Playtest 200: Stockmode Balance!
Treisk
Member, Administrator
in Patch Notes
Playtest 200: Stockmode Balance!
TL;DR - Balance adjustments!
General Gameplay
- Starting Coin: 300 ⇒ 200
- Coin reward from destroying Healing Nodes: 80 ⇒ 50
- Nexus
- Shields: 1500 ⇒ 3000
- Health: 3000 ⇒ 6000
Squads
Celesta
- Celesta
- Crystalline Hawk (D)
- Base damage: 25 ⇒ 15
- Damage per Hero level: 2.5 ⇒ 2
- Crystalline Hawk (D)
Mercenaries
- Mercenaries now become available at Level 2!
- Engineers are now available at Level 4!
- Artillery Cube
- Damage vs Titans: Quadruple ⇒ Double
Items
Tri-Star
- Level 2
- Attack cooldown reduction: 10% ⇒ 8%
- Level 3
- Attack damage: 40% ⇒ 30%
- Ability Power: 30% ⇒ 25%
- Attack cooldown reduction: 16% ⇒ 12%
Questions
- 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?
Comments
Dear Atlasien,
In Gbd5912c9a1eb40fcbf353408db14a645 the foreign team is taking a serious lead, i feel powerless until i stack four dancer leading to real burst of chaotic damage, i got some lag isue during the game, and it does not feel like a network problem.
After 15mn there is a clash between the two eris (i die because i am focusing like an fool).
And there is a massive drop of packet. I dont know what Circus saw but it feels so bad.
There was other little drop of packet during the game nothing important.
And btw, those flower circle are too real: it feels they shoot outside of it (like half a unit outside.
Cheers.
This build is hella intense! Your units dying totally sucks which is great. I love that when you kill a tower it helps out your whole team immensely.
The huge battles in the late game were sick, I totally missed those.
The delayed stock freeing thing is kind of weird, it took me a while to figure out what was going on. I'm sure if we stick with it then it'll be represented in the UI more intuitively, though.
Yeah, not much else to say except I loved it! We had a 31-minute game and it was fun the whole time!
Second Time Around
Gold
(1.1) - Reducing the gold certainly had a strong effect on the way the game played. In games tonight, Hydros and Vex, the need to try and be economical definitely changed the balance of the tier 1 use. Normally, these are key parts of the action of the squad, in a combo sense (at least early on), and both the scuttleguards and spitfires burned through coin just by using them to engage like they are designed to. Makes it an interesting challenge to figure out, I guess. Overall, I like the reduced gold. Adds a lot more dynamic systems (gameplay style change over time, match duration gating).
XP
(2.1) - Still liking the XP changes. Only comment is that it felt like back line objectives (titans, gems, expansions) had low impact on XP rate. I don't remember what the actual numbers are, or whether the intent is to make sure that the bulk of leveling comes from direct engagement, but it definitely feels like the case here. Maybe a bonus to expansion xp based on the number you have going?
Items
(3.1) - More tonight, perhaps because of levels and reduced gold, I felt like I really had to decide carefully on upgrades and items. Like it.
Mercs
(4.1) - Low actual impact tonight. I tended to play heavy army tonight, as it felt like I needed the rate of attack and presence on field.
Last playtest was super frustrating and my last post was probably overly negative because of it, so I gave the changes a fair shot and played 6 games today. Hopefully I can articulate things a little better now.
Still didn't really change how I played - I've yet to run out of stock just mindlessly spamming tier 1 with Celesta. As a win condition I have no idea how I'm progressing over the course of the game - there'd be games where it feels like I'm losing because they're killing our bases, or it feels really even, and then suddenly they run out of stock and I'm like "oh, I guess I was winning?"
did you think about getting scrap every level? What did you think about tech level = XP level?
