Game Flow, Systems, and Mechanics [TW4 Megathread]
Let us know your thoughts on specific systems in the game, e.g. gem collection -> titans, neutral camps to collect stock and supply, upgrades (items, unit inflection upgrades), win conditions, overall pacing.
When providing feedback, please use the following format:
- X happened
- It made me feel Y (or I’d like to feel Y)
- (optional) Here’s a suggestion to improve it
Comments
I like the titans auto-attacking. I have fewer of those sad moments of "aww, I had a titan and its timer is half gone because I didn't notice it".
I have a vague positive feeling about shield generators.
The warp-in mechanic feels very well-motivated this time. I like choosing a place to put my units.
I have tentative positive feelings about deckbuilding. I have a much clearer sense of the role of mercenaries than I did in TW3. And I'm already noticing more diversity of compositions.
Titans only being able to attack buildings felt really un-intuitive.
Neutral camps are a nice thing to do while I'm not collecting orbs. The way collecting the orbs works right now makes clearing a camp and protecting it afterwards really interesting tactically.
Upgrades in general right now feel pretty lackluster. I'm just not interested by small increases to attack and defense.
Items feel like overkill. There's already so much in the game to consider, items just further complicate things and in a way that isn't very exciting.
The pacing feels great, out of the gate it feels like there's so much to do, and I'm kept busy during the entire match. I always feel like there are three different places I should be, and I like that.
I kind of agree with you on the items, they seem to just be 1 more thing you need to manage. However my background is in rts games like sc2, so maybe people with moba experience will enjoy the item shop more.
When the game first starts and everyone is just taking camps it feels kind of like a PvE game. It makes me want to interact with my opponents sooner, but after that I love how much i'm fighting my opponents and such.
My only other pacing concern is that the end of the game when both sides are just throwing armies into each other can feel repetitive, though maybe that occurs less in PvP where players value their armies more. I think that providing major clear objectives to fight over on a timer that can function as (at least a partial) win condition would be great. For an overt example, objectives in heroes, but for a more subtle example, your opponents last mining base in SCII (the timer being provided by your opponent collecting too many resources for you to win.
When selecting which units I want to make up my army at the beginning of the game, I feel somewhat lost. I don't know which of the advanced units fall into which production tiers! Imagine my surprise when I picked 3 cool-sounding units that would make a balanced army (Rhino/Sludge/Trebuchet on Green - strong front-line to protect my siege) only to find that the only tier 2 unit i have is the sentinel. I think if I was more familiar with the game that would make for an interesting challenge, but as a new player I would like to be able to construct some form of balanced force, especially when i'm playing a color for the first time.
That said, I really like the system of being able to modify which subset of your color's army you get to bring to battle.
Heroes as a mechanic, by and large, feel underwhelming. This may be because many hero abilities (see: everything Vela does) don't feel particularly impactful, but it also may be because of the relative lack of hero abilities and the unclear advantages from leveling up. Hero death timers feel extremely short and it's extremely difficult to tell if gaining levels/xp or denying such are really impacting the game in a meaningful way - whether they actually are behind the scenes or not.
My main issue with heroes is that in most other games it is intuitive that sniping a hero sets the opponent back a great deal and has long-reaching consequences. It doesn't feel that way yet in Atlas, at least early on in my alpha experience, which feels confusing and makes my goal in a battle feel a little less clear. I'm not personally a huge fan of the all-powerful hero, but I also am not sure the present effect of loss of a hero won't clash with players' preconditioning coming into the game.
The other thing I noticed is that many heroes feel like "press cooldown every time it is up on the biggest clump of enemies/my most wounded guy" and otherwise autoattack, which considering heroes only have 1 spammable ability makes them not feel much different than a regular, if large, soldier.
Other observations:
Items feel like too much to consider right now, but that could be because the systems are still relatively opaque. If it was easier to gather certain types of information or it wasn't necessary to flip around between various production buildings, units, and objectives, items might be easier to integrate but right now I don't see a casual player having the time to ever really look at them, much less work them in to a game.
Gem collection rate and opportunities feel good, though it would intensely helpful to have some sort of popup explaining what grabbing a gem does for you. The neutral camps contribute nicely toward this feeling of constant opportunities.
