Game Skeleton, Systems, and Mechanics [Megathread]
Let us know your thoughts on specific systems in the game, e.g. gem collection, respawn, recall, weapons, armory/upgrades, tower construction and upgrading, win conditions, overall pacing.
When providing feedback, please use the following format:
- X happened
- It made me feel Y (or I’d like to feel Y)
- (optional) Here’s a suggestion to improve it
Themes I'm seeing (by Day[9])
Since there's such a large amount of feedback, I'm trying to collate themes and past them in the OP here for clarity! Apologies that I can't directly get to everyone <3. Many of the points brought up here are also addressed in the PvP megathread.
The big themes I'm seeing here are
1. Gems are neat -- Yaaay! This is actually the most important thing for people to enjoy! It's the core interaction mechanism in the game. There are a few specific concerns that do need addressing -- make sure gems spawn in reasonable locations (ie not untakeable)
2. Coin/expansions feel off -- Coin is kind of a "non-interactive" resource. For instance, if you're behind in coin, it's very difficult to "pull some nice moves" to get ahead. Rather, you have to slowly trickle in more coins until you are even. Along the same lines, harassment of expansions doesn't feel as impactful. Though we want the coin resource to be tied to the respawn/power growth in the game, we too agree that it needs to have more "swinginess."
3. Upgrades are a bit off -- Though some of you find the possibilities presented in armories cool/interesting, the impact and math of them is not quite correct (not to mention the heinous UX hah). For instance, it's often better to max an army and then get upgrades. Similarly many upgrades just aren't that impactful. We'll be working on this
Comments
When I play, I really enjoy the squad units. I consistently keep my gold low, because I want to max out my unit count ASAP as well as get as many upgrades as I can. When it comes to gems, however, I always feel like I have more than enough. They're used to expand, which is super important, but towers don't feel very helpful, and the neutral weapons feel very boring to me. I feel like they're just there to end the game after I've already beat the enemy's squad with my own squad units.
I feel like there's a big emphasis on gems driving player interaction in the early game, since missing out on the opportunity to expand can have a huge impact, but beyond that they feel like they either have a small impact (towers, they feel like they just delay the enemy, what's really important is if your squad is there) or are necessary but unfun (neutral weapons are necessary to end the game, but by the time i'm sieging them I feel like I've already won).
Maybe this is just because I've been playing against bots and thus haven't had to use all of the resources available to me, but the gem focused endgame seems underwhelming because of the non-unique neutral weapons and the huge amount of gems available, If I had to offer a suggestion, I'd like to have an additional, unique late game gem unit per squad, that can help out in normal fights but are meant to siege the enemy in one way or the other, perhaps by long range attacks, disabling defenses, periodically sending out swarms of units, etc. Gems could also be used for tier 3 upgrades, or perhaps made more scarce.
I felt that gold was a slow resource to gather. Towards the 30 min mark I had gathered enough to cap out my army, however I had neglected (intentionally the third game) the upgrades to do so. This resulted in feeling like I should be focusing on building an army and then upgrading it, rather than upgrading during the first 15-20 min. This also resulted in me "stealing" gold sites from allies in order to allow me to max my army faster and start upgrades. Is it intentional to have a focus on army size OR unit upgrades? While past the 30 min (almost 40 min) mark I was able to get one lvl 3 upgrade and two lvl 2 upgrades, I would have liked to have a more powerful/upgraded army around the 30 min mark then I did. However, I do realize this may have been completely my fault.
Here's my take after 15 or so games:
1. I like the gem mechanic. It's more dynamic that plopping down an extractor or building a special worker etc.
I Wish there were more ways to deny gems from the opponent. Some thoughts are you can claim opponents gem spawns for 50% yield or 50 gold or something and a long cooldown on your t button. Or maybe attack them to kill 50% of them gems in the spawn. I think that will give you a bit more to do in the downtime where you are waiting to gain enough gold to buy your next upgrade.
2. On Upgrades, I wish there were more. Late game gets a bit stale and at the end of the game everyone has pretty much identical setups. There should be some way to customize and make the squad do better at certain points in the game. That could be done with items or maybe 2 or 3 different variants on the different tier units.
3. Are there any plans for a buyback mechanic? Some sort of oh Sh*t button that will speed up respawn counters or spawn x amount of your current army.
