Tedster's Daily Test Diary
Going to start keeping track of my thoughts here as I stumble upon them. I should have some time to play pretty much every day and will do my best to log all my observations in as real-time as I can manage.
For background, I'm an experienced RTS player and have played a handful of games of various genres at pro and high-amateur levels, so I'm approaching this from the perspective of high-level competitive balance even though my experience with Atlas is still in a relatively early state. I'm going to be wrong about some stuff, so feel free to chime in and yell at me if something I say is way off or just plain stupid!
Day 1: Changes to game mechanics and flow. Resource Collection and Usage.
I've decided to ignore unit changes and observations for now because so much has changed that I haven't had time to play around with even a fraction of the stuff that's there. Instead I will think about the map and resources!
I've gone through the patch notes and done my best to internalize all the changes. From my first few games the first thing I've noticed is the changes to gem collection and camps. All of these feel great, with collection rates no longer tied to number of times a camp has been cleared and gem collection no longer requiring 1000 clicks. These are changes that felt mandatory to me after the last test weekend, and I couldn't be happier to see them implemented.
The second thing I notice is that camps seem almost too easy now. I know some people disliked the camp mechanics before. I wasn't one of them - I would personally love to see even more variety of enemy abilities so that camps don't feel 100% automatic but also have some measure of variety. It feels like I shouldn't be able to simply arrange a decent formation and then AFK while I clear a camp - I feel this is a little too "check off the box"-y to keep me engaged, but camp rotations also feel less crucial than before so maybe this isn't as bad.
The changes to Titan spawns feel better. Even against bots, fighting over titans feels somewhat more interesting and is clearly faster. I'm still not the biggest fan of the titan/lane push mechanic as a whole as is currently implemented, but I feel it improving and there seems to be somewhat more motion around the map now that it doesn't take so long to clinch a Titan.
The rates of resource collection is the next thing I notice - early game feels a lot more dynamic due to higher starting supply/stock, faster early gain of scrap, and less-automatic choices with regards to Upgrade paths due to these changes.
I would like to see even MORE early game scrap sinks before Tier 2 upgrades, because I feel like the number of choices is still fairly small - my goal in every game remains to conserve scrap and rush Tier 2 because I don't feel like I have much of a choice. Maybe this is not the case statistically, but being fairly new to the game it still feels this way, and I imagine for less experienced players it may feel even starker.
The changes to the base interface are great. Tower changes are nice, though the map still feels too small and the towers too far back to provide much hidden movement and flanking opportunities. The difficulty in moving unseen makes me feel like I shouldn't bother trying to be sneaky and should focus instead on straight-up fights and big battles. It bothers me that I feel discouraged from exploring an interesting and divergent playstyle, especially with all the cool units that might support that, and I always feel like it's because vision is too easy to get on huge portions of the map at all times.
Anyway, that's it for now. Thanks for reading!
Comments
Day 2: Units. Apoc, Toxin Alchemist, Howling Commando, Plated Warrior, Seed Bots/Grovetenders and the Blue Army in general
Going to start commenting on individual units since I've had a little more time to mess around. I'm sick, my thoughts are jumbled and typing is hard. Everything is hard. I can tell my play is particularly terrible today so I'm not even going to try playing smart games - I'm going to mess around with units and see how they feel.
Apocolytes still feel insanely good even with the reduction in charges. So far they are the Tier 3 unit that most feels like it completely takes over a game when it hits the board, even if i only have 1 or 2. If I'm ever behind as red I always feel I have a chance if I can just get a few Apocs and stick a good AOE. I'd like to see a unit or two like this for each faction, though probably a little less dramatic in ability to instantly wipe an army. I imagine it feels awful to be on the losing end of this exchange because the game can instantly reverse course in a 2-second window.
Blue feels, by and large, the most fun and the most versatile in terms of how I play them. They feel the best at being tanky but also can go spellcasters or decent DPS in a pinch. Playing blue feels kind of like playing a race in Warcraft 3 - I can actually micro individual units out of harm's way and a single spell doesn't wipe out half my army. I want to see more armies play the way blue does - I wouldn't mind seeing an increase in survivability across the board because even the losing fights I have as blue feel interactive - this is often not the case as Red or White where I can often lose a fight before I've made any real decisions because my whole army dies in 1 or 2 volleys regardless of micro.
I wouldn't even say blue is my favorite army - but they give me more opportunity to play the game, moreso than other factions, and that is fun. Even when I lose I want to feel like I'm doing something and while I don't mind glass cannons the effect feels far too pronounced to me for most units and army compositions as a whole. To reiterate: I want to play the game, even if I'm not winning, and I feel like having a little more survivability on everything might help make that dream a reality.