The army upgrades seem like more to consider than most players would have time to. They don't feel useless, but there may be too many of them, or the fact that they are on a different building from everything else might be contributing toward making them difficult to consider.
I would love to see gem harvesting not require a click. This has the unintended (I think) effect of giving an army move order or requiring you to remove your hero from a group for collection. There are times my troops are near the enemy but I still want to click a gem - likewise, there are times 5 gems are lying in a tight clump and it's somewhat tedious to click on all of them.
I would enjoy something like a "collect resource" ability on the hero, with a set radius, that let you tag the nearest gem without having to right click. This would still require an action, still give you the option of right clicking when it was important, and still not help with gems outside your collection radius. But it would remove some tedious clicks and unintended movement consequences while making resource collecting more fun and less mistake-prone.
Needing to micro in the jungle feels to me more like an apm check rather than anything really meaningful. I can do it, but it feels unfairly unfriendly to people new to the genre for no real gain in strategic depth to the game. Although it may add depth when neutral camps are contested, it feels better to me when you're mainly focusing on fighting the opponent, rather than neutral camps, which end up being the same.
I feel confused about how I'm supposed to take advantage of my main building. Am I supposed to keep checking it constantly for the research queue? Is there a way to keep it researching stuff on repeat?
I'm also confused about the relative power of units vis a vis their stock cost against their scrap cost.
Being able to choose which resource I want to gain at any point makes me feel much more in control of resource production now. I really like that.
I feel that in the later stages of the game (around level 3) my supply isn't high enough to allow me to add advanced units to my composition when they become available for me to build. I have to either kill off a large piece of my army, or wait a while until I can increase my supply resource to the point that I can afford an advanced unit. Maybe there could be a way in the mid and/or late game to increase the amount of resource generation at the command core? Maybe a research that could open an extra slot (like there is for the advanced unit production) or a way to increase the amount of generation for a particular resource?
I felt good when I played with the shield slug activated ability. It gave me a feeling that good (or mediocre) RTS micro paid off in this game and units could be powerful when micro'd right.
The ability to heal with Hydros on a timer and reduce damage with his doods on a different timer while positioning them all was remeiscent of MMO healing chars which is appealing to me. Crisis management is fun.
Wasn't sure how to categorize this so I'll put here. When choosing a unit composition, I couldn't see a way to compare unit resource costs, only abilities. Unit cost feels like an equally important characteristic when comparing units for a composition and I'd really like a way to see resource cost in the selection screen.
Heroes don't feel like heroes, they feel more like resource gatherers with a minor ability. UIltimates as a whole don't really feel too impactful or are easily dodged due to long cast speed or slow travel speed.
Maybe this is because of nobody knowing how to play properly yet, but I feel like the game is pretty much:
start game -> clear camps - > three titans spawn - > nobody does anything for a while while all the central resource towers are down -> three titans spawn -> repeat until someone dies or surrenders.
There should be something to motivate pushing or being active when the titans are inactive, or at least some more incentive. Defensive units like the purifier seem really really good and without snipers are really hard to get through, and tech units in general feel much more supply efficient than the basic units to the point where basic units don't feel too useful.
+1 to the comment (many posts ago) that the tech level of each unit (tech 1,2,3,4) should be indicated in the deck-building screen, in addition to the unit description that's already there.
Also +1 to tedster's comment (the one about gem-collecting). Another idea would be to allow any unit to collect gems and not just the hero - this would alleviate the problem of having to manipulate your hero through your army / ally's army / etc to get close enough to the gem. Taken to the extreme, that would change a lot of things - I imagine we'd see a lot more of people splitting up their army to try to control all the gem-producing points at once, or at least leaving a unit behind to claim gems; it would require more micro and being-everywhere-at-once skills. To be less extreme, it could maybe be that only units within a certain radius of the hero could claim gems; or only while the hero was in the defined zone near the gem-producing thingy. Then the hero still has to be present, but we don't have to try to path the hero towards the gem(s) all the time. It still requires the micro to click on the gem, but would be a smoother process. I don't see how this could easily be abused, either, since the enemy would still have plenty of time to destroy the gem.
