Feedback: Animations, Hotkeys, Pace of game etc.

[WarriorKings]

First of all keep doing what you're doing, with every release my respect and favour for this game grows and grows.

I'll skip the praise and go straight to giving feedback about things that I think are worth mentioning. I've had my share of various RTS experience, a good chunk of it being AoE type games, so you know where I'm coming from.

1. Animations

While those animations that are finished look splendid the use of them ingame is somewhat troublesome as of now. First: Two units attack eachother, 1 unit moves away out of the attack range of the other unit. What currently happens is that the pursuing unit starts its animation while running behind the unit retreating, but it never reaches the point of the animation where damage is being dealt because the target is moving out of attack range leading to the animation being aborted. So the pursuer staggers behind the other unit starting attack animations, moving, starting, moving etc...

For ranged units, at the point after the attack delay when an animation can be started, the target is either in attack range, or not. If it is in attack range have the attacker start and FINISH the animation regardless of whether the target is THEN moving out of range or not. So the missiles are fired after the fleeing target. If the target is out of attack range and no animation is in progress, have the attacker pursue as normal. The fact that the firing animation should be completed helps to eliminate the derpy way pursuing ranged combatants act at the moment.

For melee units the same proposition applies. Either in or out of attack range, if in let the attack animation finish. Problem here is that if an attack animation takes a long time (to get to the point of dealing damage) it might look weird. Example being the American Conquest series here! What I mean is: A spearman pursues a fleeing villager. It reaches the villager, attack range is ok, the attack animation is started. Now the animation itself is very elaborate and takes quite some time until the point where damage is being dealt. What happens is the villager continues to flee while the spearman starts swinging. At the point of the animation where damage is being dealt the villager is far off, then the damage is being dealt and the villager dies - a few squares away from the attacking melee unit. While elaborate attack animations look great in close combat, in these cases animations where the point of damage is being reached rather soon are preferred. What I am saying is that while there is no trouble with melee animations being elaborate and long, the point of the anim where damage is being dealt should come rather fast.

To cut it short: Dont abort started attack animations when targets move out of range during to course of the animation. Dont have the point where damage is being dealt or missiles fired too far behind during the attack animation. These would be my suggestions to make the combat work better and look better at the same time, whether it is hunting units trying to slay deer or units chasing villagers around or melee units trying to kill ranged units. Both points are important aswell for ranged units being pursued by slower units. In my recent test run a skirmisher was pursued by a lion and kept retreating, starting the attack animation, aborting, retreating etc.

2. Hotkeys

In my opinion, if you want this game to be competitively attractive a wide range of fully customizable hotkeys for almost all functions of the game is rather necessary. Not that I know many old games but Age of Empires 2 surprised me in this regard. For a game that old, there are hotkeys for almost anything except researches ( which is ok ) plus you get the configure them in a very convenient way:

Besides the normal stuff you can put funtions on the mousewheel and you can use CTRL, ALT and SHIFT combinations for the regular keys. Also hotkeys are divided into sections of use, so you can for example give a spearman in the barracks the hotkey A and the knight in the stable the hotkey A, rather than having to use up two different hotkeys for creating the two units.

3. Pace of the game

This is more of a question. What is the pace of the game you are to achieve in the end? I mean will it stay the way it is now with the pace being rather fast or will you try and slow down certain parts of the game? Having played the game in singleplayer as of yet (not multi so dont flame my ignorance ) I find that if you boom your polulation/eco at the start of the game the resources come flowing in fast, tons of soldiers are flowing out and the game turns into a spamfest a bit more than I think is necessary. What I mean is that the proportions of economy and military, and what is required for what seem alright BUT the pace of how fast everything is achieved is a little too high in my opinion. I'd rather have to micro to save and heal up leveled soldiers or micro in general and receive a notable impact on the game for this than just having to shiftspam units like there is no tomorrow. As is said the relation is ok. Building times of buildings on the other hand are great. It takes time to construct things. Maybe all I am searching for is increased building times for units in general - not much as I like the fast pace - but a tad bit higher. I can imagine that the costs for researches and the time spend on it are to be overhauled anyway, that's why I didn't mention it.

All in all it is coming together nicely and I can't wait to see what the future brings for this game. Keep trucking!

