Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - Beta Ravenhoff's General Feedback and Bugs

Let me preface this with the fact that in an age of half finished buggy releases this is a game that as of the time of this post (around 1 month before release) actually feels like it will be fully done in a month! I'll try to avoid the too minor stuff in this post to keep it on point.

RTS Bugs:

- Ironclads are shooting down my own projectiles
- Extreme lag for the first few seconds after dragon transformation. There is no lag after a few seconds and there is no lag in commander mode. It's just during the transformation animation + around 2 seconds and then it goes away.
- (semi-minor) The sounds for the dragons basic attack doesn't kick in until you've shot it a few times

RTS Feedback

- Shaman pathing takes shortest route regardless of which type of unit (naval/ground) they are with. This creates some odd situations where I'm keeping them with some naval units and order them to the other side of a landmass where the enemy has units. The boats will navigate around the landmass but the shamans will happily run smack into the enemy units. This also is the case when grouping them with land units as they will run across ponds and right into angry naval units. I don't know how hard this would be to code but maybe if the shamans are grouped with only 1 type of unit they will only move as those units do. As of now ordering them long distances takes a bit of micromanaging.
- The AI seems to turtle too much. I almost never have large groups of units in my base unless I'm expecting an attack. The enemy meanwhile will sometimes spend entire matches sitting in its base building units instead of trying to capture points. It should be more aggressive in my opinion.
- From what I've seen of the naval AI the AI seems to heavily favor transports but then never uses them. I've played several games and never saw an AI naval unit aside from transports. And even then I've never seen them actually load up a unit into the transport and use it.
- I do not know if the devs plan to add an AI dragon to the game. If they do not then the dragon is fine, otherwise I feel the dragon could use a bit of a damage boost for it's basic attack. Not much, but just a little.
- Not sure if I'm just an idiot and don't know how to do this, but if that is not the case I can't find a way to keep a group of units grouped up and moving at the same speed. As it is if I send my army in to attack the hunters get there first and are overwhelmed, then the rest of my army gets there and start fighting before the shamans get there to heal them.
- Starting with 11 recruits would improve game flow a bit.
- One thing I like that I should mention is the game pace has hit the sweet spot in my opinion. It starts slow enough that the units you start with are important and you can micro if you need to while being fast enough that once the game is in full swing its frenetic (but not too much so).

Strategic Bugs

- I seem to be unable to mouse scroll down. I can WASD or map-grab to move the screen down, but putting the mouse at the bottom of the screen doesn't do much. The other directions work fine.
- Save/Load doesn't seem to work
- (not a bug per se but an interface issue) When you open up the research screen it covers the area at the top of the screen where the number of research points you have is displayed. It would be nice to have the number of research points you have on the research screen as well just in case you have a bout of forgetfulness.

Strategic Feedback

- None! Hats off to whomever did the coding on this AI, they deserve a raise (or at least a cookie). It's not perfect by any means, but it's already better than around 95% of finished games with similar mechanics and the game's only in beta!

One way to help with the Shaman's pathing would be to use the waypoint feature. Shift+right-click a few times and the shamans and boats will follow the path.

I have seen the AI move units around with transports, sometimes (rarely) on Frost Islands, but particularly on Fallen Moon. That might be because those are the only maps where moving by water is really useful. Once, the sneaky AI came around the far side and sent units up to capture parts of my completely undefended base while I was busy managing the front line on the ground elsewhere, the cheeky little...

I agree, hats off to the strategy map AI. I saw how it was before the patch, and this is MUCH better now.

I don't have that problem with the dragon attack sound effects.

The strategy map will scroll down if the mouse cursor is to either side of the menu bar near the bottom of the screen, but not beneath it.

I have the dragon sound bug sometimes. Not only at the beginning of the attack, but sometimes in the middle.

The dragon transformation bug/slow is unknown to me.

Update on the lag during transformation. While it's strange that it does not appear in commander mode, the lag seems upon further observation to only occur during large battles and when I spawn away from large numbers of troops there is no lag. The reason for lag going away after 2 seconds was a ton of units died. I feel kind of stupid upon realizing that. That said I do not have a low end computer. DC has nice graphics but I don't think they are near the level to cause the lag I'm seeing.

