Comments

• CohLysion Member

  June 30 edited June 30

  Units

  Blues
  (1.1) - Though I didn't get a chance to play with them, I'm very excited for the Quadrapus now, both because of the added healing on the plate, but also because Intervention was previously broken. It was one of my favorite abilities, and I was always, in the back of my mind, confused that it didn't seem to do more.

  Greens
  (1.2) - "Batterhorn" This wins fantastically and with style that is usually reserved for a practiced royalty or the most rarefied of single malt scotches.

  Collection Screen

  (2.1) - Just a note here, it's probably in a polish pass in the future, but as is, parsing the unit part of the collection screen is definitely tough.
• Millea Member

  June 30

  Nexus

  Health: 2000 ⇒ 8000
  Physical Resist: 150 ⇒ 0
  

  Note for people a bit confused on the physical resist part: This means Nexus's effective hit points (EHP) goes from 5000->8000.

  The amount of shields shield batteries give the nexus go from 5000->2000 (EHP)

  This means nexus EHP with 3 shield batteries 20000->14000.
  With 2: 15000->12000
  With 1: Unchanged (10000)
  With 0: 5000->8000

  This makes # of shield batteries matter much less in a base race now, but makes base racing in general harder to do.

  Magic damage is now much less effective against the nexus in comparison to before, (EHP vs magic damage 4000->16000)
• tedster Member

  June 30 edited June 30

  As much as I've been badly abusing Apocalytes, the change is a good one. They were too game-defining in their current state. I'm also a fan of slightly smaller radius but slightly faster cast time.

  Also glad to see the Quadrapus buff. I'd been using them and noticed they were pretty close to worthless in addition to being super easy to snipe. The latter part might still prove to be an issue but for a defensive spellcaster it's definitely good to see some significant buffs.

  I'm still worried the Quadrapus might struggle to find a home because Blue has so many ways to AOE slow/snare an opponent that often it's better to proactively reduce the enemy's damage by slowing them than by directly aiding your own dudes, but that might change if the Quad is good enough.
• wondible Member

  June 30

  Nothing much has been sticking out for me lately; I'm feeling more limited by being bad at game than by the game itself. Haven't experienced most of the unit changes from this patch yet.

  Gameplay wise I have a bad habit of overcommitting and getting wiped, especially as melee. Often this is frustrating because I can't even accomplish my objective (e.g. killing a kingpin or trebuchet), although I've been able to hold the enemy off long enough for the last gem to collect a few times.

  Had a good Hydros game last week where I ended up pushing with team+titan twice, using quadrapus and ult to keep them going. Last night I had a Hydros game where I seemed to be on the losing side of every fight.

  I still find generators hard to manage. Supply/build are fine, but energy/bioshards tend to either be way too much, or chronically short. I've started experimenting with extreme generator builds to see if I can find a general direction I like. Pure bioshards/tech leaves you useless most of the game with insufficient upside, but might be useful in moderation. Mostly energy/supply left me desperate for energy.

  Probably a first reaction, but BioShards feels like too many syllables for a basic resource. As in the game terms should have a sort of Huffman Coding where the things you think/talk about all the time have short easy words. I'm sure shorthands will develop - Bio, Shards, BS? ("I'm full of BS")
• Millea Member

  June 30

  @wondible. I have the same concern about the number of syllables. There's already an official shorthand of "Shards" which is what pops up in game, which somewhat alleviates the problem though.
• tedster Member

  June 30

  I agree with the shorthand need, though I'm still a little sad to see Shard/Supply sharing the "S" resource tag.
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  June 30

  @CohLysion said:
  (1.1) - Though I didn't get a chance to play with them, I'm very excited for the Quadrapus now, both because of the added healing on the plate, but also because Intervention was previously broken. It was one of my favorite abilities, and I was always, in the back of my mind, confused that it didn't seem to do more.

