Playtest 199: Economy Overhaul, Item Rework, Balance Adjustments!
Treisk
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Playtest 199: Economy Overhaul, Item Rework, Balance Adjustments
TL;DR - Massive economy overhaul, huge item rework, squad balance adjustments
General Gameplay
Brand New STOCK ECONOMY!
We've restructured how resources & tech work in the game! The short summary is that players have a limited number of times they can rebuild their army. Players will fight over resources that will help their squad grow in power over the course of the game! You'll win either by running your opponent out of respawns or by hitting a powerful, juicy timing push. Our goals with these economy changes include:
- Helping games end more easily
- Increasing the significance of killing units
- Giving clarity to current game status
The Resources
- Coin represents how many times your army can respawn.
- You spend coin on units and mercenaries.
- You begin with 300 coin & units cost between 2-10 coin each.
- There is no way to passively gain coin.
- If you destroy an enemy healing well, all players on your team gain +80 coin.
- If you run out of coin, "emergency mode" will trigger. Your name will be highlighted in yellow and you will gain +1 coin every 10 seconds. You're pretty screwed if you hit "emergency mode."
- Your hero does not have a coin cost.
- Supply represents your maximum army size.
- You begin with 12 maximum supply.
- The supply cost of each unit is equal to its coin cost. For example, at the start of the game, Celesta's Wisps cost 2 coin. So, building 6 will consume the initial 12 supply.
- Your maximum supply slowly increases over the course of the game. Currently, you cannot influence the maximum supply number.
- When your unit dies, you must wait a while for the supply to return to you. In other words, when your army dies, you cannot immediately rebuild. The supply return time increases over the course of the game.
- Both squad units and mercenary units consume supply.
- XP Levels grant you scrap and access to higher level technology
- Each time you level up, you gain ONE scrap. Scrap is used for purchasing upgrades (described below).
- Your tech level is now equivalent to your current XP level. Tech levels are no longer acquired at the main base.
- XP is gained from all activities
- Collecting gems from the middle adds chunks of XP.
- Killing units/titans gain XP.
- Killing an enemy Heroes grant significant XP.
- Expansions passively generate XP. Expansions do not generate a trickle of XP. Rather, they build up to a "surge" of XP each 1-2 minutes. If you destroy an expansion before the surge, that player loses the entire progress towards the surge.
- XP UI is described in its own section below!
- Scrap lets you purchase powerful items to improve your hero & squad
- You gain additional scrap every time you gain an XP level (described above)
- You can spend scrap on squad-specific upgrades (ie +2 range for Spitfire)
- You can spend scrap on charms (ie Rabbit's foot). Charms have been greatly expanded to include passive stat bonus charms (ie +10% attack damage). Also, each charm can be upgraded to Tier 1, 2, and 3. For example
- Rabbit's Foot Tier 1 - Grant your units +40% movement speed for 3 seconds.
- Rabbit's Foot Tier 2 - Grant your units +55% movement speed for 5 seconds.
- Rabbit's Foot Tier 3 - Grant your units +70% movement speed for 7 seconds.
- You can read more about these changes in the Items section!
- Tech Level is equivalent to your XP level and unlocks more powerful options.
- Level 1 - Your Tier 1 units, mercenaries, upgrades, and charms are available.
- Level 4 - Your Tier 2 units, mercenaries, upgrades, and charms are available.
- Level 8 - Your Tier 3 units, mercenaries, upgrades, and charms are available.
- Level 10 - Your Hero Ultimate is available.
- Level 12 - Your finishing mercs (Juggernauts/Leviathans) are available.
Top Left UI
- Your experience bar is represented next to your current player level
- This experience bar is divided into chunks. These chunks are filled by your actions in the game.
- Several tabs on the bottom of the panel will fill up, and when that tab fills to 100%, it fills a chunk of the EXP bar and resets to 0% anew.
- Each tab is labeled based on what is filling it.
- For example, the C tab is filled via Combat (unit kills); while each E tab is filled by your respective expansions
- Each tab is labeled based on what is filling it.
- Collecting a Gem fills a chunk of the bar.
- These Gems still scale in size as the game goes on. This means that Medium gems fill 2 chunks, while Large gems fill 4 chunks of the EXP bar.
Other Notes
- Expansions no longer have a construction cost. Instead, Expanding places the Build Node (T) ability on a 40-second cooldown
- Players may only have FOUR mercenaries out at any given time. Mercenaries are very coin efficient (totally build'em)
- Towers have been temporarily DISABLED
User Interface
- New Health Bars have been added, replacing the previous Halo displays!
Squads
General
- Inflection upgrades now complete instantly.
Alder
- Seedbot
- Cost: 6 Coin ⇒ 4 Coin
- In previous terms, this translates to 150 Coin ⇒ 100 Coin
- Cost: 6 Coin ⇒ 4 Coin
- Grove Tender
- Health: 125 ⇒ 225
- Armor Type: Heavy ⇒ Light
Grath
- Terrapin Trooper
- Rocket Rush (Q)
- Removed the windup time on Rocket Rush
- Cooldown: 16 ⇒ 14 seconds
- Bonus movement speed: 225% ⇒ 150%
- Rocket Rush (Q)
- Rustborn Rhino
- Trample (E)
- No longer has a visual telegraph
- Trample (E)
Hydros
- Scuttleguard
- Health: 290 ⇒ 275
- Damage: 14 ⇒ 18
- Attack Cooldown: 1.6 ⇒ 1.5
- Physical Resist: 25 ⇒ 0
- Magical Resist: 25 ⇒ 0
- Aquadillo
- Damage: 80 ⇒ 60
- Attack cooldown: 3.5 2.5 seconds
- Splash damage: 20% ⇒ 40%
- Cannonball (R)
- Damage: 40 Projectile ⇒ 20 Normal
Mercenaries
- Juggernaut
- Health: 3500 ⇒ 3000
- Movement speed: 2.7 ⇒ 3.2
- Armor type: Light ⇒ Heavy
- Leviathan
- Health: 700 ⇒ 600
- Damage: 120 ⇒ 100
Items
The Item system has been entirely revamped. A complete list of the new items can be found on the forums here!
