Playtest 185 - Illusion Squad and New Map Art
Treisk
Member, Administrator
Tonight's playtest features exciting new art changes and a new squad, Illusion!
Art!
- The art team has done a rough initial pass on map art!
- Titans are now significantly more sinister looking.
- The Worker has received a new model and animations.
New Squad: Illusion
The new blue squad, Illusion, has emerged from the shadowy depths, and is now available! This is a very rough-around-the edges version of the squad, but we're excited to see what people think of the concept.
Please note that Illusion Squad does not have any squad-specific upgrades yet.
Hero
- Passive - Illusions. The Hero will spawn an illusion of itself every twenty seconds, up to the max illusion cap. The cap begins at 1. Each illusion can be independently controlled and has effectively 25% of the Hero's stats in every way. Upon death, the illusions will explode, blinding and slightly damaging nearby enemies. Hero illusions can also use the Hero's basic ability, though the illusionary version will do 25% of the damage. Every two levels, the illusion cap increases by 1, up to a max of 5.
- Basic Ability (D) - Deadly Strike. After a short delay, fires a void pulse at nearby enemy, dealing damage and slowing the target.
- Ultimate Ability (F) - Clone Swap. Swaps places with target Hero illusion. After the swap, both the hero and the illusion will emit an eruption of void energy, damaging and slowing nearby enemies.
T1 - A basic backline unit.
- Ability: Phase Mode (Q) - The T1 will partially phase out of reality, temporarily losing the ability to attack but gaining a movement speed buff and the ability to phase through other units.
T2 - A caster that can summon other squad units to its side, replacing them with shadowy illusions. Illusions are controllable and have 25% of the stats of the original unit, and will die after 20 seconds. Upon death they will emit an eruption of void energy, blinding and slightly damaging nearby enemies.
- Ability: Shadowplay (W) - Teleport target Illusion squad unit to the caster, replacing it with an illusion.
- Ability: Cast Shadow (E) - Spawns an illusion of target squad unit.
T3 - A powerful being from another dimension. By default, it is cloaked and cannot attack.
- Ability: Manifest (R) - The unit becomes visible and immobile for the next ten seconds, emitting an aura that slows enemy movement and attack speed. While visible the T3 fires dodge-able shadow volleys at nearby enemies.
Alder
- Bramblethorn Goliath attack damage reduced to 80, from 120.
- The Bramblethorn Goliath's auto-attack now strikes enemies in an small cone.
Questions
- What did you think of the Illusion Squad? Even in its rough state, does it represent a squad fantasy you're excited about?
- Did the Bramblethorn Goliath's auto-attack change help make up for its loss of unit-walking?
- What did you think of the new art?
Comments
Wow, from the description Illusion squad looks like exactly what I've been wanting in this game. Can't wait to try it out!
Illusion Squad
(1.1) - Didn't see any Illusion in pvp games today. Played one in bot to see how some of the abilities worked. For the most part I like the concept of the squad. I'd like if there was more of a decision to be made about what you do with the units, whether it makes sense to clone or not. With the one pass I saw of it, clones just came down to finding the biggest thing nearby. The captor abilities are more interesting, especially with the growing number of illusions. Deadly strike seemed low impact, but Phase Mode and Manifest both seemed like there was a lot of potential there.
Bramblethorn Goliath
Cone Auto-Attack
(2.1) - I don't have too many games in on Alder, so the difference doesn't appear as significant to me as it might to others. I like the idea of a cone attack, in the form of this big tree leading with the shoulder and sweeping through enemies, Ent-style.
New Art
(3.1) - Love it. Glowing red eyes of doom are awesome, especially when they are backed up against a cliff wall. It's a seemingly small thing on paper, but the appearance of positive blocking terrain as opposed to negative (gaps in the floor) really changes the feel of things. Like the workers, too. All around, great adds.
New Map Art
The new map art looks great aesthetically! It has a cartoony vibe that I really enjoy, it actually reminds me a lot of the type of art used in Sly Cooper which is one of my favorites games aesthetically. The new art looks quite a bit darker to me, I think maybe because the shadows and lighting are more realistic? Either way it was initially a shock but I got used to it very quickly and now that I’m used to it I think it looks really good.
