Making split farming more effective
I love the game so far but one of the main aspects I would like to be improved upon is the benefits of splitting your army. Being able to multitask is a hallmark of an RTS game and while units like engineers and juggernauts give players that ability, I think increasing the benefits of splitting your army throughout the game will make the game more interesting. Right now, it feels like you can keep all of your army together and farm camps and you won't fall too far behind a player who farms camps with his army while farming critters with a few units. Making sure that players have to split their army from time to time could increase the number of small skirmishes outside the titan fights.
An ideal solution could be to increase the size of the map and add new objectives to fight over but right now my suggestion is simple: increase the bioshards dropped by the grubs. I feel like farming grubs with a few units became less effective with the latest patch as well. Players start with more resources and camps spawn more frequently but grubs don't spawn more or give more resources. I think increasing the resources gained from the grubs can make the gameplay more dynamic and interesting.
This could also alleviate some of the problems players were having with pathing around allies as the team fights will be less cramped if some units were to be away from the main battle. This would make battles easier to manage without sacrificing the benefits of the current pathing system.
Comments
The more I think about it, I think I have found out two potential issues with my suggestion:
Every bioshard piece gives you 15 bioshards so making grubs drop one more bioshard piece would make them give 30 bioshards, which is probably too much of an increase and I think developers would like to keep it consistent so bioshard pieces dropped by the grubs can't give more than the ones dropped at camps. A way to solve this issue could be to make bioshard pieces worth 10 bioshards and make it so that grubs drop 2 pieces and every other drop could be readjusted to drop more pieces. This way, the reward from other sources will remain same (except for some sources that give multiples of 5) and the drop from grubs will be increased by 5. A simpler solution could be to increase the rate at which grubs spawn and reduce their HP.
Making grubs drop bioshards frequently could lead to tech options being even more powerful than they are and they are probably too powerful as it stands. This could be solved by slightly increasing the bioshard cost of all things in the game but that would probably be too complicated.
A better solution could be to make camps drop slightly less bioshards. This way farming grubs would become relatively better even if grubs still drop 15 bioshards each, tech units won't be as dominant and killing towers and enemy heroes will also be relatively more rewarding. It would also not cause the first problem I mentioned.
I think a lot of people simply equate multitasking with a good game and want to artificially implement it into the game. That's not a good way of doing it. SC2 has "multitasking" as a result of underlying game mechanics such as expansions and large maps. It isn't necessarily shoehorned into the game just for the sake of having it.
I think one of the worst things that could happen about GoA is for the game to become unnecessarily difficult mechanically. I would love for there to be scenarios where multitasking is beneficial as a result of the strategic choices made in the game, and I think the game currently has those. But it wouldn't be good if multi-tasking was mandatory for playing at a high level by design. That would really go against some of the fundamental design objectives of the game.
I think when the new game modes come out, we will likely see some experimentation with the concerns voiced by the community, such as lack of multitasking.
I agree with your second post, that the economy seems mistuned at the moment, as a result of the previous patch. Hopefully, after the next patch, we will see some readjustment towards lower shard counts.
I wasn't suggesting implementing more multitasking to the game for the sake of it. I think making decisions on when to split your army or how to split it is a lot more interesting than keeping it altogether all of the time. Like I said in my post, there are opportunities to multitask and split units. I simply think it will be better for the game they were more pronounced.
I don't think it is a design goal for the game to have all of your army in one group all the time. New players can do that and the game's UI allow them to use abilities without changing control groups, which is great but I think the game should allow high level players to use multitasking to gain an edge over their opponent. I think it should be rewarded more and having fights with 2-3 units and not only huge team battles around the titan would make the game more engaging to play and watch.
I think it's important to identify "splitting the team" as functionally equivalent in a 3v3 to "splitting an army" in a 1v1 RTS. Yes, it's mechanically easier, but that in part is intentional, and if your team needs to be more than 3 places at once it's probably too complex outside of a few edge cases.
Now, that could be a situation where the whole team is together and 1 player splits off a handful of units to do 2 other things, but for the most part in any team RTS it's rarely correct to splinter armies further than this because the possibility of facing overwhelming numbers is so high.
I remember how rarely it was right to split up in Warcraft 3 team games and I already see more of it here, especially if they can tweak objectives further to encourage split pushing.
I was making a comment that intended to address the wider criticism. I apologize if it seemed like it was directed at you, not my intention.
I both agree and disagree with your points. While I welcome additional multitasking, I think it is important that it enters the game through a diverse unit pool, rather than being explicitly designed into the game. I think there's already significant scope for multitasking, but as usual, all the game rewards becomes mushed into the pile of bioshards, and therefore they might seem a lot more insignificant than they actually are. The thing I fear the most is that if multitasking becomes too rewarding, it'll create a barrier to all the strategies that are bad at splitting and operating in small numbers, which I don't think is a good direction to go in.
@Tedster has a good point with the distinction of army splitting and inter-army splitting.
Ironically, the game mode of Atlas that I preferred the most was one where fights were dispersed throughout the map the most, but it wasn't well received by the community.
I think many players want this SC2'esque style of RTS where strength in one aspect of the game can make up for weakness in other aspects, and I don't think that's what this game tries to be. The unit battling is going to be the point of focus in Atlas, and if you want to be good, that's probably where you have to put your efforts into improving.
Battles should certainly remain as the focus of the game. Otherwise, I would be suggesting more economy/base management oriented multitasking improvements. I think that battles can be more varied though. Instead of most battles involving all the armies of all 6 players at the same place, the game could do with more battles between 2 or 3 players or even some skirmishes with 2-3 units at each side.
I definitely agree with that and would love to have that. Back when we had 3 symmetrical objectives (in this case titans) on all three lanes, it'd be kinda cool to see it being like 1v1 in the start, then maybe someone would rotate and it would be 2v1, and then the other team would react etc. And it would end up at 3v3, but not at the first titan usually. When the game went towards late everyone had to show up because every titan was super important.
Anyway, devs went away from that because they wanted a bit more 'directed' gameplay that was easier to understand for newer players. Where to go and when. The 3-titan iterations also had the issue of one team being behind could very easily suddenly be sieged by 3 titans and it wasn't very fun. Personally I think that could be tuned through making titans weaker but most of the community didn't like that concept.