One final comment is that I find it weird that the advancing-to-tech-2/3/4 button is in the building with the resource generation. It would make more sense (to me) to be either in the building with the research upgrades, or in the building where you actually produce units (since one major point of advancing tech levels is to unlock new units). The place where it is feels unintuitive to me.
Overall though I do like the game mechanics - there are some great ideas here.
Destroying Neutral Camps gives more than just gems?
I destroyed some neutral camps but I didn't really notice my stock or supply change (it's implied in the OP that killing neutral camps somehow affects the current supply and stock). That makes me feel confused. If I kill camps, what benefit aside from the obvious gems do I get? I am struggling to understand the entire benefit, and it's important that I quickly learn what I can get from these basic resources (neutral camps).
I recommend that you make a floating "+8 stock" or "supply increased by ___" indicator at the death site of the last enemy you kill in the neutral camps to explicitly inform players what they're getting by killing that camp.
Where are the gems going?
Killed some neutral camps and collected the gems. I can't keep track of the gems in all three temples, so I can't tell which temples these gems have gone to. This makes me feel confused, like there's obscure, hard-to-understand mechanics and I'm losing an edge by not understanding them.
ERIS - sandstinger vs beetlefighter
These are Eris's two first tier units. I played with swarms of sandstingers that were very easy to get (only costing stock) and their quick-move ability made them fun to micro and use in many situations. It made me feel empowered to be able to take individual sandstingers and take them in and out of the frontlines. On the other hand, the beetlefighter doesn't have much flair and I didn't use it enough to find it's strengths, so I left it alone and it didn't feel like I was missing out. It feels ridiculous that it has traffic cone emojis for legs.
I also really enjoyed using the spells that the Devilkin Dervish and Scarabs have. The Devilkin Dervish's aura and ranged attack feel versatile, and the Scarab's ability to move through units to melee felt awesome to use because you can use it offensively and also to retreat.
MARKDOWN AWW YISS
8/8
~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|.~.|After PvP I feel like the game is usually very one sided. Out of 6 games only 1 felt like it was really close the whole time.
Most games one team dominates the first round of generators and then just steamrolls from there. Its not like one team gets a lead and runs with it (though that definitely helps). It feels more that one team is just a little bit better than the the other, but that's enough for them to completely control the game. Since there are no alternative objectives you simply have to keep trying to fight them, and keep losing. Normally when behind, my team ended up feeling trapped in the base and any attempt to leave resulted in the enemy quickly pushing us back in.
Simply said, once one team gets even a small advantage on the map they can quickly dominate the game by controlling everything. There seems to be very few ways to get back into a losing game. Perhaps its just my lack of experience, but that is the way it feels.
Day 1 thoughts from a MOBA and RTS n00b:
Gem Collection
I tried many times to destroy enemy Titan orbs that were unclaimed (as in, they didn't have the little cube above it) and was unable to do so. It felt really unintuitive that those orbs stay there for the timer instead of me being able to destroy them.
Titans
I quite like the Titans and the fact that they auto attack only buildings. My only complaint is that the Titan gem spawn timer feels really really long to me after a Titan has died. Games often turn into matches where there's lots of activity around the Titan gem spawners and then lots of dead time in between. I think it'd feel better if the timer were shortened (in addition to being able to destroy unclaimed enemy gems like I suggested above).
Neutral Camps
I still don't feel like I have the hang of these camps and need to focus more on this aspect of the game. One part that is weird, though, is that I have no idea how to deal with orbs when I've attacked a camp with an ally. After destroying a camp with an ally and the orbs pop out, I don't want to accidentally take someone's orb. Loot etiquette and all that. But then someone in one of my games said we can share them? Very confusing, never figured out how to do that, and I'm generally just kinda unsure about how to approach that. I'll need to test that out more tomorrow.
Upgrades
For now, I like all of the upgrades except for items. I'll need to play more to really get a feel for the upgrades, but I already feel like the items are totally superfluous. There are tons of upgrades to get that require lots of specific resources, so adding items to the mix feels overwhelming and needless. They might do really awesome things, but the other upgrades already do such awesome things that I haven't tested items out at all.
Win Conditions
"Conditions" in the prompt above is plural which suggests that there are multiple win conditions? I've only seen one which is wreck the enemy nexus. And that part feels pretty ok actually.