The new workers look awesome, I think they look like cats but Cycle seems to think they’re mice. Either way, I love the new model for them, they look really cute. Definitely makes me want to keep them alive more now, and also makes me feel a little bad for how often I was killing them this playtest haha.
The new Titan skins are far more intimidating, they went from reminding me of EVE (from WALL-E) to some kind of evil Sith machine haha. I also noticed they don’t seem to permanently aggro like they used to, so that’s cool!
The pathing blockers in particular made it far more clear that they were line of sight blockers due to the added depth. I am a little worried that from the perspective of someone who hasn’t played they might think it’s an actual wall initially.
One of the complaints I have about this particular iteration of the game is that I had a harder time seeing health bars than I usually do. I’m not sure if this is to do with the new art or pathing or using squads with smaller units or some combination thereof.
Illusion Squad
When I initially read about Illusion Squad, I was really excited about the concept of the squad. It felt like the kind of squad the encourage splitting up your army more, with the ability to instantly recall units, teleport your hero to different locations, phase your units to different locations ect.
In practice, the army felt like it needed to all be together to do things, individual units didn’t do enough damage to justify 4 units runbyes then recalling them, and even if they had it wouldn’t work because the range on the ability was too short to use it for that purpose practically.
Likewise with the hero ability, the range was too short to really use it to be zipping around the map like I wanted, and I was disappointed but not at all surprised (since it would be super broken) to see illusions couldn’t collect gems or build neutral weapons.
So this is obviously just my very specific view of what I was expecting when I read the squad description, and not at all indicative of how well the squad as a whole works atm. I didn't actually play illusion at all this playtest and dont remember playing a game against it either.
Wind Squad vs Celesta
I played one game of Wind vs Celesta on bottom that felt unwinnable.
Here’s the game code: Gba070d8247f54c85ba8e6f69669a81cc
The biggest thing that stands out to me was the power of Celesta’s hero ability. Even very early on in the game it seemed to do half damage to my sprites, and later on even with magic resistance upgrades it was doing two thirds or more. This was especially odd because the hero ability didn’t feel particularly high damage vs other squads, except maybe Eris and Celesta.
Even when getting a full surround, my units would simply melt and die rather than kill the Wisps. This got worse as units numbers get bigger since Wisps in a ball can all attack while even with a full surround typically not all Sprites can attack, so Celesta’s DPS increases faster relative to Wind’s. It quickly reached the point where even with a full surround Celesta would just attack move my Sprites, kill enough in one area to open up a path and proceed to kite away through that hole (see 10:43 for one of the biggest offenders in the replay), which was incredibly frustrating. Wind’s hero ability definitely needed to be tweaked from its former power, but in it’s current form it actually hurts more than it helps because it creates invulnerable walls that my units can’t attack past / into in most cases (see 7:55, 9:35 and quite a few instances earlier in the replay as well) but it could also just be a case of me sucking at using the ability properly.
Once Purifiers came into play too I felt like Wind doesn’t have an equivalent ‘good’ tier 2 / tier 3 unit. Tempests are hard to micro by design and don’t deal enough damage in their current form IMO and don’t add any ability to engage into Purifiers anyway, and Transporters generally only help in getting surrounds which I feel like I wasn’t particularly struggling with in this game. Another thing I noticed is that Wind’s hero ability doesn’t actually go as far as it’s cast range, many times I would cast the ability on a Purifier but the Purifier didn’t get stunned.
Aside from Celesta’s hero ability, I can’t tell if it’s a case of Celesta being too strong or Wind too weak / matching up poorly against Celesta at the moment. Playing as / with / against Celesta today against other squads Celesta didn’t feel as dominate as it did in this matchup. It might also have been the difference between 1v1 and 2v2, but Celesta / Eris vs Wind / Fire and Celesta / Eris vs Eris / Fire for example felt far more evenly matched, although the Celesta team did end up winning both of these games as well.
