? I'm not sure what they do? I think they shoot a beam, but I'd just blob them with all my other units and A-click.
I didn't use B to back. I forgot it was a feature, and then when I remembered it later in the match, I was afraid it would leave my units behind.
I feel like I had to blob with the seed-guy. Doesn't bother me any, but when we're doing two simultaneous things on the map, it seems like a waste to split up, with the synergy the seeds get.
The resources confused me. I saw the gems, and collected them fine. But, they didn't really have an impact on the things I wanted to build (units). I thought gold was intrinsically passive.
The map feels pretty homogeneous. Metal floor, with some natural stuff in random spots. I couldn't tell where I was by looking at the game screen, I needed the minimap.
What does the big tower structure before the big cube structure do? I attacked it endgame, because it's bigger. I think mine was attacked earlier in the match, and the announcer called it a 'Mega Core'
I didn't know the cube would end the game until we destroyed it. Looks pretty similar to all the other silver rectangular buildings.
Probably temp art, but all my buildings looked the same, all my upgrades looked similar, and they had no descriptions. I bought a few for kicks, didn't notice a difference, and didn't upgrade again.
We won the game! And I immediately wanted to play more. Unfortunately, I was playing on a lunch break. But, so many things to discover and master! I wouldn't say I was excited, but maybe.... incited. I wanted to be less shit at building forests of scary plants.
That's all I got! I'll probably post a followup feedback as a separate thread after I've gotten my teeth wet. Sunken my feet into it.
Judging by your feedback, it seems like most of the trouble you ran into had to due with a lack of understanding of some of the game mechanics. This makes sense, theres a toooon to learn in Atlas! Obviously playing more games will help you understand what to do more but I highly recommend you watch this video by Day[9]:
Hope you get a chance to play another game and join us for PvP :D
Comments
I finally played my first game. I think overall it was pretty fun.
When confirming the squad this frustrated me because I initially had a hard time finding the "confirm" button, I understand what you guys were trying to do, but it's probably better to have a static button in a normal location.
As the game play progressed I found myself hammering on my number keys thinking that I created control groups. It was a bit confusing because I wasn't sure if you could or couldn't create control groups (I suppose you can't because there's no indicator for control groups). It's also awkward because you can't hotkey your main buildings so you can quickly upgrade without scrolling back to the building.
I like the focus on smaller personal army size because it makes it easier on someone not very competitive in rts games. One thing that had me frustrated though was the unit collision when trying to cross paths with another friendly army or standing still and another army walking through mine and it just pushing my units out of the way or trapping them in the middle of a ball of units i couldn't escape from easily.
First game Feedback
Login Screen: Love the music.
Hero Select: Location of 'confirm?' dialogue confusing. Intuitively looking on RHS to accept.
First game: 43 minutes with bots. Kind of a grind. No fast paced back and forth to force a finish.
Overall enjoyed the gameplay.
1) Early game growth feels slow. Highly restricted by crystal mechanic. Early on, my bot friends colelcted all of the crystals, and I could not find any... While this might be strategic, it can be frustrating.
2) Late game crystals seem overly abundant
3) Turret ranges feel ridiculous. Way too long. Expansions hard to hold.
4) Gold mining: unclear how much until a site runs out.
Will play again.
3rd Game Feedback:
Generally I enjoyed the not-so-quiet transformation of the traditional RTS and am feeling good about the game and its rather impressive alpha state.
some quick negatives //
UI/UX negative: I had a hard time finding my units on my mini map these first games and it hasn't gotten much easier to glance down in the corner and understand where the hero and armies are. This was definitely due to a combination of the color and shape choices for the objects/nodes/units on the map. I suggest diverting from existing scheme and find some alternative colors and shapes.
UI/UX negative: When selecting units, I had a hard time parsing and filtering information quickly. I believe this is due to the concentric half-circles that denote different things at the bottom of the units. A more intuitive interface for each of the units/hero would be nice for quickly bringing me up to speed on what is happening, who I have selected, what their health is and so on..