Update on naval AI in RTS. I had my first battle on frost isles and the naval AI actually did something. That said it was still really underwhelming. While it put up a good fight on the landmass in the center due to it getting there first and producing a decent army on it once I kicked it off the island the AI couldn't handle it. They would rarely have any naval units aside from transports, and when they did use transports it was never en mass. Usually they would try and launch an attack using 1 transport with 2-4 units (small units too. It was mostly troopers so the transport wasn't even full). Since I routinely kept a large army on the central isle they could never actually take it. This caused the match to turn into me building up on the central island and launching invasions whenever I felt like it until the AI was defeated. Very anticlimactic as it looks like a really fun map. That said the Air AI seemed up to snuff on that map. The one AI that had bomber balloons researched used marauding hordes of them to assault my staging areas. The other AI however seemed to just turtle in it's base and not do anything.

Also a quick question if anyone knows. In campaign is there any difference between the dragons? I know there is in skirmish but was curious about campaign. Also do the devs plan on adding AI dragons?

Oh and thanks Stabbey. The waypoint system made it much easier to use shamans.

I definitely get the dragon transformation FPS drop.

Also, I'd love to see a more aggressive AI player, too. They do tend to turtle far too much.

Also think that starting armies should mean more. If I can build them rather quickly, why should I bother with anything larger than one unit?

And I really, really want to see AI dragons. Please.

My thoughts exactly! When in TBS mode, I can spam hunters, and just set 1 on each avaliable country. The enemy may invade one of them with 5 units, starting with a 90% chance to win. It does not matter. in 5 seconds I can spam lots and lots of units and finish them off with my dragon...

So, Yeah, I think that the units on the TBS map should have some more "weight" in RTS. I´m just not sure how to do that. Setting all units to have a bigger production time could help solve the problem, but could create a lot of other problems as well...

Because against an actual player, a large enough starting force can be enough to rush your opponent.

Not exactly true (My only loss was when I was defending with 2 troopers and 1 hunter against 6 armors, 8 devastators and 2 shamans. The AI immediately rushed me. By the time I could even get the dragon out he had already mostly destroyed my base. I did kill many of his units with my dragon when it could come out but it was too little too late.) But in general I concur. It take too great of a force disparity to get an advantage (80% or more usually). How about this as a possible solution: Increase how many troops each campaign counter represents. Then you could have TBS sections play a bigger role while not messing too much with RTS balancing.

I think some balancing may be done, but you CAN have a bunch of hunters/troopers/Grenadier pretty easily... And they are easily destroyed.

I mean, you already begin with a huge force, may be able to capture more points in less time than your opponent. If you already have siege weapons, you may even make him unable to develop, being shot down by a barrage of fire...

The dragon issue occurs, but not so much. In multiplayer, the IA should be improved to use anti dragon units a little bit more and capture points quicker. Having a large force and turtle is bad, for the AI too.

Update - Minor issue but the cards often have the wrong names for the units (in the English version at least). Cards will say things affect jeeps instead of hunters or priests instead of shamans. It's a small thing and it's easy to figure out what it represents but I figured I should mention it.

I tend to find the units are a great boon in either rushing the opponents base for a quick win or capturing 3/4 of the map before my opponent gets to establish himself. However if my opponent pitches a Trooper against a region with 5 Hunters in it I'll end up losing 3 or 4 of those Hunters in attrition which defeats the purpose in many ways.

Come to think of it you could easily spam whatever units you have on the strategy map to avoid losses if it's not a particularly attrition heavy game (ex - You are playing with 5 hunters vs the enemies trooper you could start spamming hunters at the endgame to take less strategic losses). But it might be a system that needs to be looked at.

If a trooper attacks a region of yours with 5 hunters you either auto-resolve or rush.

I usually choke the AI when I have unit advantage. Most times I still don't have the firepower to take out the actual base because they keep spamming grenadiers, but they all just die so they can't do anything else.

I'll rush to a few baloons and then let those destroy the base while my hunters keep cutting down the unit spam.

Update - I really like the 5 second delay on spawning after death (maybe even bump it up to 10-15 seconds) As it has made me actually cautious with my dragon and suicide eye/flame on their biggest group of units is not the best strategy anymore. However I do not like the spawn delay if you haven't died. I hate despawning as a dragon only to immediately see a group of troops in trouble but now I have to wait to spawn even though I haven't died. On the plus side I tried the game on the harder difficulties (only played on normal before) and the AI is MUCH harder. It actually puts up a good fight on hard/insane. Still can win more often then I lose but it's not the cakewalk that normal is. Although once you've gotten enough dragon skills the AI is easy again. Hopefully the story mode won't put you on such even footing.