Impressions
I was pleasantly surprised to see a lot of game mechanics that seemed to meld traditional RTS gameplay with the ideas of Dota-like games. My previous RTS experience is minimal at best, but I have played a large amount of Dota 2. I was able to pick up the controls fairly quickly - the keybinds for selecting hero, units, and both helped immensely. I initially attempted to use control groups, but found them cumbersome because my control groups reset on unit death. I had some trouble controlling neutral units since I don't think they are selected by the hero&units hotkey. I felt I was able to grasp the goal of the game; I did have some trouble figuring out what I should be doing strategically, when I should attempt to kill NPC camps to improve my economy, when I should start building neutral weapons, etc. After a few plays, I think I had a better handle on this, although I continue to sometimes lose all my units trying to kill neutrals.
I found many aspects of the in-game UI confusing and generally had a hard time visually reading the battlefield. Many times when I was fighting, my hero or other units would die suddenly without any warning. Eventually I noticed the health bar but even knowing it is there, I find it hard to tell when my units are in danger, which is quite frustrating. Similarly, killing units felt fun but generally lacked a feeling of reward and accomplishment. Also, when deciding whether to fight or not, I found it difficult to figure out how strong my units were compared to my opponents. There were a couple of times where I wanted to look at my base and upgrade my units mid-combat but couldn't tell how my fight was going.
I was annoyed by the presence of neutral camps near to towers because they tended to get involved when the AI was attacking my towers or I attacking theirs. I had a hard time judging the power level of the neutrals even with the easy/medium/hard indicators. A couple of times, I tried building towers nearby expecting them to help me kill the neutrals only to have all my units killed when I failed to kill the neutral. I would also like to see more variety in neutral camps - it was a little boring seeing the same units in every camp.
Mechanically speaking, I was confused about whether to build physical and magical resistance because I had no indication what types of damage my opponents were using. I assume that ability power increases the damage from abilities, but I have no idea if that is actually the case or not. I also have no idea whether auras stack or not.
Some other random thoughts that are less cohesive:
- I had a really hard time judging tower range, which made it hard to know whether to build neutral units to kill towers
- There were a lot of issues with pathfinding where my hero or units would get stuck trying to walk around each other; I died from tower shots while my own units blocked me
- My friendly AI seemed very needy and unhelpful, especially on the bottom portion of the map; every game about 5 minutes in, the bottom nodes would get attacked mercilessly. I felt helpless to actually defend that part of the map.
- I felt like I had to fight with the AI to acquire gems, which was kind of annoying
Hopefully my thoughts made some kind of sense - overall I really enjoyed playing it. My main concern is the readability of the game. I think some improvements could make combat much more enjoyable and could help the player understand why combat did or did not go their way.