4. There needs to be a way to cancel recall yours and theirs. and also cancel neutral weapon building
5. I feel that different squads should excel at different parts of the game. At least as far as I can tell you have to have some amount of farm before you can start to siege. One squad could have a bit better T1 unit and T3 unit but a weaker T2 unit. This would force the other team to forgo upgrades early or push their T2 units out earlier than needed. To make a SC2 analogy banshees against zerg will kill all their early game plans and force an early lair. I think this would make squad selection matter a bit more.
6. And i did not know that you could upgrade towers.
7. I like how the spawns work and the respawn timer is great. I just wish that I could choose where I spawn so that I can get my dudes in the battle as soon as they spawn
On the subject of gems -- it feels really weird, especially very earlygame, to have your gems spawn in attack range of enemy towers, which I have no intention of attacking that early -- maybe they're less inaccessible than they seemed, but it felt very much like they just randomly spawned in a place where I had no real way of gathering them. Are they supposed to spawn like that? Are you intended to need to attack those towers if you want the gems that happen to spawn there (at least for long enough for the gem to finish gathering)?
Edit: past me was drunk, don't mind this edit
When I placed a neutral weapon down (specifically the static ones), I felt bummed out when I found out the placement of it was incorrect, and I couldn't cancel the building of it. Was thinking of doing a cancellation fee, similar to Starcraft 2 and other RTS.
This is especially true when your ion cannons no longer have anything to target. I understand that's part of the balance of the unit, but if you accidentally walled off part of an area you can't even friendly fire it to gain access. I think there needs to be some sort of destroy/recycle/move mechanic added to neutral weapons.
I was very frustrated by both the unit limits and the 3 unit types per squad limits.
I think both would have been fine if I got to cherry pick what three units I had, but no matter what squad I played, there was always a unit I absolutely hated having in my army. It wasn't even like I could "outgrow" these units like in other RTS games. Furthermore, the units that most interested me in squads, tended to have harsh limits on their numbers, forcing them to support the units I didn't even want.
Along a similar line, having only a single normal ability on a hero made some of the squads feel very boring to control in the early game. Celesta, with the very long cooldown on her hawk and no ability wisps, was the most egregious example of this that I played.
On several occasions I was too focused on microing my main army, that I lost track of my reinforcements and they were cut off and killed on route. Since they respawn at base you have to walk them across the map in order to rejoin your main force. Part of the issue is just that my awareness is low while I'm learning the game, but on the other hand there are a lot of slows, and stuns that make walking around the map with a few units very dangerous, and it's quite frustrating when your reinforcements get cut off and killed for free.
So currently the solution would be to recall if your main army is pushed out and you have a respawn so that you can form up your squad and push out again as a unit, but that leaves your neutral weapons to die and that isn't a great option either.
Basically my complaint is that I don't like units always respawning at your main base. I would like to see an option to move your spawn location to one of your other bases or maybe even to be able to either build a structure (long build time and low health) that units can spawn at or buy a respawn at your heroes location with gems.
(Reposting from my topic for organization sake)
So, first off I just wanted to start by saying I find upgrades super fascinating, they feel like an interesting and vital aspect of game play and figuring out when to begin upgrading and more specifically what to upgrade which brings me specifically to what I think would be a wonderful change.
I feel uncertain about which upgrades to get at most times, and which ones I should be investing in because I do not know what the stats are for each of my units. I feel that this would be alleviated by when mousing over an upgrade, if it showed the units stats what they are and what they would become after the upgrade as I would then have a better understanding of the outcome of my decision.
These are my initial thoughts after a game or two with each squad.
Gem Collection:
I'm curious to see how this will go in PvP, it is a somewhat uninteresting task during the bot games because they don't really fight hard to deny gems. I'm certain this will change as we move into PvP testing later today.
edit- It is also frustrating to have some gems spawning within enemy turret range in the first 5 minutes of the game when there is no way to clear out towers to get to them.
Respawn:
Overall, I like the way the respawn mechanic feels. Repurchasing would shift the focus more toward macro which is a somewhat passive part of the game at this point, leaving more time to focus on micro which I prefer.
My only issue with respawn, is the timer. It is not as clear as it could be, the bar could be more prominent or shifting it to the upper right hand corner and upping the size of the portraits might help. If it were to be shifted up, making the container transparent so it doesn't block much of the onscreen action and then just have a thin bar with slightly larger units portraits with the timer over the portrait to save space. (attached, please excuse the mspaint work)
Recall:
I don't find myself using recall as frequently as I should. I'm sure this is something that I will just have to develop as I get a better understanding of the game. I typically just rely on respawn instead of recall (even though I know I should recall those low units instead.
