Harass and Unit Pathing

FayeFaye Member
in Feedback

This is a two-part feedback thread, the first thread is about vision. First topic for this thread is harassment, both economic and unit.

Harassment

I really, really like how harassing the economy works in Starcraft (both games). There are numerous tools provided to harass and the player is rewarded for effective harass by slowing down their opponent. You can even win games just from harassing the economy of the other player. I love that in an RTS. I have much less experience in Warcraft 3 but in a game with similar design to Atlas (hero, low number of units) there was still an economy to harass with multiple ways to do it.

In Atlas I have yet to see an effective form of harassment. Granted I haven't played enough to truly say but I did try to do it myself. I would pick Eris with the goal of using Sandstingers to harass the coin economy in the early game. The reason I used Sandstingers is they have a dash forward ability. This gives a lot of mobility on a fairly short cool-down. When my opponent was out on the map gem collecting I would sneak as far as I could around the map to get in the quickest route to their coin expansion.

It is easy to kill the workers, yes, but ultimately what I found is that the reward for harassing wasn't anywhere near the risk. Unless I kill the expansion I do not slow the opponent down by any significant margin (I checked in the replay). That plus losing units would give them experience, so they would in the end gain more than lose and my risk/reward would be very little reward for an insanely high risk.

I admit I have not tried killing workers in the main base. I tried against bots but was repelled really easily by what I assume is the auto-attack from the main base. Having not killed any workers I can't say whether it would slow down their coin economy enough to justify giving free experience. Experience is more valuable, in my opinion, than coin is. Units will respawn over time so you don't have to remake them so coins value goes down really quickly as the game goes on, meaning any harassment on coin is nearly pointless. So with that said, what can I harass in Atlas?

Gem denial, in my opinion, is not harass. Yes it slows down the players economy but it isn't the same as committing units to harassing the economy. You're essentially just zoning out the enemy from a resource. This is effective but it isn't the same as harass because there is not a lot of risk involved. Basically there is no way other than having you and your allies aggressively denying gems to slow down the economy of your opponents in a meaningful way. At least not without giving up a lot of experience in the trade, which as I said is probably more valuable than coin is.

Economy, from what I can tell with limited play testing, can't be harassed effectively. So that leaves unit harass, which is a bit vague but basically what I mean is using your squad to harass the enemy. I think this can be done in two ways; one is killing key units (tier 2/3) and the other is killing the hero.

Having played a lot of Eris and Vela with the intent of picking units off I can say that unit harassing is fairly effective in Atlas. I can't really say for other squads but both Vela and Eris have tools to really poke and harass the enemy.

My main issue is that killing tier 2/3 units is really effective while killing a hero feels really ineffective. Of course it is helpful to kill the enemy hero but the spawn time is really, really short and experience is gained regardless if the hero is alive or not. This means you can constantly kill an enemy hero, which will be annoying for the enemy, but ultimately they aren't hurt too much by it. It may be a harsh penalty to increase the death timer for a hero but right now they come back a little too fast considering experience is gained if they are dead or not. At least that's how I think it works, again I haven't played enough to know for sure.

Pathing

Lastly, pathing. I won't go too deep into this but I feel that the current pathing is a bit clunky for units. There is a measure of player skill involved in keeping all the pieces moving properly but the way units behave around each other feels off.

In Broodwar pathing was the bane of everyones existence but it was also a way for a player to mechanically improve (except for things like dragoons bugging out). In SC2 the pathing was simplified and made far too easy in my opinion. A lot less frustrating than Broodwar but it took away some measure of skill.

I think Atlas at the moment has pathing similar to Broodwar but it still feels off. I know that I'm not good at controlling the units currently in Atlas but even with experience it feels like the clunky body-blocking that the pathing currently has will end up being more frustrating than Broodwar. It becomes even more hectic and frustrating when you're moving around the map with an ally.

I don't want units to move out of each others way like in SC2 but I do want units to take an intelligent path because currently trying to micro back an individual unit is really painful. Maybe this is fixed by playing more but from an initial impression it is really clunky and can be frustrating.

That's all for these topics. I could probably go into them even more but I think for initial impressions this is as far as I can take it without playing more PvP.

Comments

Sign In or Register to comment.