Gameplay negative: I also found myself wanting more control of my resources. The gems = coins = units = gems cycle led to a partially apathetic portion to my game play experience. I believe some adjacent and ADDITIONAL approach should be made in regards to coin so as the capture and sit on your thumbs feeling is lost.
Positive feedback: Okay so this one is more of a conceptual feedback /: There is a moment when your economy becomes strong and you've got T1, T2, and some T3 when players begin to evolve their styles and the true Real Time Strategy components come to the surface. This is a very fun and powerful part of the game. I believe that this mark is the best and most rewarding aspect of playing the game. The hybrid game Artillery has built is in full swing and my hero and army composition are in harmony for the first time. What a good feeling! How fun!
Those are some slap in the face first impressions and I'll be throwing some more of my two cents in as I play more and more.
Great work and happy Saturday!
Nathan
So far I have played 4 games against the bots. Enough to feel like I have got a decent understanding of the basics. One thing that I am having a hard time with is as a new player is gauging the importance of expansions. I think this issue is coming from I am not feeling a noticeable difference in my output capabilities after taking a second. For example in starcraft 2 when I take a second base I get a noticeable surge in economy. I find my self taking a second, but never taking a third throughout the entire game. This comes from me not being able to find a time when I weigh attacking the neutrals guarding the expansions more important then pressuring my opponents.
So my first impressions on expanding is: I know its critical to expand, and I know that my economy is growing when I expand, but as a new player with limited knowledge of the math behind the game I am not getting that feeling of growth when I expand.
One suggestion I have is to make economy more of a game focus. Right now I feel the main thing I am focused on the entire game is micro/fighting the enemy. I know it was a design decision to not have macroing in the game. I think having to worry about your economy throughout the game could add another dynamic to the game.
So I just finished my first game and wanted to provide first impressions while it was still fresh. I found a couple things:
I played the sniper class, Vela. It was nice, and I enjoyed it. But it did feel a bit... clunky with regards to some of the combo fair warning/take aim/peaceful resolution. I had some difficulty getting them to all go off with synergy.
The problem was mostly that if I used fair warning, it would give me about 6 seconds to then use take aim before it wore off. I would try to use take aim as soon as possible after, but It took a second or two for my dead eyes to twirl and then lock on. And then a few more seconds before the shot went off. Meaning that fair warning usually wore off before the take aim hit.
I tried using take aim first, then launching fair warning, but then the opposite problem happened where take aim went off before fair warning landed.
Some suggestions for improvement:
Make fair warning last longer, or make take aim faster. That allows for fair warning, followed by taking aim. Or conversely, give take aim more wiggle room by allowing the bonus damage by checking for fair warning while starting, rather than 3 seconds later when the shot is taken.
That being said, it was my first game, and I probably will improve with practice. So, maybe get some more opinions from people who have played more than 1 game.
Other than that, the squad handled well.
Other thoughts:
The 'on unit' UI didn't do a great job of conveying the important information easily. The health bar and reload bar were right on top of each other and the same color. It was hard to tell at a glance if my hero was almost dead, or just reloading. Putting the health bar on top, or side, or making it a different color would help.
Also, status effects were hard to see. It might have been a graphical glitch on my end, but I had a hard time seeing who was marked, or slowed, or whatnot. I am not sure what would help. Maybe a bigger red circle for marked? Or a little star next to them? I don't know, but it needs to be more obvious than it was. At least when the players are new and may miss the more subtle signs. If you are worried about the game aesthetic, perhaps you can have it as an option on the graphics menu to turn on 'oversized status markers' than can be turned off once you know what to look for and don't want your screen cluttered.
The aiming and targeting was very clear though. I really liked the tracers and tower beams to show who was targeting what. Very well done there.
I felt as though the universal hero T button delay was not really needed and just led to me wandering around a field of gems I couldn't collect because of cool down. I don't know why the delay is in there or what purpose it served, but I felt it slowed me down a lot when it came to picking up the spoils.
Presumably that feature was added so that when grouped each player gets a chance to grab a gem rather than the person up front getting everything? If that is the case, perhaps the timer could be dependent on how close the nearest allied hero is?