Overall Pacing
The games feel a bit long to me. The beginning of the game and the end game feel equally long, probably 7ish min., but the mid game can stretch out for 20-30 min. which can get old. It feels like there's a big difference in my enjoyment levels if the game lasts ~30 min. vs ~40 min. So it may be that the game time will speed up as people get better at the game instead of you guys needing to tweak anything, but we'll see how day 2 feels.
Gem Collection
Overall gem collection has changed quite a bit but it provides an objective for a team to work towards but there is now a need for conflict instead of the time of passiveness in between when you couldn't attack the opponent's gem collectors. It made me feel like there is a consistent time of conflict between the two sides.
Titans
Titans i feel like they are essentially a really overpowered objective in a way very much like the systems in Heroes of the Storm. I feel it to be very monumental in turning the tide of a conflict or fight. For example if you take a titan and then a team fight erupts. Your enemies have to choose between the titan or the team fight. It directs the need for team work and diversion of resources to address the problems.
Neutral camps
To collect stock and supply from neutral camps give them additional purpose to take them before your enemy can. It gave me an opportunity starve the opponents of resources very much to what you would do in taking away expansions from enemies in Starcraft.
Overall Pacing
It is a very gradual but exponential process as the game proceeds as less and less basic units are being use and the more advance ones dominate the battle field.
Items
In all of my playtesting I haven't even considered using items. Honestly with scrap as precious as it is I always felt like my resources were better used either teching up or making advanced units.
Scrap
I tend to find that scrap pacing feels very good when you are winning and gain control of at least one gem site per round. However, when you are locked out of a gem site and all you have are the neutral camps on your side of the map, i felt very scrap starved. To combat this, I try to research scrap instead of getting more stock and supply cap, but overall being behind means less scrap. This make my army smaller/weaker which in turn makes me want to engage less which means even less scrap. I had this happen in a couple of games and just wanted to express this opinion.
Day 1 PvP Gameplay thoughts (From an experienced RTS player perspective):
Heroes feel underwhelming and their deaths don't feel like they matter
I posted this earlier after my experiences with bots, and one thing I've come to realize is that this game is designed so that a hero + army has about the same number of abilities and power level as a LoL hero might have on its own at around the same level. This is a neat concept and I really like it, but it currently makes the hero feel very much like a worker that your army is escorting since the only thing your hero does better than your regular troops is pick up gems. Most hero abilities are used every time they are up and since there is only 1 of them (plus ult) you aren't really making choices or having much for your hero to do in a fight.
On top of that hero deaths feel less punishing than losing troops since they respawn so fast and you fight just fine without them, and it doesn't cost anything. I almost always focus on normal units and ignore enemy heroes as primary targets, which feels counter-intuitive and unrewarding (sniping a hero normally feels GREAT).
White-Red and Green-Blue armies feel very same-y
This is partially due to lack of hero differentiation, partially due to unit composition, and partially due to the unit mortality rate. As I mentioned earlier it feels like hero + army = 1 complete MOBA hero, which suggests a huge amount of diversity but in practice there are two primary "army compositions" that I have encountered and managed to piece together and thus the actual engagements felt somewhat same-y. White and Red, for example, both have ranged assassin-y heroes (that don't feel like they make too much of a difference), a siege tank, marine-like basic troops that die to a stiff wind, and mid-late game space-control spellcaster units. I didn't feel like you approached the fight differently regardless of whether the opponent was Red or White, except how I would plan to separate my troops when spells went down. Green and Blue felt similarly with the tanky sustainability and how I would fight as/against them, though a little less so than Red/White whose heroes felt extremely interchangeable (Celesta and Vex, for example, play almost entirely the same, right down to their ultimates which both are too slow to hit an opponent that is paying attention but can instantly win a fight where the other guy is trapped and force a disengage. Likewise, Grath and Hydros feel very similar and encourage extremely similar play styles).