Toxin Alchemists feel really bad to me because they are so all-or nothing and their immense frailty, cost, and ease of killing makes me feel like I'm making a mistake for ever building them. I don't think it makes sense to build just one Alchemist since it takes so long to stack the poison, but I also don't think investing a huge chunk of time and resources into building ~3 of them makes sense either since the opponent can pretty easily snipe them and leave. Individual troops are pretty damn easy to kill in general, and investing so much into a frail specialist that can only kill 1 thing at a time feels like a mistake every time I do it or see it done. I haven't experimented with them TOO much but so far they've made me feel dumb for trying to use them. They feel super easy to counter, are huge and easy to spot, are difficult to keep safe, and don't feel like they do the task they were designed to do particularly well unless left completely alone.
Howling Commandos feel weak and underwhelming because it feels like they do nothing particularly well and their splash attack is very easy to counter with passive solutions. While they are reasonably tanky, the main problem I feel is that the one place their splash attack would be good (fighting against fragile ranged T1 units) can be countered with almost no effort by the opponent simply mixing in a tiny number of melee tanks. This feels particularly problematic because normally you'd want to Attack-move so your splash damage guys spread their splash damage around a bit instead of focusing on one single frail target, but the damage is so low and the AOE so small that it feels like their attacks are almost completely wasted against even low-tier melee. But the commandos will naturally pick up the melee targets (which are out front) with an A-move, which they seem awful against, meaning you have to micro excessively just to get them to attack the right targets, which they're not overwhelmingly good against anyway... while your opponent didn't really have to do anything other than build a couple units to make your guys kind of crummy.
If Commandos didn't cost any scrap this might feel ok, but needing to make many of them to take advantage of the ranged splash combined the apparent ease of rendering them ineffective makes them feel like a trap and whenever I make them I feel like I'm tanking my own effectiveness.
Plated Warriors feel great because I can see significant results from babysitting individual units. More units like this please that reward me individually selecting units mid-combat to get maximum value! More units please that reward me for pulling a dude out of combat and sending him back to base - instead of moving everything as a blob and accepting that my guys are going to die. I love this unit design and it feels like it's in a great place with regards to tankiness.
Seedbots and Grove Tenders feel incredibly similar and make the insta-tower mechanic feel less exciting to me. I love, LOVE abilities where you can plant little static towers mid-battle, but the extreme similarity between these two units makes me sour on the green aesthetic and makes Grove Tenders feel less exciting. I'd like to see something different from Green's tier 1 in order to make the Grove Tender more appealing as an option because right now it feels like you could accomplish what the Grove Tender gives you by simply making Seedbots cost Scrap and giving their plants an upgrade path.
I'm going to go ahead and stop there for now. These are the units I have strong opinions on so far. I will continue testing out various units and builds to see what else comes to mind.
Day 3: Units. Bramblethorn Goliath, Terrapin Trooper, Healer, Grath
Still sick. I probably won't get too much playtesting done today but I'll see what I can do. Going to force myself to play around with Green against bots, even though Green is probably my least favorite faction. Will focus on individual units and once again go over how they feel. It sure would be great if I could swallow.
Bramblethorn Goliath feels good for a T2 unit. It's one of the few green units that I really have a fun time using, just because it has such a huge bucket of health and feels like it punishes the opponent for just A-moving while costing just enough and taking up just enough supply to not be free. I like the give-and-take the goliath represents, though I feel the splash damage could be slightly higher. This could prove a misplaced gripe though with more playtesting.
Terrapin Troopers wouldn't feel so bad if they weren't so small and difficult to micro. I feel it is unnecessarily difficult to get Troopers to do what you want them to do - they are as small as zerglings and thus feel fragile but are supposed to be tanky. They have collision problems, moreso than most other units. But the worst thing of all is that they have an activated ability that feels really bad to me unless I individually select a trooper, which feels way too hard to do. Even having 2 Troopers selected makes their Q feel bad as they often run into each other and do nothing, and if you misclick and accidentally have them all selected your entire battle line is now out of position and has wasted abilities.
The only good way to use Troopers seems to be to individually select them, one at a time, and use their ability, over and over and over rather than being able to use abilities with your whole army selected. BUT THIS GOES COMPLETELY AGAINST A CORE DESIGN PHILOSOPHY! What's worse, it does so on a T1 unit - the units that usually have the easiest barrier to entry because they're available at the start of games and are what new players will fall back on the most often.
Whether or not Troopers are any good, they feel awful for me to use and require me to spend entire battles performing repetitive and precise micro tasks. I don't feel that they fit with the rest of the game and ultimately don't feel fun to me - I would never play Grath explicitly because of this unit and how frustrating it is to have to deal with.