  In retrospect, it was so obvious that this was broken hahaha. Plated Shell, on the other hand, was just tragically not good. But man, 50% AOE damage reduction was obviously good, and just didn't feel that way. And now we know why, hahaha

  Greens
  (1.2) - "Batterhorn" This wins fantastically and with style that is usually reserved for a practiced royalty or the most rarefied of single malt scotches.

  Never had scotch, but I'm up for an adventure.

  Collection Screen

  (2.1) - Just a note here, it's probably in a polish pass in the future, but as is, parsing the unit part of the collection screen is definitely tough.

  Duly noted. =)
• Treisk Member, Administrator

  June 30

  @wondible said:
  Probably a first reaction, but BioShards feels like too many syllables for a basic resource. As in the game terms should have a sort of Huffman Coding where the things you think/talk about all the time have short easy words. I'm sure shorthands will develop - Bio, Shards, BS? ("I'm full of BS")

  We'll be using "Shards" in most of the voice-over work as the truncated name. Perhaps presenting it as that in tooltips is ideal. We've been tossing this back and forth and haven't come to a concrete conclusion just yet.
• Foamborn Member

  June 30

  Quadrapus fix is great. The transition from tier 1 to tier 2 is much smoother. I think the extra 20% reduction on intervention may be too strong. The plate change is also really nice. It is really nice to have another triage spell available. It also makes the upgrade (2 charges) better.

  I really like the change to Hydros's ult also. It felt very sketchy to have all your army alive with no health bars and then you'd heal for pennies and get rolled. This change gives some needed wiggle room.
• Lef Member

  July 1

  I won't comment on balance, but rather on systems that have cropped up in my absence. Auto-build is surprisingly reasonable. I left it on for the first 10ish minutes of my games and let it just make tier one units while I focused on micro. Eventually I turned it off since I wanted to go for apocalytes and ignitors and the auto-build didn't want to accommodate such high shard value units at such a fast pace. Auto-collect is excellent, even with the caveat that the gems die when the collectors are killed off. Anything that saves me clicks is awesome, and gem collection took a lot of clicks. I played through the tutorial before playing the test. I think its reasonable. I didn't know where upgrades were in the real games, but I imagine they're covered in the bot games that I haven't gotten to check out yet. Choosing between energy, shards, supply, or slots is interesting and certainly fulfills the 'attention tax' that most RTSs have, but I like it because it doesn't require me to shift screen position and is more immediately responsive to my current needs.

  Battles were solid, but there was pretty serious lag going on in the 3ish games I played. Titan spawns felt like the major point of contention, but the game also felt flat. There were things that happened that changed the tenor of the game, but they were all player generated. It didn't feel like the game prompted any changes over the course of a match. The variation by unit composition and hero selection is probably enough, but I did notice a lack of a MegaTitan or Gem Frenzy to prompt action in the mid game. Overall though, the game feels like a much smoother experience than when I left.
• marktillery Member, Administrator

  July 1

  @Lef glad to hear it! I'll take a look at your recent games to see what was going on with the lag.
• marktillery Member, Administrator

  July 1

  @Lef ok here's a trace from one of your games:

  http://imgur.com/G2RURT9

  Take a look at the row labeled "ctick" for CohLysion, Trumpetmcool, and yourself. This row indicates when the simulation thread started each tick of the game. You'll see that for CohLysion and Trumpet, the ticks are mostly evenly spaced, but for you there are big gaps and then sudden bunches of ticks.

  This indicates that there was some issue with the network between the server, and you, probably packet loss, although possibly buffering delays. This could have been caused by a weak wifi signal, a big upload or download going on at the same time, or just bad internet weather.

  If this happens regularly with Atlas, but you don't experience lag with any other games, let me know.
• wondible Member

  July 2

  @Lef I had network issues with one game but web browsing was fine; went away when I changed my router (firmware change also helped) Not certain, but maybe something to try if you've got one you can borrow to test with, or from a different location.