- Items now each cost 1 Scrap to purchase. As a reminder, players gain 1 Scrap each time they level up!
- More items now provide some amount of statistical gain (things like Physical Resist, Attack Damage, Ability Power)
- Items are now three-tiered.
- The first tier of item usually provides a simple statistical boost
- The second tier usually offers a better boost to the same line of stats
- The third tier offers the best stat boosts, and provides a bonus "gift," either in the form of a new, rarer stat, or a passive effect, or an active effect.
Wards
- No longer cost Scrap
- Ground Ward
- Expires after 120 seconds
- Now holds up to 3 charges
- Recharges every 120 seconds
- Air Ward
- Expires after 180 0seconds
- Now holds up to 2 charges
- Recharges every 180 seconds
Questions
We'd love broad feedback about the components of the new systems in the game! Specifically
- How did you feel about gold in the game? How did it change the way you played?
- What did you think of the XP system? What did you think about the "chunks" of XP from various actions? What did you think about getting scrap every level? What did you think about tech level = XP level?
- What did you think about the updated item store?
- What did you think about mercs in this new system?
There's certainly more that changed, so feel free to add additional feedback!
Comments
Wow, what an update! This build was definitely way more interesting than previous 2.0 builds! It's too bad it was kind of anticlimactic when you realized that the endgame was just who could sneak in and quickly snipe the enemy nexus first, since, oops, meganodes and nexuses are way too weak now!
In all of my games it seemed like my teammate and I were making a natural progression towards the enemy nexus by slowly taking down towers and expansions, when the game abruptly ended because either my team or the other had just went and killed off a nexus without anyone even realizing they were headed there. I'm very excited to see how it goes when you can't just backdoor a nexus, because if you ignored that part of the game then it was playing out very well!
I never came anywhere near bottoming out my gold, so I don't know. Steaks
were way more important. But the whole system is way more interesting than the previous one. The whole linear gold thing got boring pretty fast.
I think the tech=xp system is a pretty good idea, I just don't feel like it changed the game much from the gem system. It still just kind of feels like, "if I just kill creep camps and collect gems and stuff then right around when I've killed them all I'll have pretty much everything unlocked." It doesn't really feel like you have to work for anything, so it's not super exciting when you get it. I think a big part of this is that there's really no danger in the early game.
Scrap income seemed good, it felt like a good pace. Chunks of XP from actions definitely needs some UI feedback or something so it's more clear how much of what you get from doing stuff, like a little XP plume thing popping up on top of a unit's corpse when you kill it. I never knew what each letter for each little XP meter stood for either, and it didn't seem to matter.
Well, there's a lot of 'em!
I think it's super cool to have an item store with lots of different possibilities for your squad. It's a big part of why MOBA's are so fun to play: have a plan for what items you need to go for and work towards them. Once you finally get what you need it's super rewarding. I'm pretty sure everybody loved charms right away so this just seems like a natural progression.
As an added thing, I will say that having lots of different hotkeys, more than other MOBA's -- item slots, wards, unit abilities, merc abilities, etc -- doesn't feel overwhelming at all and I like that there's a lot more microability and depth that way.
OMG way better! I love that they use less supply than your standard units, encouraging you to actually use the cheap support mercenaries and not just stockpile resources for a bunch of expensive Juggernauts! Woooooo it's
SO SICK!--
P.S. It seems like there were some graphics changes snuck in? New textures or shaders or something? I don't know what it was, but I liked it a lot!
Not enough rat. I really felt like backdooring just wasn't an option.
Woohoo! So much material to consider.
Gold and How I Feel About It
Topic
(1.1) - First impression of gold, fairly positive! I couldn't quite tell right away how it was working, when I'd hit a limit or what to plan for, but overall, playing within it was fun. My natural tendency, when reading "limited resource" was to be thrifty. That's probably the wrong way to play, and pretty quickly I found I'd just push the button until it beeped. That didn't seem to have much repercussion, though. Overall felt like I was playing with more units more quickly faster soonish. The game definitely feels like it gets rolling quicker as a result, though part of this is Crunchmap (see previous feedback, it seems to be faster).
XP System and How My Accountant Feels About It
Overall Impression
(2.1) - I really liked having so much more impact from XP, both when ahead and when behind. I perhaps would have expected being at a severe level disadvantage would suck, but the one time that happened, it wasn't noticeable, which is cool. Makes me feel like you guys have struck a pretty strong resonance on this one. I think one of the reasons it didn't feel bad was that there was still a great deal to be doing, so looking through the item lists wasn't even something you'd have time to do. Plus, the fact that each level effectively has a decision attached to it, seems like it lessens the disparity (where before it was just a scalar indicator of the balance of the gameplay).
Chunks
(3.1) - I like the idea of having separate trackers for each type of XP, and it's a nice way to have in-game feedback on how you're doing, even just at the level of having little badges for your expansions. It's not too clear yet how the chunks get broken out (how much each thing one can do is worth), but that doesn't seem that big a deal. I could imagine that with more time on the build, planning out levels for tech advantage could be a thing, like just-in-time ults before, but for now, it's more just a feedback kind of thing. I like seeing it broken out.
Scrap
(4.1) - I dig scrap. If I may reference other IP, it feels more like vanilla wow to me, less LoL item shop, and I really like the iterative process of building up levels. Feels more flexible than Heroes. Overall feel of working with it was very positive.
Tech Level and XP Level
(5.1) - I also like it attached to XP level. As I say above, at least for these early games, it didn't feel painful to have a level disadvantage. The game felt faster, and the rate at which one diversified was high. Even mirror matchups felt more varied. It made me wonder what it would be like if XP influenced the nature of scrap purchases, like if you got economic levels, you'd get variants of upgrades with perhaps more defensive, more resource based affixes.