I really liked the hero and unit respawn. It felt fairly friendly and didn't lead to a lost game even if you over committed and got killed. I think that the time delay penalty is more than sufficient in creating the incentive to avoid getting killed though.
As you are aware, pathing needs some work. I had a hard time getting my army into the orientation that I wanted it some times. This is especially the case when I would tell my hero to build something only to find him stuck inside my army with my units just looking at him like he is crazy.
Other little bugs. I found that control groups got removed when I unit died and didn't come back when they respawned. Not sure if that was intentional, but I found myself being unable to really use control groups well because of it. I mostly just switched to using ` and double clicking a group.
I have more thoughts, but I will save those until I have played more game so that I can see if they hold true for more than just 1 match
I've now played at least 1 game with every hero, and I'm gonna do a revised day two thoughts now that I have some more experience with the game.
From around the 10 minute mark to the 15 minute mark when I'm developing my tier two and into tier three units, I feel like I have a harder time supporting the production of those units. It feels like I get taken out of the flow of the game. However, this could entirely be down to playing with bots which makes it harder to take your 2nd expansion with the neutral mobs. I'll have to check it out tomorrow when PvP goes live to see how it works there.
I really enjoy how unique the play-styles of each heroes are.
The game I feel is easy to pick up and get sufficiently good at where you can have fun and not worry so much about mechanics. But there is still enough room for player growth that you won't get bored after a few games. That last aspect has me hooked, I can't put this game down!
So I played my 3rd game of Atlas with a fellow Technical Alpha tester, and he just rushed 4 expansions at the start of them game. All in all I was on 1 base for 15 min then only got a 2nd after we both decided to kill a camp of neutral monsters. He came to a conclusion there is only so much coin can get you, but in the end he was x10 more powerful then me and I FELT USELSS player base crystal capturing nodes rather than team based nodes is a simple fix. That way It's not a race against my teammate for the first 5 min rather a race for resources to destroy my enemy
Brief feedback on gameplay:
edit: moved 90% of this comment since I realized it wasn't in the appropriate thread
First impressions after watching tutorials but before actually starting a game:
I felt surprised by how much I liked the Atlas logo/font and how the task tray icon looks pretty neat.
I felt bad when I saw the game looks similar to Dota 2 mainly (with the towers, nexus) but that seems so ingrained I wouldn't know where to begin to make a suggestion. Dota 2 simply isn't fun for me.
I felt like the game flavor is unoriginal when I saw some hero names: Vex & Eris. They remind me of destiny- the Vex are an enemy race of time traveling robots and Eris is an overly-serious failed-raid-survivor NPC. Not that Destiny came up with those names, it just seems a lot of games or using the same terms and names.
I felt like the game was dumb when I couldn't find the video/display settings or any settings really.
There may be a bug trying to go full screen with the client. It just stays the same size. When I try to make it full screen it goes in the top left corner as expected- only it's off screen too far in that corner.
First impressions after playing against bots as Vela, Elegant Assassin (long range dudes):
Game 1-
Video settings popped up - hooray! Still weird how the game is separate from the client but I assume there are design reasons.
I felt pretty overpowered when I won with siege titan spam (biggest neutral weapon) on the nexus at about the 30 minute mark. I snuck two siege titans in to take out half the nexus earlier so maybe its luck. I like to think the power level is a design decision to make sure the game ends at some point, and that's good.
I felt a good back and forth during the mid game, almost like tug of war SC2 arcade games like Desert Strike. ))<>((
I felt weirded out that I couldn't see info or stats on my hero in game, not even the name. This goes for selecting buildings, enemy units, or gems spots. Perhaps a separate selection info cursor thing could work because accidentally clicking off of your army could ruin the game at a critical moment.
I felt annoyed at unit collision/path-finding when units try to move past each other and they hit like a wall that takes forever to move around. It's almost like they're too bubbly and it'd be weird if that was on purpose as some sort of challenge for micro. How about the units climb over each other? Seems like a cool, dynamic solution to a boring problem.
Game 2-
UI bug: some neutral weapon hotkeys are not visible completely. Is the following info relevant to this?- I'm playing full screen 1080p 60z monitor no v-ysnc getting around 96 FPS.
