So I've had a little bit of time playing with the new update. There's no real organization to what I'm going to put here, it's just going to be a pile of thoughts and first reactions. As always, this is a first reaction so a grain of salt is inherent.
The campaign changes were cool. I like how the second map has the enemies now zerg rush you once you finish setting up. In my first playthrough of the third mission I didn't notice any glaring changes in it aside from the graphic overhaul, though I'll probably play it through a few more times to see if anything stands out.
The new textures are awesome and the buildings are a huge improvement. It's cool to see how the concept art has been incorporated into the game. New sound effects are also great, though there are still some volume balancing things that I noticed with some sounds seeming a little bit too loud.
As for buildings and new textures, it'd be nice if there was an easy way to tell who controls a bloom site when you're looking at it. Right now you have to click on it and see who's name is attached to it or look at the minimap. This is also true with the mines at the moment. I absolutely love everything about the mines, but with the colors only down on the very bottom of the legs it is hard at a quick glance to tell who's mine it is, especially if there are servos or drones in front of it. Last critique on the mines would be to make some sort of cue that the game has registered my build order for a mine, as right now I have to sit there for a second and wait for the mine to appear before I know that the game has actually heard my command. Either an audio cue or something like a foundation or holographic projection so I know it is building. I mentioned before that I think it would be cool if the mine spat out an unfinished package when you blew it up, but now that I've seen the bloom packages you can have scattered on the ground, it would be cool if a package would crash into the ground and make one of those when you blew up a mine. Gives you some instant gratification for blowing up the mine.
One final building comment is that the mega turrets either have always had four barrels and I didn't notice before, or it's a new thing, but the four barrels firing with only 2 projectiles looks a little funny.
Super happy to see a new map, even if it has some issues. The AI doesn't put up much of a fight, and pathfinding tries to walk you through the holes that run between the walls so you get stuck having to micromanage pathing around them. The biggest issue though is the ridiculous amount of pressure you can create by spamming spawn from the cage. I did a T3 rush by strip mining all of the nodes on the map and having the drones and other servos break bloom and got an army of bloomspawn out that tore through the enemy base without an issue. If the same tactic was pulled against me, I'm not sure how I'd be able to defend against it. Between the cage being indestructible and the fact that these bloomspawn have no population limit and each type produces simultaneously with the others only serves to make them even more broken at the moment. Once I hit T3, I can just QWERT over and over until I win, no servos even required.
Fists, despite the new variations that I've found, all still seem to suck. I am trying to find a use for them, but they are just so weak still. I can equip a 10 dps fist with the founder head and it still is out damaged by everything. I also just picked up a shield that gives the fist bonus damage but even that doesn't do much to help its case. Also, I found a healing fist that can heal a target for 10 hp every 10 seconds. In the time it would take that fist to fix literally anything, I could walk my army back to a beacon, heal everything I have fielded, walk back across the map, and restomp the other team. I think fists could stand to take a role similar to what I've used pistols for - lots of fast attacks to proc effects. However, with an attack speed of only normal, they are far inferior to this task than pistols and still outdamaged by swords. I haven't actually gotten a drill-spear so I can't judge it compared to those yet.
Body parts providing armor is awesome, as it now makes my elemental weapons even better since they will go around the natural armor of enemy servos, loving it so far, though it sucks to have my sword/shield heavy armor servo torn apart in 3 seconds by enemies with acid rifles. Really digging it though as it adds a real use for the non-regular armors since those are now glaring weaknesses in your servos normally. That said, armor stat generation is kind of messed up as my highest armor piece, besides the founder gear, is a common body that dropped with 4.6 armor. I actually got an epic body in my second crate, but it has only 2.4 armor so that's kind of a bummer. I was hoping it'd have a separate effect like the Early Access body with the armor and crit bonus.
Gameplay-wise, I noticed how completely differently the game plays without infinite drones running around. The AI doesn't have the insane field presence it used to, and it is now a lot more important to use your servos in a smart way. I really like this, though it seems that the way it is now, a single drone should have more presence. Now that we are sinking resources into these drones, they can't fill the same role as cannon fodder like before. When I'm tanking a turret or drawing the aggro of bloomspawn around a node, I'm losing resources now. With the cost of drones as it is, until late game it's very difficult for me to justify building drones that I know are probably going to be thrown away resources. I don't need it to the point where 2-3 drones can pick off a servo, but would be nice if they didn't die in hordes to everything that looks at them funny. I forget where it was mentioned that you wanted drones to be a workhorse early game and fall off late game as the servos grew in power, but right now they are too expensive to use early game aside from the free ones you start with.