Healers feel like their mana refresh rate is very low. They also have unclear impact on a fight. Healers don't feel particularly strong to me and it's tough for me to tell if adding one or two to a battle does much to make my army better or worse. This might be a problem in itself - I'd personally like their impact to be high, which would encourage counterplay and sniping Healers, rather than the current feeling of "meh, maybe they're helping?" that I get. However, regardless of their overall impact, I've noticed that unless I am spending large quantities of time standing around doing nothing (not something you probably want players doing anyway), my healers are almost always at 0 mana and are themselves standing around doing not much of anything. Maybe this is a balance issue, but they feel underwhelming because a lot of the time they aren't even able to do their one job. I love units with passive heals, so wouldn't mind seeing their performance improve along with the impact of sniping them - but moreso than that, I'd be happy to see them consistently do the thing I hired them to do.
Grath abilities feel watered down to me. This might be personal preferences, but when I use Grath I feel like I'm playing a watered-down Hydros with a worse heal and a strong-but-ultimately-uninteresting ultimate. The rock is at least somewhat different than a pure heal but much slower to utilize, and his Avatar form does not feel like close to the impact of a huge game-changing AOE. It's weird because Grath is clearly very good, but in such a passive way that it's hard to notice what's happening. I feel like these are things that could be tuned to feel more dramatic and fun, so it's not a huge deal, though I wouldn't mind seeing more differentiation on his basic ability to make him feel notably different than Hydros.
Day 4: Units. Kingpin/Transport, Shadow/Ice Frog/Other Cold Dudes
Small update for now though I'm going to post more later. Starting to get a little healthier and that means I'm able to process more complicated lines of thought. For now I'm going to focus on a handful of units that I've been messing with lately as Blue.
The Kingpin is a cool unit that nevertheless makes me feel like I'm being forced into a narrow pigeonhole of units and strategies.' For reference, I'm a huge fan of Reaver/Shuttle play in Broodwar, and Kingpin/Transport does an admirable job of mimicking this classic unit. The new Kingpin design also looks good visually, a huge improvement over the old "Big Golem" guy. The big problem I have with Kingpin is that, as Blue, I feel forced to use it if I want to do any real damage. And if I'm going to play with Kingpins, I feel forced to use the Transport. Thus, if I want to have the option to be a damage dealer, I need to take both of these units in my deck - which is especially hard to swallow when I am joining a PUG game and don't know what my role will be.
I've seen a number of games (human and bot) where it was necessary to have the option to go DPS because my teammates did not have enough damage output to really threaten the enemy. As Blue, if I don't take both these cards, I put myself in a position to not have any bursty DPS if my team happens to need it, either due to composition or the natural flow of play during a match.
The issues with the Kingpin feel further compounded because you can't really use it with a turtle style like you would a Reaver in Broodwar. There's no expansions for me to guard against Dark Swarm/Zergling/Ultralisk combos and I can't really force a fight by slowly crawling across the map: my opponents can just walk to a different lane and bully the rest of my team while I struggle to keep up. And with 3 players per team it's guaranteed I get flanked or have to fall back at some point in a game - at which point I lose my incredibly expensive and crucial dudes.
It's tough to say this because Kingpin/Transport feels pretty good to actually use! But with the way decks work it feels bad when I have to commit two slots for the potential to deal damage, and I often find myself having to decide between skipping over Kingpins or cutting another preferred strategy to shoehorn in both units.
Maybe if Kingpins had the ability to lift off on their own, but were fairly slow to do so and were extremely slow to land? This would let you still have some measure of mobility when you used them, but they would be much more committed to a fight once an engage happened, or would only get off 1-2 shots before you'd need to lift them off and pull back. Or maybe if they had a "high speed" mode that gave them normal movement speed but took a decent amount of time to enter/leave. I'm not sure this would be a good solution but I would love to see them feel more practical without having to stack my deck around them.
Shadows, Ancient Ice Frogs, and other blue "AOE slow" units feel like they have too much overlap and not much variety. Shadows especially feel confusing - I'm already fielding a bunch of units that have slow/snare/freeze effects, but here's one more unit that not only has to channel its slow/snare but must also be standing right in the middle of the enemy to do it. It's weird because many of these effects are individually strong - but with so many similar effects to choose from, especially when playing Rhyme, I find it a little boring since I feel like I'm picking between different shades of the same flavour. If everything I have does roughly the same thing, is it really fun to get the higher-tier units?
I feel like there is room for a lot more variety in the Blue AOE spells - icicle shards dealing significant damage over time, walls of ice blocking off corridors unless shattered, slippery ground making direction changes difficult, curtains of sleet blocking ranged attacks... but for the most part all I have access to are AOE snare/slow effects with minor damage components and slightly different shapes, and that makes me feel less excited about many of the units than I otherwise would be.