I felt nostalgia for SC2 when I forgot upgrades and forgot an entire expo location all the way to the 20 minute mark. (note: I'm a silver league Zerg in SC2)
I had mixed feelings about the AI not trying to punish me for taking what I believe to be the gem expansion in the top left corner pretty early. It's good that I didn't have to worry about it and was rewarded for a supposedly risky play. On the other hand I wasn't challenged on it so was it really a risk? Maybe the AI is bad right now on purpose to keep the games from getting too frustrating.
Speaking of which, I felt frustrated at the UI. It's hard to distinguish the army and the gem nodes on the mini-map. The colors are almost too close to the friendly green units as well (is it worse for someone who's color blind? is there a color blind mode?). More importantly, I didn't see a way to select all army. Am I spoiled from SC2? It has those buttons above the mini-map for all army and idle workers.
I felt surprised I was able to win earlier than game 1, at about 25 minutes. I had 100 gems, bought some neutral weapons, and won handily. Idling resources is, of course, bad but it made me think I should have won way earlier and that's good because I'd love it if average game time was around 10 to 15 minutes. Ideally it'd be like 7 minutes but that's unrealistic for this kind of RTS I imagine.
Final thoughts:
Atlas is not as much like Dota 2 as I expected, which is fantastic. However, I didn't get that "this is awesome" feeling like I did when I first played Rocket League, for example. Atlas was fun and I'm curious to see if it's still fun when I lose, especially against other players, because that's a rare aspect for making a great game.
Finished Four bot games at this point.
The last game I was more comfortable and decided to go with the typical RTS strategy of "expand way more than my opponent and I will crush them with resources". Once I had complete saturation of my side of the map, I felt in fact exactly the same as I had in the previous three games. I had no power surge and it didn't feel like I had an appreciable advantage at any time.
This was the art map, so I DID have a crazy influx of gems and obviously that was more than enough to win the game, but my core army / units themselves didn't feel like they were more powerful / overwhelming in any appreciable way. Maybe it was my own miss management of resources? An example would be my army size was still the same as my opponents, and my upgrades were only barely ahead of them because my coin influx wasn't particularly impressive even with the whole map in my control.
One thought I had to fix this, was that I felt a bit strangled and repressed when I couldn't build on enemy expansions. I feel like being able to do this could further punish opponents with superior expansion control, giving to our team while hurting the other more completely.
Maybe another thought would be an upgrade to unit caps? So if you do control the resources and have the extra coin you could expand your unit caps and create larger and stronger armies than your opponents.
Along the same lines, when the game passes the mid point (15 or so minutes in, everyone is tech 3 and most bases are saturated) I felt a little bored and a feeling of malaise as the game seems to drag a bit. The start of the game is super fast and very fun and hectic! After the mid point it seems to lag in pacing and it feels like it takes a ton of time for any meaningful changes in army, upgrades, etc to take effect, especially compared to the early / mid game. I've never gotten close to any kind of "ultimate power cap", but it feels like it would take over an hour to get there.
I have one more item to pick on with the gameplay. Whenever I would engage in a massive battle (3v3 or 2v2, usually in the center of the map with tons of open space), I felt very frustrated trying to move my units around the battlefield into meaningful positions. Movement feels very clunky when it comes to pathing around other units. Oftentimes the art / map seems deceiving with the size of gaps, where units look like they should be able pass through but can't and end up going on a very goofy path. It feels to me a lot like old Dragoons from Brood War, but sometimes even worse! Unit movement and interaction with other units is definitely the most frustrating aspect of this game currently for me.
Just some thoughts. Love where this game is going so far.
In the start of my first game, I felt a little lost because I forgot how to spawn units. I later found out the buttons are there above the mini-map, but in my first time playing there were so many buttons in the HUD which made it difficult to find. Perhaps when the game starts, the v icon glows?
I think it be nice to be able to rally your units to your other units. It was a little annoying to keep losing units because I would rally them to a place my army was no longer at. I eventually learned to do v, tilde, ctrl+1, so maybe it is just something that people will eventually learn.