The new abilities are cool. The higher tech levels are obviously better, but it is also useful to have more abilities overall for more firepower. However, the addition of more abilities does seem to leave weapons and parts without abilities at a severe disadvantage due to the large amount of bonus damage generated from having two abilities to cycle between.
So, this is everything that jumped out at me in like 1.5 hours of playing today. I'll probably disagree with half of this in a week like last time, but this is how it stands now.
Heh, we've already made a quick fix to the bloom well color xform issue. Bigger fix scheduled. We just biffed that one and only evaluated it on the grass map.
The immediate response ack to building a well is on the punchlist for tomorrow;)
Yeah, if we keep the bloom "pods" (not sure why we wouldn't, but we still need to sit with it a bit and get feedback), we'll incorporate them more.
Bastion art remains stand-in. The only "not stand-in buildings" right now are the Dropship, the Bloom Refinery, and the Factory. Those aren't final, yet, but they are over the hump and will be getting small tweaks. Every other building is stand-in.
Creep Rock City vacillates between OP and nerfed Bloomspawn. Today (with some turret changes we were trying), they were completely ineffective. At this point, the question is "Do you like the idea of the map?". It's not balanced yet and the AI won't even try to buy the creeps. It's really one that needs to be played against a real person right now.
Still working on fists. They don't have any powers yet. They'll get there.
Still working out the balance of armor vs. regular DPS/damage vs. trample vs. in-the-RTS-game progression. At this point, I guess we're really looking for feedback on the concept. Is it cool? Does it make the game better/more interesting?
Which drones are you building? The Boring drone (still needs a non-jokey name) stayed "the same". The healing and stun drones got a LOT better.
Yes, weapons without abilities are generally less good if you can micro all the abilities properly. We have a few folks who "don't want that complication" and would prefer to take some simpler gear. We're trying to provide that as an option, even if the most competitive folks won't find value there. I'd expect most of the more core folks to bedazzle themselves with all the abilities they can. That's fine. They can just vendor the other gear.
Thanks for the feedback!
On fists: I kind of liked the direction they had before with the +5 heads: start small and scale fast, like it's a skill based weapon. A martial arts view on it could go lots of places.
Some thoughts, I only played this version maybe an hour and the last another hour.
I like the previous model for bots better. You build a factory and it produces bots throughout the game, for free, up to a cap. Now I have to micro the factories. And the truth is, there is practically no reason to build bots until you have your third mech out (heck, you can't even build most until you have 2 mechs). I'd like to see a compromise between the two systems, where "up to X" bots are free and can be set to be maintained. Then you can overproduce to build a vastly larger army for a price. The marginal cost of factories and turrets in general should be increasing.
I crashed while in the arena, and when I went back in game it just treated it like I never started that game. Seems like an easy way to "game" the increasing risk/reward for consecutive arena battles. You should build on the assumption that the game doesn't crash, and it will serve to motivate you to make that a reality.
When designing mechs I'd like much more filtering options. Just like in the sell place I'd like to be able to filter (hide/unhide) parts by rarity, and reorder them according to DPS and rarity and quality. When choosing between weapons I'd also like a dropdown menu to be able to show only fists/rifles/pistols/swords/shields. The reasoning behind this is that the UI only actually shows something like 15 pieces max, whereas hopefully, long-term, players will be sitting on inventories many times that.
The mech that controls biologicals has no cooldown on the ability. Pretty damn strong when fighting a coop-game. On the other hand, the guy that gets controlled is pretty damn stupid. It seems to follow the controller around at a fair distance, so it often misses the opening parts of any battle. Just feels kind of tame.
The mech with the ability to eat bloom wells for bloom, that just seems like way too strong an ability in any player versus player game.
The mech that gives a radius for new drops, I'd like to see the radius increased. You can't drop the mech on the mech, so the actual area you can drop in takes a bit of maneuvering with the mouse to really find.
