12/13/15 pvp: My Thoughts
Early Game
The early game was full of meaningful decisions. I felt like I the player had the ability to discover my own builds for the heroes that I played. This was satisfying and felt good as a whole. The decisions extended past opening strategy though. One question I seemed to ask myself during games was: When is the right time for us to kill these neutrals and take our thirds.
Can I drop a mini ion cannon and annoy his third?
There seemed to be a lot of dancing of armies early on. No one wanted to take a fight unless they felt they had the upper hand. For most of the early game I found myself along the dividing diagonal trying to get gems and not let my opponent get gems.
Mid Game
I consider the middle game to be around the point after both teams have taken their neutral defended third, and armies start to become a little more fleshed out. This stage of the game is when I started to feel my team was behind or not. Often when I felt behind it wasn't because of the other team collecting more gems then us. It often felt that we just could not win a team fight. I couldn't put my finger on whether this came from them being flat out better then us or their team composition was just better then ours. One thing I noted was playing against Ryme and Hydros felt like playing against a mac truck.
The middle game seemed to be a point where all your decision making started to revolve around microing and finding ways to create advantageous engagements with the other team. Although there was still always tension for those delicious gems alot more maneuvering started happening. Pushing towers became more of a thing and trying to kill bases definitely became a thing. I liked the middle game, but I also sort of felt there was not enough to do back home. The only thing I would look back to my main for was upgrading stuff like attack or attack speed.
End Game
I think the end game started right around all the players having maxed out armies, and the only thing left to spend gold on was upgrades. At this point I felt the game completely revolved around team fighting and pushing towards the enemy MEGA CUBE. I played one or two games that felt pretty balanced at this point. Most of my games though I felt like there was a clear winner already and the other team was just prolonging the inevitable. I do not mean balance as in hero or unit balance, but balance in the sense of one team just dominating the other. When I was on the loosing side I often got that feel you get in a Moba when all you want is for the rest of your team to surrender with you so you can just get into the next one. Which wasn't to pleasant. I will say though the games that went back and forth at the end felt amazing and a lot of fun. The games where we dominated also was fun 
Game Complexity
I think for a game that is in a technical pre-alpha this game has surprisingly a lot of dept. I was blown away by how many heroes you guys had to choose from in such an early stage. Each hero played so differently and unit abilities felt really thought out. One thing I really loved was while I was playing I could see there was a lot of complexity behind engaging with teammates properly, getting good arcs on your opponent, using abilities optimally. However playing to perfection or in chess terms playing computer moves proved to be very difficult. This is where I find that Atlas becomes an easy game to learn but a hard game to master. Which to me is really cool.
Fog of War
I have two things I want to discuss on fog of war.
One I thought that the neutral vision ward gave a crazy amount of vision for its price. I know it is hard to put a value on something like vision, but let us try! It costs 2 gems to drop a vision ward. This ward is able to reveal multiple flanks to you at once. A Properly place ward can cover from one side the dividing diagonal to the other. Now lets say you drop this ward in the grass towards the top of the dividing diagonal near the gem expo. For 2 gems you can sufficiently see any counter play your enemy might try to make. You can see any flank they might try to pull on you. I think this is a lot of knowledge for 2 gems. One thing I thought was there should maybe be 2 vision wards. A smaller one for 2 gems that let you cover passage ways, a lot like LoL wards. Then there should be these wards for maybe 4 or 5 gems. That effectively give you a lot of information, and the value of it directly correlated to how long your opponent lets it stay on the map.
The second thing is being able to see opponent gems disappear from your fog of war. I first noticed this on the art map when my team was out of position when the gems spawned. I saw gems disappear off of my mini map even though there was fog of war. I am indifferent on whether this is good or bad, but it does give you some information on your opponent. I think though it is very limited info. It allows you to get a general idea of where 1 or more players might be for the other team. Such as you only see 1 opponent in the 2v2 area of gameplay map and 1 opponent in the 1v1 spot. This third player is missing. Then all of a sudden you see a gem disappear on the map way out in no wheres land. You might be able to infer that he is trying to swing around for a flank or to attack bases.
Overall Concerns
One thing that scares me is before Friday with zero knowledge of Atlas. My thinking was it is an rts. Now after playing it I would think its more of a rts/moba hybrid. I am NOT saying this as if I am upset about it. I actually really like Atlas! it is a very unique game, and hope it doesn't steer to far away from what it is right now. What to me makes it feel like a moba at some points is how stream lined the base/economy is. You essentially never have to look back home, and base taking is just set it and forget it. One thing I am concerned with is over the future iterations of Atlas that the game looses more rts attributes and are replaced with moba esk attributes.
Another small concern I have is the current state of gold and gems. Right now they are completely separate from each other. and I am sure you guys have specific reasons for every decision made, but why are they so segregated? I would like to say I like gem collecting. I like the whole system and its fun. I do sometimes feel like I have to go out of my way just to get dem gemz though. and since I'm sort of a `a type of guy. Its often me bringing my whole army out of the way to get them. I am curious to why more things don't cost gems. like higher Tier upgrades and T3 units feel like they should have small gem costs with them.
Overall gold wasn't fun to me. It felt like a necessity more then anything. It felt slow to get even with a lot of bases. It did feel balanced very well in accordance to what you can buy through out the game. What I did not like was gold was only used for two things units and upgrades. I did not feel like there was enough things I could do with gold in comparison to all the options I had with gems. Now I am perfectly content with never building anything but towers and expos, but I can't help to feel like the whole game would feel more fast pace if I just saw my gold number rising faster.
Comments
This leads me to my last thing about gold. I didn't get that satisfaction you get in other rts games when I took an expansion. I could not sense that growth in power from it. One thing I thought notable was if you graph your income per minute on the Y axis and time in the game along your x. Atlas follows more of a step function rather then a curve up like other rts games. I know these steps exist and I know I am mining more on 3 bases then 2, but it doesn't feel noticeable.
Final Thoughts
Love the game! flat out. It is fresh, that is the best way I could describe it. The way squads work rather then having an entire race feels good. neutral units feel like impact-full choices to make during a game. I can see myself laddering with a team in this game, and I can see my self inviting moba dwelling friends to play something that isn't LoL or Dota.
I look forward to playing future iterations of Atlas, and would like to say thanks for the chance to play it. Also sorry for a wall of text.
There is some great stuff here
I honestly think more "RTS" like maps and improved pathing will go a long way to making the game feel "RTS" like. I do think Atlas is a moba/rts hybrid and I think that is for the best!
I really hope that we don't get caught up in debating if something is a "RTS" feature or a "MOBA" feature. Whats important is if it is a "good" feature! I think Atlas would do best to take the coolest features from both genres.