Weapons:
Vs bots I don't find myself using weapons until mid/late game. I just micro my units around to collect gems until I have a stockpile for a final push.
Upgrades:
In the early/mid game, upgrades don't feel like a very solid choice. If you don't want to fall behind in fights, if feels like army numbers are forced until you have a least a couple T2-3 units. As far as improvements go, maybe lowering the price of the level 1 upgrades so it doesn't feel like you are starving yourself for units.
Towers:
I find myself not upgrading the turrets vs the bots. It doesn't feel like the bots are aggressive enough to get a good feel for how necessary continued upgrades and building of turrets will actually be.
Win/Pacing:
I'll probably come back to this after having played some PVP, but right now it feels like gem hording until 15-20 minutes and then dropping a bunch of cannons near the nexus to close out the game.
Game times feel very good. Most have come in under 30 minutes, which is the sweet spot for me, most people won't afk if games aren't drag on near/over an hour each.
I really like the concept of the respawn mechanic, but I felt annoyed while playing with it, as I was trying to spam V to get out single units at a time at points when they were respawning at slightly different times (like if 3 units were respawning between 5 seconds of time). Maybe if there was a cooldown for the respawn use so that rather than being forced to spam to be efficient, it would be a more thoughtful move to use.
UX:
* I don't know what upgrade is best for me because there is no tool tip for how much damage/atkspd/modifier my units currently do
* I am having control issues because I'm coming from SC2 and expect some of the same behaviour
* I ran into control issues when accidentally added armory to selection (using
shift+#), there is no army selected panel, so I had to find the armory I selected, remove from list, and assign hotkey again. This has to do with the UX/UI you guys seem to be going for, where everything is ready for you to invoke, so I think maybe don't allow adding to unit selection if it's a building and you have units assigned already?* I feel the game is dragging on way too long for its simplicity, but for some reason feel out of control. I believe this has to do with me expecting a command to work one way and finding out it doesn't quite work as expected
* Control groups do not persist through callback and respawn. I usually like to check out the map and see what's going on, a little bit inconvenient to go back to base, select units, and go back to action.
* I feel like individual unit selection when trying to micro is in battles does not feel snappy. I have to make sure I'm selecting the right unit to micro out of damage because the only indicator is a small circle.
* I'm not feeling any type of team play here because each teammate seems to be responsible for their own "lane". It more or less seems like if you win all 3 lanes, you will most likely win the game.
* I don't feel like there's much room for macro since it seems like you hoard gems and just make cannons. There's a cap in each tier of unit, instead of a "food" source, so every army is going to be the same late game (per hero). I also don't feel like if there was a 1V1 mode, it'd be very entertaining because strategies will seemingly be the same.
UI:
* I can't research while playing because Alt-Tab minimizes in full-screen windowed, so I don't know know what's happening in the game and don't react fast enough
* Can't see top row of icons for upgrades because tooltip for building seems to be offset (see
Tooltip_offset_001.png)* I can't get out of a replay if the game has dropped players, there is no option to quit with
F10Game Mechanics:
I am having difficulty controlling my game play because:
* Can't waypoint to units, will set spot where unit is standing but not actual unit. I can group my building with my army, but spawned army will go to location of waypoint at time of pressing
v* Can't queue actions for multiple gems because of cooldown -- suggest moving hero over to next gem and waiting for cooldown until invoking and then repeating for next gem
* Can't attack own units - if units are stuck, can't kill them off
* Mini-map dosen't move when spell targeting is active
When you press Recall with no units, it still plays the sound.
I feel confused about what will happen when I press the spacebar. My expectation is that it snaps the camera to my hero (if selected) but sometimes it snaps to a group of units somewhere else. I'd like for it to always snap to the hero if they are selected.
its a bit of a hassle that control groups don't persist through respawns
unless i'm doing something wrong
One of the things I felt a little frustrating was the fact I didnt know when the random gem dots would spawn. I am not sure if that means I need better game sense to know it spawns every X amount of minutes but thats my gut feeling.
One thing I would suggest, mabye if there will be different difficulty settings in whatever single player aspect you may have, is for a little easier time put either a bar or counter at the top of the screen to display when they spawn.
When I realized i couldn't see my control groups I felt blind and a little frustrated.
When I try to select units and aren't sure if I have, I feel frustrated. I would like it to be more obvious which units I've selected. Having control groups would help with that; I'd use control groups to verify my selection. I felt good when I selected only one type of unit and saw that their photograph was the only one highlighted; this helped to verify my selection. This feeling was impossible for neutral units since they have no photographs. (Photographs: Hero, Z unit, X unit, Y unit). I noticed that the circles around the units change when I select them but when things are crowded, I can't always see them.