Healing bots need some kind of priority system wherein they heal first and shoot second. At least that's my opinion on how they should act in combat.
There seem to be an upper limit of selecting maybe 25 units at once. I don't see any reason for such a limit existing in this modern age. We're not playing WC1.
AOE damage in general needs to be "X+0.1Y damage split over Y targets" rather than "X damage to all targets in area". Units don't have a collision and battles often end up as a huge melee in the middle with melee bots, melee mechs and everything else nearby in an area no larger than 2x2 command centers. Most AOE damage is devastating in these battles. I've had a single rank 4 missile salvo almost kill 7 biologicals in one attack.
When using a sword and shield, I noticed that bash is often unavailable. It appears that the range for bash is actually smaller than the standard length required to hit with swords. If I manually move the mech closer, then attack, bash becomes available.
Also, I dislike that mechs need to engage to enable these at all. I should be able to use it as any normal ability in games, ie it's an activatable ability that I can click on, then click on a target, then use. Perhaps Shift+leftclick or rightclick to use it as a normal activatable instead? Anyway, if you insist on keeping it as "activate to hit your current target", please provide in the UI what my unit is actually attacking. In huge battles I have no idea what my guy happens to be fighting, so often I have to rightclick an enemy and then use the ability. This negates the purpose of having it be "activate to hit current target".
Oh yeah, one more. When activating a missile salvo there is a deadzone close to my mech that I cannot target. I would like a UI display of this, in the form of a ring around the unit activating the ability. The purpose is to allow me to see precisely where I can and can't hit immediately.
Which drones are you building?
This is fixed in our build. I thought that fix was in this update, but I guess not.
There are parts that increase it.
They do have that. The difficulty is deciding what they do when you RMB on an enemy unit. Should they not attack at that point? If so, then do they follow the normal RTS convention of walking up to the thing they can't work on (as if it was a move command). They shoot so that they don't do that. We have a more interesting "minionization" system planned that will likely alleviate 95% of the frustration here.
Plan is to do some of both. Diff parts have diff damage curves. And, yeah, the obstructions will be getting fixed, too.
This is already fixed.
Yeah, the difficulty in seeing what you're attacking is a problem we need to fix. Still taking feedback on whether this control scheme is desired.
We had that and folks didn't like it. I guess we could add it back as an option.
Drill, healing, gun. Haven't tried catapults yet in early game
My 2 cents:
I like the idea of Creep Rock City, seems like it would be a great PvP map, have only skirmished in it so far. Initial impression is that the penultimate creep is a bit cheap, I had 2-3 take down the dropship + 1 turret + 2-3 factories.
AI and factories, it appears that the computer is spamming the factories but not building drones.
Creep Rock, played 2 skirmishes that seems to indicate a loot crate drop but none was given.
I have played a few skirmishes in which I built 2-3 bloom refineries then proceeded to eat the remaining bloom wells on the map. Once I ate all but mine the AI appears to turtle.
We have bloom falls that proc creeps, with eating bloom wells appearing to be an offensive tactic can the bloom falls occasionally proc a bloom well?
This is a result of a quick slash 'n burn throughout the AI to tone it done. Got a lot of feedback that it was too hard, so we took the nerf bat to it. Right now, we're in the process of rebuilding its meta thinking so that we can control it better to make it more fun at every diff level and harder at the higher levels. That said, it's pretty normal for the AI to uber suck at this point in the process. The game is still changing at a rapid rate. AI always gets fixed up last;)
Not entirely sure what you're saying here...
Shh. That was supposed to be a secret. Yes, we'll be doing that. The goal is to make the game dynamic (so we need to make all the RNG stuff fair). Adding bloom wells once the game has started should spice things up. Bloom pods will also fall in.
Ok, this is going to be a pretty big wall of text here, so here goes.
While the current bang-for-your-buck provided by the drones is still a little lackluster in my opinion as well, I vastly prefer this system to the old one of infinitely spawning drones. One issue that a lot of people brought up in the last version was the difficulty in actually crushing an enemy in games that made went to endgame. There were so many drones spawning and no way to stop it because they were always free. It didn't matter how much of the map the other player controlled if they had no way to cut off the enemy's economy. I had games go for more than 45 minutes because I could not push against the endless flow of drones. The only way to stop it was to run a servo into the enemy base on a suicide mission to destroy some of the factories before it died while your other two servos held off their army with your own drones and turrets. Though the new system is by no means perfect, it does at least allow a player with the upper hand to leverage that advantage in economy.