Day 5: Upgrades! Units: Sludge, Apoc, Terrapins, Chiller
The introduction of unique upgrades for every unit is a welcome patch, as unit upgrades are fun and interesting. They also mean that some units can be a little underpowered pre-upgrade and a little overpowered post-upgrade and vice-versa, which allows for the good kind of game imbalances (think cracklings vs unupgraded lings, Vultures with speed/mine vs. vanilla, etc.) that encourage risk-taking and early concessions in return for late-game power.
While I'm sure most of the upgrades will be modified in some way from their present form, the list by-and-large looks interesting and interactive and for now that's the best thing I feel you could be shooting for. Great patch, and it's already been fun to mess around with!
The Abominable Sludge feels incredibly strong with the changes+upgrade, and also very fun. I'll be testing this more against players in order to determine just how good it is. However, it currently makes play vs. bots very trivial, and while a lot of that is an AI thing even a newer player may be able to simply smash a Sludge into a pile of guys and come out way ahead unless the opponent is relatively alert and able to split armies/focus fire. Not an issue in itself, but the damage + heal makes a single slime able to wipe a poorly controlled army so it's something I'm going to keep an eye on and see how well it works in actual matches, especially between players of lower micro skill level.
Edit: Holy geeze the Sludge is nuts right now. Especially with the bug healing it from buildings. How do you kill these things? How do you survive a fight that involves them without just running away?
The Apoc upgrade feels like a significant buff that I'm not sure the Apoc needs. The previous Apoc upgrade was pretty mediocre and very situational, and I'm glad you removed upgrades that require 2 different units to be functioning in tandem as those feel bad to have to build around if you want them to do anything at all. This new upgrade can, in the best of cases, allow back-to-back firing in the case you get a good hit on a stack of t1 units.
This may not prove to be a big deal, mainly because if you hit many targets with an Apoc you often win the battle (or the game) anyway, but recalling the times when Apocs could hold two charges is pretty terrifying, so I'll also be testing this more extensively and report back on how it felt. It does suggest that you won't have to make as many Apocs to still contribute in big team fights, but would still want as many as possible for smaller skirmishes when dodging is easier. This may provide interesting enough decision-making to make the upgrade a cool option.
Edit: After playing with this more it doesn't seem like an overwhelming thing so I'm going to stick with the more optimistic outlook. It's a fine upgrade so far but if you land a really clean hit you're already doing so well that an immediate refresh isn't that huge a swing.
After playing more with Terrapins I don't hate them as much, but still feel they are too small to be fun. If it was easier to select 1 or 2 Terrapin I wouldn't be so annoyed every time I got into a big battle with them. However, I do understand that this would require them to cost a bit more supply and be a big sturdier/harder hitting overall since they would take up more surface area in a fight. But I'd gladly take this trade!
It's so hard to see their HP because their bar is so small, and so challenging to grab your tank unit in the middle of a fight to either use an ability or pull it out of combat, which is really rough since you really want to micro your individual tanks more than most units.
I have no idea what the Chiller is for or when I'd want to use it. I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with the Chiller, but it feels like it lacks both flavor and a clear place in an army since most factions can already replicate the effect with a more versatile unit that is often much lower on the tech tree. Getting to tier 3 just to get a specialist unit that snares 1 guy with its autoattack feels like one of the weaker things I can do, especially considering my other options. It seems weird to me for this to be a neutral unit since I don't see most factions needing it to get a snare. I don't have too much else to say about the Chiller, and I'll keep playing around with it, but it's a very un-splashy effect for how late you get it.
Day 6: Decision-making, Game Flow, Game Length, and Roles
Today I want to focus a little less on units and look at the feel of the game as a whole. It's been a week that I've been playing with the recent builds and I'm getting a reasonable feel for how most matches go. Specifically, I want to focus on PvP matches and communication.
A single mistake made by a single player on a team feels more punishing than in other MOBAs and even many RTS games. A teammate who is caught out of position doesn't just die and give experience/gold: they usually lose their entire army, which tends to set them behind for the rest of the game (and certainly the next 5 minutes). This feels particularly brutal when you are partnered with someone who doesn't have voice communication and who you can't easily coordinate with. It's also rough with newer players who aren't sure where to be and when.
I don't know if this is actually a problem or simply an observation. I've taken it upon myself to personally claw my team back from various disasters (though this feels impossible as some factions/unit sets: you almost require big AOE effects to be able to take on this role) with great success. But it's extremely hard to overcome teammates who aren't in the right place when they need to be - much like in Heroes of the Storm, taking objectives intelligently feels super important even in a casual game, unlike Dota or LoL.