I'm not a fan of how many things are tied to the key levels(4,8). I just end up saving my scrap until I reach those because there's so many things that unlock at those points. I don't feel good about getting level 3, 5, 6, 7 - I'm just desperately trying to get to 4 and 8 because that's where all the good stuff is.
I had to look at the out-of-game list to figure out two items that seemed good and then just built them every game. They give an illusion of choice but you're really just going to do the same thing every time - if you're DPS you get DPS upgrades, if you're tanking then you get health and resistance. Of course, upgrades are very straightforward in other RTS games as well, but there's always a tradeoff of whether you want upgrades or units or tech - there's no tradeoff here because you don't use scrap for anything else.
Cubes are still really strong. I tried motivators for a few games and I didn't even notice the difference between having them or not. There were a few moments where I'd be like "oh maybe I could get this merc now", but I already had 4 and I didn't have a way of getting rid of one besides feeding the enemy. Either way, mercs don't really feel that impactful at all after the initial cube wave - by that time, you've already started upgrading your squad, so it'd be stupid not to spend your supply on the squad units that will actually benefit from the scrap you've been working towards.
There still isn't any sense of economy anymore - bases don't feel like they do anything, and more often than not they actually just feel bad because I know my opponent is getting a bunch of XP for killing my workers. There's no way for me to snowball and get a huge army lead or anything like that - I have to nickel and dime the opponent until they suddenly lose from stock, or hope that they somehow got way out of position and I can rush the nexus. I don't know how I'm supposed to get a meaningful advantage over my opponent and that's really frustrating.
Overall, the game basically feels like a fighting game now - a series of neutral fights until someone runs out of HP/stock. Thinking about it like that, the game is kind of fun, but it's not at all what I expect when I'm playing an RTS.
Hi. I'm coming in from playtest weekend 2. So far I've only gotten in one bots game with the holiday and all.
Haven't gotten deep enough into it. There was a certain micro satisfaction of buying units more often, but it was also kind of a panic "OMG I need to get units out" without thinking about it too much. Some confusion about how much I could buy, but I know that's a temporary UI issue. I didn't run out of gold. I felt like we were getting raided pretty hard - and then the other team went yellow (so did some of my allies briefly) and we won.
I like that there are several avenues to XP and when it's working you have some idea what you are getting it from. Keeping track of where the XP chunks came from could provide some interesting post-game stats. On the downside there is no longer the strategic element of having to a get a certain resource for a certain benefit (e.g. gems for mercs)
So far I like the scrap; I've always hated superfluous zeros and it's a pretty good pace of decision making. As with units I sometimes forget to spend it, and then end up making decisions in a rush.
Turning tech into XP get's rid of a little complexity. It removes a strategic axis in terms of timing (tech rush etc) but that's fine if you've got depth elsewhere. Tilts the feel a little from RTS to RPG.
Number of choices is a little bewildering coming into it. Mostly feel like generic stat upgrades. A few percent here and there doesn't provide immediate feedback and I'd like to know what my allies/opponents are doing as well.
Didn't use them much, but I was barely starting to get the hang of them in playtest 2. As a new user of the system it was easy to fill out squad units and then realize I had no supply left. Or if I wanted a particular merc, the old line of reasoning was the active "get gems", and now it's the passive "wait"
I had a lot of really fun and exciting games today.
The lower stock really put the pressure on in some games and forced desperate plays which I though was great. G306fca79e3b64dd593f1970db546b45b is a great example of this as we had no stock left in the top lane and so I went and pushed through some fountains solo to give us a chance to stay in the game. After some solid defence to a scattered push we were able to snatch a win. This game also had a really fun matchup in the botlane where Cycle the Alder bully was stomping me as I sat on level 7 forever desperately waiting for the level 8 power spike to be able to fight back.
Backdooring was much less of an issue and the instances I saw of it honestly seemed pretty fair as it requires you to be late into the game and for your enemies to be rather far forwards. This might be different as Celesta who could potentially level 10 BD still, but I didn't play her.