Glad to hear that the color is already getting fixed as that is something that is helpful to have. Though it'd be nice if I could right click a unit on a bloom site and have them stand within capture range until it is finished. Currently the unit will walk over to the bloom site like a move, but then if they are being shot at or an enemy goes nearby will go running off after that unit even if I was hoping to capture the node first. I don't mind if a ranged unit fights, but when I send a melee servo over to capture a node and he decides to go on a jolly chase after an enemy bullet drone that wandered past instead it can be a little frustrating.
I love the idea of the map, and the idea of having allied bloomspawn, though a little counter-intuitive to what I understand of the story so far, is a really cool mechanic. I think a good way to make use of the cage would be to make it a capturable facility in the center of the map. If it passively generated a few low-level units, but then at T4/T5 could throw out a single massive royal creep that was on par with a servo, it could be a great way for a winning side to roll through the other team once they had asserted dominance, while providing a use up to that point.
The new armor mechanic is a great step forward in my opinion. Before, armor was so rare that I never paid any attention to the damage type, only the DPS value of each weapon. Now it pays to have weapons that do a damage type besides regular, since all servos have armor against it naturally. This will also help to bring status effects into the mix when we are using fire or freeze weapons instead of regular ones.
My only suggestion would be to make servos have armor against more than just regular damage. Not necessarily every type, but maybe each body gives out 2-3 resistances depending on quality/rarity. Shields could provide blanket protection due to the loss in damage I suppose. This way it isn't necessarily better to go with a freeze gun that has slightly lower DPS than your normal one, as your enemy may have some resist in each of their servos. With the special armors only being available through shoulder slots, it is very hard to actually get a decent resist against these special damage types without having to ignore all of the other cool things you can have there.
I've experimented with all of the drones, the issue is how quickly they can eat resources. As an example, when I start on a map with my 400 Bloom, it is important that I spend it as best as possible. My two main styles of play so far have been the instant T2 and strip mine, or to drop two bloom mines down to get resources flowing followed by an armory or factory. Early game, the drones don't have the stopping power to trade with a servo or even really push them off. I've had several occasions where the enemy will be capturing a node with drones and I can just march my servo in, kill all five of their starting drones, and drop my own mine. Because of this, I have to already be ahead for it to be worthwhile that I start making drones. When I have to choose between making a new bloom mine for 150 bloom each or dropping the factory, waiting for the resources to flow in to the point that I can actually make the drones that I want in a quantity that will actually be a threat, and then marching them off just to be annihilated by a single servo that simply opens with a volley pod and then cleans up with a rifle for 4, 5, or even 600 bloom in total, I'm going to take the one that gives me something tangible at the end of those resources. I haven't tried doing a drone tech rush yet, and that is something I will experiment with tonight, but right now the drones aren't worth what I could make instead with those resources. This only seems to be more true now that parts will have tier-based abilities, as the first person to begin unlocking these high-level abilities immediately gains a MASSIVE advantage in battles and makes it seem like a race to tech up. Even when I don't bother researching anything or building a single structure, the amount of power I gain when I unlock those abilities by tech-rushing and just charging in with my 3 servos is immense.
Weapons that don't have powers don't necessarily need to be worse. I think a good example of a system like that working would be Runescape (yes, I did used to play that game) when it began to shift over to a new combat system that wasn't composed of simply watching your character fight. They added in all sorts of abilities that you could use and hotkey to spice combat up, but for people that didn't want that, they had a power you could use that disabled all of your abilities but made you do something like 40% more damage. If the overall damage output of a weapon without abilities and a weapon that used its abilities as they came off cool down was similar, there wouldn't be any inherent advantage either way and it would be a matter of whether a player wanted to be able to have directed spike damage or longer term continuous damage.
Still here? Cool. I'm done now.
I've only had Servo for a week now.
Before the update I would play a game or two then walk away. With the new updates its more interesting of a game that can hold my attention longer, which is good.
