TheFoilist's epic, verbose, and generally incoherent feedback thread

TheFoilist

Okay, y'all at Artillery have seriously outdone yourselves. I thought the game was pretty good during the last test weekend, but I would pay all of the microtransactions in the world to play the game in its current state. Props and kudos all around!

I will focus on aspects of the game that I feel need some improvement. If I don't mention it, it's safe to assume that I think it's perfect the way it is. And I will wrap it up with a TL;DR in Day[9]'s patented feedback formula.

Squads and Mercenaries

Here are my thoughts about how the units interact, in very general terms:

The primary tool you have for actually winning the game is your mercenary force. Mercenaries are a must for attacking the enemy base. However, mercenary units are expensive and do not respawn, so killing or losing even a few can be very impactful. Your Squad is your supporting cast, used mainly for defending your mercenaries and base from enemy forces and occasionally to attack or harass the enemy. Because squads respawn, you can take risks with them that you shouldn't with mercenaries, but their death timers are long enough to make killing or losing a whole squad pretty impactful. Your hero is a mega dude who builds and collects stuff, and whose death timer is so short that killing or losing one is hardly impactful unless a fight occurs immediately.

Postulate: In general, squads beat unsupported mercenaries in a straight-up fight, and a combined force of squads and mercenaries beats unsupported squads in a straight-up fight.

So how does this play out? I'll use a simple thought process as an example.

I want my mercs to attack his base.
He wants to kill my mercs so that his base is safe.
He wants to attack my mercs with his squad (see Postulate).
I want to kill his squad so that my mercs are safe.
I want to attack his squad with both my squad and mercs (see Postulate).
At this point, the best he can hope for is an even fight, with both of us using both squads and mercs.
And so a massive team fight ensues, with the winner having a chance to push or expand freely.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a metagame! I have seen this formula show up in every game I have played so far. I have no idea if this was the intended relationship between the units, so I leave it to Artillery to make of this what they will. I will say that the fights I found more fun or interesting took place outside of this formula, for example when trying to take or deny expansions using primarily squad units and turrets with a smattering of mercs in the early to mid game. In the later game, this formula becomes more prevalent.

Speaking of which...

The Late Game

The late game is where Atlas begins to lose its appeal for me, for three main reasons.

First, given the short length of the test, players did not have long to come up with effective strategies. I'm sure that most of us, myself included, had nothing more than a generic idea, e.g. "Play Hydros, buy tanky stuff, profit" or "All Praise Be To The Holy Church Of Seed". This helped guide us through the early and mid game, but I felt like players tended to get a bit lost in the late game. We simply don't have enough experience to know what our win conditions are.

Second, building on the first point, the game itself doesn't give us many options for winning the game. We have a few expensive mega-mercenaries who are certainly good at killing enemy structures, but not much beyond that. The only way to win in the late game is to somehow get your mega-mercs to the enemy base. The formula I described in the above section really comes into play, and gameplay slows way down since the price of mistakes also increases the later the game goes.

Third, Coin accrues so slowly that, even in the late game, people can still be fighting with incomplete squads. Players might have an incentive to delay their game-ending push because they want to wait for those last few Coin to get an extra dude out.

Actually, on that note...

Resources

You have probably heard a lot about this already, so I'll try to stay brief. Coin income being fixed is great for keeping relative squad power balanced, but I do not like the feeling of a non-interactive resource. I keep getting an itchy feeling that I should be doing something to earn more Coin, not just waiting for it to slowly accumulate on its own.

I seemed to float a ton of Scrap as the game progressed. I could sink it into mercenary units and upgrades for a time, but Gems were a much more limiting factor. After some experimentation, I found that it is more efficient to take only about half of the Scrap expansions available and as many Gem expansions as possible. However, this was with sub-optimal Gem collection from the central spawns, so it may be that the amount of Scrap income on the map is balanced for players who are better at the Gem collection game.

I don't have a clever segue this time, so...

The Map

It's big. It feels like it takes a while for my units to get where they need to go. However, it also forces players to react quickly to their opponents' movements. As I see it, army positioning is one of the deepest strategic parts of the game right now. Getting surprised or flanked is one of the fastest ways to lose a fight in Atlas, and the best way to prevent it is to position your units smartly. Also, map plays are the main means of circumventing the formula I derived in the first section. If you can outmaneuver your opponents and reach their base uncontested, you do not need to risk everything in a big team battle.

That said, I am still not a huge fan of the 2v2 / 1v1 dynamic. I have watched a few games where the bottom players literally never interacted with the top players for the entire game, and the game was decided by one team taking the top gem expansion. I want to see a map where all three players are equally capable of interacting with all three opposing players and are equally capable of influencing the game state.

TL;DR

I think I just discovered metagame in Atlas, based on how Squads and Mercenaries interact.
The late game gets a bit drawn-out and deathball-y for my taste.
Coin are not interactive, and Scrap really piles up.
The map is big and positioning is important, but the bottom players still seem isolated.

And now, for my feedback in standard Day[9] notation:

(The first section really isn't conducive to this format, so I'll skip it).

When [the late game] happened, it made me feel [confused as to what to do and bored at how long it was taking to figure that out]. I suggest [more late game units? maybe]

When [earning Coin] happened, it made me feel [like I should be able to do something to make it go faster]. I suggest [adding some way for players to increase their Coin income, or increasing the Coin income rate as the game progresses].

When [the accumulation of Scrap] happened, it made me feel [like a newbie trading in TF2. Ba-dum tss]. I suggest [taking a look at how resources are distributed around the map and over time].

When [the map] happened, it made me feel [fuzzy and warm inside because it reminded me of Brood War's positioning game]. I suggest [that you pat yourselves on the back].

When [my spawning on the bottom side of the map] happened, it made me feel [isolated and useless]. I suggest [making the bottom side a bigger point of contention for all three players or redesigning the map so that players are distributed more evenly].

Well, there you have it. I don't think I missed anything major. As usual, sorry for the wall o' text.

Cheers to everyone, and thanks to Artillery for running this test. Watching this game develop is like watching a beautiful flower bloom with time lapse, only to have the inside of the flower contain a bunch of smiley face stickers, a cup of delicious apple cider, and Superman. You've got an amazing little game here.