There was actually one other game where I played as Celesta vs Wind, and watching the replay again it had this same kind of dynamic where Wind simply couldn’t get a good engage vs Celesta. It’s less obvious due to the 2v2 dynamic, but wherever I see Wind engage Celesta Celesta always seems to win. It might just be the high movement speed, low collision and high DPS of Celesta combined with the fragile nature of Wind that makes the matchup seem so one sided, where it’s hard to get a surround and any commitment to attack means I’m going to be taking losses.
Unit's getting stuck next to stacked Mini Ion Cannons
This only happened in one game to me today, but units became completely unable to move when walking next to stacked mini ion cannons. Happened in two locations, once by the entrace to the top team's green expansion and once while assaulting the nexus. The only way to get units unstuck was to recall them out of the game.
Here's the game code: G4e3759d9ebe242d69561678a1e562bdd
PART 1
Aww yiss feedback time. This was one of the more enjoyable playtests for me since the T1 unit cap increase, and I think I've narrowed down the reasons why. Stay tuned to find out later on in the post huehuehuehue
New Art
Love it. The style resonates with me as I love cartoony stuff. Light-hearted > serious in my books. Now, going into it, I first took a look at the art by loading up a replay, pausing, and looking at everything. My initial reaction beyond "wow so cool" was "hey the map is dark" and "I wish there was some differentiation between the top lane, middle 'Nexus lane', and the bottom lane". I totally dig the tree color differences to delineate between the two teams, but wish there was more to tell the difference between the zones as well (and maybe even something for the titan camps). League of Legends uses very subtle changes to mark the difference between areas, but DoTA is super different for each side.
That said, when I actually played games, I didn't even notice the art. I hope that comes across as a good thing because that's how I mean it lololol. I didn't notice it at all. I could focus completely on the gameplay and trying to be awesome in general, and had literally no trouble navigating the map, reading the readability during engagements, and discerning which side was which.
Titans look much cooler in black, and the super high contrast of these black robots in a nature-esque environment makes them feel like they don't belong - but in an interesting-lore-kind-of-way rather than a disconnect. I really enjoy them. The new gem art fits more in the arted map now, but they still feel unfinished to me - like they don't belong in the wrong sense hahaha.
The new workers look awesome, I think they look like mice but Pursuit seems to think they’re cats. Either way, I love the new model for them, they look really cute. Definitely makes me want to keep them alive more now, and also makes me feel a little bad for how often I was killing them this playtest haha.
Illusion
I didn't really play Illusion Man but I played a very fun Seed v Illusion 1v1 in bot lane against Tristan. Sure, the lack of getting detection was frustrating, but Alder is pretty good at 1v1 and I was able to stay on even footing against those T3 units. I don't have much else feedback regarding Illusion than this, but it seems like a super cool squad to play.
Bramblethorn Shift
I played a single game as Alder, and did what felt like a very middle-of-the-road build; ie: I made a handful of each unit and got some key upgrades but didn't be all like GOLIATHS YEAAA. Love that the Goliath now has splash, though now Alder's AoE is mostly late-game (though it's better than nothing). I'd be very interested to try Alder v Wind and see what my options are. Since I played 1v1 only with Alder, I can't comment on the Goliath collision because the frustrating part regarding that is my allies' unit collision.
And if you were expecting more of my opinion regarding aoe damage on the Goliath, I think I'll be more verbose in my next section:
PART 2
Eris v Alder, or "SFR and Visceral Feedback"
(And I don't mean the 1v1 matchup of Eris and Alder)
I played a handful of games as Vex between playtests, and on the playtest day Sunday I played a ton of Eris. Almost everything I did felt rewarding, and I felt like I was a beast, even when the 2v2 lane was evenly-matched or even when I was losing. This to me was a key realization towards squad identity as well as why things felt fun as Eris.
Eris is, in my mind, very streamlined design-wise; every tool she has at her disposal points to the same goal: dealing (burst) damage. Her basic ability lowers phys def so you can burst harder. Her ult is a giant flaming ball of burst. The T1 Sandstingers have low attack speed but high damage and a cooldown reset for bursty burst. The T2 Devilkin bro has an aura so you can run up and burst faster and sooner. The T3 Apocalyte (excellent name) calls down burst from the sky. Even Eris' squad-specific upgrades ( the building is called the Research Facility so... researchables?) have the same bursty dream. In this respect, she's the complete opposite of Alder.
