Thoughts after first game
Preamble
* I watched only about 10 minutes of the game play tutorial video. Some or all of my confusion about the game systems maybe explained in the rest of that video. Sean was doing a good job of explaining, but I was impatient to jump in.
* I have a large amount of prior experience Blizzard's RTS's, so the keybindings and genre tropes are all familiar.
Impressions/Thoughts
* I felt like I was low on coins but not the other resources the whole game. I felt like I had enough expansions (I had two expansions most of the game) but still didn't feel like I was getting the coin income to be competative.
* I have no idea what scrap was for. Coins felt like minerals and gems felt akin to gas from starcraft, but not sure what I was supposed to use scrap for or how to value it as something to collect.
* It constantly felt weird to "steal" my own color gems when roaming the battle field. For the first half of the game, I kept thinking that I should take the gems that matched the enemies color and block the enemy from taking my color.
* Other than the ultimate goal of killing the enemy nexus, I had no idea what to do to achieve that goal. I am not sure if the first thing was to deny the enemy gem gathering while gathering gems myself, or if I should take on creep camps for expansions, or if there was a third thing that I should do.
* It felt like I was never safe unless I sent a death ball out to gather gems and make bases, so if part of my army died, I just sent the whole army back to base to wait for a respawn since I was too low strength to take on the bot death balls that roamed the map. This led to a lot of waiting for respawns. Waiting for timers in order to refill my death bll was not fun.
* Not sure what the different colors of mines represented. Some where green colored and some were purple colored? No idea what distinguised those two in functionality.
* I understood up that yellow sword mecenary camps (2 sword icon) were less tough than red sword (3 sword icon). Never attempted to take on a skull icon camp, but I assume those are the toughest
* It was super weird not to see the unit build queue and the respawn queue visually near each other on screen. Trying to look at two timers in two different parts of the screen was not intuitive. Also representing the build queue as a number that ticks downward but the respawn queue as a bar that slides was weird since they are the same sort of count down to units being deployable. Seems like they should have been represented the same way visually.
* Every time I killed an enemy unit there was text that looked like +Exp that floated up for a second. I'm assuming that means experience points and I have no idea what those did in addition to the fact that there are 3 resources.
* Deploying units didn't feel good, since unless I was watching the respawn timers like a hawk or repeatedly pressing V the whole game, I was wasting time with the units ready but not doing anything. I felt bad when I realized that I had units available but weren't using them and the minutia of pressing deploy repeatedly just felt like busy work.