I feel there are a few possible implications of these observations.
First, the tutorial and bot play seems really important - both could be used to help teach players good objective management (for example, bots could intelligently ping objectives at useful times or after successful battles to teach players good map control strategies and how to rotate effectively). There will still be players with no microphone and no understanding of strategic movement, but at least new players will be encouraged to learn.
Second, I feel it could be slightly easier for some factions to play heroball, if needed, to make random queuing more rewarding. This could be as simple as making hero levels a little better for winning fights (and a little worse for Titan strength) to give one player better potential to carry the team, or maybe adding a few more splashy AOE effects at high tiers for armies like Blue that have trouble doing damage if their teammates lose their armies. The value of smart, objective-based play would remain, but you could still potentially carry a team on your shoulders without having to have picked a specific Apocalyte- or Sludge-based strategy or whatnot.
Third, and I'm sure you already have a stance on this, in-game voice would be nice eventually
The flow of games feels pretty good, though there feels like there is a slight lull at Tier 2 as many factions have options that feel lackluster compared to rushing straight from T1 to T3. It's clear you're putting in more work at T2 so this is more of a placeholder observation, but I think it needs to be made because it impacts my next point. Again, this has just been my experience over a limited number of games, so YMMV.
Games are ending in about 12-15 minutes rather than 20-25 I think this is happening for (at least) two reasons (EDIT: Three reasons, thanks Millea):
There could obviously be more reasons games are over so quickly, and the games don't feel bad when they end this fast (I've only had one game that felt "over too soon") but it's outside your stated goal for game length so I wanted to bring it up.
Roles feel a little too set based on faction. Obviously you want each faction to have an overarching "aesthetic" to it, but I feel like ensuring that every faction could potentially fill every role - Tank, Skirmisher, DPS, Crowd Control - would allow for better matchmaking and richer gameplay. Unlike most MOBAs, there's only 3 people per team, and no items/skill trees to help shore up weaknesses in team composition or specialize in new capabilities. Furthermore, with the frequency that players lose entire armies (and thus, long-term capabilities at whatever role they were assuming) there is more incentive than usual to be able to fill different roles.
I think the main goal with allowing each faction to fulfill all (or most) potential roles is that they approach these goals DIFFERENTLY than one another, rather than strictly better/worse. Obviously each faction should probably be the very best at one thing in a GENERAL sense (i.e., green should probably have the best all-purpose tanks) but that doesn't mean anyone else needs to be deficient in that area - and may even have a unit that is better suited for a specific specialized tanking role. A good example would be Protoss having the best all-purpose tanky units in Brood War, but Zerg (the tiny, expendable army) had access to the best lategame tank unit for use vs. small, fast attacks.
In many places i feel you're doing a pretty good job of that, but there are some areas that I feel restricted by an aesthetic principle that is in place which is detracting from interesting gameplay options. White is the army of wind and long range snipers and their armies can pop instantly if you get on top of them - but does that mean they shouldn't have some sort of tank, or tank-like option, that shifts this dynamic around in an interesting way? White has a lot of parallels to Terran in BW, and while Terran seemed to lack a true all-purpose tank unit if you are familiar with Mech play you know that Vultures and Spider mines fulfilled all the roles of a traditional tank in a truly unique and faction-defining way. They weren't used all the time in every matchup: sometimes Terran was just a bunch of Marines and Science Vessels - but the capability was there.
Being able to bust out any given role if my team needed it, or to counter my opponent's picks/roles, or just to keep my opponent guessing as much as possible how to approach the battles, I feel would add a lot of depth and replayability to Atlas while also making Random Matchmaking a much more fulfilling experience.
Day 6.5: The Igniter
This is something I've been mulling over and I don't think everyone will agree with me, but I think there's some merit to this opinion as well:
I don't feel the Igniter as it currently exists makes sense as a Red unit. In fact, I think it makes much more sense as a Blue unit.
Ok, hear me out!
Slow, splashy space-clearing effects are fun! Locking down an area for a long time is neat, and the rare times you catch a napping enemy in such an effect is great. I like the Igniter and his big dumb fireball.
But here's my issue: the Apocalyte and the Pyrosaur already provide big, splashy space-clearing effects that force the enemy to retreat or move in a very specific way. And they are good troops, maybe even amazing in the case of the Apocalyte, with abilities that help out in a variety of circumstances and can often not be fully avoided even by a fully attentive opponent.
