Some late feedback
I was in test weekend 2. About half of my concerns were met. Things I liked test 3 over test 2:
- Resources feel dramatically more compelling, with good choices to buy between them. For me this was by far the biggest improvement between test weekend 2 & 3. The numbers/pacing for population control probably needs tweaking, but this system is great,. Choosing where to spend scrap was particularly enjoyable to me.
- I felt less annoyed by people taking gems because there is the joint objective middle.
- Much less emphasis on flying units.
- Choosing between jungling, fighting middle, harassing the enemy tower are all more compelling.
- Customizing your army with the 4 merc pools actually feels good. Makes each round feel more unique.
Still concerns for me:
- I end up sitting around a lot while I wait for my hero's 'T' button to refresh. Feels annoying.
- Heroes still don't feel like heroes.
- Having to walk hero back to an expansion to build a base. Its time away from more interesting things like fighting.
- The races still feel very similar to one another for my taste.
- Pathing 1 unit past other units is still extremely frustrating. Often I click on a unit in the front of a fight and try to move it to the back, but instead it dances back and forth while dying.
Suggestions:
- Hero art and the hero spells still feel uninspired. You've got damage in a line, damage in a circle, damage with a stun, etc. Make them unique. Make them more flashy the higher level the hero is. Reserve particle effects for the heroes themselves. Make the particle effects bigger as the hero levels up. In general high level heroes should be able to defeat small armies by themselves.
- You could entirely get rid of the 'T' button fairly easily. Let any unit who right clicks on a gem collect it. To create expansions, let people just click on the empty square and give an option to "create base." Optionally require there to be one of your units near that expansion location.
- Clicking on workers to make buildings feels none-intuitive at this moment. It would make more sense if I clicked on the base, and the base spawned the towers directly (no moving workers required).
- Limit flying units even more or remove them entirely. Most other games that are played for several years straight (excluding starcraft) limit pathing ignoring units to cooldown based skills. Flying units generally detract from the strategy/tactics because they lower the importance of terrain as an element of the game. It also acts as an extremely hard counter to units that cannot hit them. There are just more interesting ways to handle mobility.
- Make the races dramatically more dynamic/different from one another. I discussed this much more in my test weekend 2 feedback post. But one race where the hero is relatively weak, has no active skills (passive auras only), but the units themselves have more important active skills. Make another race where the units themselves are extra weak in combat, but the hero is strong. Then another race that generates pathing blocks. The similarity between the races makes it difficult for me to identify with one in particular.
- I was always disappointed when I didn't get the juggernaut as allies often made decisions with the unit that I did not understand. Consider buffing this unit and making it AI controlled.
- Making scrap/gem generation always equally distributed regardless of who grabbed them might help me not have such a knee jerk reaction to hate what my allies do. I sometimes feel "he took my scrap, and now hes building the wrong units. I should just try to take all of the scrap."
Comments
Here's some of my thoughts (mostly agreements) with what you posted
Under the Still Concerns:
I agree. There does seem to be a lot of waiting around for the hero's T to refresh, and it was a bit dull feeling.
I agree. We (a group of us) right after TW3 had a long discussion about how often it was best to tank with your hero because dying didn't actually cost you anything. It was, in a way, the most throw-away unit.
Under Suggestions:
I like this idea. I would love to try it, but this may pull away from the point 2 above, making the hero feel even more useless.
I agree, I didn't even know that workers could build towers until after TW3 was done. Oops.
Perhaps making the juggernaut controllable by any of the players, or control being able to be passed? Just some ideas. I was on the opposite spectrum, always wanting to have someone else get it and not wanting it.