some observations and opinions
Little bit about my self: started playing RTS games with the original Warcraft: orcs and men, and started MoBA games (hate that title) with the Dota allstars mod. I've played semi-professionally in a few League of legends tournaments as well as some Dota 2 tournaments and a few amateur sc:bw/sc2 tournaments. I currently don't play LoL or sc2 anymore, but I do have a 6.2k mmr in Dota 2.
Now the way I view atlas is as a 3v3 rts Objective based MoBA game. Instead of controlling one unit and casting all of your abilities from that one "hero", you have an entire army and a stronger commander type unit that allows you to pick and choose which abilities you have access to at any given moment. You also have a micro system very reminiscent of Warcraft 3; units can block other units and won't automatically move out of the way etc.
I like most everything I've seen in this game. I think its a very cohesive game that does exactly what it sets out to do in a way that's surprising and fun while still keeping its competitive edge. There is one thing however that does bother me and that is the way the bases are structured.
What i mean by this, is how two people spawn together and one person spawns off alone. While this does make the map feel less symmetrical and the game play more asymmetrical; I did notice, especially while playing PvP, that the person who is assigned to that single base tends to end up being left out of the action for the early and mid game in most instances.
This might just be a matter of opinion, but considering the size of the map and the speed with with the units move, the map also further increases this feeling of isolation. Now, I certainly wouldn't want all of the players to spawn next to one another nor would I want everyone to spawn apart from each other at an equal distance, but maybe its worth exploring some kind of Teleport function which allows the armies to move from one base to another in an emergency.
Its just a suggestion and I don't know if this isolation would persist if I was to play with a group of people I know instead of some strangers. It certainly might be the case that I am the minority in this opinion as a result.
I also noticed that killing enemy expansions really had very little impact in the overall scheme of the game. Even when my own expansions died, I rarely cared because it was so easy to re-expand and i already had enough scrap that i wasn't able to spend completely. I think in the first game i played vs AI i built a few towers to protect my expansions but then i just kind of stopped doing that while playing Pvp because i realized that it was just a waste of time. the only obvious solution to this problem would be to make the scrap resource much more valuable in the game through resource dumps or scarcity. Perhaps it might be worth looking into a mechanic similar to StarCraft where you can mine out resource nodes as well. (again just a thought).
And one last thing that felt a little flimsy was the power of the healing towers. What i mean by this, is that they are so fragile that even in early game if some one gets a juggernaut and him and his allies push a lane, unless the all of the enemies respond its almost a give-me for them to be able to take the healing tower after taking the first tower in that lane. It removes the importance of this tower as an objective aside from the fact that it gives you access to more guys.
I cant wait to see what this game develops into when it goes live and I can't wait to see what new squads you are able to come up with going forward.
Just a small little question for the sake of curiosity: I noticed all of the licences in the help menu, was the game coded with JavaScript and NodeJS or were those just used for the launcher?
TL:DR, the size of the map makes the 1v1 feel lonely, scrap feels too plentiful and healing towers have very little HP and are too easy to kill.
Comments
Friendly FYI, this mechanic is already in the game in the form of a Merc unit called Teleporter. It's the final tier unit of the Tacticians. Also, Machinists have a unit Transport.