The gem system is a great idea, but I felt like I never had enough
GeekmasterK
Member
First of all, I absolutely love most of the game. Not much to complain about at this point, except one thing that frustrated me the most. I love the idea behind the system of collecting gems and fighting your opponent over them. However, I felt like I never had enough gems to do what I needed to do because everything was too expensive. I never had more than about 16 gems at a time, and most of the time, my gem count was in the single digits. I found myself only building one mercenary unit for the whole game, and when it died, I never had enough gems to build another for the rest of the game. I ended up only ever using gems to take expansions most of the time, and I never used wards. When you overhaul the economy like you said you would, PLEASE consider reducing the cost of mercenaries, or increasing the payout of collected gems. It was really frustrating feeling like mercenaries were not worth building 98 percent of the time due to never having anywhere near enough gems to build them.
Still, though, I see a lot of potential in this game. I love the fact that it has a focus on hero units leading an army. That's something I feel like we never see enough of in RTS games.
Comments
Can you post your replay number please? I feel like it is not the norm to have a very low gem count such as you described, unless you are either constantly building mercenaries or getting strongly denied from expansions or collecting. At least from my experience but I would like to see yours.
Take gem expansions earlier to get the funds flowing. Don't overestimate the difficulty of clearing camps, it's not as hard as it seems. Invest a little in towers to protect them while you are a way, maintaining your resource income is your main goal. No need to destroy your opponent so early in the game, just punish their overextensions (if any) and don't over extend yourself.
The main problem was that I had trouble taking the gem expansions early. I found myself spending more time trying to take a nearby gem expansion than anything else. This happened to me pretty much every game I played during the last playtest weekend. Now that I'm thinking about it, the issue seems to be that I have trouble killing the bots guarding the gem expansion near my base. I didn't have too much trouble collecting gems from the map, but I never had a constant supply.