Item Store
Variability and Levels
(6.1) - I really liked the item store. I missed the stat upgrade tree from before, but this actually feels better in many ways, in part because of the distributed adds. These make the choices more stylistic in some cases, and less just building blocks. The bonuses feel massive, too. I almost can imagine armor and weapons being air dropped onto the units with each add, progressing from Diablo 3 starting character outfit to legendaries.
Mercs Within This Framework
(7.1) - Yay for the middle man! I felt like it was much more worthwhile to play with a range of mercs here, though their impact wasn't as strong as I'd like. As an example, I felt like the Healer, given it now takes out from your entire unit count, didn't actually heal enough to feel effective. Great to have in the army, but didn't negate enough damage before losing. Still, like where they are at in terms of economy and army size.
Other Comments
Wards
(8.1) - I didn't feel like wards had much of a decision associated with them, because of the (lack of) cost. Late game, before, there'd be so many gems it didn't really matter (making it equivalent to how they are in this build), but I like the choice of using up resources on them early on (from the other builds). I'm not sure how you guys would fit that into this form of the economy, though. Wards spawn back at your base, but you have to kill them (collect them) before you can use them out in the forward field.
Nexus Rushing
(9.1) - I'm not sure I'd change anything, but we did keep getting GloriNib'd tonight. I would like to have towers back, in part for this, but also for base building. However, instinctively I feel like this isn't necessarily something that warrants a brute force solution. It's probably just a gameplay adjustment. That being said, I like building fortifications. Can we have constructible walls back?
Squad Changes
Hydros
(10.1) - Overall, like the changes, feels less tanky, slightly more applicability (largely due to the Scuttleguard increased damage). Aquadillos feel a fair bit less impactful now, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Jumping into a pack felt more like a suicide mission tonight. The T2 (forget what it's called at the moment) feels super vulnerable, more so than before, as they felt really tough to keep active in engagements without getting wiped out. Some good there, but without them, the dynamics of the squad definitely go down.
Both games I played last night ended in a back door!
Coming from playing a lot of Dota, it felt especially weird to me, since Dota religiously enforces the Order Of Things. You can't effectively damage the second tower until you've killed the first, and you can't effectively damage the third until you've killed the second, etc. It seems to me that the nexus ought to be immune to damage until at least one of the mega nodes has been destroyed.
As for the rest of the changes, this was the first Major Revision since I got into the daily tester group, and I gotta admit, it was pretty overwhelming! That said, I noticed the following:
1) I could expand the size of my army much more quickly, and I felt like I could actively get ahead in army size.
2) I felt like I could research tech. In both playtest weekends, I felt like upgrades came strongly at the cost of building units, which were way to valuable to give up. Now that they're on different resource costs, I was able to get a lot of upgrades, which felt interesting to me. This seems like a positive trend. It also made sense to me that upgrades/charms are working on the same currency.
3) The new system added what I might describe as "traditional" macro. In my mind, this moves it from an RTS-MOBA hybrid to an RTS with MOBA elements. I don't think that this is particularly good or bad either way, but it drastically changed the feel of the game to have to remake my units manually each time I got wiped. I suppose you could say it feels like a slight genre shift, mechanically.
4) I felt like my ultimate was a lot further away. I think I got mine in one of the games right before it ended, and in the other I'm not sure I ever got it at all. This may be in part because of the backdooring issue, but as a matter of preference I feel like I'd want to get my ult earlier rather than later.
Regarding the actual questions asked:
1) Gold never felt super limiting, but I don't think that bothered me. I got kind of close once, but I was very much losing and it actually seemed like a good indicator of how I was doing in the game.
2) Somehow collecting XP from gem nodes instead of gems from gem nodes makes less intuitive sense, but overall having game actions improve your hero level makes sense to me. I couldn't tell if you still got XP from combat (aside from killing an enemy hero), but I feel like you should simply from what the term "experience" implies. Tech level and player level being tied makes all the sense in the world to me. I think it also helps gate the game ender units (I'm looking at you, Juggernaught).
3) I really liked the new item store, especially since the items don't compete with units for resources. I couldn't really tell if the item "slots" were limiting, and I didn't get that far, but since the charms feel so much like upgrades now I think that would be kind of weird, especially since two of the slots are full of wards.
4) So apparently, getting 4 assault cubes at the beginning of the game is better for clearing out neutral camps than getting your base units. Therefore, going assault and grabbing 4 cubes is The Way To Play, from what I could tell. That said, having mercenaries be so heavily limited and competing with your main army for supply made a lot of sense to me in a broad sense.
I'm really excited about the future of Atlas. I keep getting more pumped with each big change that comes out. I do have to ask myself whether or not it's because I like new things, or because the game is inherently awesomer, but either way I still have reactions to playing games.
Gold
I never ran out of gold. I surprised myself by how much I liked the limited gold fund. I always felt like I could afford what I needed - a first for Alder. I've been playing Alder for about 8 or 9 months, since I joined, and the only build where I could buy everything was during that build where everyone could buy all the things. Ever since then, I've felt entirely resource-starved in every game. In this iteration of Atlas however, I could build what I wanted, when I wanted. Even losing fights felt pretty cool, because build times were lower than respawn times. Getting 80 gold for killing health towers felt like an excellent reward, and honestly more than enough.
XP System
I'll start with Tech being gated by XP. Initially I really disliked it. After playing, it seemed pretty cool, where players are now rewarded by unlocking more powerful stuff for fighting well and expanding well and gemming well. I would have loved if there was some option to circumnavigate the gated tech, like having high-tiered units and upgrades costing vastly more or something, so that players at least have the option to weigh whether their tech is worth a heavy investment, or if it's better to wait and level up and get it at a normal time. Plus with the respawn mechanic removed, it makes their decision all that more important.
Regardless, tying gems to XP felt interesting to me, since now players who are losing heavily in combat have ways to even the score. Tactical gemming and staying on the fringe of the opponent's range seems like it'd be an option now to try and "get back into the game", whereas in the previous build I felt like, if for example bot player is losing, it's better for the bot player to abandon lane and group up. In this build there's at least another way to get the ult.
