movement
ShomoTooth
Member
in Feedback
Had a great blast tonight, the game is really fun but there where somethings that jumped out at me right away. Pathing and unit collision is kind of wonky. I noticed a lot that if i wanted to move a unit to the back of my units i was not able to because friendly units would not move out of the way this was pretty frustrating for me. Another thing is that a lot of the units feel very sluggish and moving around the map took a veryyy long time it seemed, but that might be a preference because i enjoyed playing Eris the most.
Things i would change:
1. friendly path out of the way of other friendly's
2. speed up unit movement
3. Doing number 1. might fix the feeling of the units feeling slow and clunky.
Comments
Pathing is a huge area of concern for us right now, and is the number one player complaint. We're definitely going to be making major improvements there over the next 3-6 months.
Increasing overall unit speed has some pretty big impacts on game design generally, so I'm not sure how much that's likely to change. I'll see if someone from the game design team wants to comment on that.
Welcome to the playtest! Woo!
As a design goal, we want some clunkiness with unit motion. It makes for easier surrounding on the enemy and forces players to think slightly more carefully about positioning. That said, we don't want it to be straight up frustrating. Otherwise people will quite playing :P.
So as you play more, we'd love for you to collect more specific examples of when the pathing was especially frustrating (pictures/videos/replay links are all awesome for this). Also, keep track of whether you feel more comfortable w/ the pathing/motion as you play more. It might be that you feel no change, enjoy it more, or it becomes the most rage inducing part of every game you play.
ALL THAT ASIDE, there's definitely some annoying pathing issues that, as mark said, we'll be addressing over the next few months.
Pathing issue: started a bot game and had a Hydros ally at AI-2 (bottom position). The initial units became stuck on terrain/structure for the first several minutes of the game. The units were twitching, so they clearly had a move command active, but were unable to go anywhere. It resolved at 6:45 when the large tower outside the base was attacked and a ping triggered. Perhaps the AI reissued a command to a closer point that allowed the units to path? Picture of positioning is attached.
As for units more broadly, with the caveat that I've only played a couple of bot games, I haven't had any problems I couldn't play around until lategame when several armies are jammed together. I've had issues with collision size relative to graphical size, where I've been trying to force a Pyrosaur through a gap it wouldn't fit, even though it looked like it should, in order to get close enough to flamethrow. In those clusters, it's impossible to rearrange units anywhere, really, so I could never make a hole big enough for the Pyro.
@Audacity, you've found one of our corner case bugs woo!!!
The situation you are describing is a known, tricky issue that we have a fix for. It be in for this pre-alpha playtest, but it shouldn't affect human players. Those types of snarls can be easily resolved with an extra right click or two, but AIs haven't learned to identify them. If this happens for YOU though.... well please let us know lol.
If you find awkward situations where units can't get through, taking a screenshot like with the Hydros glitch is great. We have some internal screenshots of odd stuckness, so having double confirmation or new data is great.
One thing i notice with pathing is that units will walk into corners at an angle rather than around them. If asked to walk around a corner, they attempt to walk directly through the corner and slide along the wall. This also means units are slower
@Enjoied Re sliding on walls, that sounds like a newly introduced bug - I'll pass it on to our pathing team!
Enjoied - thanks for the report. Do you remember what squad you were playing when you saw the sliding behavior?
I want to make sure it wasn't Ryme, Frozen Sage, whose first-tier army unit (Glacial Ranger) has a "walking" animation that includes a lot of head-turning.
Hi Enjoied - If you can give us more details about how many units were around, and where on the map you saw the behavior, that would be great! Feel free to PM me more details so we can work on tracking it down.
I completely agree with OP but for the unit speed.
On another hand it sometimes feels units are sliding over the map, not really 'stomping' the map, maybe some footprints , i dunno.
i guess the movement speed is more of just a personal preference for me haha, i really enjoy high mobility heros in mobas and played zerg in sc2 so that's probably just my style of play.
Try Eris. Her Devilkin Dervishes' aura is suuper nice for fast movements. With the upgrade you can just alternate and keep your entire army almost always boosted!
That aura + the Sandstingers' dash are great.
I played him for one game last night, was definitely my favorite class? race?? hero?? idk haha
Hero or Squad
I'm going to second this. I get that movement speed has a pretty significant impact on the game overall, but hey, that's what the alpha is for, right?
I'm not really sure that it's movement speed specifically, though: the whole game feels slow to me. Structures take a long time to build, static cannons take a long time to create, unit respawn timers feel long, and movement feels like swimming. I am happy to admit that I'm biased—I, too, am a SC2 Zerg player—but playing Atlas felt a lot like playing SC2 at Normal game speed, and I wanted to be playing Faster. Seriously: I actually dug through the settings to see if there was a game speed option I was missing.
Having a slower game is fine, as long as it is a conscious design decision, and it certainly opens up opportunities for certain styles of play that fast-paced games simply do not make viable. I just felt like I had APM that I couldn't spend on anything because the game felt slow. Sure, this is because I've played RTS games before, but I was always a pretty poor SC2 player (read: gold/platinum league), so I think there's something to that observation.
I found unit collision for structures a little weird; specifically when placing neutral weapons like ion cannons. In conjunction with terrain, I managed to close off a choke even though the structure's art looked like it would have path-able corners.
The unit collision felt a lot better today, I don't know if it was just because i was more used to the game then i was on Wednesday but there was no point where i was out of position today because of bad pathing, i just felt alot more comfortable in general with all the mechanics and felt pretty in control of everything
Slowing moving units cause a huge issue for the rest of the squad, because they just block them on any movement direction. I feel like the ability to temporarily stand on top of eachother, and then spread out afterwards would fix this (think: mutaball.)
Unit speed is a design decision, but quite often it can be for the better.
For instance in Sc2 you notice how units with movement speed below 2.5 are typically quite unmicroable. Like what exactly can you do with an Immortal/collossus when a Psi Storm or a Disruptor Ball is going towards it? The units are simply too slow to dodge the "skillshots".
However, stimmed Marines (movement speed 3.12) is a ton more microable which makes it possible to dodge skillshots properly.
The same concept applies to MOBA's where Heroes of the Storm suffers quite a lot from the slow movement speed which makes the whole juking aspect much less significant than in LOL.
Hence I think you should consider the advantages of increasing the movement speed from a design perspective. If you want to maintain travel distances you can also always increase the map size.