The biggest concern I had for this build was the low impact from expansions. If your enemy kills an expansion at some point in the game they probably got more XP from it than you did if they killed the workers. It's possible to push into the enemy brutal camp and kill 18 workers every two minutes if you left the bases up and this would give 18 XP bars which seems about what having 3 expansions there would produce over the course of the game if left uninterrupted. Even though you get so much XP for attacking enemy expansions they produce so little that ignoring them to rush a healing fountain or an enemy tower is usually more beneficial.
You could take a single expansion at the start of the game and play aggro and if you were trading at least evenly in the fights you'd likely come out ahead through worker kills and gem control.
I know this isn't super important at the moment but in terms of balance Vex, Alder and Celesta feel leagues ahead of everyone else.
Gold definitely felt tighter during this test. My finicky graphics drivers prevented me from actually seeing a game to its finish, but I at least felt that the gold supplies were running low as matches moved into the endgame phase.
I do feel that gathering xp does feel a little disconnected from level progression, despite all the UI attention. I think at this point I am just conditioned to harvest gems and clear camps, and leveling just feels like something that happens at a steady rate. This feels fine, but there is definitely some room to make resource collection more strategic.
I think it would help to add a second resource and divide the upgrades between the two. It would be interesting if players prioritized titan camps in different orders depending on their resource goals at each stage of the game. The second resource could also have a finer denomination than 1 scrap = 1 upgrade, which would be helpful for balancing certain types of upgrades against each other.
I've never really been a fan of the generic upgrades. I think they represent a false choice. There will be one or two orders/builds that are better than the others in virtually all situations. I know that right now they aren't well balanced against each other, but for individual squads they never will be: The unique qualities of each squad are going to make a subset of the upgrades markedly superior. Trying to balance squads against a universal set of upgrades will force them to be more similar to each other.
I find that choices feel most meaningful when in choosing one thing I am explicitly giving something else up. This can be as simple as a binary choice; heavy armor or faster move speed, increased slow for glacial rangers or increased range, cleaving claws for scarabs or burrowing claws. Depending on the match-up, I will want to choose one or the other, or else it might be that neither option is as pressing as some other upgrade (I want to make it clear that I think there should be flexibility in the order in which you purchase upgrades).
Mercenaries felt fine, though like everyone else I didn't see any juggernauts or leviathans, and it is difficult to gauge how effective the support mercenaries were. Guardian cubes were fun because of how situationaly tanky they are against squads with long attack cooldowns.
I mentioned something today about the way "expansions" work in the game Gigantic, and I want to try and explain it more clearly in writing. Summoning points periodically spawn power orbs, which players can channel to pick up. If your team has a creature summoned on the point, i.e an "expansion," the creature will pick it up for you. However, the creature won't do this while disturbed, so when an orb is up enemy players can try to sneak in, push the creature off the point, and steal the power orb. It might be interesting if heroes in Atlas could walk up to an enemy expansion and press T to try and steal the resource payout, just like collecting a gem.
Summoned creatures in Gigantic also have special functions depending on their type; some are vision wards, while others are healing springs or siege machines. One type creates gates that restrict the enemies passage through the most direct routes. Because there is a very limited number of summoning points, players need to think about what creatures they want and where. This reminds me a lot of designated tower locations in the old Atlas map. Perhaps a good way allow towers while preventing "tower spam" would be to create a limited number of construction locations on which to build defense towers, but also competing types of utility buildings such as healing zones, vision towers, and anti-air turrets.
FYI there were a few Leviathans in this game, so they didn't go unseen. They melted pretty fast, but yeah, they were there.
One comment I have beyond Triesk's questions is that there's a real problem with map control right now. There is no map control beyond where your troops currently are, and there's no way (aside from the teleporter, late-game) to affect the other parts of the map. The towers are either disabled (player built towers) or ignored (static map towers). People were running past the starting towers or the mega nodes without losing a single unit today, so unless you can force a fight under them it's like they're not even there.