Alder can snare, stun, zone, snipe, heal, tank. He's a grassyalienguy-of-all-trades, but also lacks the ability to commit to any one discipline. His specialty to me feels like dipping a toe in each role, and using combinations of them to gain an advantage in combat.
My point with this comparison isn't to say "Alder needs to be able to commit to something!" but it was just an observation I made.
Something I noticed while playing Eris was that I gravitated towards building to her climax. That is to say, the most climactic moments were based around her ult and the Apocalyte (thus I built AP in like every game). My build was mostly to get enough Sandstingers to win fights to level to 6 and get my ult, and then to get some T3 bros and drop fire. It was immensely fun to shoot armies and watch them melt, or to even miss and be like "oh man it would've been so sick!". These moments to me were SO incredibly enjoyable and visceral that there were times I had to shout "OH OH" in the voice chat because I just couldn't not. I recall hearing my opponent make similar remarks out loud too during those big fights - it's just exciting to do something meaningful in engagements.
That brings me to the Alder comparison. While Eris has these huge amazing abilities that wipe armies and just feel powerful, Alder's biggest bombs aren't what they used to be. Living Vines may be the strongest tool he has, but snaring an enemy is only half of the fun - the real enjoyment comes from watching the little +xp pop out of their dead bodies. The same concept applies to the Deeproot Terror, which now mostly stuns twice and dies, and without my team beside me to take advantage, Alder lacks the damage count to finish off that reward. With the presence of Poison Squad, the infamous Tree of Life doesn't have the punch it used to (read: at all). The old way of dealing with ToL was to just, well, disengage or snipe it, but now Poison completely disables it. In games where Poison isn't around, experienced players have become much better at killing off the tree, leaving me as the Alder player feeling helpless, where my "big plays" can be shut down or avoided pretty easily.
In line with this, the old counterplay to an opponent targeting the Deeproot Terror/Tree of Life was to Re-cycle it with the Goliath, both wasting their DPS and giving the Goliath a huge combat advantage. However in the current times where the Goliath has no unitwalking, it's hard to actually get him into combat to make use of his newfound abilities - he ends up being a ToL-extender/transport in many engagements. Maybe I need to eat more Needleferns? (This is an excellent time to re-state my suggestion regarding the Goliath: perhaps give him unitwalking when he's on the way to eat a Sapling or Tree? could give some really nice micro moments as well as allowing me to walk through units for the price of 1 charge of Re-cycle)
Needlefern is probably the most fun and rewarding tool that Alder has, because the reward is not meant to be "lol their army is dead" but rather "look you can't come into my space right now". Needlefern does not win engagements, but prevents them from happening. This was my favorite aspect of Alder from a few months ago: the Saplings from the Seedbots zoned effectively and deterred the opponent. With the new high T1 cap, the enemy can disregard the Saplings and just charge at me after a certain critical mass. Needlefern has been an excellent tool to help this issue, but when that seems to be the only option I have in order to take a fight, I feel like I'm missing out.
In contrast, Eris is all about fighting and seeking out engagements. I have a pretty strong feeling too that the rest of the squads also do that: they all want to fight. Lately as Alder, I've been dreading combat with other squads unless they're Hydros or Grath (though I don't think I've played them in a long time).
In short, Eris gives me excellent feedback when I'm doing well (in the form of dead units), which lets me know I'm ahead, did something good, and can continue doing this stuff to win the game. It feels to me that when Alder is doing well, the feedback comes in the form of snared units, which eventually out-run him anyways. I no longer dictate fights as Alder, and therefore feel less powerful as a player. It had started to get so bad that I was used to it, and would look at the level disparity and think "oh I'm doing well! I'm only 2 levels behind!". His synergy and concept still seem super good to me; I just wish he felt useful in combat.
What did you think of the Illusion Squad? Even in its rough state, does it represent a squad fantasy you're excited about?
