Arted Map and Neutral Weapons
The map
The map feels much bigger and more chaotic. Often, I just observe 3v3 squads slamming into each other in the middle zone, but when I'm playing a character like Eris with her high mobility using war dance I want to flank and retreat to maximize my survivability and damage. It might be a case of inexperience with the map, but with the huge number of towers and lack of backdoors, it's hard to find avenues to punish overextension. The flow of the map requires a lot of managing the gem mines and teleporting to my base. It feels a bit daunting, while at the same time I don't feel like I can use the avenues around the gem mines to set up get behind my opponent.
The unarted map has a very clear layout, and that layout guides the players to appropriate areas. There are a ton of chokes, and a lot of avenues for getting behind and to the side of your opponent. The arted map has this to a smaller extent, and after several games on the arted map I crave going back to the old map.
The gem mines
Plain and simple, I dislike them. Destroying towers and the mines is best achieved by using neutral weapons, which require gems. Having a gem mine gives you a ton of gems over time, making the control and fortification of the gem mines easier and less costly to your offensive. Gems beget gems and though snowballing should be encouraged, it feels a bit excessive.
Neutral Weapons
Both maps had this problem, but the gem mines exacerbated it. Neutral weapons are the primary means of map progression on an offensive due to their high structure damage and long range. Due to their incredibly high healthpool, they can often make pushes along lanes without any support from the heroes. Perhaps this is intended, but I enjoy the hero vs hero combat so much that I would much rather the heroes being the primary means of map progression while the neutral weapons act as a force multiplier.
I'm confident the cheese strat of ignoring your hero progression and devoting the whole of your resources to creating neutral weapons would not work at a higher level of play, but it is very unfun to deal with wave after wave of high-health cubes while the enemy heroes (THE GUYS I WANT TO KILL BECAUSE THAT'S THE BEST PART OF THE GAME) are nowhere to be found.
I would much rather the neutral weapons become a point of conflict that force both sides to engage each other. Perhaps the design is working as intended, but that is my feedback.
I hope this feedback is constructive, thanks for reading.
Comments
This is something that crossed my mind as well. It makes it such an incredibly decisive battle as soon as these are taken, because if you don't destroy them almost immediately, they pay for themselves in just a minute or two. And it's trivial for the defender to reinforce with a few mini cannons, while it's insanely costly for the aggressor who has had to collect gems manually. You would think that the gem expansion team would fall behind in units and upgrades, but this definitely doesn't present itself in my experience, probably because they forced attention to another battle location and have an easier time gemming and recouping the expansions.
Twas indeed awesome!
Re: map -- this map is a gameplay version from several months ago and, as you note, struggles to have something other than "frequent army mashing." It's rarely correct to not go directly to the gems (the gem mines help some with this) and so the gameplay becomes a little flat. The clarity of architecture and cool possible flank angles of the Art map get erased by the loudspeaker of the gems.
Art focused on arting THIS map because
1. It takes several months to fully art up a single map. So, in order to have an arted piece for the Pre-Alpha, Art began on this map in August.
2. The gameplay was reasonable enough that we were happy to have people play on it.
Re: gem-mines -- Our goal is to have multiple points of contention even in late game. We don't want the ONLY place in late game to be "his nexus, my nexus, gem spawn area." Gem mines are intended to be those other things. We probably won't do anything much with them right now since players' opinions of them vary widely as they play longer. Some players grow to dislike them, others grow to love them. Overall, game design team is pretty happy with some of the gameplay they create.
Re: neutral weapons -- The power of neutrals is a little too optimal for "hold-n-flood". Ideally, we want people spending their gems across the entire game, applying different kinds of pressure across different fronts in the game. We're already in the midst of doing a complete rebuild of the neutral weapon system so this should be a big point of investigating on our next Test Weekend.
I know you've already addressed this thread, Sean, but I want to emphasize my very strong agreement with this point. I feel like neutral weapons right now (most of them -- excepting the ward/totem) de-emphasize player-versus-player interaction, which I am very much not a fan of. You talked a bit in your first AMA about some beetles that you'd previously tried, with the idea behind them being that your army has to go help them with the building-destroying because they just disable the towers, and I know you said that they were super duper broken; but I think that is much more the kind of direction I'd like to see neutral weapons take -- maybe not literally overpowered tower-disabling beetles
-- but if they're going to be something to help break down enemy defenses and push through, I think they should do that by making your heroes/units better at breaking through, not by getting into a super-passive attrition war (I really don't like ion cannons, for this among other reasons ~_~).
As examples of what I think are much better-done, more-engaging breakthrough/convert-advantage-into-win mechanics, I'd point to LoL and Dota's neutral map objectives -- Baron, Dragon, and Roshan -- because they force the team that achieves them to go kill the bad guys to make use of them as game-enders. They don't just sit outside the enemy base being the equivalent of HotS swarm hosts.
Incidentally, LoL and Dota do have much more passive game-ending mechanics -- inhibitors/barracks -- which, while serving a useful gameplay purpose (providing a significant pre-total victory objective which you have to push into the enemy base to achieve), I am equally not a fan of because they tend to result in very uninteractive win patterns. As a possible/specific strategy, I think indirect siege-type stuff like that is alright, but as something that shows up every single game as the optimal way to win it very quickly becomes wearisome (especially for the team that's behind, that in addition to having fewer resources has to deal with the metaphorical locusts
).
Summary: OPINIONS. Converting gems into passive, grinding victories = not that cool. Something like converting gems into making your heroes/armies temporarily more badass, then blasting through? Maybe much cooler. Thoughts?
I absolutely agree with Jeekaroose here, right now neutrals feel very un engaging as he said. I would love to potentially see the ability to maybe get a temporary army unit that can participate in fights. Perhaps some super powerful unit to include in the army that can change the fight and encourages you to do a strong push with the team, instead of, place an ion cannon then play a mini holdout mission.
On the topic of gem mines, I perhaps feel maybe if you brought them away from the sides they wouldn't be as much of a problem. Because right now if an enemy creates one, you have to go so far out of your way to take it down. And as Decency said, it doesn't have to be up long to benefit from it, but if you don't take care of it you are effectively throwing the game away. If it wasn't such a time investment to go kill them, I feel like they wouldn't be as big of a problem. Imagine gold bases in SC2. They aren't in some random god forsaken corner of the map. They are close to the area of scrimage, thus if you can seize and hold them, you get a reward. And I feel like bringing both of them closer, could provide the option of, "Well, we can't take theirs away, but let's go take our own that's not too long of a walk." Where as when they are so far across the map, giving up on one to go to the other is so much time of walking. For a great example, look at League of Legends, they don't put dragon below the bottom lane and baron above the top lane. Contesting them would be far more difficult.
I like the idea of gem bases, while sure, can side objectives be better than just more resources? Absolutely. Does that make it bad? Not exactly, you just need to be careful with how it's implemented, because it's one of those things that could either be too powerful, or really bad. I just feel the problem more has to do with the fact of how gems are used.