Because of this, positioning becomes more important than combat - and it is extremely easy to get out of position. The free wards make it feel plausible that you could stay positioned properly, so it doesn't feel like an exercise in futility. But at the very least it feels like an extra level of intensity which was not there previously.
The healing towers feel like bona fide objectives now, so that helps with a sense of progression in the game. This is purely because they are your only source of the limited gold resource.
It makes losing troops feel like a bad thing (as it should be), but as it also drives you to pick off enemy troops. So I don't think it ended up changing the way I played, it's just that I now felt bad about losing my entire army instead of feeling like it didn't matter because they'd just respawn.
It does seem to disadvantage melee squads though. As Hydros or Grath I'm always taking the brunt of the losses in a big engagement, and consequently the biggest hit to my gold as well. So melee squads will run out of gold first in this new gold economy, and I'm not sure if there is a way to change a "support tank" play-style to avoid this. I just plan to get far enough ahead that our team wins before I run out of gold.
I really like tech level = XP level, it feel like a great unification of RTS and DotA concepts and works well for staging the game out well. I think this helps force a more linear progression onto players, ruling out various silly rushes or accidentally overloading on tech units. You will need to bring a feeling of player agency back from another angle though, since there's no real variance in "builds" any more (at least early game).
"Chunks" and scrap per level both felt like basic but effective economy mechanisms. I don't think I'd have noticed the difference between chunks and continuous XP flow though. Tying tech in with level makes sense since it's also tech level, and gives you just one secondary resource to focus on, which is good.
I like it, but you do need to plan your item picks out in advance. I've even gone to the point of writing out my scrap allocations in advance for the first ten levels, because there's no time to read the items and think about it during the game. Especially since many of the picks, Dark Matter at least for me, are based on the T3 power and not necessarily their base T1 stats.
Artillery cubes say they deal little damage to squad units, but it seems like a lot to me. Artillery is OP, I should have expected this
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The current tech level prerequisites seem to be keeping a lid on mercenary abuse, while keeping them a key supporting part of your army. Martyrs and shielders being the easiest ones to use, because their manually triggered abilities come with descriptions. I have trouble getting the automatic abilities (like healers or enhancers) to target the right goon.
How did you feel about gold in the game? How did it change the way you played?
Gold fills the niche it was created for, it made games have a conclusion and it made me care about losing fights. However, it caused games to be settled by attrition in an abrupt way. The suddenness of the ending was my chief complaint, but thinking about gold in a broader sense makes me nervous. It seems like given the number of squads in existence, and going into the future, gold will be the hardest part of the game to get right. If everyone always starts with the same amount of gold, than something like Wind squad with small disposable units could be in trouble. Finding the right amount of gold to start with to make the mechanic impactful without being too constraining is going to be difficult for squad design. There are fixes but long term the starting gold compared to cost of units is going to be the most important relationship.
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?
The XP system does real things now. I think I like it overall but there are a few sticking points. Getting scrap for leveling is the best part of the system. Previously scrap and gold felt like they were occupying the same space. Scrap now feels like its own thing. It also doesn't translate into units, but instead makes units more powerful. This was fun because scrap felt more strategic. Planning around leveling and how you wanted to buff your units is where players can differentiate the most. Previously, you could skimp on tier 1 and research tier 2, but tying the tech level to XP means you have to build a bunch of tier 1 units to get the XP to level up. So spending your scrap on the various upgrades is what caused divergence in the way people played their squad. It also made obvious decision points.
The bad of the XP system is that it creates shut outs. If you have a bad tier 1 vs tier 1 match up its easy to just never get XP. Mercenaries should mitigate this problem, but I can see situations where you just don't have to tools to defend yourself. Tying tech to XP also creates other, less extreme, situations. In one of my games, I had a bad match up so I just didn't attack. While the match up was good for him, my Alder opponent wasn't attacking. Either because he didn't think he could pressure or for whatever reason. Since no one was attacking, the pace of the game slowed to a crawl. Theoretically the expansions should have allowed us to get to higher tech levels, but they were very slow in doing so. In the absence of engagements, the system slows to a crawl, which delays you from getting to the tech that would otherwise change the nature of the match up.