The unit mortality rate is something I'll touch on in a bit, but because large numbers of units can and do die to a single round of fire or a single spell it can feel very resource- and time-consuming to integrate new abilities into your army for any length of time unless they are big, splashy abilities. Since there are no neutral waves to utilize these abilities on it feels difficult to get the hang of many shorter-range abilities and many abilities that would normally be useful in a poke war can feel lackluster since the only thing to poke over is titan spawns. It feels very much like you have to mass enough of an ability that you can one-shot opposing forces, and even then you often will lose a huge hunk of your army before you can bring abilities to bear. The ultimate result here is that it feels more practical to focus on just a few high-impact abilities that can help win big battles even in low numbers rather than branch out.
Gem collection and pacing feels good, as does choosing in-base resource gains
It takes a while to get the hang of, and there's some clear bugs with the in-base system, and it would be wonderful if there were popups showing how much of a resource you were gaining, but the overall flow of the game as a result of resource collection does feel good. I feel that scrap gain could be slightly faster early in the game, or that upgrades to lvl 2 and 3 could be reduced in cost a bit, because right now I feel like you're highly incentive to rush to higher tiers rather than play around with tier 1 and 2 options in most cases.
I wish there was more push and pull besides titan spawns
There is plenty to do in the game so far, which feels good, but there are only very isolated opportunities to make "progress" toward a win. There are no towers guarding sight lines and preventing creep waves from pushing, so map control feels relatively unimportant and as a result there are less opportunities to stage a comeback, perform an exciting flank, steal important objectives, and win through any means other than brute-forcing an opponent
As a result, it feels like the better team almost always wins. It's pretty quick to recover from a lost battle, and while you lose some higher tier units as a result you don't lose much strategically. The strategic part of the game feels very bare-bones and I'm not sure how to shore it up, but there do not feel like too many opportunities to outplay or outthink another team quite yet besides just having better mechanics.
Unit mortality feels too high which makes the feedback mechanisms feel weak
I already got into this, but I want to specify how it impacts the feedback mechanism for a newer player. Entire armies can be wiped off the map instantly in this game, which from a strategic perspective may not be a big deal (you can rebuild them very fast) but from an understanding perspective feels incredibly punishing. It is often hard to tell what someone did wrong in a fight: there is simply an empty feeling of frustration. Learning can be really hard when there isn't any time to learn as you go - I feel like I'm immediately thrust into reflection mode in these circumstances. To a less-experienced RTS player, this could be incredibly hard to overcome and find the fun.
I look at unit mortality on a spectrum from Starcraft/SC2 levels of instantaneous liquidation to Warcraft 3 levels of unit resilience and each death counting for something. Army sizes in titan are much closer to War3, though build times and overall troop counts over the course of a game might be closer to SC. Still, the game mainly features small engagements, so I feel like having slightly more time to react to wounded units or enemy tactics within a battle might be slightly more approachable. Many abilities simply erase large chunks of troops, and while the warm-up time on these abilities is usually significant it feels like a compromise could still be worth exploring.
Hero experience doesn't seem to matter
It unlocks ultimates. Theoretically it makes the hero stronger, but at no point in a game did I look at hero experience and feel like it had any impact on decision making or relative strength. Maybe it could unlock more abilities, or gradually turn a hero into a powerhouse? I'm not sure what impact it has on the game right now, but it currently feels like it's just cluttering up the game and my brain when I should be paying attention to other things.
Items still feel like overkill
They add an extra hotkey to my character, which is what adding many units does, but have to be bought from a different building. They don't feel like something most players will ever have time to consider right now, but that could change with more experience or interesting items.
Abilities with very long cast-times that one-shot large AOEs of troops feel overused
A unit like the Apocolyte, or Vex/Celesta ultimates, have the capability to instantly vaporize a large AOE of dudes. But these abilities are very straightforward to dodge, leading to all-or nothing gameplay that usually just forces a disengage unless you can mass enough to punish an entire army. This is interactive, but feels uninteresting. More interesting would be incremental spells that deal moderate damage but are harder to completely dodge, or deal damage over time with a short cast time but don't instantly kill armies they hit.
It feels great to one-shot an army, feels terrible to have your army one-shotted, and feels underwhelming when you throw down an ultimate and your opponent just leaves because there's not too much of a reason to hard-engage at this time.