I like that different reward values when playing. Before all rewards were the same ($500 or there abouts.) I would play on easy to make quick money and then buy new Crates. The new system is better ($100 for easy, $400 Medium I don't remember hard). Its nice to be rewarded for the difficulty.
I have found issues with the side missions (build so many, kill so many) At times once I complete a side mission, when I go between menus, the numbers do not update or the side mission does not clear (I have had it stay 7/10 Beacon between games and between the store and main menu. Only when I exit out and re-enter does it change). Also the side missions do not refresh unless I exit the game and restart the game. I don't know if this was planned or if they are daily side missions that fresh once you relog.
I still find at times after an enemy is destroyed that my Servo/Turret will keep shoot the ground. It seems that the animation gets stuck. Once I give the unit a new command it will obey, but I do not know if in a mass melee if my unit will keep shoot the ground as they get pounded on. If I find out I will let you know.
New start cash amount is nice, allows you to diversify your servos better, out of the gate. I haven't been able to find anything else to spend the cash on beside parts or the arena. Is there anything else to spend in game cash on?
Havent played the new arena yet, but the old arena was not time/cost effective. Playing through one round successfully in the before new update gave you about a 90% return (cost $1000, would get about $940 after completing and leaving after the first battle). Tried it again and played through 4 missions successfully and I only received about $1243 for my time. Playing in skirmish mode I can make about $2000 in the same or less time. I feel this should be addressed. Maybe it is when you finish a full arena match instead of not completing all 5 matches. It would be nice to know what your losing out on if you quit mid arena. If it said "If you leave now you only earn $xxxx out of $XXXX." Knowing whats at the end would make some people fight through to the end.
Build drones: Can you please make it so you can build a drone infinitely. Going for 200 spawn kills, I maxed out everything (tech, drones and structures) but I was limited to the number of drones I could cue by my drone limit. I think I should be able to cue as many as I want and then have them be produced as one is destroyed.
That's all I can think about for now. Good game. Keep it up. (now if I could only someone online when I want to CO-Op with a real person).
The story is the story. That's in the campaign. Skirmish maps have more leeway, IOO. If they break canon a little, that's ok.
I think that's what I was saying. The non-power weapons will be stronger to compensate. I'm not sure implementing that with a power is a boon to the people who don't want to mess with powers, but the idea is similar.
Great point about the cost of drones. There has to be some way to attack economy and this accomplishes that a little bit better now.
Is there any interest in a PVP night soon? At this point it seems like finding "where" the balance should be just needs to be hashed out with human vs human. Ideally the balance should be able to allow a variety of strategies depending on what your servos are built to do. I think that is what will require the most testing and perhaps new weapons can continually be introduced so that a "Counter" is always going to be developed. A drone tech rush sounds like it could be a good mid game move after grabbing as many bloom sites as you can. Right now the late stage servo techs are immense and I imagine that whoever gets there first will decide the final outcome.
It is good to hear that there will be new bloom sites opening up in game...is there more plans to add randomness to the maps? Will terrain ever play a role?
The new graphics and animations are cool. It is nice to see the audio and visual elements coming together to add immersion. However the pods shoot into orbit a little to often and I feel its a bit over done atm.
We just made some fixes to this. Should be better next update.
This bug is on the list for this week.
It should be a better proposition now with some of the related changes. We'll give the idea of showing more info some thought. We had envisioned it as a bit of a gamble. Ideally, it's also fun/quick enough that you don't want to abandon. There is no way you "lose" by playing another mission and losing. You only have the chance to "get more". Perhaps that's not clear.
We'll provide some way to queue past your cap or infinitely. Need to decide if we're keeping this feature change first;)
Fair enough, I was just commenting on how I found it a little strange when I realized what the cages let me do. I'm not complaining, just commenting on it.
In our playtests, yes, drones get trashed with barrage. Those are some of the best moments. But, the better folks *never* let their drones get hit by barrage.
This is definitely true, I wish that I was able to get into PvP matches enough in to actually see what's going on in a real game, as I wasn't around for the one "official" PvP night there was a while back, and haven't had a chance to get online competitively against anyone since then. So all of this is coming from my experience against the AI, which is naturally going to be different from actual play.