As a result, I have not been able to find a place where it's right to make Igniters instead of these units. The opportunity cost of including a unit in my deck with an ability that will probably never hit a competent opponent that hasn't been rooted by a teammate is huge, as is the in-game cost of making one instead of a Pyrosaur or an Apocalyte. On top of that, the specialized role it is trying to fill is only situationally important, and often requires me to make multiple Igniters to utilize - which represent multiple Apocalytes or Pyrosaurs, units that get better the more of them you have (but are still very good in small numbers).
These problems will probably be compounded considerably at higher skill levels, when players are very unlikely to ever take Fireball damage unless they are held in place by a team-wide effort - which would have resulted in dead armies with Apocalytes anyway, at a much faster rate.
The funny thing is I would LOVE the Igniter as a Blue unit. Blue doesn't really have a way to force tanky armies to disengage on a T3 caster - it can slow/snare your guys, but it doesn't really do measurable AOE damage with anything and if you don't mind your frontline being snared by Blue you can just sit there and slug it out with them.
Swap out the Igniter Fireball for a Hailstorm or the equivalent and have it slowly move toward the enemy dealing massive damage and you have a bona-fide waveclear ability that blue can try to build combos with. It's expensive and splashy and tbh that feels a lot more flavorful as a blue ability than Red, who I don't really envision having slow-moving, easily avoidable AOEs when everything else they do is flashy, fast, and sudden.
Day 7: Units: Trappers, Beetles, Trebuchet
Small morning update - these are mostly thoughts that have been bouncing around in my brain for a while. I'll try to post a more gameplay-oriented update later this afternoon or evening if I can put something interesting together.
Trappers are a cool unit, though I'm still trying to figure out where they fit. Since the trap doesn't do damage and I can only have 3 of them at once, I often find myself wishing my entire team had trappers so we could coordinate blocking off large portions of the map in quick succession. Will 3x Trapper teams be a thing?
This unit is probably too hard for new players to use - specifically because the trap doesn't do damage, the range for laying traps is low, the windup time high, and it's not clear how and when to use them. It's also kind of weird that they have an expiration timer - I don't know if this is to prevent someone from filling their base with traps over a game, but 180 seconds seems so functionally long that I feel like it could just be removed entirely. However, games currently are lasting around half as long as you expected them to, so maybe with a longer game time this would matter a lot more.
Beetle Fighters feel rewarding to use and do a great job of allowing Red to fulfill all the major roles you would want on a team. Beetles are a super-cool option for Red to fulfill a tank/blocking role and give them the kind of flexibility I really hope to see more of in every faction. They aren't amazing tanks vs. everything or at every point of the game, but they are fantastic in select circumstances and provide an adequate option in many others.
This is the kind of thing I was talking about earlier with regards to building flexibility into every faction with interesting and sometimes situational role-players, and I couldn't be happier with the results so far. Great job with the bugs!
Trebuchets do not feel fun to play against. Trebuchets seem pretty fun to play with, but I have never once enjoyed myself playing against them - even when I managed to snipe them. Because they are almost always firing at you from offscreen, the counterplay to them is neither interesting nor exciting - you just play an annoying minigame, all the time, until you either find a way to bonk them or get hit.
I'm not even losing games to Trebuchet - they're just consistently obnoxious and frustrating. A unit whose primary function is to fire from completely offscreen feels almost like a design flaw - I just want games involving trebuchet to end, one way or another, and I almost don't care who wins or loses because the minigame is just that annoying and boring to deal with.
Dodging AOEs is a rewarding activity when paired with trying to snipe units or escape a gank but with trebuchet I'm just always playing a 1-player game of Mario Party with no reward structure in place.
Day 8: Nexus health and backdooring, Cliffs and lack thereof, Small objectives and lack thereof
Today I'm going to talk about one concrete observation and a few philosophical ones.
Nexuses feel way too squishy and make sudden backdoor attempts, even by 1-2 people, potentially fatal at any stage of the midgame and on. Backdooring feels incredibly powerful right now, to the point where you can steal absolutely unwinnable games. While this does present a comeback mechanic, it also feels a much too strong because you can lose every single fight over the course of a game and still win out of nowhere. I've had my completely overclassed team throw in the towel and rush the Nexus despite having killed none of the opponent's base and being way behind and it resulted in an immediate win - and I've had another game where it came down to the wire, with the opponent only killing our nexus seconds before we killed theirs, and only because we did a bad job of attacking it first. This doesn't feel like it should be quite so easy.
It's also extremely easy to snipe important buildings because you can simply walk by towers and start destroying warp cores/shield batteries. This feels strange - either towers are doing too little damage to discourage this behavior, or buildings are dying too quickly, because while backdooring feels like it should be viable some of the time it happens much, much faster than in similar games and requires very good coordination to stop. It's also possible with nothing but T1 units and can be done over and over with little fear of repercussions since if you make it to someone's base, you can kill a Warp Core/Battery before they can react more often than not. This means that if a game goes long, SOMEONE should be constantly backdooring if at all possible because the payoff feels consistently much, much higher than the cost.
