Friday Afternoon Playtest

Last note, they I'll shut up

It is fun seeing how the Devs insist in using walls. You're saying that walls are now even more robust. So perhaps it is the concept of wall that doesn't really work so well. It seems to me that the enemy (humans and AI alike) isn't stopped that much by those walls. In fact the player the mostly build walls, it's the one most likely to fall first during a match.

It might happen because the player that invest in walls misses to invest in structures and units with offensive capabilities. Therefore can't defend as well.

That happens regularly, unless walls are supported by turrets, and/or wisely exploited as coverage for your land units.

So, ultimately, I really like the people behind this game - they're friendly, smart, and they're doing great. But sometimes I wonder if the people who are designing the game are in fact the same people who're coding it

I wouldn't dislike to see walls a bit taller. That way once you build them side by side they would look like a proper wall. And not like a line of *panettoni* in an Italian supermarket

...

with more walls we see more bots cause they can move faster around it. This makes tanks a bit underpowered in games with a lot of wall building. Tanks are beter to defend tho but you can also build turrets for that. I do like the new energy buildings animation

I find tanks shooting fire at metal buildings and metal units a bit weird to be effective ammo. I think it would be more logical if the would shoot aside or some kind of chemical that dissolves/eats through metal.

Tanks are really good at spearheading a attack and bludgeoning through enemy defences with support from artillery (And hopefully soon with flame tanks too!)

But yeah, bots are really good at flanking and engulfing enemy forces.

Well fire can produce plasma under the right conditions I believe.

The biggest mistake I see people make with walls is putting their turrets so far behind them that ground troops can destroy the walls without taking return fire. And combat fabbers can reclaim the walls so fast and at such a long range that they won't really impede any prepared force. Sometimes I think that my opponents are trying to play Stronghold. I like to toss up a catapult within range of their defensive line, snipe all the laser towers with missiles, and then send in the slammers. A group of doxen with just a couple slammers pack a really mean punch.

Indeed. If you put walls too far from your Turrets, or if you move your units *in front* of the walls, walls aren't gonna help you that much.

I'm actually surprised to see the same mistake again and again in the LiveStreams from Uber. There should be some reasonable logic behind that. And I'm starting to suspect that I will not like it

The performance seems much better in that build

I'm especially eager to playing with those formations

Good news everyone, T2 bomber OPness is now fixed (i hope so at least)
I expect formations to be game changing as the damage per second per meter² is greatly reduced.

It's already possible, i use this function that way.

LOL, Dr. Farnsworth style?
http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Good_news,_everyone!

Mr. Purkiss, I rather suspect you know the answer to that question...

If you can't see it yourself, the point is that the natural distinction between functions is not only "shoots air" vs. "shoots ground". That's not how you think in the early game - at least I don't, and I think a lot of players don't. You think in terms of "keeps away scouting parties" vs "keeps away invasion armies". From a gaming perspective, it makes sense to have units / buildings which fit different roles (which I believe everybody and their grandmother on this forum more or less agree on), but it doesn't make sense to have buildings / units which only fill half a role. If you force the player to always build a group of buildings together, effectively treating them as a single building, then why not make it so? If one works without the other, then split them up. If you have a group of defensive structures which only work effectively in the beginning of the game when nobody have big armies, and you have to build both of them because you're not sure what to expect (and really, you should expect both, everybody have a little of everything in the beginning), then you're begging for some modder to come make a template which always builds T1 fortifications in pairs, and no one is ever going to build them in any other way.
An no, the same argument can not be used for all defenses. I think that when people start getting proper armies, they tend to diversify somewhat, and the way the different types of armies are used are somewhat different, meaning that you wouldn't always go "T2 AA - T2 AG - T2 AA - T2 AG" etc.

Yeah
Someone in the forum has a signature with him and this quote.

It seems that the ant is going through an identity crisis


The commander has now a reliable way to shoot with the uber gun.

Yeah it was very rare for ground units to hit air, over the years i saw maybe 3 gaurdians hit air units. It was a nice touch though.

Guardians were pretty awful at hitting anything in the air, but some of the other units did ok. The heavy laser towers couldn't hit fighters effectively, but they could chew through bombers and gunships. And it wasn't uncommon to see a tank pick a brawler gunship out of the sky, although the other 50 brawlers would wipe you out still.

For me, walls are very rarely about protecting something, and more about funneling enemy units. As a method of protection, they have very limited application, especially now as we get our unit roster more and more fleshed out.

Oh, and apologies for the lack of commentating on the video last night. My microphone looked like it was picking up, but.. apparently not. >.< I added the embedded YouTube archive to the original post too.

the video appears to have no sounds

Naval is still visibly too slow sadly, really guys they need to beat across the lake faster than the tanks can go around it, its silly otherwise, and damn frustrating if ur sea-borne line of defense is in the wrong spot; case and point, when the bots were rampaging through garat and scathis base the first time. Naval wasnt op before, pelters and holkins made short work of them in what two shots max no fleet that closed with a base didn't sustain heavy losses to achieve even minor goals of killing a nuke built too close to the beach etc... Now they simply cant do that because their too damn slow. Hope this changes, i'd like the rugged TA-like boats most of us were dream of when we reached the naval stretch goal.

Otherwise some damn fine stuff, when formations are weighted properly so high-health units move in front they will find regular use i'm sure. Can't wait to try out bomb-bots for myself.

It's there, just very quiet. Sound was turned down because he was supposed to speak over it, but apparently his microphone didn't work.