Edited December 18, 2012 by WarriorKings

[Kimball]

1. This is out of my area of expertise, so I'll let someone else answer.

2. Once the options menu is implemented, I believe we plan to include this. Currently, you can customize a good number of keyboard shortcuts (and all sorts of other stuff) manually in the config file: 0 A.D./binaries/data/config/local.cfg

3. I think you might be the first person to ever say that the game is too fast. That being said, I can sympathize with the "spamfest" style that games can tend to devolve into, as you so eloquently described it. Once the game reaches Beta, we'll start worrying about things like this. For now, it's more important that we get (mostly) complete iterations of each feature that we want to include in the final product. Once we hit Beta, there'll be a feature freeze and we'll work on making the game faster and more fun.

[WarriorKings]

3.

Let me elaborate on why I think the game pace right now is rather fast. I took an hour yesterday and examined the startup 300 res 4 civ 4 mil 1 scout from my point of view, mainly being the basics of competitive AoE2 gaming.

The basic goal for me at the start was to get as much population as fast as possible. Afair that is achieved by constant shift (5) production at the towncenter. So I geared my eco only for that goal, to enable constant 5batch production right from the start, something along these lines:

2 mil on house

2 mil on wood

1 scout on hunt/chicken

4 vil on chicken/hunt

5 vil on berry

5 vil on wood (1/2 of those go to help building the next house)

5 vil on wood

5 vil on farm (if all other food has run out)

etc, switch to soldiers for wood, then mining as soon as wood is spare after building houses, farm, and dropsite for wood.

Something along these lines, far from perfect and has a bit idle TC time at the start, but I got the general idea I think. The constant 5batch production boosts population so high that once I upped comfortably to the next town level, I had 70 - 80 or more population. This is from a perspective without raiding / getting raided ofc. Now I didnt do this, but theoretically once in the next town level, you can add more TCs and militia barracks to multiply Worker production. Given that the civilian soldiers can also act as workers and the MAX population of this game currently is 300, one can reach this number oh so fast if you can keep up constant 5 batch production everywhere. The current gatherer rates, building times for units, and unit costs make it easy to support fast production of vast amounts of units. I will play around with this a bit more, but what I wrote earlier was the first thing that stroke me there: While the building times for buildings are good, either the gatherer times andor costs andor the building times for units could be upped a little bit. As I said I like the fast pace, I just have the feeling that the rate at which mass units can be produced could lessen the value of micromanagement, strategies etc in the long run.

Hypothetical example - i dont know if this is accurate:

We are dealing with territories. Player A makes an early army, sends it to Player B, small map. Now players cannot simply place forward buildings, so that reinforcements have to be produced far away then sent in. Player B can reinforce his army very quickly. Now soldiers of player A have to walk slowly across the map to reinforce, while Player B pumps 5batch reinforcements straight into the fight. So it becomes a contest whether player A can hurt the eco of player B bad enough to actually outproduce him over time.

What I am getting at is that the value of units has to be strengthened a bit more, so that outproducing is not the only way to win. The level system for units is a great way in that direction, I absolutely LOVE strategy games with these elements. Now if costs, build times, or gatherer rates were upped a little more, the value of units automatically rises and so does the significance of losses, economical damage, strategy, micromanagement etcetc.

Mind you I have no idea how the game is played atm in multiplayer, these were all impressions from my test run earlier.

[Yves]

I agree that the game has a fast pace in multiplayer games. My definition of fast is that the most important resource is my time and the game deciding factor is where I spend this time. I would prefer if good tactics were more important than clicking-speed and knowing your shortcuts (I don't know them well). Maybe it will be improved when we have better support for formations and when we really start working on the balancing.

[FeXoR]

I think defensive structures are available to late in the game so that rushing is always possible before walls are available. And if walls are available siege units are also at the same time (well OK after building the needed building to produce them). In addition I find walls quite useless due to the lack of the wall towers range. It would be enough if they don't get the bonus like defense towers (one more arrow/2 arrows per garrisoned soldiers) but still have a "normal" range like archers have. Defense towers could then have a higher range due to the higher position of the projectiles start of flight.

On the other hand citizen soldiers are overpowered due to their ability to build up their own economy. So massing cittizen soldiers will always led to a dominance in sense of the armies size. Even though elite units may be stonger they can't make up for the exponential strngth gain by punping citizen soldiers.

Edited December 20, 2012 by FeXoR