I've seen a lot of uncertainty from other commenters regarging the tech tree, and I'd like to float it out there that I found the tech tree really compelling.
For example, when playing as Ryme, when I got the T1 range upgrade, it made my units feel MUCH more powerful, and I found myself going for it relatively early, usually between my first and second T2 caster unit. I also found that the freeze duration increase was a huge buff that made me feel like I was maximizing Ryme's utility, but that that was a tech I'd usually get much later in the game, generally first thing after getting my icefrogs out (great name by the way).
And with the generic techs (T1 attack, attack speed, defense, ability power, etc.) I also felt like each army had some flavor and techs that I'd want to prioritize. As Vela, I'd go for a T1 attack power in the warm up period, because Vela's units are cheaper (so the opportunity cost felt lower) and the army as a whole felt very right-click oriented and I knew I wanted to maximize this. Conversely as Ryme again, I find myself not going for any of the generic upgrades until I have one or two tier 2 units, and then I'll go for an ability power +1 at that point.
My point is, after a few games with each army, my interaction with the tech tree feels like it starts to reveal itself, and doesn't seem as dauntingly arcane as it looks at first. I feel like the tech decisions I'm making have reason behind them and are not arbitrary, and that my understanding of the game is increasing. That is a good feeling, because in most competitive games I find that I enjoy learning how the game works and how to best min/max my style.
I felt really good about the tech tree overall. I'm only starting to get the hang of when to get what but I really enjoyed experimenting with the tech tree depending on the race and how I was planning on playing.
While sometimes I got a little bit annoyed at having trouble getting some upgrades late game due to the gold spots running out (especially if I waited to get them until I had most of my army) I think that its a good thing. I'm glad that it makes me choose more specifically what i'm going to do rather than just getting everything like I want.
I felt a little bit underwhelmed by player built towers even after upgrading them occasionally. They feel really fragile and I only ever upgraded them a couple of times because they seemed to just get plowed through even by a single squad without neutrals. In fact I ended up only building them occasionally as a stall tactic when I had a ton of gems. Maybe if they had better upgrades I would be more interested but at least from what little I tried to use them they just don't last long enough to be worth the gems.
Speaking of gems (and neutrals) I really enjoyed the many uses of gems and all the different strategies that people used them for. I remember one particular use that an enemy made of them where he kept me on the defensive most of the early game because of Ion Cannons constantly harassing my towers. It was annoying but I hadn't seen it before and actually enjoyed the challenge that it brought. Another time I used cublets to great effect while I distracted the enemy and managed to take out a tower. I really enjoy the variety that these units bring to the game.
I think the only thing that really bugged me about neutral weapons was the large Ion Cannons. I felt very frustrated trying to deal with these and they tended to be very hard to kill and wreak the base. Which considering they are 24 gems I suppose they should be. Partly this is due to me not countering them properly and I understand that part of the point of them is to end games so I won't complain too much about them. Just enough to say as a newer players I found them hard to deal with.
Respawning
• Like a lot of people, I found it a hassle to manage the rally point and redeployment of my units.
• Suggestion: The respawn time of units in the queue should be averaged with that of nearby units so that they respawn in a waves.
• Suggestion: Players should be able to hold V and click on a location to have units deploy and rally to that spot.
Harvesting Coins
• The workers seem vestigial since they have no function besides coins. I guess you could try to pick off your opponents’ workers, but you might as well just destroy the expansion since it will cost them gems to rebuild.
• Suggestion: Just have players build expansions directly on top of coin piles. Maybe workers could exist to truck coins from these expansions back to base, and be vulnerable to interception while they do so.
Gathering Gems
• The brief cooldown on capping gems was a persistent annoyance, especially considering how close together the gems often are. It’s long enough to feel like I am wasting time, but too short to actually go and do something else.
• Suggestion: Your hero should have a stack of ~3 worker drones, which they throw out with T to collect gems and build structures. This means that players can throw out all their drones at once, then go do something else for a bit while their stacks recharge.
*Idea: In contrast to what I said above about workers moving coins, it would be interesting if gems where hauled “pikmin-style” back to the nearest expansion or node.
Upgrades
• Physical research and armory structures seem unnecessary. Instead, just put a panel on the HUD that displays upgrades and can be clicked to open a larger selection menu. This would make room for upgrade descriptions and allow players to select upgrades without having to click back to base.