Some additional thoughts off the top of my head
An addendum:
Requiring everyone on the team to click the same gems to get resource counts feels really awkward. Unlike in a normal moba, where you soak the most resources if your team is split up soaking xp and gold from multiple locations, in this game you are best off swinging by everything your teammates did in order to actually get the rewards. This feels redundant and counterintuitive, and encourages big team deathballs rather than interaction all over the map.
I'm not sure yet what a clean solution would look like. I don't think you want teammates fighting over gem drops, nor do you want gems to be automatically claimed by the nearest player (this would make titan drops weird, for example). But I'm also not certain simply giving the entire team all the resources claimed anywhere one the map is correct either, though I could be wrong on this one.
A possible solution might be to normalize gem resource gains across the entire team, but reward additional resource for unit kills, or for having a hero present in a battle where a unit is killed (i.e. he/she gets experience). This would remove the current follow-the-leader style of creeping and cut down on the boring/frustrating clicking while still rewarding the people taking active participation in certain types of fights. I'm not sure if it's the best answer but I feel it might be better than the current concept for the purpose of cutting out annoying or tedious portions of the game while also encouraging more action across the map, rather than in just a handful of places.
Addendum 2: In-base resource gains
The in-base resource gaining mechanic feels cool and innovative, but it's also somewhat deceptive. When you are doing well, you are almost guaranteed to increase your max supply every single time it comes up, outside of occasionally gaining scrap (especially late in the game). Gaining scrap early rarely feels right, as that is a resource you can gain by simply doing well, and gaining stock is something that only tends to happen when you are doing very poorly.
The problem I have with this is that gaining stock, rather than feeling like some sort of comeback mechanic, this in-base mechanic punishes you when you fall behind by forcing you to grab stock when you really need to be grabbing scrap to catch back up in unit quality. It already feels like a game is unwinnable when you don't have enough scrap to build anything but T1 units when the game has reached T3 and later - preventing someone from rebuilding any army at all feels unfun and at that point it's hard to understand why you're allowed to keep playing at all.
There are times when building stock seems to be fine and just a setback instead of a punishment, but it feels like this exact function could be replicated by simply slowing down the unit construction timers. If it wasn't so fast to rebuild armies of wisps or whatnot it wouldn't particularly matter if you had infinite stock.
I suspect this was put into place to prevent players from simply building infinite amounts of T1 units and throwing them at the opponent over and over, so maybe it has to stay. It's possible that slowing down the rate of T1 unit production might also help address this case, but I don't know if it would be enough, so maybe the current mechanic is fine, but I wanted to voice my thoughts so far.
Early game
This portion of the game feels really nice to me. It reminds me a lot of League of Legends (I am a jungle main so it makes me feel at home.)
It feels like the decisions i make really impact the game and the army management feels slick with smaller groups. I enjoy the small skirmishing and the need to reinforce your position constantly.
Mid game
There is something not right here and I'm not 100% sure what it is, but it definitely feels slow for some reason. It could be because it takes too long to snowball a game into your favor, it could be the trading of armies leaves everyone unable to do much, or even the lack of scrap and how difficult it is to farm for it, especially from behind. I'm not sure... it just feels off. Maybe there is nothing wrong with it at all and I'm just bad and throw my lead away when I get it lel.
It seems the mid game bleeds into the late game and then loops after fights because everyone loses their advantages.
On the other hand, lots of fights, which is really enjoyable.
End game
Kind of difficult to close, unless you managed to dominate the map for a long time, slowly reducing your opponent's army to nothing.
It feels very decisive when a team wins, it feels very difficult to beat the team that has been ahead during the mid game.
Items
Items feel very out of place. I have yet to buy any of them at all as I would rather spend scrap on other things (upgrades, units) and it feels like there is very little incentive to actually buy them.
I feel like they should be based off of your hero level, maybe give us a choice between 3 different items every 5 levels or something. They currently just seem lackluster and not worth the valuable lifeblood of our armies that is scrap.
