Playtest 210: Stock Patches, Easier Collection, Main Base w/ Upgrades, Arted Map, New UI!
Treisk
Member, Administrator
Playtest 210: Stock Patches, Easier Collection, Main Base w/ Upgrades, Arted Map, New UI!
(And a verbose title! WOO!)
Welcome back! We are continuing to push forward on our choose-your-units-not-your-squad build! To build upon this, we have some more things to collect on the map, and upgrades are back! woo!
General Gameplay
Stock Patches
Whenever you kill a camp, a crystal patch will drop. You may place a collector on it to begin a 150s countdown! At the end of the 150s, everyone on your team will receive a burst of stock. But, LOOK OUT, if the collector is killed the stock patch dies D=.
Easier Collection & Denial
To collect a gem, simply right click or a-click upon it. There is no longer a cooldown for gem collection. You may spam your little heart out.
If a collector is destroyed, the gem beneath it also dies. Be careful what you plant!
You may now place a collector on top of an allied collector. Doing this will cause the reward to split evenly among you. Spam on everything!
Main Base
Your main base now has three structures
- The HQ holds your generators and tech levels
- THe production structure builds all your units
- The upgrade structures contains all upgrades for units.
- There are now 4 stat upgrades -- Attack damage, Ability Power, Physical Resist, Magical Resist
Art galore
The map is now arted and there's a new UI! Let us know what you think!
Unstoppable!
- Added the "Unstoppable" keyword to the Juggernaut Aspect!
- "Unstoppable" units cannot be moved by displacement abilities (such as Gust) and have 99% Tenacity (crowd control effects last 1% of their total duration).
# Units
General
- Stat Upgrades have been readded to the game in a simpler form!
- Ability Power, Attack Damage, Physical Resist, and Magical Resist can all be upgraded up to three times! Find these upgrades at your upgrade structure in your main base!
- Most units now have one upgrade apiece, available at your upgrade structure! There are too many to list here, but AtlasPedia should have ya covered!
- Tech Level 3
- Scrap cost: 175 ⇒ 250
- Tech Level 4
- Scrap cost: 250 ⇒ 300
Blue
- Hydros
- Turn the Tide (Ultimate)
- Cooldown: 90 seconds ⇒ 240 seconds
- Turn the Tide (Ultimate)
- Ryme
- Frozen Orb (Ultimate)
- Cooldown: 60 seconds ⇒ 240 seconds
- Frozen Orb (Ultimate)
- Quadrapus
- Scrap cost: 75 ⇒ 50
- Shadow
- Scrap cost: 100 ⇒ 75
- Frostcaller
- Scrap cost: 100 ⇒ 75
- Kingpin
- Scrap cost: 150 ⇒ 75
- Aquadillo
- Stock cost: 8 ⇒ 10
- Scrap cost: 125 ⇒ 250
- Damage: 100 ⇒ 80
- Attack cooldown: 1.4 ⇒ 1.5
- Ancient Ice Frog
- Scrap cost: 125 ⇒ 200
- Health: 550 ⇒ 700
- Damage: 60 ⇒ 80
- Attack cooldown: 1.7 seconds ⇒ 1.5 seconds
- Movement speed: 3.8 ⇒ 4.0
- Icy Breath
- Range: 7 ⇒ 8
Green
- Alder
- Basic ability: Tree of Life ⇒ Living Vines
- Deeproot Terror (Ultimate)
- Cooldown: 90 seconds ⇒ 240 seconds
- Grath
- Bestial Rage (Ultimate)
- Cooldown: 90 seconds ⇒ 120 seconds
- Bestial Rage (Ultimate)
- Terrapin Trooper
- Rocket Rock
- Range: 20 ⇒ 8
- Speed bonus: 150% ⇒ 300%
- Rocket Rock
- Grove Tender
- Scrap cost: 100 ⇒ 75
- Howling Commando
- Scrap cost: 75 ⇒ 50
- Toxin Alchemist
- Stock cost: 9 ⇒ 6
- Scrap cost: 0 ⇒ 50
- Bramblethorn Goliath
- Scrap cost: 100 ⇒ 200
- Attack cooldown: 2.3 seconds ⇒ 2 seconds
- Rustborn Rhino
- Scrap cost: 100 ⇒ 225
- Abominable Sludge
- Scrap cost: 150 ⇒ 225
- Movement speed: 3.7 ⇒ 3.8
- Bruce the Moose
- Scrap cost: 100 ⇒ 200
Red
- Eris
- Sand Storm (Ultimate)
- Cooldown: 75 seconds ⇒ 120 seconds
- Sand Storm (Ultimate)
- Vex
- Pyroblast (Ultimate)
- Cooldown: 90 seconds ⇒ 240 seconds
- Pyroblast (Ultimate)
- Devilkin Dervish
- Scrap cost: 75 ⇒ 50
- Scarab
- Has a new model and animations!
- Scrap cost: 75 ⇒ 50
- Pyrosaur
- Scrap cost: 100 ⇒ 50
- Apocalyte
- Stock cost: 4 ⇒ 7
- Scrap cost: 150 ⇒ 225
- Health: 225 ⇒ 275
White
- Celesta
- Celesta's basic ability, Crystalline Hawk, has been renamed to Illuminate!