Speaking of ults, I felt like level 10 is too far off currently (or games are just ending too soon). I'd love to be able to use my ult for at least 2/3 of the game - I think taking ults (both ally and opponent) into consideration makes for really interesting battles.
The little vats of xp that collected up and spilled over into actual xp bar progression felt pretty natural too. At first I was like "wtf are those CEEEEEEEEE things" but it felt pretty good when actually playing.
Getting scrap every level as the only way to get scrap was really cool. If workers didn't move scrap pieces to expansions I wouldn't have been as confused for the first game though lol. I found myself looking forward to leveling up every single time - a feeling I experience in any other game where I level up.
Items
Overall loved the diversity. Revamped upgrade system essentially, as far as I understood it. Tooltips were a bit ambiguous, especially concerning the activated abilities only being active at lvl3 items, but the concept felt really cool. I feel like I have many many options for routes of attack.
Wards on cooldown is amazeballs.
To repeat myself from above, bypassing the tier=xp requirement with a heavy cost of higher tier items could be interesting too, although with the current system it's essentially the same (if a lvl2 item costed 4 scrap, I'd need 3 extra levels if I were to want to buy it, and then I essentially just have the tier requirement).
Mercs
I only used the Square (Assualt) Cubes to one-shot titan camps, and occasionally did multi prong ion cannons, which felt really awesome.
Teleporter backdoor to win games was dominant, but ignoring that, I mostly saw cubes being used as parts of armies. Many opponents would constantly have 4 mercs of various types up, whereas I personally went for a squad-heavy comp. I really really loved seeing this difference, because it makes me feel like there's strategy space to optimize army comps at various states of the game, as well as react to the opponent's squad. I feel like I need to play another 20 or so balanced games before I start to wrap my head around all the different options.
UI + Health Bars
Golden standard top health bars are just so good. Every battle felt parseable. Unit selection under-halo also felt really crisp. I miss the attack cooldown indicator, but I assume that eventually the unit model animations will have some kind of tell.
Inflection Upgrades
These getting built immediately is the best thing ever. I can now upgrade mid-battle and have what I need in a pinch. For qol, I could imagine having it be a 2 or 3 second build time so I have time to cancel in case of a misclick, but this is kinda negligible probably.
Other Thoughts
I've never had more fun in Atlas. This build really feels like an RTS. I did not miss respawn at all. I felt like battles meant something. I could make an actual army as Alder and that felt amazing. I feel like there are many many different builds and plans of attack. I feel like a single player has more impact on the game now, rather than being a small ripple in a 3-player pond (okay, analogy not so good).
Now let's get more players in the gameeeeeeeee
Thanks for testing :D
As you might expect, this is one of the big things design is discussing today. Not certain we'll have a perfect solution for Sunday, but we'll likely do something short-term like buffing the Nexus health/shield values.
This was admittedly an oversight on our part; we scaled mid-to-lategame damage way up through the new Item system, but didn't compensate structure health with this. As such, damage is scaling up to as much has 400% of base, but structures went mostly untouched haha.
You mentioned not feeling much danger in the earlygame. I suspect this is largely a result of Titan camps being a more attractive draw earlier in the game because of how rewarding the dropped Gems are, and how meaningful the expansions are. and as such, even though the gems in mid are VERY valuable, unless we communicate that well, players aren't as inclined to fight over them. So, that'll take some work to feel right for sure.
Incidentally, what you touched on here (UI feedback) is what I'm inclined to point to as the easiest way to make this system really feel impactful. The UI for these systems will, in general, make a pretty big impact. As you stated, you didn't really know what each tab meant. Optimizing that UI to match the experience is a big goal to really making that system feel complete.
Stoked that you're enjoying the item system btw! We're pretty happy with the general feeling we're getting from our first crack at this specific item system setup!
Thanks for testing :D
I actually only played for about half the playtest time. This wasn't because I couldn't play the rest, I just ended up not wanting to.
I feel like we have barely any decision making left in the game, we're on a railroad that we can't get off outside of minor deviations.
* No more choosing between gem or scrap expansions (order, timing, etc)
* Losing battles doesn't actually matter anymore than it used to until you actually run out of stock. It's like fellreaver in Hearthstone, it doesn't matter how much you burn until you otherwise run out and I was never running out.
* We can only build 4 mercs at once, the relevant combinations available isn't enough when we can only ever have 4 total.
* XP is really the only resource we control now, and that's relatively boring.
* Resource management is almost completely pointless
* Even if you lose your units you can rebuild to the composition you need or would better suit your needs...
* except... you can't tech faster or slower than the others unless you're winning or losing. It's a "win more" situation where more xp=higher tech=better units=win more fights through more options and stronger units, bigger armies, etc
* There was no way to really skip anything other than T1 (through mercs). Forced progression indirectly through XP.
* I didn't feel like I had much in the way of access to significantly affect my progression
* The tower-disabling charm is completely worthless now where before it was a cool tech option
* Wards are free, no choice in if you can afford them or not. Just chuck them down every so often because they expire and you get them again.
* The nexus is very weak and vulnerable to backdoors or even just walking up to with any level 8+ squad (or two).
* I never saw any juggernauts or levs built because they simply weren't needed and you wouldn't have the supply cap for them anyways
* Cubes are just better T1 units for many squads, more health, more damage, better for killing titans...
* Alder is stupid good because of his stuns and healing vs cost and ability to counter it. Whatever balance was there is completely gone, he's broken and unfun to play against.
* The healing charm is now basically mandatory for everyone else so you can heal while out in the field. Just an illusion of choice that you could not buy it.
* Not being able to build towers to protect areas was very much missed because they're all so squishy now. You can't really protect an area or slow down the other team unless you're actually there yourself.
* Deathballs were one of two ways to win, backdoor or deathball. Deathballs are very scary because they snowball hard.
I don't like starting with all my resources and then essentially being allowed to extract it overtime. I'm not building up to something, I'm slowly whittling away savings... kind of lame conceptually.
It seems too simplistic and tied together while not really noticable. For all I cared in-game it was based on the play-time, there wasn't really much of a visual feedback linking the chunks of XP gained to any real actions in-game (even if they are heavily linked it wasn't conveyed well).