I enjoyed the simplicity of being able to have all your units selected and use everyone's abilities, yet still having to individually select units in battle for movement and positioning. Feels like the best of both worlds between difficult micro and easy to pick up.
Placing weapons was a little frustrating, mostly for two reasons:
The hotkeys are so far away (although the entire left side is being used, so I can't think of a good solution to this, maybe I could just switch the hotkeys to alt+something?)
Messing up a weapon feels so punishing. A few times, I would hit the wrong hotkey or place a weapon in the wrong spot. Especially for the tier two weapons, it really hurts. It would be nice if we could cancel a weapon within 3 seconds or something and get some amount of refund back.
The mid-late game felt really slow. These are some reasons why I think it felt that way:
My game was 40 mins long, although I can see from the game feed, that 40 mins is the higher end of game length, a game looks to be an average of 30 mins. I thought that my game was pretty much over within 20 mins. Even though I was pretty sure my team was really ahead in economy and army, it felt like a grind to kill the opponents over and over until we won. Although I do understand that the more time a player gets while being behind, the more he has the chance to catch up due to skill. It's also possible that it took me longer to finish due to inexperience. Also, in a pvp game, the other team would probably have forfeited much earlier.
The map feels too large for the speed of the units. I was playing Vela, who has the fastest units, and still it felt really long traveling from one point to another. Especially in the mid-game, where you're bouncing around collecting gems, placing expansions, defending towers, and harassing bases. I used this time to upgrade and such, but I kind of like the Starcraft feel of having more things to do than time, so having to make priorities. Here it felt like I had enough time to do everything I wanted.
The music. Although I liked the music, it made the game feel slower due to it's pace. Don't really know if this matters, but it was just a thought I had.
I think it would also be nice to have the standard upgrades and neutral weapons in the Atlaspedia (which I think could have a better name: Atlas Almanac? Atlexicon? Give it a map UI and just call it The Atlas?).
All in all, it's too early for me to have any strong opinions about the game, but I think there are some really cool concepts in play and there is some potential here. Atlas feels a bit like what Heroes of the Storm is trying to do to the MOBA genre for the RTS genre (although I don't think HotS executed it quite well enough); trying to keep the core, fun elements of the genre, while removing all the bite: the things that could turn a player away from the genre.
It's entirely possible that doing such a thing is negative, because it takes the low emotional swings for a player to really enjoy the high emotional swings, and removing the low dilutes the experience. In any case, we have no idea until we try.
Won a game with just about every squad. Probably about 4 hours logged in so far
First impressions
Economy:
The way this was implemented is awesome. I like how you have 2 resources where one if for your units/upgrades while the other is used for structures and siege units.
I also loved how one resource was constantly being defended (coin) while the crystals appear periodically, forcing engagements out in the middle of the map. For me, this is the key part of the game. This crystal spawning mechanic is what determines the flow of the game.
I find great joy in literally fighting for resources out on the map like this, rather than your typical resource gathering in other RTS games.
Another thing i loved about the economy is how the coin deposits were laid out. I like how it gets harder and harder to defend coin deposits as the game progresses. Im sure this will be different for each map that gets made, but having this general formula for map layout would be awesome.
One thing i wasnt sure if i liked was the crystal deposit locations on the corners of the maps. I understand the purpose of them is to increase the pace of the game passeed the mid-late game, however i can see some meta-like issues arising from this.
Another thing that i think would help alot, is if there was a bar or something that indicated when the crystal nodes were going to appear. Like a count-down or something.
Overall i love the economy.. its creates purpose for fighting.. and purpose for defending.
Macro:
Ah, the 'macro' of this game
The macro is super simple, which i love, i love that you only need to make a unit one time, and thats it.
I love the re-spawn system, and how easy it is to get units back out on the field. Im not gonna lie, when i first heard of this re-spawn mechanic i was strongly against it. However it is implemented beautifully here, because you pretty much always want to be out on the map.
I love that each specific unit has a cap. You always know what your composition is gonna look like, and your not spending time thinking about what you need in order to win..... needless to say this is a VERY micro heavy game.