Only got to see Illusion Squad once, playing in a bot-side mirror matchup. I like a lot of the concepts in the abilities, but I just have no idea how to make them work. A lot of it feels like I'm just super bad at microing units that aren't just an Eris deathball. The illusion T3 is super cool, and this is the first squad I've played that actually felt like it would benefit from being split up, even on a mapwide scale, at times. That said, I could barely feel the basic hero ability doing anything, which again could just be me doing it wrong.
Overall though, I'm excited to see what comes of it.
Did the Bramblethorn Goliath's auto-attack change help make up for its loss of unit-walking?
Didn't see Alder at all this test, sadly.
What did you think of the new art?
I love the art style that's been shown for the maps so far. The improved models neutral titans looked cool and made them feel meaner and less Aperture-Sciencey.
Other notes
Vela continues to be awesome to play. Played vs Hydros, and that meant that every "engagement" was "poke from far away and then run and kite while crabs roll up and chase you". As with Eris, however, Hydros just hits a critical mass of crab people and gets plate and then just goes where he pleases and crushes Vela in fights under your own healing towers.
I don't exactly know where to split this into paragraphs, so I'm sorry that it's just a big block of text, but please bear with me.
After a full day of allowing my thoughts to collect, I still haven't gone back to watch the replay of the last game I played yesterday, but I feel very confident in saying that it is the most interesting game of Atlas I have played so far, and it absolutely brought to the forefront what is my least favorite thing about the game at this moment (a question I failed to answer on Wednesday). The game, from my perspective, had a very interesting storyline. For much of the early game, I felt like I was winning bot. I managed to hold the bottom gem expansion for well past its return in investment, I managed to siege down some towers, and I managed to at least hold even with levels, if not gain a small level advantage (I can't exactly remember). Then, in the mid game, one of the enemy top side players came down and routed my gem expansion, at which point i looked at the scoreboard to see a very large experience deficit on my top side players. When the one top side enemy came down, they couldn't really do anything to exploit the numbers advantage, and I saw this. So, I made the call to abandon the bottom side of the map entirely and group with them for the rest of the game. Now, I think this is still generally the wrong decision, but there were a few key factors that made it feel okay for me in that game specifically: First, both my natural and first easy expansion were totally mined out, and therefore not points on the map that needed protection by my army. Second, I never take my far corner expansion (the yellow one) because it feels too out of the way and not worth protecting for the amount of gold it returns. Third, my only mining base was the bot side 2x base, which justified to me not taking the far bottom base and also existed as the only easy point on the bottom side of the map to collapse on when grouped top as three. Thus, I had nothing to lose by abandoning my side of the map and helping my top side players. This felt great, and the next few fights actually went in our favor, either due to the numbers advantage of a 3v2 or the positional advantage gained by forcing them to wait for their third player to join the fight. This is the first time for me at least that teamplay felt correct and rewarding, and the comms in discord during that part of the game were filled with strategy and calls, reminding me very much of my old days playing ranked 5s in League. Then, the somewhat controversial moment of the game: my team managed to pull almost a full army wipe on the opposing bot side player, and we saw one of their top side players far away on the top side gem expansion. In the heat of the moment, we made the call to exploit the bottom side advantage we temporarily had and push through bot side's 2x expansion path. Once got through, and top side still hadn't responded, we saw an opportunity to take the win. This felt AMAZING. We were at a disadvantage, found a weakness in our stronger opponents, and were positioned to properly exploit it. This is the thing I think Atlas is missing most at this moment. Most of my losses in Atlas feel like they are decided by the 5 minute mark, and are followed by 15-20 minutes of waiting for the other team to win. Engagements when behind are brutal, secondary options are few, and comebacks seem very unlikely. This means that in many cases, the winning team gets to kind of stop playing the game once they get ahead. It brings a mindset of "okay, I'll get ahead in the early game, and later on I'll win." The only other competitive game I've put tons of time into really is League, and this mindset ends up COMPLETELY absent in League due to the comeback potential available. If all three lanes manage to get ahead in the early game, racking up a couple kills and taking some early objectives, but then all the players go off by themselves to farm for kills, a coordinated and grouped team, even with a gold disadvantage, can make plays to win the game. The best example of this might be a haphazard baron call by the jungler and AD carry of the winning team. If all 5 players of the losing team show up, kill those two players, and take the baron for themselves, they can absolutely win the game right there in the right scenario, effectively punishing the careless top, bottom, and mid players who assumed the game already won. This feeling is EXACTLY the feeling I got from yesterday's game, and added hugely to the disconnect in feelings after the end of the game. The top players felt like the game was already won, bottom side was fairly even when all this started, and so the possibility of an out-of-the-blue victory seemed very strange from a Starcraft perspective. But I think harboring and promoting that kind of teamplay leads to more interesting games overall, and allows for closer back and forth games, more amazing comebacks, and also even more dominating victories by teams that truly play better than their opponents in all stages of the game.