What did you think about the updated item store?
Neutral upgrades are excellent. I also like that they aren't entirely flat stat upgrades. Rabbit's Foot is interesting for instance. I do think that having them mostly be passive feels like a bit of a step back from the summoner spell-esque tools they were in previous iterations. I also think some of them are redundant, and I'd like to have squad upgrades and items in the same pane since they now occupy the same mental space.
I don't often suggest things, but having an item that increases out-of-combat movement speed might go a long way towards giving players stronger cross-map potential.
What did you think about mercs in this new system?
Mercs felt like a footnote. They might show up, they might not. Putting them on the same resource system as my squad units had me favoring the squad units. That's likely personal preference though, as I'm quite used to Vex at this point and would rather have more spitfires.
I had a lot of fun this weekend as I learn the game. One general suggestion right off the bat: Could you guys implement filters/pagination for the replay sections? I do a lot of my learning watching pvp replays and dicking around vs the AI, and both those activities are at odds with each other with the current replay listing.
The move to 200 max reinforcements made it more critical not to lose units and the scarcity made taking towers a more important objective to take and defend. With its limited nature making reinforcements a most precious resource, I'm not sure how I feel about having in addition a respawn cooldown and a unit build time though, particularly with the melee squads (not to mention the walk back time). It can feel a bit too punitive with those.
I agree that there must be some breather for the winners of a fight, to get something done objective-wise before getting respawn-zerged. However there seem to be some overlap in the various direct and indirect penalties that could be simplified.
Not necessarily saying things should buld/spawn faster, but rather that the system should be simpler with less stuff to keep track of, yet that it delivers the about the same constraints. Like some respawn time could be rolled into the building time (is there ever a time where you would not want to be at your max allowed supply?).
Didn't focus too much on the xp system other than the classic rts philosophy of 'always be doing stuff and you'll be fine'. Not entirely clear on the mechanics of chunks. If I have a chunk of xp from gems that is say 90% full and I need to get another gem somewhere to fill it up and 'cash it in' to convert it to normal xp, then I'd rather just have an unified xp number. Otherwise it can sometimes feel like I'm holding frequent buyer cards for a bunch of restaurants with 6 out of 8 holes punched and no free sub in sight FeelsBadMan.
Some clear feedback on xp numbers would help a lot though. The number itself doesn't have to be through the main UI, a combat log would be fine although maybe different sizes of the XP text to indicate how big a chunk something was. Be it knocking a tower and seeing a big bold chunky XP, or a drizzle of small xpxpxpxpxpxp when brutally aoeing a whole bunch of T1s aside from being satisfying to watch can also help learn which things give xp and which don't (ie. seedstuffs).
Regarding powerspike levels, I think the tech curve is a bit too steep right now. Most games I didn't get to lvl10 for example. It would be more fun to me to have access to the whole basic kit (ultis and t3 units) by the midgame with maybe some upgrades/item/merc teching for late game.
Items with actives as it's tier3 bonus would be more fun with weaker versions of the active for earlier levels like the sprint boots. Maybe the base stats of the item could be tuned down to compensate, but in general I'd rather have more tactical options than more passive stats.
Still learning the mercs, not much new to offer here.
Feel free to ping me if you've got any questions on how any of this works! :D
We posted an Item Cheat Sheet in the General Discussion forums that might be helpful. Also, we're hoping to get an updated in-game tooltip that lets players know what each item is getting them into before their first purchase. Not certain when we'll get that in just yet though.
Excellent! I'd like to see how this changes as the game gets a little more figured out, so please keep tabs on how this feels and let us know whether this changes for you at all!