It's overall fantastic. Bundling the different abilities/stats into items for different trade offs is really cool. Having tiered items is great, but I almost feel like it should be inverted so active abilities are earlier and big passives later. Early game is where you're focusing more on micro and the abilities can really be handy, makes those battles more engaging. The big passives will help with large scale late game battles.
Too little of them and they are flip flopping between useless and overpowered because of it.
We may actually end up dialing more towards encouraging some level of thrift, haha. We didn't see a ton of instances last night of people hitting Emergency Mode, and we definitely want some of that. But mostly, this will be a case of watching a ton of last night's games and analyzing what the step there is. Not totally clear just yet.
As a side note, I'm hoping we can clean up the item tooltips sooner than later to help players plan around their higher-tier purchases better. Right now the only way to learn is to experience, or to use the cheat sheet, haha.
Awesome stuff, glad to hear it! The clarity issue, I suspect, will mostly come from cranking out the proper UI for the system, which we can do after we've refined the system more.
Vanilla WoW in the sense of "I leveled, so I got a talent point to spend"?
WOOOOOO!
Awesome! Yeah, the item hybridization was something we hadn't planned for the economy rework right off the bat; we were playing the build with single-stat items for a while. We got the idea of hybrid-stat itemizing early last week (if I recall correctly) and immediately dug it. Interested to see how this continues to play out, and, moreover, stoked to learn what we need to adjust for this kind of growth system to live in an RTS!
Deeeefinitely gonna need some tuning on mercs, haha. We pretty much didn't touch specific Merc stats for this build (other than Juggernauts), so the stat set on Mercs right now comes from the era where you could have just a sheer ton of them. We'll likely do some rebalancing of the mercs now that we have a more explicit merc cap.
We've talked (briefly) about maybe increasing the cooldown of wards even further than we had them in earlier internal builds, for this exact reason. If you can do it this frequently, it's not much of a decision point. This will just take some discussing and iterating to get right. The short version of how we arrived at this implementation was simply that it didn't make sense to use either resource (Scrap or Coin) for Wards. So we turned to an existing model for vision-granting items, which was to make them free and put them on a cooldown. But as you alluded to, having two kinds of wards somewhat diminishes the importance of your choice of where to place them.
NIIIIIIIIB! Haha yeah, we're going to do something short-term for this while we're discussing longer-term solutions that target making the ends of games make more sense, and feel like something you're progressing towards.
Will likely be adjusting their base EHP to compensate for the increased damage. Or rather, to make a broader statement: Having proper itemization scaling in the game will push us towards revisiting a lot of the base values of units (especially higher-tier units that will be affected more by this system).
Thanks for testing and for the feedback, as always! <3
Gold
I played a few games, and they all ended before I got below 100g, maybe even 150g. I know that games were ending a little faster than intended due to the stacked bonuses of some of the charms. As things are currently, the function of the gold limit mechanic is largely psychological, and I think players will quickly learn to ignore gold.
I'm not sure if the gold exhaustion mechanic, were it to become more relevant, would make for good endgame scenarios. If one player runs out much sooner than any of the opposing players, it's pretty much gg for that team, so yes the game does end decisively at that point. This does create some teamwork around making sure that one player doesn't run out too quickly. The scenario I am more concerned with is where all players exhaust themselves without doing significant damage to each others defensive structures. If this happens, the game will devolve into long stretches of inactivity punctuated by clashes until one team wins a decisive enough victory to push down the nexus.
Perhaps a better way to make gold more relevant would be to give players a smaller sum at the start (perhaps 50g), and institute a constant rate of gold gain. This would make player feel a little closer to the edge during the early game, and perhaps force them to play cautiously for a minute or two while their gold reserves recover. Players would build up a gold buffer in the early game while their supply limit is low, which would begin to deplete in the late game as the scale of armies and engagements outstrips the rate of passive gain rate. This gain rate would still be a little higher than the current emergency rates, which might reduce the game lengths of games that have "stalled out."
Supply
When you get down to it, the regenerating supply system is hardly different from the old fixed gold income system. I don't really find that to be a problem, and I like that I can now alter the composition of my squad each time I rebuild it, because it allows me to respond more promptly specific kinds of threats (for example, switching to Orions to counter an incoming air push).
There is a bit of a funny double wait cycle because I am waiting on supply to return and also for units to build, so my trips back to base involve me queueing up a batch of units and deploying the previous batch. I feel like the unit build times are in that awkward "comercial break" range where if I just wait I'm not doing anything for several seconds, but there isn't enough time for me to go do something else in between. Since its not vital that I deploy units right away. It would certainly be simpler if units built instantly, but supply regen timers where increased to compensate. Perhaps most units could build almost instantly, but certain units (like heavy siege mercenaries) could take considerably longer to build, creating some timing play where your army is a little down in supply while your siege weapons build.
Mercs
I like the new Merc system. The fact that you usually want to build cubes right away feels a little weird, but it actually seems like a good way to smooth the variations in each squad's ability to clear early titan camps.
Scrap and Items
The new system seems like it works well. I think my personal preference would be towards a greater emphasis on squad specific upgrades versus generic item upgrades. I feel like some of the items are granting abilities (lifesteal, for example) that are (A) very flavorful and should be the province of a particular squad and/or (B) could be very unbalanced/unfun in the hands of certain squads.
Note on movement speed buffs
There are now a lot of stacking sources of movement speed bonuses in the game. In most of my games, each team had rabbit's foots, teleporters, and often both teams had an Eris. This made the pacing of the later game pretty hectic, and made the map feel quite small.
To combat this I might reexamine the teleporter's speed field, as it kind of intrudes on the mechanical space of squads like Eris and Wind. Perhaps it would be safest to just prevent movement buffs from stacking.
That's definitely a possible option. We're discussing what that story arc towards the end of the game should look like, and, as such, what we need to make that make sense. But the intent of what you're suggesting is spot on, everything should progress towards ending the game rather than the end being sudden and unsuspecting.