So, a little long winded, but there's my 2 cents on yesterday's game, teamplay in Atlas, and what I think team based games need to keep a healthy competitive feeling.
Illusion Squad
I played Illusion in each game this time, but I don't think I've quite figured the squad out yet. I think part of this is that the pieces of the squad are still rough and don't yet fit nicely together. The most general thing I noticed about the squad is that units have a fairly disparate set of move speeds, which made them fairly awkward to coordinate as a group. Beyond that, I have some thoughts on each component of the squad individually:
The Hero: The periodic duplicates where a bit of a hassle to manage, especially since they use the hero marker on the mini-map. They often spent a lot of time standing around at random places on the map before I noticed them and added them to a control group. Rather than passive duplicate generation, I think it would be cool if his D created a burst of duplicates that all run in different directions, helping him to escape.
I also never found his F useful. It seems like there is an opportunity for something a lot more flashy. What if the ultimate conjured illusions of your entire army at a distant location, allowing you to harass and fool your opponents in a number of ways.
T1: These played pretty well. Phase mode was fun, though they shouldn't be able to be stunned while phased.
T2: The awkward thing about these units is that their two abilities do very similar things. I ended up using this ability to mostly to create a meat shield of free units. I just spammed E, then W, then backed my real units away. It can be pretty awkward to use W, since it isn't always clear which caster the unit is being teleported to, and you can only rescue a small portion of your forward guard this way. Perhaps they should just have one ability that can rescue real units and replace them with illusions in a small aoe would be easier to use as intended.
Note: making eight Void Monster copies is pretty funny, since you can create huge invisible/invincible walls.
T3: I used these mostly to back door the enemy nexus, so I didn't actually use them that much in conjunction with the rest of my squad. They are a lot slower than most other units, so that can't really keep up during maneuvers. Since there is not detection in the game right now, they essentially function as slow moving force walls. Manifest doesn't really do that much, since the unit can't push into the middle of enemy groups of units, and your opponent can usually just back out of the are and focus fire them. This makes it more of a zoning tool, but right now invisible wall mode is better for that. It seems like this unit wants unit walking to work as thematically intended.
Looking at the big picture, I think the mechanical heart of squad should be the illusory units, and I have an idea for a squad-wide ability that might accomplish this: All units in the squad have this activated ability. Pressing Q and clicking in a direction causes selected units to move in that direction and leave an illusion of themselves behind. Pressing W instead creates illusions which move in the specified directions instead. The idea is that the two operations look identical to your opponents, so they can't immediately tell which group is real or illusory.
Conceptually, I like this idea. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to play against the Illusion squad so I can't offer feedback on how it actually executed, but it begs an interesting question of whether y'all are looking at squads with drastically different skill ceilings. This seems to be on the higher end of it, and as a result I feel I need to be more comfortable with the core game (making calls on what to do with my gems at any given point in time, knowing how to respond to someone's actions, etc.) before undertaking such a role.
OK so I relayed this to Day[9] in the Discord channel yesterday, but I'll put it into writing just in case! The best thing I can say about the art is that it gave me a clear delineation of what terrain was/was not passable. Sometimes the map art can get TOO artsy and it's not clear whether something is a doodad that won't offer collision. That wasn't the case here - take it with a grain of salt because maybe I'm used to the no-art version of the map, but there was no confusion.
