Getting in one last bot game, G046f73571208444b82ae87705f83d158 , for one last bot feedback post.
The bots have many bugs, and make many sub-optimal choices, but one "choice" my allies made particularly galled me.
I was harassing the enemy resource expansions and my AI team mate followed me. But the AI decided to clear the titan group there, instead of killing the expansion base. So that the enemy got more gem resources? Or maybe it wanted the creep XP, instead of the base XP?
Either way, giving the adversary more income is the dumbest move I can think of.
I waited till I have played a few games and watched a bunch before i gave feedback hoping that this way it would be a bit more valid. The first time i played i didn't watch Day9's video all of the way through so I was pretty lost. Thats on me. But it did show me just how involved this game is. Its certainly not something you can just pick up and play if thats what you're going for.
After watching the video and playing a few games (especially the first ten minutes or so of a bunch), it became clear to me that there seems to be a hugely unbalanced field when it comes to damage output. You've got Celesta, Vela, and Vex at the high end and playing as anyone else is incredibly hard to do. I kinda like Alder though as when going into engagements with the enemy or with the titans, its really cool to make so many other targets for the other guy to shoot at and I loved the idea of upgrading them to different plants.
I do have to echo a lot of the criticism about resources that so many others have said. The gold collection was too slow and i really felt like I was always waiting for more. When playing Celesta it wasn't as much of a problem because she's got some really cheap units, but when playing Alder I was literally making one for every 3 of Celesta and it doesn't seem to feel like a fair trade off. The scrap was so easily stockpiled that after the first ten mintues of making sure I have scrap income, I never had to worry about it again. It makes it feel like a useless resource almost. And gems are super hard to collect. Getting an expansion to harvest gems is so vital that it felt like every game played exactly the same. If you don't get the easy to obtain gem expansion, you're not going to do well. In one PVP game, my expansion that was harvesting gems was destroyed and one of my teammates built one there before I could get there and it felt like it was game over for me. I had to waste a lot of time just trying to secure another steady gem source.
The game wasn't all bad though obviously. Fighting over gems in the middle of the map was a lot of fun although if one squad had a significant range advantage over the other, they clearly had the advantage. (Celesta's second unit was huge for this.) The graphics were great for an alpha, as were the animations. The whole premise is really cool. Its like a nice mixing of LOL and starcraft (even though I'm more of a starcraft fan) and being able to control the abilities of all of my units at once was a really cool design choice. It really helped when playing Alder and upgrading/consuming plants. The one last bit of feedback I'd like to give is that the fact that you had to map the merc compound to a hotkey (e.g. 1 or 2 or 3, etc.), but the main base already has a hotkey (even if it is on the right side of the keyboard) felt like a really odd design choice.
@AceAl said:
Getting in one last bot game, G046f73571208444b82ae87705f83d158 , for one last bot feedback post.
The bots have many bugs, and make many sub-optimal choices, but one "choice" my allies made particularly galled me.
I was harassing the enemy resource expansions and my AI team mate followed me. But the AI decided to clear the titan group there, instead of killing the expansion base. So that the enemy got more gem resources? Or maybe it wanted the creep XP, instead of the base XP?
Either way, giving the adversary more income is the dumbest move I can think of.
Thanks AceAI, your comment lead me to finding a bug where the AI could unintentionally target and clear a nearby camp when attempting to find the most effective camp for it to clear.
The AI makes a ton of interesting choices, however currently it cannot intentionally feed resources to the opponent. ... as far as I know.
I was enjoying the bot communication that was added at first. The welcome message was nice and it was interesting to see. It started to get a bit annoying for me when they were spamming the chat with messages often to do stuff I didn't care about as I was messing around and testing. I don't really have a problem with it because it's probably really good for guiding new players and I'm not the intended target. I did really like the message that confirmed they were following my ping command though.
Comments
Getting in one last bot game, G046f73571208444b82ae87705f83d158 , for one last bot feedback post.
The bots have many bugs, and make many sub-optimal choices, but one "choice" my allies made particularly galled me.
I was harassing the enemy resource expansions and my AI team mate followed me. But the AI decided to clear the titan group there, instead of killing the expansion base. So that the enemy got more gem resources? Or maybe it wanted the creep XP, instead of the base XP?
Either way, giving the adversary more income is the dumbest move I can think of.
I waited till I have played a few games and watched a bunch before i gave feedback hoping that this way it would be a bit more valid. The first time i played i didn't watch Day9's video all of the way through so I was pretty lost. Thats on me. But it did show me just how involved this game is. Its certainly not something you can just pick up and play if thats what you're going for.
After watching the video and playing a few games (especially the first ten minutes or so of a bunch), it became clear to me that there seems to be a hugely unbalanced field when it comes to damage output. You've got Celesta, Vela, and Vex at the high end and playing as anyone else is incredibly hard to do. I kinda like Alder though as when going into engagements with the enemy or with the titans, its really cool to make so many other targets for the other guy to shoot at and I loved the idea of upgrading them to different plants.
I do have to echo a lot of the criticism about resources that so many others have said. The gold collection was too slow and i really felt like I was always waiting for more. When playing Celesta it wasn't as much of a problem because she's got some really cheap units, but when playing Alder I was literally making one for every 3 of Celesta and it doesn't seem to feel like a fair trade off. The scrap was so easily stockpiled that after the first ten mintues of making sure I have scrap income, I never had to worry about it again. It makes it feel like a useless resource almost. And gems are super hard to collect. Getting an expansion to harvest gems is so vital that it felt like every game played exactly the same. If you don't get the easy to obtain gem expansion, you're not going to do well. In one PVP game, my expansion that was harvesting gems was destroyed and one of my teammates built one there before I could get there and it felt like it was game over for me. I had to waste a lot of time just trying to secure another steady gem source.
The game wasn't all bad though obviously. Fighting over gems in the middle of the map was a lot of fun although if one squad had a significant range advantage over the other, they clearly had the advantage. (Celesta's second unit was huge for this.) The graphics were great for an alpha, as were the animations. The whole premise is really cool. Its like a nice mixing of LOL and starcraft (even though I'm more of a starcraft fan) and being able to control the abilities of all of my units at once was a really cool design choice. It really helped when playing Alder and upgrading/consuming plants. The one last bit of feedback I'd like to give is that the fact that you had to map the merc compound to a hotkey (e.g. 1 or 2 or 3, etc.), but the main base already has a hotkey (even if it is on the right side of the keyboard) felt like a really odd design choice.
Thanks AceAI, your comment lead me to finding a bug where the AI could unintentionally target and clear a nearby camp when attempting to find the most effective camp for it to clear.
The AI makes a ton of interesting choices, however currently it cannot intentionally feed resources to the opponent. ... as far as I know.
I was enjoying the bot communication that was added at first. The welcome message was nice and it was interesting to see. It started to get a bit annoying for me when they were spamming the chat with messages often to do stuff I didn't care about as I was messing around and testing. I don't really have a problem with it because it's probably really good for guiding new players and I'm not the intended target. I did really like the message that confirmed they were following my ping command though.