- Cleansing Light (Ultimate)
- Cooldown: 90 seconds ⇒ 240 seconds
- Vela
- Diplomatic Measures (Ultimate)
- Cooldown: 50 seconds ⇒ 120 seconds
- Diplomatic Measures (Ultimate)
- Purifier
- Stock cost: 5 ⇒ 6
- Scrap cost: 100 ⇒ 75
- Deadeye
- Scrap cost: 75 ⇒ 50
- Precognitor
- Stock cost: 4 ⇒ 6
Neutral
- Teleporter
- Scrap cost: 150 ⇒ 200
- Health: 700 ⇒ 500
Comments
Really enjoying this patch - fighting over the gem spigots feels more meaningful and decisive. The ease of dropping collectors feels very nice when claiming an uncontested area, but the cost of losing a denied gem makes placing a collector in a contested zone feel like a point of strategic/tactical decision making.
The camps felt really good (also I adore the 'easy'-level caterpillars, love all the art assets coming in), made for a good task to fall back to with teammates after battles over the spigots. Always felt like I could identify something to do at any given point in time and was constantly making decisions about where to send my army.
Back in the awkward position of trivially winning bot games and getting crushed in PVP
Yay for no build cooldown. Cuts out waiting around after camps, and a little micro if I manage to split my hero out for collection. Uncertain about when it's socially acceptable to share.
Buildings: more stuff to hotkey ;^) Defaults maybe? Not sure if incarnation as buildings is really useful, except as a UI feature for players familiar with other games.
Didn't get a lot of time to appreciate the UI while fighting. Took a little experience to figure out the numbers on the tabs, but the build interface was fairly clear to someone who already know the base mechanics.
One time my generator queue got really backed up, because I would just queue stuff every time I went to build. Fortunately I didn't want to change directions.
Art/Map Art/UI/Sounds
(1.1) - Kind of a broad area. Only negative thing I ran into (super minor) was initial confusion at Vex's sound pack, because it sounded a whole lot like everyone in Discord.
Other than that, everything is looking really nice. This is the first time I really started to see the change in scale, and I like this a lot more, aesthetically. It seems to fit the squad and battles a bit better. Grand scale could still be nice, though, if you guys end up doing multiple play maps.
(1.2) - UI is still taking some getting used to. I like the tabbed panels at the bottom, though, once trained where to look. The queue structure isn't too clear until you get enough research and resources to fill the card up, but a tutorial pass would definitely cover that. One can definitely notice the impact on impression of having the more integrated polish in the UI. We've been saying it [edit: "it" being 'that's kind of a polish detail, it'll be worked on eventually as the game gets closer'] for so long that it's always exciting to see polish passes getting put in. Recently, these have been bigger ones than normal, yay!
Map Design
(2.1) - I'm still trying to get what games I can in on this new map. I miss the middle expansion from map[-1], but the 150s spawners are much more interesting strategically. I'd keep these "zone plate" mechanics over the broad two-side massive fort expansion.
Base Buildings
(3.1) - If there was a vote, I'd vote for main base building units, going back to previous builds. It's a very minor QoL thing, and while part of me likes generators as being the primary focus (via the building that is default selected), but getting the units going still feels like my priority, especially after picking out my deck immediately previous. Could just be our indoctrination to the squad battle, though.
Balance
(4.1) - No feedback.
Keywords
(5.1) - Like the Unstoppable keyword. Good use of letters, especially vowels. The symmetry of the word is also great in print form. Keep up the good work.
Only played one game on staging before this playtest but wanted to say that I found it a huge hassle to cancel unit production.
First off, I also enjoyed this update and like where the game is headed.
I agree with Nib that the unit canceling feature is a bit of a hassle by going to their tab at the bottom, and I often misclicked on research that was nearly completed by accident when trying to click on the one just below/above. BUT that is more of a my bad thing and won't effect many people.
The map has a good feel to it that only takes two or three games to learn where to go and what is happening. One thing that I did bump into this time, compared to other play tests was drop plays. I had little to no way of quickly responding to seeing an enemy flying unit due to my poor choice in units at the beginning of the match and left me feeling not useful to my team.
I have mixed feelings about the changes to gem collection.
I feel kind of compelled to click on all the gems to make sure I get enough scrap, so it feels like I am actually doing more busy work. I guess I could avoid some clicking by dividing the gem claims with my allies, but trying to divide gems evenly is its own kind of busy work. It would not be much of a functional stretch to reward players with a participation cut just for having their hero near a gem when it is capped and/or harvested.
Permanent gem denial is an necessary feature now that there is no cooldown on T. It did not make me more cautious about capping risky gems. Gems don't persist for very long as it is. If you don't have a window to cap a gem now, most of the time you won't find one before it depops. I felt it was better to think of the gems as baby sea turtles, cap all of them, and force my opponent to spend time picking off the vulnerable ones while the others reached the sea finished harvesting. I could see myself learning to cap and guard gems one at a time in the large middle area, but I think the top and bot fountains are too small for this sort of strategy.
Small, miscellaneous notes:
* With the hard and easy camps in the center so close to each other, it is easy to accidentally aggro the hard camp over the cliff with an aoe. I did this once, but realized the second after I had capped the stock patch. I lost my patch and felt sad.
* New titan art was cool.
* New scarab art was kind of cool, but doesn't really sell me the hive fantasy. I guess that makes sense now that the squads have been rolled into factions.