WOO! One other note: A simple way to describe what you're talking about re: upgrades and charms being on the same currency is: Scrap is in charge of your army's power growth. And that was a pretty major goal of this design of the resource system, so it's awesome that you picked up on that and that it was clear. =)
Ooh, interesting. I like this perspective actually. Nice!
The timing/pacing of unlocks is still something we're likely going to move around just a bit. We also might not, though, haha. I agree that it feels like you don't get your ult until very late in the game, though. And one reason this might concern us is that the Hero's ultimate may tie into the squad's core gameplay patterns too much to hold off on introducing them so late into the game. Just another item we'll have to discuss.
This was one of the things we liked most about this system, actually, is that you could look at your stock and tell roughly how you were performing in the game. Levels are a part of this, too; you can get a rough "report card" of how you're doing simply on the UI. And we'll likely look to make this more significant. Maybe we do something like show each player's total stock loss, or something of that sort.
You definitely get EXP from combat, and our UI needs to communicate that better. And it likely will sooner than later, once we have the pieces locked into place a bit more tightly. The rest of this is great to hear!
If you get to "full build" in a game (maxed items in all 4 slots), I'd love to hear your thoughts on this from that experience!
Haha, funny story, in internal testing we actually found ourselves not using mercs much at all, so that particular issue didn't stand out to us terribly much. By the time we got to the playtest, people had figured out this "One neat trick to reach level 4 at 3 minutes!" So the short answer there is: yeah, we'll have to tune mercs quite a bit over time to make them "feel right" and play nice with the other systems.
Thanks so much for testing, and welcome to the daily group! :D
WOO!
Re: Health tower rewards -- we were talking as recently as an hour before publishing about perhaps adjusting that 80 coin reward value. We're probably going to continue discussing that.
We haven't started discussing the tech circumnavigation bit yet, but it's on our radar for sure. The ability to rush T3s is something we're aware we took away, and we have to discuss whether to bring that back at a cost, or answer that question some other way.
WOOHOO!
Answered this above, but the short re-answer to this is: We might be getting ults too late, and we'll have to toss around whether that's the pacing we're okay with or if we want earlier access to that.
Nice! Hopefully it'll feel even better once the UI for it is more complete, haha!
Oof, good point. Maybe we can toss in a short-term fix here. Will investigate.
We're looking into what quick solutions we have to communicate what a player is working towards when going down an item path. Might not have anything particularly soon, but we'll likely handle it through tooltipping when we do solve it.
Woo!
Hahaha we've gotta talk about what to do specifically in the Assault Cube case. Also, I'm going to totally scope your games for the Ion Cannon splits. Very cool!
Yeah, it's actually remarkable just how much the health bar change had an impact on everyone's experience. Bonkers. Re: attack cooldown indicator -- not sure if that'll necessarily be back as a UI element, but there might be some cool stuff we can do with unit animations down the line.
Other games handle this with "undo" mechanics, but also limit what situations you can make these purchases in. We'll eventually have to chat about what that full item/upgrade purchasing experience should look like.
WOOOO HOOOOO! :D
Thanks for playtesting and for the post!
Broad, less on-rails skill tree. There were definite optimums, in part due to prerequisites, but it didn't really lock you into something. Plus, the skills add to what you can do, and it's the same here. I like that I can build Hydros as both Holy and Ret. For comparison, In 2.x[<199], upgrades would come down to what units I was focusing on, critical abilities, and history of the game. They were more assessment decisions, less diversification decisions. Here, it feels like there is both. This meant I did find myself looking forward to getting a level here more than I did before.
Make it so you have to walk back to base to learn new skills?
The short answer to this block is: We still have a loooot of tuning to do to make sure the system feels right, and does what we want from it. We're asking a lot of this system, so we need to make sure it has the right configuration. And how exactly we reach that isn't perfectly clear yet.
So it seems like the big thing you're getting at in describing the weirdness is the "two-step" aspect of the current respawn/redeploy system. There's a pretty good chance that this is another "with time" thing that we'll just iron out gradually.
We still need to actually talk about whether this is exactly what we want, haha. The artillery cube opener that emerged might not quite be healthy. Lots to investigate there!
I think for now, we're very content with saying "some things are going to be crazy powerful on some squads and dismal on others." As long as we're keeping an eye on things, I'm hopeful that we can get away with doing a bit of that in exchange for the freedom to customize that we gain from it. Not to mention the variance that creates. That said, we also need to make sure it's still providing us with variance!
The Teleporter is another topic of discussion for the short-term, for sure. And it was an overwhelmingly loud factor last night.
Thanks so much for playtesting and for the post! Woo! :D
How did you feel about gold in the game? How did it change the way you played?
Overall I like the idea of using finite resources to promote game resolution and I like that knocking objectives grants you extensions. However it didn't change much the way the game itself is played as even with respawns it was on one's best interest not to trade units inefficiently. Finite gold just adds a timer. As such some notifications on the status of your reserves could help give the player feedback of how he's doing (ie "you've depleted 50% of your gold reserves!").
I didn't check if I could see opponent resource counts somewhere but I can definitely see that being useful to decide ganging up on someone who's low on gold.
On victories I was never close to running out of gold, seems like when a battle goes past the tipping point the losing side starts to basically hemorrage supply so that increases the longevity of the winner's current units a lot, so a lot of gold is saved. On losses I did run out around the time the enemy was smacking the nexus. Didn't get to play a close neck to neck game where it came down to gold efficiency.
What did you think of the XP system? What did you think about the "chunks" of XP from various actions?
Feels like fighting is worth more than resource collecting in terms of xp which is not a bad philosophy to have IMO, it's a pvp game after all.
What did you think about getting scrap every level?
I think it's fine. Leveling should entail a reward. Not entierely sure if awarding an upgrade/item is too much or too little but I'd definitely be disappointed to get nothing for leveling up, especially since each level takes longer to get than the one before.
What did you think about tech level = XP level?