When backdooring is so powerful that it feels like it should be the main strategy in every game, I feel like it's a bit too strong or at least too easy to perform at relatively early stages of the game. There's very little risk involved for throwing a horde of T1 units at a shield battery, as you're almost certain to kill it in 1-2 attempts and if you do you've gained more than you lost.
Even when you have vision and spot someone running for the core it's often likely they'll be able to kill it before you clean them up unless you were already very close by. This seems like something that would dominate, at least at the middle levels of play, unless it were slightly tweaked.
It would be really nice to have some cliffs in the game, at least for testing purposes Many of the testers have been discussing units like Trebuchet and Purifiers and we agree that trying these units out with more varied terrain features would be a cool way to gauge their functionality under a wider variety of circumstances than are currently available. Purifiers in particular feel lackluster despite being a really cool unit, and with Transporters/Teleporters in the game it seems like the map is ripe for some more varied features, which might also allow for trying out different midgame objectives.
It might be too early to try out other maps or game modes, but the potential feels like it is there for the game to be played in a variety of styles.
More objectives unrelated to Fighting Battles would provide more comeback mechanisms. Right now the comeback mechanism is clearly Backdooring, and it works (maybe too well). Unless more small objectives are added to the game, I don't see this changing any time soon. I'm not sure, however, with the present map in mind, how you could add more small objectives that did not focus on fighting big battles. Creep camps are a start but the risk associated with invading the other side of the map to take them is not consummate with the expected reward. Taking the creep camps on your side of the map is, at best, parity.
I'm not sure what can be added to the map that constitutes "optional objectives" with the current map size and shape, and with no workers or creep waves spawning from base. This might be a problem with no easy solution, but I do feel like solving it would help solve some of the snowball effect that seems pretty prevalent still.
Possible solutions to backdooring that i've thought up.
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Here's an example of a replay that's an example of backdooring making the rest of the game not matter very much.
Also, towers could maybe be in range of all the stuff you're backdooring, whether or not you have to kill the towers before you're allowed to kill production/shield buildings
Day9 just said after a game i just played with him they're looking at backdooring. For next patch they're probably increasing shield battery/nexus life.
We did ittttt
Day[9]: Build 222. Changes to the game thus far, Observations, and Units: Observer, Howling Commando, Ice Frog, Purifier
From now on I'm going to list the current build along with my blog post, which hopefully will make it easier to ID whatever the hell it is I'm ranting about at any given moment.
I'm going to start this post by talking about major changes the game has undergone since I started this journal, specifically with regards to issues/units I've talked about so far in this blog. In many cases the game has been patched to change units or gameplay mechanics, so I wanted to highlight what seemed like the most significant.
The Sentinel feels like a problematic unit. It hard-counters Shadows, the only other "fully stealthed" unit, and soft counters other stealth abilities, which are already rare enough as is, while providing so much vision that every team should probably have a Sentinel guy. The sentinel is an incredibly simple and powerful unit and it mirrors similar units in other RTS games. However, it does something that is typically impossible in MOBAs: permanent, mobile vision and stealth detection, at a very low overall cost to the team using it (since only one player really needs to make any of them).
Legal maphack is a tremendously powerful ability on its own, especially in team games where positioning is absolutely crucial to winning big fights (which happen often). This alone makes Sentinels highly appealing, to the point where I could see every team having one player committed to being the Sentinel guy. Remember, in most MOBAs at least 1 player is usually in charge of warding as large an area as possible at any cost: Sentinels do a better job of this than wards ever could and take a much smaller commitment.
On top of that, however, Sentinels feel like they counter the few stealth units the game has, passively and with minimal investment. Shadows, for example, die the moment they approach the enemy army with a Sentinel nearby: they have no use outside of shadowing armies and/or diving in to drop AOEs (apart from occasional spot use vs. Trebuchet) and all those uses are countered with a single Sentinel, something you're likely to want to have anyway.
There are clear parallels between this and Dark Templar in SC, but with a notable difference: Shadows (and other stealth units) cannot prey upon workers or production lines. Units in this game are build for harassment or direct confrontation, and while DT vs Obs play involved a constant tug-of-war due to positioning and spread out bases, with the DT being able to force constant adjustments and micro taxes on the defending player, in Atlas units are only concerned with direct fights or hit-and-run attacks on other units. Unfortunately, both of these uses for the Shadow are countered by the same thing: have anyone on the team make a Sentinel. Blue then loses its only consistent source AOE damage as well as the use of an interesting recon unit.