As for wards, give us a stack and it refreshes when your hero is at a healing tower maybe? They didn't seem to make much of an impact though. You can almost always see your opponents on the map or be able to devise where they are by looking at where they aren't.
overall, the pacing of the game felt slow and dreary. once my team was behind, i felt like there was little to nothing i could do to come back in the game. in other words, after one big battle is lost, it feels like my unit disadvantage is permanent for the rest of the game, as it continues to snowball.
this made me feel pretty bad and disheartened throughout the entirety of my matches, both of which were fairly long. it didn't feel like there were many points in the game where we were even (save the beginning). i much preferred the respawn mechanic, and the limit on squad units featured previously. in those builds, i felt like i could go toe-to-toe with enemies often, and not get completely punished for a failed engagement. it also made it so that each unit felt much more impactful in the way the i controlled it. in this build, i and my enemies had much less interaction, and once one team fell behind we both waited to see who had the biggest deathball. even when contesting over titans via gems, i felt like there was much less contention and interaction than in previous builds because one party was more likely to back off and sacrifice the chance at a titan than to charge in and do their best.
there seems to be some hero balance awry, but i really couldn't tell. all the new abilities, units, and unit combinations are such massive changes and numbers of possibilities that i could have just been a total noob. i played as grath and alder, both of whom i thought were semi-tanky, harass/control heroes, but i never felt like i fit in those roles. whenever i encountered a dps hero, my units would die almost immediately and i never had the chance to harass or control the playing field. maybe i've just got the wrong roles in mind, or maybe those heroes aren't meant to 1v1 others, but it felt like they should have i suppose.
in fact, most of the heroes seemed pretty similar: you engage with each other, and whoever wins wins. i know there are some obvious exceptions to this, but the way units move all seem very similar. the only unit i played with whose movement felt significantly different than others was the big slime dude, and while there's a lot of room for improvement in my control of the slime dude, it feels like it'd have little effect on the game. i'd much prefer units that moved erratically like vultures or zerglings, that fill drastically different roles due to their movement.
i'm also unsure of what i thought of the resource management, or more specifically the lack of bases and being able to choose what you gain, all from the same location. at first i was excited about the idea but now i'm not so sure about it. the increase in choices on its face seems great, but i felt like i actually had less choices to make in regards to what i did with my units. it was very binary: attack creeps or try to make another titan. if i was behind, all i felt like i could do was amble around and essentially do nothing. i really miss bases and towers. it makes the controlling of space less abstract, and it makes defeating titans feel more impactful. it also makes it easier to know who is behind and who is ahead, and it gives you good goals for what to do moving forward in a match. i guess i'd see it as investing time in your choice of resource, rather than choosing at your convenience. perhaps the titans and gem fountains accomplish these things in part, but i really miss the bases, or maybe choosing between bases and gem fountains simultaneously.
sorry about being so verbose, but this is the first time i've felt this strongly about the direction of the game and i wanted to make sure you got my feedback. thanks!
Resource Management bug, and interface feedback
When I use the production facilities to manage scrap, stock, supply etc, it will default to producing either stock or army supply with no user input. If I want to immediately start producing scrap, I must put two scrap in the queue and then cancel the current resource in order for scrap to start, and it will remove both scrap from the queue instead of removing just one scrap. If I don't put two scrap in before cancelling, and instead only put one scrap in and cancel, then it will cancel the current resource, but it won't research scrap like it should - it will research either stock or army supply; it will start researching stock if I cancelled an army supply, and it will start researching army supply if I cancelled a stock. All the while, I am just trying to get scrap research started!
This makes the resource interface feel bad. There is already a fair bit of latency so having to do those five or so extra clicks really kills it for me.
Of course, this is a bug, which you will fix. But you definitely need to improve this HUD panel that the resource management menu lives in. I can't really easily tell if I have the units, resource, or research production building selected at any given time because they are the same colour with some of the same menu panels. Make a larger design change where the different menus stand out from each other more.
I MESSED UP WRONG THREAD
Day 2 thoughts from a MOBA and RTS n00b:
Gem Collection
I still want to be able to destroy enemy orbs. There were a couple games where that would have made creating Titans nigh on impossible, but the Titan spawn areas tend to be main battlegrounds anyway, so I think it'd feel good to fight so hard for those areas. If Titans are going to be essential to gameplay (and currently they are imo), then push it all the way.
Titans
Titan gem spawn timer still feels long, and matches started to fall into a rhythm: attack neutral camps, fight for Titans, support Titans, attack neutral camps, and on and on it goes. That felt repetitive to me, and I'd like to see that shaken up somehow.