XP as a teching resource can feel rather punishing to the losing side. I got the impression that the biggest xp source is killing enemy units, compared to say gem collecting. So being a couple levels down means being down in upgrades as well as supply (tied to level right?) and even unit tiers/abilities on lvl4/8/10. I don't mind it as long as there's a way to outplay people through the xp advantage, would need to play more games to see how that works out as I learn to control my army better.
What did you think about the updated item store?
I'm a big fan of items with actives like the sprinting boots rather than passive stat bonuses, would like to see more actives. I like the idea of the final tier upgrade offering a little extra for the commitment.
What did you think about mercs in this new system?
I like limited mercs as I believe the squads should be supported by mercs and not the other way around.
Not a big fan of having to choose mercs before the game though. I get that the idea behind separating merc factions is to have the player make a decision based on the strengths of a particular faction but I think that decision is more fun to make ingame. Maybe with a way to tech switch late game for a price.
I've always hated LoL's rune/mastery/summoner system for example because it's extremely frustrating to do the wrong thing before the game even starts, be it because of a misclick, or simply because of a misread on what the opponent is planning to do (based on their comp). What it leads most of the time is to always pick the safest best thing (ie ALWAYS bring Flash), so it feels like choices are neutral (I didn't screw up) vs negative (i done messed up) instead of A vs B.
Random misc feedback: loved the new hp bars. A lot easier to evaluate what's going on in fights. How about an option for autohiding at full hp for myself and always on for enemies? (since the hp bar helps spot them agains the terrain). I don't mind always on for both though, that's what I have it on right now.
Actually, that's something I noticed as well. The new limitations on mercs feel like the supply makes the decision for you, and having that bottled through a pre-game decision too might be a little tough.
I also want to add that for my part, the new supply system made my army feel more dynamic. If I had a lot of T1 units and I felt like I suddenly needed a lot of T2/T3 units to respond to an enemy, I have that choice now. The respawner doesn't just poop out whatever I'd made earlier in the game. Its less linear for sure, but I liked that in these playthoughs
Mechanically it played out fine since you never actually run out of gold, but psychologically it feels terrible to be limited like that.
It basically turned the game from an RTS into some kind of MOBA-wannabe, which I'm not a fan of.
Hugely against the MOBA-style "here's a billion options that are all just minor variations of each other, have fun parsing all of this crap" that creates a huge knowledge barrier for no reason. Would much rather have fewer, more straightforward upgrades that are very distinct from each other.
Rushing 4 cubes at the start seemed basically mandatory so you could insta-clear titans. After that they were too supply-inefficient to really bother with them(other than teleporters obviously).
This was the first time I didn't play a playtest all the way through, because the game just wasn't fun for me anymore. There's basically nothing that resembles an RTS now - no economy, no tradeoff between tech/mass/power, no meaningful fights for territory - just skirmish and level up as fast as possible so you can crash into the nexus.
It feels like much less of a waiting game now that we have more of the gold up front. That being said, I feel like the gold rate is a little too high at the moment . I didn't feel like I was burning through it fast enough even when not playing particularly safe.
-I'm still not used to the new XP system, but I'm okay with it so far.
-I like getting scrap every level, it feels much less arbitrary now than scrap seemed previously (previously just floating a ton of scrap).
-I'm kind of on a fence about the tech level = XP level, some squads that rushed T2 or T3 as a build path are now locked out of that playstyle even though it was an interesting option.
First impression is that this, along with the changes to scrap, are going to make for more interesting decisions being made in the game. It was pretty much just pick the same two charms as soon as you had the scrap before and now there is a lot of different routes to investigate. Items levels will make for more differentiation that was previously lacking.
I liked having more freedom to invest in the lower tier mercs. Getting early mercs feels more worthwhile than they had in the previous "wait for a bunch of juggernauts" style of game.
How did you feel about gold in the game? How did it change the way you played?
I didn't really feel the impact too heavily. Most game didn't really go long enough for it to be a factor but I do like the idea of watching the noose tighten and being forced into risky plays like grouping up and rushing a healing fountain. Overall I felt like I was more worried about the XP I gave my opponents than the gold I was losing.
What did you think of the XP system? What did you think about the "chunks" of XP from various actions?
I really like the gems spawns contributing to your XP but am not a big fan of the expansions. It was really hard to determine how much XP was being provided by each source and exactly how large an impact taking my expansions was having. Killing enemy workers is currently very valuable and I would often lose ground to my enemy and then just wait for them to go somewhere else on the map before I killed the workers and the expansion and it seemed like I got more XP than they did. I think it would be cool if expansions slowly worked towards providing you with scrap outside of levels.
What did you think about getting scrap every level? What did you think about tech level = XP level?
Levels felt like they truly mattered and I found myself counting down the experience for all of them instead of just from level 5 to 6. I think the tech level being based on your XP level contributes to the impactfulness of levels and helped add power spikes to the game. I was saving up scrap so that I could spend 2 at level 4 and 3 at level 8 so I could immediately get the stronger benefits.
What did you think about the updated item store?
I really enjoyed playing with it and am a big fan of the concept but I think it currently heavily favours damage squads. Building physical resistance is very difficult with the hybrids available unless you want ability power in which case you have 2 options one of which is the thorns which doesn't feel very impactful.
What did you think about mercs in this new system?
Most mercs didn't seem to have much purpose. Besides artillery cubes and teleporters the only ones that I could really make a case for using are engineers, hornets or perhaps motivators and enhancers if the game goes late enough and you need to fill extra stock.
OK, so I had to think about this one, hence the delay in responding.
It didn't change the way I played directly because I never hit zero, but I was a bit more cautious and always nervous for the persistence of my units. The one time I took Eris though, holy crap it felt really bad vs Vela. My poor little stingers could be picked off so easily and it felt like I'd either be forced to retreat because the engagement would end poorly for me, or I'd engage and snipe the enemy hero in order to prevent exp acquisition (and get a good bit for myself) at the cost of gold. I don't know if something like that ends up being a viable trade-off strategy, or if I was just playing like crap, but it felt uncomfortable. Felt better when I was on Ryme (didn't get a chance to do Hydros, which I put as a disclaimer b/c that's my mainstay so I feel I'd get a much better gauge by playing him).