I completely, 100% echo @Cycle 's sentiment that I didn't notice the art in the heat of battle - per his comments, I wouldn't take this as a negative. For reasons like I just cited above, the art was not a detractor at all and the theme fit the general vibe I get from most of the squads. It's animated, but overly whacky - it has color and character. I don't necessarily think I need more drastic themes in a single map, but I do look forward to different themes (color schemes, terrain types, etc.) in different maps!
Misc comments
I found it surprising to read some of the comments that @Pursuit was making for Wind and feeling that it applied pretty readily to other melee squads - particularly Hydros, my go-to (primarily the issue of melee only attacking the perimeter of a ball of ranged units, whereas the entire volume of ranged gets to attack). It seems like there are so many situations in which I try to get a surround with my mostly-melee army to get an advantageous engagement against ranged units. However, I take so much damage trying to get into position that I feel like I'm in a poor situation by the time my units are able to fight back, plus so many Scuttlebros are still unable to engage in melee range due to the choke-i-ness of the map. Retracting Roll is obviously a great tool for closing distance quickly (and reducing damage taken) but if you can't get into a good position in between the time the enemy notices you and the Roll expires, well, booo.
One of my favorite sets of back-and-forths was against Grath because it felt like we were on almost equal footing and positioning choices was what made or broke us.
New Art
Love the art style, improved the map and gameplay experience. The Titans are much better then the previous versions. One minor issue: the forest areas are a little dark and it is hard to spot my own units.
Illusion Squad
I had fun with Illusion squad but I don't think I would rush to play them again in the present state. (Unlike poison squad - which I still want to play more of...) I am not sure that I really get the squad yet. I liked the tier one spell, though I did not have much success with it. The tier 2 seemed useful, but, again, difficult to use. The tier 3 was nice when I got it into a good position, but it seemed to die really fast in big engagements. The hero ultimate did not feel at all useful. I had a chance to play illusion v. illusion which was very fun to see learning taking place during the match as we each tried different things out and saw what worked and what didn't.
Pathing
One small issue, particularly with the melee squads, the size of the gap that units can fit through and the size of the unit don't seem to quite match up, or maybe are at pixel tolerances. I had several times where units are lined up in a fight and I try and micro a unit through what looks like a sizable gap, but it is just one pixel too small, and the unit proceeds to walk in the opposite direction. I noticed this particularly with the Scuttleguards, but have seen it elsewhere.
Gameplay
One "not fun" thing I've noticed in several games is closing the game out when one team gets significantly ahead. I played one game on Sunday that ran for 45 mins - our opponents were ahead for most of the game, but just couldn't quite get the kill on the nexus. After a big engagement, my team rushed past the meganode and killed the nexus with some cubes. The win felt very unearned and unlikely to be repeated / lucky.
I've played a few other games where it was clear that one team had a large gold and gems edge, but as the game continued the extra bases became mined out, the opponents caught up to the max army limit, and the match - somewhat - evened out. This sounds at first like a good thing, but it feels more like prolonging the agony, as, usually, the team that is ahead eventually wins, it just seems to take longer.
On the behind team there is will be a series of engagements where your entire army is wiped out, and your team just holds on. You spend a while waiting for the respawn, which is definitely not fun and it feels like you are getting your ass kicked repeatedly. On the ahead team you feel like you are winning each engagement and should be getting further ahead, but in reality your opponents are catching up as you are wasting gems in failed pushes.
What did you think of the Illusion Squad? Even in its rough state, does it represent a squad fantasy you're excited about?
I was more excited about it before hand. Having played it just a little, and against it a fair amount more... I'd say it's very interesting but has some flaws. you're already aware that the clones are easily picked out as they look completely different. That'll be fixed and will allow some cooler (or more annoying) plans. I thought people might use the swapping ability to go deep behind line then warp to safety or vice-versa, or bait pull backs by pretending to go somewhere they weren't. Sadly I never saw any of those things happen, instead they just used it for more DPS (which feels necessary at this point, splitting up really hurts you in the game right now). Cloaking their T3 unit and just picking away at the nexus had no direct counter as you're already aware, but soft counters exist in that they then have invested a lot into something that doesn't help their main army or fights (see previous points about splitting up). The squad in the future seems promising as they are fleshed out and people get good/learn new tactics.