Thanks for playtesting and for the post! =)
I'll see if we've got any data we can look at from that game that might point to a lag issue. Thanks for reporting!
Which unit are you asking about here? Want to make sure there's not an issue we haven't caught.
A quick note on how we detect attack targets within range -- if the unit's collision circle (the halo at their feet) enters the circle that accounts for a unit's range (take a Purifier's range indicator, for example), the unit is a valid target. This differs from, in some games, the unit's model itself being the target. As such, you might get the occasional interaction where you think a unit is out of range because its model is inside its collision halo, and you're looking for the model to be the target. The goal is certainly for that to be as intuitive as possible, but some units might not be nailing it perfectly right now, and we'd encourage you to bring up any examples of outliers you might find!
Thanks so much for testing!
WOOO!
Touched on this briefly last week, but I want to make sure I keep touching on it -- the UI will help us SO much in communicating these systems once we have the systems themselves more locked in.
Nice, WOOHOO! So stoked to hear this! Especially stoked that you had fun in the larger battles! :D:D
Thanks so much for testing and for posting!
Yeah, I was personally pretty jazzed about how different games looked with just the reduced starting gold. People are starting to really play more and more conservative in fights with their units, yet aren't generally less active on the map. Which means that every little thing you do in a fight is more meaningful than it used to be. This was very much a desired effect of this system, so WOOHOO!
The short answer here is that the values on everything will still need quite a bit of tuning, and that'll just happen pretty naturally as we collect more data on what players are doing and where EXP is coming from. And things like granting bonuses based on total number of consecutive or concurrent X or Y are things we might look at to incentivize certain types of actions; but we also need to make sure that if we do something like that, we can communicate it clearly.
Woo!
By that, I assume you mean you felt more of a need to flood out T1s? Or do you just mean you focused more on Squad units than Mercs in general?
Thanks so much as always! :D
Yeah, more the former, more focused on trying to find the right balance between T1 and T2, which tended to involve a large number of T1s (though the record doesn't necessarily support that approach).
Definitely have gotten this feeling a couple times myself. It's noteworthy that this is still just a first pass on the pacing of this system. The goal is certainly not to have the feeling of "Okay, I'm level 6 with 2 Scrap, just gonna hold onto this until 8." If you could keep tabs on how this feels through further iterations of this system, that'd be super helpful!
Touched on this above, but will restate here: We definitely want a player to have more clarity about what their long-term purchase goal is before their first purchase in that tree, and a rework of those tooltips is in progress!
Great piece of feedback here, and something we've been talking about ourselves. A big goal of hybridizing items was to branch out on exactly what players are buying, but it tends to be true that players will go down a very focused path (such as "Get all the stuff with AD" or "Get as tanky as possible"). That's mostly okay, but the difference in how we do it and how other games do it tends to be that they have a LOT more options down each path, so each choice feels like you're really losing out on the alternatives to make this choice. So expanding the breadth of this system would be one possible solution.
Not certain what you mean here exactly, could you elaborate? Of note: There was a bug in 199 that prevented Mercs from benefitting from item stat bonuses, but that was resolved for 200.
I think expansions not feeling particularly meaningful is just an issue of tuning. And if we tune it well and find that the problem persists, we'll look at other alternatives. In terms of feeling the "economic growth" of an RTS, that's something we're still having discussions about.
Re: feeling like a fighting game -- I think if the game consists of pure unit-bashing in the middle, this will absolutely be true. Fortunately, you can also do things like counter/split-push, harass, etc.
Thanks for playtesting and for the feedback! Keep it coming! :D
Been touching on this a bit, but important to make sure it's clear -- properly interfacing this is going to be key in making every aspect of this system satisfying; and we can start working on that as soon as we've got the systems locked into a comfortable spot!