I was worried going into this game and not having something like a Build Order that you would have in a game like sc2. However i realized that the build you do in this game just as important.. You can spend your starting resources just building units.. or you can upgrade and tech first and use the left over money for units. This creates a nice dynamic of "do i want quantity or do i want quality"; which, depending on the which squad youre playing, has its benefits either way.
Micro:
Man oh man... the micro
Just awesome.. I love everything about every squad to the point where its impossible for me to pick a favorite. I love how diverse all the abilities are and i love how each squad has a very specific play style.
The only thing i didnt like about the micro was how the units collided with eachother, there would be times when two units would endless run into eachother in the same spot. Im sure something like this will get fleshed out in the final release.
I had fun with every squad, mostly because each squad prompted me to go through different routes of tech and upgrades.
I loved that your army position in relation to your teammates matters a HUGE amount. Concaves are huge in this game.. and making sure your army is in the correct position during the engagements is of utmost importance. WHICH I LOOOVE!!
I especially love how all the squads fire a different ranges, you have your melee type who want to be in the front, and your long range squads who want to be near the back.. etc. Its just a great way to have awesome/flashy micro wars. Massive props.
Final Thoughts
This is the RTS that ive been waiting for.. perfect combination of MOBA and RTS.. please do not deviate too far from this structure of gameplay because it truly is something special.
First off, sorry that I didn't make the time to play more often. The holiday season got me a little tied up at the office. That being said, I will still give you my impressions based on the 2 games that I played.
The broad strokes of the client made me feel very welcomed. Though the tabs aren't entirely functional, I felt as though the overall ideas conveyed were very reminiscient of battle.net 1.0 (which is the client that introduced me to PC gaming in the first place). At the moment, I can't think of many ways to improve it specifically.
In the game, I would feel very frustrated when I would send my units back to base and they would be removed from my control groups. Simple fix, I'd presume :P
I felt like the acquisition of safe bases on the test map were a little bit too easy, which would lead to a bit of clashing on the allied side of things. If an ally just took all of the bases right away, it was tough to go out and secure additional bases with your limited resources. This is probably not necessary to change, though.
I've played a few games against the bots on both the artistic and gameplay maps. Unfortunately, I missed the PvP portion. Anyway, here are my thoughts.
I felt like I was often times racing my allies (bots) to the gem and gold sources in order to get the gems before they did. Maybe it would be better if there was something asynchronous about this where those on the same team could mine from the same sources.
I wasn't able to see unit health when the health was obstructed by a building or other object on the map. It would be nice to see an optional numeric value of HP that you can watch decrease over time. From a visual perspective I find that easier for determining how much damage I am doing over time and allows me to more quickly decide if I should retreat or continue to push.
Macro. Overall, I felt the macro potion was a bit too simplistic. In one way, that's great because it means the learning curve is minimal for understanding the economy. The flip side is that the macro can start to feel boring once an optimal strategy is found. I feel like in its current iteration, the optimal strategy is to build your army numbers as quickly as possible and then upgrade the tech. That decision making process here needs to be a bit more grey.
Micro. The micro is quite fun. I like that I can cast any of my army compositions unique abilities without have to tab through them. It seems to be a very good balance of complexity and ease to learn/remember.
Overall, I've quite enjoyed testing this game. I look forward to playing it more in future!
First game. I played with a friend, in voice chat, against bots, on (1/13/2016). I went a Green guy with seeds, named something A. My friend went a flowery-looking girl who started with a C. I'm not sure who our robot ally went; I think it's hero was some thin red demon with a bow. I tried to attack it a couple times, because my cursor (or maybe his highlight? Not sure) turned red, and he looked similar in color to the enemy units I had encountered.
That's all I got! I'll probably post a followup feedback as a separate thread after I've gotten my teeth wet. Sunken my feet into it.
@Prost Congrats on winning your first game!
Judging by your feedback, it seems like most of the trouble you ran into had to due with a lack of understanding of some of the game mechanics. This makes sense, theres a toooon to learn in Atlas! Obviously playing more games will help you understand what to do more but I highly recommend you watch this video by Day[9]:
Hope you get a chance to play another game and join us for PvP :D