However, I was using it as an example of when I've tried to go for a drone-centric start in the new build, not when I go for a tech path that has servos powered up to the point that I have other options. It inevitably means that at some point I have to charge my drones directly at the enemy units and it rarely ends in my favor. Before, when drones were free, it didn't matter because I wasn't losing anything as long as my factories were still alive, but now I have to basically spray my resources at things in order to get kills if I don't have a solid servo backbone.
I totally understand that you've been saying this since the start so I'm not trying to say that you think drones are exactly where they should be. I'm not trying to pin that on you in any way, so anywhere that it may seem I'm saying that isn't true. It is cool that Servos are once again the main focus of the game named for them right now, but that doesn't mean that there can't be a solid reason to build the drones too, at least early on. Obviously, in late game when everyone is running around with their second level abilities, drones get swatted like flies. However, the first 2-3 tiers should still provide adequate space for a drone army to be fielded and at least somewhat effective. The only drones that I have even remote success sending out on their own are catapult drones because they can stun a servo and then just beat on it while it is helpless. Other than those, the rest of the drones need constant assistance and protection in taking down buildings or other drones to keep them from getting smashed by enemy servos.
Ok, I thought that's what you were saying, but I just wanted to make sure since currently it seems that both have roughly the same damage scores in game, just one has abilities and the other doesn't.
In case you don't know,
Side mission: Build 10 Bloom Refineries, does not seem to be working. My count after multiple games is still 0/10. The other side quests count up are working as normal.
Great game.
This reply probably belongs in support.
Glad you're enjoying it! I think we just fixed that bug yesterday.
Related to that, I have a bug that I sent in with the bug reporter but given its less than stellar record I'll double check that you know about it here.
I'm working hard to complete my missions, but when they are Build Turrets: -95/10, Build Factories -78/30 and Win Games: -81/3, it takes quite a while
Those got fixed two days ago. Then, really fixed yesterday.
Lots of quest completion in PT today;)
I'd really like the ability to rally to a servo along with infinite queue, so you can set up a factory and let it go, only having to come back to mess with army composition or to stop building them if you need to save the bloom. Other things I'd like are the ability to rally all factories fast, and if there isn't already a hotkey for it, a key to cycle factories but not snap camera to them. You can get too many to hotkey them all and there is no multiple building selection.
While I'm suggesting stuff, give the servos their own hotkey so you don't need to use groups for them, f1, f2, f3 would be cool. Tabbing to get access to different servo/building commands when you have a bunch of them selected in a big blob would be cool too like WC3
We just added multiple building selection yesterday, in fact.
Rally point on Servos (or other moveable targets) is coming.
In our latest build, if you hold shift whilst setting a rally point, it will set it for all buildings of that type.
Tabbing through selection is also on the list.
I guess we could give you perm hotkeys for the servos on F1/F2/F3. We'll add to wishlist.
Sounds good. Wish I could give feedback on the balance at this point. This is the first version I've played and haven't been able to get a game going in MP. I'm liking what you all have done so far though. Should be a great game by beta.
Still playing away, still having a great time.
When selecting the graphics I want to play with (Shadow options) I usual go no shadows for quicker game play. Lately If I don't re-pick it each time I start the game high shadows come back on. Also during multiple games with out logging out, shadows will come back on, not always, at some point when a game starts.
Also what is the drop rate for torsos and Legs. I buy a crate and get tons of weapons and missile pods, which is okay. Then head drops. but torso drops I have gotten like 2 in the multiple crates bought, but no legs at all. Seem a bit one sided. Maybe you could separate Crates into options to buy, Random (all items), Servo (body parts excluding arms), Back (pods), Support (armor, resistance) have the random one cheaper maybe (no idea what you get) while the other specific ones a bit more (500-1000 more). Just a thought.
Keep up the good work!
Worth a "woot" on that.
Hmm, that's odd, but we've seen stranger. Surely a bug somewhere. We'll have QA dig into that.
Proportionally, yes, there are currently less non-weapon parts. That's why you're seeing a lower drop rate. It will get fixed over time as more art and parts get made for those. We've been focusing on weapons to flesh out more of the direct gameplay.
Question,
Is there a place to download the new updated fixes?
Or will there be a big release on a later date?
Not trying to hurry you just wondering.
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