The other stealth units in the game are also soft-countered by a single Sentinel: I can't imagine how frustrating it would be to pop my Ultimate as Vela only to have said ult countered by a single basic recon unit that any team can and possibly should have.
It feels to me like there aren't enough stealth units in the game for Sentinels to have permanent detection. Maybe if their upgrade let them use detection as an activated ability or something I could see them being in a more reasonable position: this also would make the "counter" to Sentinels simply be "also have Sentinels" which I would guess you'd see if the current build was the basis for a larger meta.
Even then, however, I feel the Sentinel might be too good for this type of game.
The Howling Commando feels worse the more I play with it because it doesn't beat the things it's supposed to counter. Howling Commandos look fun: sort of tanky! AOE ranged damage! Use them instead of Terrapins! As a Tier 1.5 unit, it's appealing when you're staring at the unit list to consider how awesome a big pack of them would be, upgraded and AOEing down cheap T1 stuff in the blink of an eye.
Except they don't. They lose to other T1, pretty badly in fact. They are big, lumbering targets, with less range than the stuff they're supposed to kill, and do so little damage and cost so much that even firing against a group of wisps you get worked, and they're bad against melee and bigger units (for obvious reasons).
How to fix Commandos? I don't know. They seem like they'd either be insanely good (as they apparently were before) or really bad. I think the problem might be that they are built to be a Hard-Countering unit (Splash Ranged damage on a tanky dude) but are at Tier 1.5. A T1.5 unit that is supposed to wreck tiny fragile armies is probably too good if it works since most armies fall into that category early!
Ice Frogs feel weak and unimpactful for Tier 3 units. This is part of a broader problem I see as "too many AOE slow/snares in the game right now". I am going to write up another post on this, but in the meantime Ice Frogs seem like the most blatant culprit of this issue. I can get AOE slow/snares a million different ways (especially as blue). Why waste a T3, expensive dude that has to channel in the front lines on it? He's just gonna get popped anyway.
Purifiers highlight White's problem with having no tank. White is the army of long range and hit-and-runs. But that doesn't mean they can't have some sort of unit that tanks! Purifiers feel very frustrating to use right now because White can't support them - they have no units that encourage enemies to bunch up or create a strong line to prevent people from sniping their purifiers - which take so much supply it's not even practical to create a wall of wisps (which aren't good at forcing bunched armies anyway). This means that using Purifiers feels totally out of your control sometimes - you have to hope a teammate blocks for you, and if they don't, you often lose your cool build-around-me unit without having any clear options.
Beetles for Red are a fine example of a nontraditional tank filling the gaps in a faction's capabilities and giving them the capacity to assume a role they wouldn't normally be known for. Ultralisks for Zerg in SC are another example. Specialist tanks that aren't as good at generalized tank roles (compared to, say, Terrapins) can still tank in a different, interesting, "White" way that lends diversity and opens up doors to different team compositions and play styles.
A thought. What if shadows could shoot up so they could shoot sentinels from melee range? Then a sentinel would have to still be careful against shadows
Well, that would kind of help when wandering the map, though the Sentinel could just fly away safely every time. But when engaging an enemy army you typically need to move your shadows into the middle of a pack of Tier 1 dudes, but because Sentinels give vision what actually happens is the T1 guys see the Shadow moving out front and instantly pick it up as a target and snipe it from a casual Attack-move command. The defending player often doesn't even have to notice the Shadow is there because of where it is trying to move to, it just gets blown up collaterally.
I made a picture showing the saddest shadow in MSPaint. The shadow is sad because he is trying to hurt the wisps and disrupt the tanks. He is sad because he can't find himself another role in the game yet, but he's countered by a really good unit that every team can have! Poor shadow.
I feel that an upgrade that adds invisibility to your wards will create more interesting play opportunities around the emphasis on unit battles and positioning than the Sentinel. With this addition, you will require your own wards AND the detection upgrade on your wards to clear enemy map vision. Additionally, you would still have the opportunity (though not the guarantee) of having vision on enemy invisible units.
Wards placed and removed are two large facets in the reading I've done on League of Legends, and I believe it would provide a more interesting aspect of gameplay to Atlas through interaction than the Sentinel has thus far.
I feel very similarly. The more I play with it the less healthy and interesting I feel the Sentinel is compared to interesting ward play. It takes a complex and rich facet of RTS/MOBA gameplay (establishing vision) and strips it down to the simplest and least interactive unit.
Observer-type units can work great when there's an opportunity cost to them and when maps are large with varied objectives to guard, so deploying and managing observers feels like a system of choices, but on a MOBA-style map it just feels like you're getting full-map vision for free at almost no investment - so of course you have to take it. And there's not much artistry to their use, outside of microing them to avoid getting sniped.