In all honesty I liked that more things were tied to my level, it certainly made it more significant, but I was so focused on the gameplay that I didn't really notice how often or how much the exp went up. To me, this is OK - as one gets better in the game they can figure out timings and focus on best returns for types of exp, but for a beginner, you can play by knowing "this is good, that is bad" without HAVING to know the specifics.
As others have noted, it's a little unfortunate that this gates tech choices because it limits playstyles and ways to respond to match-ups. Won't go into it more since Treisk has said it's being thought about. However, over the course of the game I felt super-focused on what my hero/squad was doing, moreso than in previous builds because it felt like almost everything else hinged on the choices I was making. It was intense but I liked that intensity as compared with traditional RTS intensity of "primarily work on managing your base and interaction in the field is secondary".
Overwhelming. I like the options in theory, in practice I spent so much time poring over them and trying to figure out what to do (quick note: the cheat sheet only helps so much because I still have to look through most of the items to find what I'm looking for). For now, it's definitely a positive because it lets me customize my squad (always a good thing) and also react to my opponent's squad selection.
A few of the options seemed ironic because, for example, a Vela T2 setup would probably benefit from the Flux Ribbon. That's not really practical in the current gated tech system though, it just made me lament the loss of such things, heh.
For whatever reason, insta-upgrades felt satisfying. Maybe because it was one fewer thing to track?
OK so, I really like how I have the options to intermingle mercs in early. This is a very welcome change and something I like having the option to consider. However, I'll probably dabble more with it once it's balanced. For example, I liked the option of getting a healer early when I took Hydros, but I found that it was just less effective than getting another squad unit. Cubes were addressed higher up, and they're almost like cheating early on, heh. I really love how the limit of 4 mercs means that my choices will evolve over the course of the game - that variety is good.
General closing feelings
Ultimate moved to level 10, I honestly can't tell if it felt too late in the game because I'm simply used to getting it sooner, or because it SHOULD be in sooner. It's part of the identifying characteristic of the squad so maybe it should be there a bit earlier? Or maybe it's a big goddamn deal so we should feel proud of when we hit 10 (or afraid when the opponent hits 10)?
Some choices were taken away in this build, while other choices were introduced. Overall it feels like, as a player, we came out ahead and I liked the direction that's been taken. If we can reintroduce some of the choices that had been lost without sacrificing core gameplay/balance, I'll be super-stoked.
Health bars were great, look forward to playing Hydros in PvP and being able to better heal MAH SCUTTLEBROS more efficiently instead of having to guess which ones are taking the most damage, heh.
I'm OK with wards not having a cost, but yeah, the cooldown seemed a bit quick. I'm OK with knowing that my opponent has the wards out somewhere, but I should feel good about taking 'em down and blinding them for a bit longer. Similarly, I should be calculating with my ward placement, whereas right now I just sort of spammed 'em.
I liked the "respawn" being food rather than the units so I could adjust army composition over time as needed. This brings in more of the "traditional" RTS side of things.
Wow holy moley... so I've played one game of the new build so haven't played it that much, but so far I really like the direction in which the game is going right now. Compared to the build a few months ago it feels much more fast paced, things kill things faster and move faster.
I like it!!
How did you feel about gold in the game? How did it change the way you played?
I haven't gotten to a point where I have spent all my gold and gotten myself into a position where I'm just hanging by a thread. When I got into the game, immediately I felt confused just by looking at my available resources and the cost of my units. My first thought was "WHOA I can get a BILLION things" until someone had to explain that the coin will run out eventually (I didn't remember this part from the patch notes then XD). Still though, that did not discourage me from getting the biggest possible army at all points in time since a bigger army grants more presence on the map, and also faster camp-taking and expansion-taking. There is basically no reason not to max out supply, it felt like maxing out was absolutely the norm, so spending the gold as much and fast as possible felt like the right thing to do, even if it means you'll burn out eventually.
I think the high death timers of troops in previous builds of the game was what made killing units worth it, since it would cripple the opponent's ability to do things for a long period of time, which is what made me think the new limited gold resource system was a bit unnecessary if it's in place to prevent seemingly endless battles due to armies constantly coming back all the time. I would prefer starting off with way less gold but being able to get more of it a bit at a time during the course of the game, for example gold drop pick-ups around the map.
What did you think of the XP system? What did you think about the "chunks" of XP from various actions? What did you think about getting scrap every level? What did you think about tech level = XP level?
It's super cool! Previously I disliked the idea of not being able to attain XP in any way other than killing the opponent's units, which meant if you can never take a good engagement, or even engage properly in a lane, you will fall behind in levels for a long time. This has happened to me AND the players who I laned against, and it felt bad/I felt bad for them. Now that there is at least a way to progress through levels and catch up, it feels great.
What did you think about the updated item store?
It's great that the only way to get more of them is to level up. I think it's better if the game was centered around levelling up since gems are important, and so are expansions, and the items are a way to incentivise getting those levels as fast as possible while keeping engagements a bit more interesting. Not much to say here since I haven't played with them a great deal, but I will keep an eye on this!
What did you think about mercs in this new system?
It feels strange to have so many mercs available while only being able to use a few of them at a time. I would like to have a few sentinels around on the map for map control while pushing with juggernauts while dropping everywhere on the map with transporters for example. Basically the utility of the mercs feels underwhelming given the limited number of mercs you can actually have on the field. I think it would be better to raise the cap on the number of mercs, or even make them take up main supply if some mercs are too powerful in large numbers.
If at all possible, I would LOVE to try a build where you can only build several types of mercs in the game but you can choose which ones to take in in the hero selection screen. I LOVE discussing choice of heroes when playing draft mode in MOBA games because it actually gets everyone talking and engaging in a discussion just before the game, for example one person might want to go sentinel / transporter / something because that person likes map control, or another person might want to go cube / juggernaut / something because they like to take on the role of sieging down buildings and camps.
Can't wait to leave more feedback after playing more! :>