Neutral Camps
I worked more with the camps today and really saw how valuable they are for resource collection. I still don't understand how the resources are separated or what it means for me to claim an orb vs. a teammate. I tried claiming a teammate's orb, and it just changed the little cube color to my color which made me feel like I had stolen that resource. I think some more explanation about that in the revamped tutorial/intro bot mode would really help.
Upgrades
I still never tried a single item. I looked at them, but they didn't seem to compete with the bonuses offered by the other upgrades. So the items still feel superfluous to me. The upgrades, though, seem really strategic in interesting ways. After every match, I'd see how many upgrades people got, and some successful people chose to get tons of them while some successful people didn't. I like that, and I like the idea that upgrades provide flexibility not only for a person's play style but also for that particular game's strategy and needs.
Win Conditions
The end of the game felt better today than it did yesterday. I started to see games end differently: some were pretty much a landslide that couldn't be stopped, and some featured nexus attacks that could be stopped and didn't result in victory. I have a feeling that that's because people had played more of the game since yesterday, but it felt really good today.
Overall Pacing
I got a variety of pacings today which was interesing. In general, my games today were mostly between 20-25 min. in length, and that felt really great. But I had one game that was almost 40 min., and it was fantastic. There was some serious vying for power, and I loved it. Looking back at yesterday's stats, my games were around 27-35 min. and didn't feature that same vying for power, and that didn't feel nearly as nice. So I think the pacing is improving as people get better with the game, which I suspected would happen.
Personally I don't enjoy camping. Late game battles are pretty boring dps, and early game battles are the same mini game of hoping I haven't path-blocked the guy that get's targeted. I can already see it turn into a grind, and yet I feel like I need to do more of it than I am in order keep up in economy.
Endgame is unsatisfying. A battle disparity will zone one team out of the center, giving a team not only access to the greater part of the resources, but a steady stream of titans to keep the weaker team too busy to counterattack. If the teams are even, the battles are so back and forth that it feels somewhat random which titan happens to land the final nexus punch first. Unless somebody pulled a backdoor strategy, I feel very little player agency in bringing the game to a conclusion.
Gameflow and Mechanics:
During the early game I felt as though it was moderately mechanical just making sure to clear all the camps to make sure that next time they would give more scrap. However it felt good when i was talking with my team and coordinating everyone so that we would take every camp and start contesting the fountains right on time.
The first fountain fights felt more like just trying to micro the small army against my opponents small army to keep my units from dying and kill a few of their units and since everyone only has tier 1 units still it felt completely hero dependant so some heroes i would easily bully away and others would easily bully me.
After the first fountain I felt like after pushing with the titans (which unless coordinated would always take 1 tower (or 2 mid) before dying, I felt like there wasn't any reason for me to interact with them because then i would lose out on the scrap from camps and if I would just take camps more efficiently than they did i would be able to pull ahead. This left me feeling as though besides fighting for the fountains or pushing with the titans I rarely would interact with the other team since that would lead me to fall too far behind in camps and by the time i finished clearing all the camps again a fountain would be back up.
Mechanically i felt the items were powerful but felt very thrown in there. Like whenever an item was used I was like "Wow that was good" but I didn't feel like they were something i wanted to build, it was an extra building with extra effects to keep track of that would sometimes do something great and mostly just be ok.
The only other gameplay mechanic i didn't like was the amount of damage the aspects do. Lategame the aspects can essentially end the game on their own unless 2+ people focus on killing it. As much as i appreciate the need to be able to end, I felt like the aspect was simply too capable of doing it on its own. I'd rather the aspect either have ALOT of life but very little damage and act as a damage soak for towers so that it essentially negates towers from nearby teamfights as well as soaking any a-move commands since those units will just attack the titan) or making it able to deal alot of damage to towers while being a lower priority target so that if it's focused down it will die medium quickly. The primary thing i don't like is the scenarios where a team is pushing with their titan, a team fight breaks out, the defending team wins.... then realizes the titan never stopped and is on their nexus... they all focus down the titan.... except its 30 minutes in so the titan just kills their nexus even though it was getting fully focused by all the leftover armies from the teamfight for 10 seconds....