Not a fan of the Armory Upgrades
• From a development standpoint, having upgrades that need to be consistent across all squads will impose an unnecessary constraints and difficulties as you work on fine-tuning and balancing the squads.
• From a gameplay perspective, they are kind of bland. The squad specific upgrades are so much more flavorful and really help to make the squad unique.
• The best upgrades are very tangible to the player and to their opponents. Ideally an upgrade qualitatively changes the way the unit behaves and interacts, and comes with a visual cue (Zergling/Baneling Speed from Starcraft 2 is a great example of this).
• Suggestion: Lose the armory upgrades and expand the squad upgrades a bit. If attack speed is important to a unit in the squad, make an attack speed upgrade: one that is balanced specifically for that unit. For ease of apprehension it would be helpful if some upgrades are available to more than one squad (look at Heroes of the Storm talents like Seasoned Marksman and Block), but no upgrade should be available to all squads.
I don't have as much recent RTS experience as I would like due to grad school, but my initial impressions after playing PvP is that the Gem system creates a recovery barrier. It makes strategies that in other games would be considered all ins not that risky. For example
Would be nice for main base deploy to be able to be toggled to auto. Late game defending a home base rush, you might have reason to not deploy instantly, but otherwise, I can't think of a reason to not automatically deploy any available unit.
GEMS:
I'd like to start this post by saying that the Gem system has been my favorite aspect of Atlas so far. The early game is exciting because of these objectives "peppered" throughout the map and if a player is really ontop of gem collection throughout the entirety of a game, they will have a significant advantage either in tech or neutral weapons.
COIN:
Conversely, The coin system feels like it's in a vacuum. Especially in the early game, when you're not going to be pushing into an opponents expansion due to the towers. In SC2, there's a thrill you get when you harrass the enemy, it feels like every worker killed means the world and is either catching you up or getting you further ahead. I feel that Atlas is lacking this. The Neutral mobs and Towers seem to be a major reason for this feeling.
I feel that rather than neutral mobs, the opponent should worry about denying you from your 3rd, 4th, 5th bases. I feel that if there were no initial towers and the player had to consciously devote gems to have any amount of static defenses, getting the defenses up would be more emphasized and it would open up more avenues for harassment. To clarify, it's not the towers themselves that I don't like, but the fact that you are given them at the start of the match.
It felt weird to divide up expansion spaces with my allies. In a team game, it feels like expansions should produce income for all team members.
I can see that there might be strategies where the "carry" player is allowed to take all the expansions and rocket ahead in army supply and upgrades, but I'm not sure if that is really a desirable dynamic for Atlas.
A few things really seem like they should be shared across the team more since the game is so team oriented.
Tower Upgrades
I feel like I should be able to upgrade my teammates towers. I'm frustrated when I can't. I'd like to feel more useful setting up defense.
Structure Destruction
The gems that pop out of the structures often feel like they're not a reward. Maybe I didn't catch how much they were worth, but mid game it seemed silly to bother trying to take them if there were any regular gems anywhere. I'd like to feel like they weren't a waste of time. If the smaller gems were faster to take later in the game it would feel better.
Experience
I feel pressured to be very aggressive early. I'd like to feel like playing safe is a viable option. The result of playing carefully can be very negative. If someone is off near bottom and being careful not to GIVE kills, they can fall far behind in experience. 4 players can be relentlessly feeding/trading up top, all gaining levels. The person at the bottom would basically be caught up on levels if they'd just sent a single unit up top though right? That just seems unnecessary, so I think team level gains should be used.
Side note, what's the range on XP gain? It'd be good to point this out somewhere.
Forgive me. I saw the replay and laughed. Oh please forgive me <3.
Either way, we do need a better safeguard against building the complete wrong thing. I'm not necessarily sure canceling is the best route because I don't want players to abuse this (ie build ion cannon --> insta cancel under pressure --> build again --> insta cancel). Something like cancellation + much quicker build times might be a good compromise. If it only takes 5-10 seconds to build, it's hard to abuse build/canceling.
Can you give me a bunch of examples? That would be super helpful.
Gladly. Eris's t3 unit is the one I had pvp experience with. They are a long range, aoe focused unit, that meshes well with Eris's hero abilities(both high damage, ranged, aoe effects). The rest of her squad, however, where all her squads actual power seemed to lie, is these shorter range, dashing, single target stalker units. The stalkers are built around focused fire and manipulating their blink AA reset and the aura of her t2 unit - the very antithesis of aoe. This leaves the t3 unit, which I thought was awesome, as a support unit for the units I thought were boring, the stalkers. They seemed to exist solely to support the stalkers against the swarmier squads. They didn't even do a great job of that, because the stalkers with both blink and the move speed from t2's aura were so fast that enemies rarely stood still against me if I was actually trying to micro whether they were trying to dodge the meteor or not.