One big reason we've steered clear of that is that we don't want fights to turn into "OKAY FIGHT STARTED, PRESS ALL THE STEROIDS". This is also why we diminished the number of "Press this to AOE buff your army" items, like we had in the first version of Charms. SOME degree of that is okay, though. It'll just be a matter of tuning the system itself and fitting the content to match our intent.
Thanks for the post! <3
So I think the important distinction that we're leaning towards is that your squad has its core play pattern, and mercs support that play pattern or do something entirely different but don't typically have distinct play patterns. For instance, your Artillery Cubes don't do bonus damage to Marked units and aren't affected by Vela's ultimate. That said, Mercs definitely need some tuning, and it's on our to-do list for sure.
Funny story: a change that didn't make it in for 200 changes that tooltip (and also tweaks Artillery Cubes a bit). You should see that go in Wednesday.
A longer-term stretch goal for autocasters is to have them be single-castable. Lots of little usability things there, especially with autocasters, that we'll want for the final game. We actually had a janky implementation that almost did this cleanly, but a couple things fell apart with it, haha.
The rest of this is very cool to hear though!
Thanks for testing and for the feedback! :D
What I mean is that by the time cubes stop being useful and I've unlocked more mercenaries, I've been spending my scrap on stuff like Wisp health, Wisp attack range, Precognitor upgrades, +damage...most of the mercenaries don't benefit from any of this, so I'd rather be more efficient with my supply and just keep making squad units.
@Anees -- Gotcha, so you're talking particularly about the inflection upgrades that are exclusive to squad units. Cool cool.
Yeah, I mean, that's a side effect of Mercs being intended to support your army rather than be the bulk of it. That said, unit caps on squad units should also be supporting this.
Say you've invested in Wisp health and range. So your strategy there is "Go heavy on Wisp upgrades, cap Wisps, then find other units to support them." So you're committing to a 60-supply investment of Wisps, more or less, and filling the rest with support. And that support could be 2 Precognitors + 4 mercs; it could be 4 Purifiers and 2 Precogs, etc. etc.. You're definitely, almost unshakably, keeping that core 60 supply invested in Wisps, as you've established that upgrade path.
The trouble here would be if you did not feel compelled to fill the remaining supply beyond the 60 you invest in Wisps. Which might be the case, and is likely problematic if so. :P
@Treisk Right, I'll make 2 Precognitors but other than that I'm just maxing Wisps and the game's usually over before I hit the unit cap. Even if I did hit the cap I'm not sure what I'd make other than maybe teleporters and juggernauts. Basically it boils down to: I don't think mercs are worth their supply costs at the moment, and even less so after I've been investing my resources in squad units instead.
I only played two games last weekend so I don't feel I had enough experience to merit valuable feedback. However, here are some quirks I've wanted to point out:
-Enhancers have a fun quirk where sometimes they'll buff my sentinel instead of one of my ground units. Not sure what their targeting priority is but ha!
-Similarly, I had some situations where the titans were attacking sentinels. I'm surprised the titans even had detection, but anyway! I can try to find the exact time in the replay if this helps.
-Level 10 for ultimate seems high (I was on the fence about this last week) as I didn't even hit it in either game I played
-New health bars are super helpful in terms of unit management/healing. However, due to the fact that these bars don't show up until damage is taken, and that allies don't have truly different skins vs enemies, in the middle of a clash I get quite confused (particularly in mirror match-ups) where to move and where to target. I can rely on the minimap when it's army glob A vs army glob B, but when we're all intermixed and people coming from every direction? That does me no good!
If not for the slightly damaged T1 unit health here...it's very hard to notice the blue ball vs orange ball in Celesta's staff or the wisp's "pincers" here and make a decision in the heat of the moment. All I see is blue and purple in terms of shading.
You can turn on always show health bars in the options.
I didn't realize that (thanks!), and I'm torn because I like for my OWN unit's health bars to hide. I actually wouldn't mind it for the enemy too if I had another way of better distinguishing them on the field.