Did the Bramblethorn Goliath's auto-attack change help make up for its loss of unit-walking?
I never saw the unit even once!
What did you think of the new art?
New art was great, I really like the direction they took. I didn't feel it impacted my play (which is good) but really made things a lot more natural. I love the bushes, a straight 100% improvement over the old ones in look and feel. The transitions from dirt > grass all look natural (not artificial or patterny) and well blended. I have a slight suggestion for the transition from dirt > pavement though, it seems to imply the dirt is piling over it or some level of depth that doesn't exist in the gameplay (EG the top left area of the map). The workers are adorable.
Other thoughts
Late game is really weird still. I see teams with 150+ combined gems not ending the game, and I see teams with 90 gems just bullrush past the towers and end the game they are by all accounts losing. This can be frustrating and amazing at the same time. This has also been brought up but I figured it should be in writing here.
Passed along to Art. Woohoo!
So let's talk about Illusion squad briefly. This is one of our more "out there" designs, where we're trying to really fit an aesthetic and a fantasy, and are going to be doing a lot of rapid iteration to get there. The versions of this squad you see over the next several weeks will likely be very different from their previous versions. A player playing Illusion should feel elusive and clever, and it should take some degree of succeeding at that to actually be successful. An Illusion player using guile to create advantages will be rewarded for that. And in nailing that aesthetic and gameplay fantasy, we're going to certainly want all kinds of feedback on it (this included).
Passed on as well. We may have a solution that we'll experiment with internally and see how it feels.
We're definitely not content with the way games close out. In fact, I would go as far as saying this is the weakest phase of our game right now. The current suite of changes we're working on for a future build, we're certainly hoping, will polish the rough edges of this and give a cleaner, more ceremonialized ending to games. And if it doesn't immediately, we'll double down and make sure the end of the game is actually a satisfying moment, as right now we're falling short of that.
Thanks for testing and for feedback as always. Go forth and poison nerds! :D
This has definitely felt like a big offender so far. The next version of Illusion should feel much better than this and have some more interesting decision points, haha.
Definitely the fantasy we're going for. Hopefully this ends up feeling the way we hope it does, haha.
Passing this on. Awesome to hear it. Man we love the new workers so much haha.
Thanks as always! <3
Passed it along to art. Awesome stuff.
Agree. Replied above with a bit more on this, but the short of it is, we're unsatisfied with how games close out and are working on it. Please continue mentioning these feelings though.
Could you talk a bit more about what your initial shock was like?
DEATH TO THE ADORABLE WORKERS! HAHA!
I could be mistaken, but I don't believe we changed the gameplay of this, haha, you may have just gotten lucky.
We've hit some of the same feelings and are working on nailing it down a bit more. More thoughts and feedback on this would be awesome!
For Wednesday, we've made some adjustments to Celesta's hero ability, and we're keeping a close eye on it. This is definitely a big offender in the Wind and Vela matchups for Celesta. Let us know if this matchup feels better, if you get to play it!
Oh, speaking of this matchup -- looks like we may have, at some point, had the wrong defense type on Wisps, which created the scenario you discussed -- a full surround wasn't actually as meaningful as it should have been. This was also skewing the Eris and Vela matchups particularly hard for Celesta. Oops! Fixed for Wednesday.
I'll be investigating that potential bug with Cyclone this week, thanks for reporting it!
Passing this on to see if this is reproducible and actionable. Thanks!
Thanks again for testing, see ya Wednesday! :D:D
I opened up my first game on the new version and immediately thought 'Wow, this is so much darker than the old version!'. As a general rule of thumb I prefer lighter, simple, easy to understand graphics over dark, beautiful yet harder to read graphics (for example, I play SC2 on mostly low setting to improve performance and improve readability), so I was actually a little worried initially about the darker look. That fear quickly proved to be unfounded for me once the action started though, since the game seemed for the most part (health bars as aforementioned excluded) to be just as if not more readable than before.
Also thanks for taking the time to respond to all the feedback!