I felt similarly in the squads I tried in bot games prior to the pvp test:
I tried Celesta's squad for her t2 unit, and I even liked her t3 unit, but I hated being stuck with the garbage and seemingly out of place wisps all game with their terrible range and durability.
I tried Alder, but his t3 unit, which seemed to have lots of awesome synergies with the rest of his units, felt like nothing but a meatshield for those units because the squad didn't support a lumbering melee in any way. His other units were fun, though, and I just wished I could have had a different t3 that I actually wanted in that kind of army or barring that just more of my other units.
I tried Vela, but her t2 unit felt terrible with it's slow movement and the fact that her t1 + t3 + upgrades had crazy range and did plenty of damage to snipe things without the numerous downsides of her t2 unit. Another example of wishing I had some other unit there that supported what I wanted to do or at least just more of my other tiers.
Related but slightly different point:
I'll admit to being a rather casual player of RTS games, and a big part of my investment in those games comes from getting out of the early game and building my dream(or gimmick) army, ESPECIALLY in team games like 3v3s. Atlas made me feel trapped in the early game, never providing me a late game fantasy to build toward. Every squad insisted that I have zealots/marines/stalkers all game very game. If I loved my battlecruiser unit, I was tough out of luck because I could get two at most. I thought the whole point of the squads was to represent the different kinds of comps that I would normally be able to get by mixing and matching units within a race, such as the vastly different styles, timings, and power levels of units found in bio, mech, and fleet terrans in sc2. Instead, they felt like races with all the interesting comp options hacked off. Basically, it felt like having more races actually gave me less options, not more.
I'm glad you found it entertaining and funny as I did. It was quite memorable when it happened.
And I forgive you <3.
Warning: I haven't read this entire discussion yet! Sorry if these opinions are redundant or already addressed.
First off, I love where this game is going and I think it is very unique in a genre that suffers from monotony. In my experience, however, the game feels way too structured, and everything feels soft or... planned. I can only put buildings in certain places (and some are already placed for me), I can only have certain units and in certain amounts, etc. I feel that a certain amount of structure is acceptable, but RTS's need a bit more freedom than Atlas currently provides. Also, this drastically reduces the chances for strategic diversity. A few points:
I wonder why we are automatically given five upgrade buildings when we can't possibly use all of them at once. I think it would result in more dynamic games if instead we were given more starting gems and the choice to build these buildings or defenses/offenses. This also leads to the question of why we are forced to place turrets in certain locations. Why not let players learn where the optimal places are to build them, and then allow them to vary that in order to shape the flow of battle?
I also hope to see more options for unit composition. I appreciate the structure that squads provide, as it definitely could make counter-play decisions easier, but limiting how many of each unit players are allowed to make also might be too far in that direction. As of now, it feels like there are zero counter-play decisions to be made and that the superior team composition is determined in squad select. I'd much prefer a general supply cap and unit variation choices.
Perhaps these are simply due to how early this test is, but I desperately hope to see more meaningful army and structural choices in the game.
Update: Day[9]'s awesome AMA soothed a lot of my worries and if you haven't seen it, go check it out!
I would like to start of by saying I love the feel of squads. One thing that I noticed is that If I am looking for a certain play style I sort of need to play certain heroes. I know in the AMA day[9] said the goal is to add more heros/races to add more content to the game. Have you guys looked into adding more T1/T2/T3 units to each race, and now giving the player the decision as to what combination of 3 he can choose. I feel this sort of system is both really rewarding to the player and allows for an added element of progression to keep players playing the game longer.
I think this system would actually make races more dynamic. In doing so would create more content for the community to discuss and discover over time.
Also It would help for those people that really love a hero/race but there is that one unit that they aren't to fond of.
While I was hoping to have more insight into game systems by the end of the second playtest, I don't. The reason why is that rather than pay attention to any sort of strategy or micro or anything else, every game I just grouped with my two allies and ~ A'ed the enemies expansions/towers/eventually even nexus. I'm sure there's lots of awesome strategies in the game, but I never felt the need to try them. When it came to playing with two random strangers, this strategy seemed to dominate everything. It wasn't very fun either, even though, I won every game.