Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - Beta VGMKoren's feedback and suggestion thread

Hello everyone! First of all let me say that this game is amazing. Of course I might be biased because I unconditionally love any game that allows me to be a dragon, but hey.

Early Game balance:

-Would it be possible to start with 15 recruits, or at least 14 instead of 10? Currently when you load into a game you have to sit around doing a lot of nothing until you can build your first building. It's only a few seconds, but it'd make a difference for healthy game flow.

Interface:

-It's hard to know when your dragon is initially going to be ready without simply pressing the R button. Some kind of visual indicator of when you can first summon a dragon into the match would be handy.

-It'd be nice if, when you have multiple buildings selected, you could see if a building is building/researching anything.

-Speaking of research, if you click on a research button with multiple buildings selected, the icon for that research doesn't go away, but you can still click on it. At a glance this makes it hard to tell what research you've got currently going. The icon should disappear when clicked, and then show up on the aforementioned research icon.

-When creating a lobby it would be nice if the extra player slots started out locked instead of unlocked, that way people can't randomly pop in as you're setting things up. To my knowledge, most lobby-based systems work this way.

Dragon balance:

-The dragon breath skills feel generally underwhelming. While the basic attack is nice, there's no reason to not pop these abilities any time you can, and even when you do they don't feel that great because it's hard to notice increased damage in a firefight.

SUGGESTION: I've noticed that the dragon can only fire so many shots before overheating, however with the amount of shots it takes there's almost no way that you would reasonably hit this cap. Your abilities will come up, or you should be popping out of dragon to micro your army before they do. So my suggestion would be to bump up the power of these skills, but also make them much more costly on the dragon's attack overheat meter. You could even go really fancy and create a few firing modes. For example you could have an ability where the dragon fires orbs of fire to the ground that do AoE damage, like a mini Eye of the Patriarch, but takes up a third of your attack bar per shot. Or, you could create a focused laser for, say, armored units that increases the bar rapidly but does high damage.

-Currently, with the low cost of recruits needed to summon the dragon, there's no real penalty to dying as the dragon aside from the couple of seconds where you can't control your units. Considering the dragon is tremendously powerful and twenty recruits is trivial, it'd be nice if every subsequent death either took longer to respawn the dragon or cost more recruits. As it is now there's no real incentive to stay alive. Even if I summon the dragon five times, for 100 recruits, that's only 1% of my total recruits spent on the dragon.

-This might just be me, but I feel like the Sabre dragon in skirmish mode simply doesn't offer as much as the Mountain or Zephyr dragon. Whereas with the mountain dragon I can spawn in and make a huge difference in the fight with Eye of the Patriarch and Flame Pillar, and Zephyr dragon I can do massive healing to my units and steal their own, the sabre dragon doesn't feel like he has anything instant to bring to the table.

Game Bugs:

-In the few times I've played against the default A.I. in free-for-all skirmish matches, I noticed it doing some weird things. It seemed like the computer was only focusing on one "person" at a time. So I would see one of my opponents building a ton of units and structures, while the other two would just sit there and not even build structures to produce units. It seemed to swap a few times in the games that I played, with one opponent who had just been sitting in their initial base with no structures build suddenly building a massive army with their gathered recruits. Seemed a little strange to me.

-Every time I attempt to go into a skirmish from the campaign map, the game crashes. There was only once where it didn't (The first time I tried it), but I'm not sure what I did differently. For reference, I've been selecting the Zephyr Dragon skin each time, putting the game on free for all, and summoning mercenaries via card to the first battle of the game. No idea what else could be causing this. (Already tried the common suggestions.)

Post Game:

-It'd be nice to see a score screen/post game lobby after a skirmish, instead of being booted back to the main menu. That way you could see why you won/lost, build orders, that kind of thing. Right now it feels awkward to not have a few moments reflect on the game you just played.

More to come when I play more.

I agree with most of these points.

My suggestion was to start with 11 recruits, so the first tick of income is enough to get you building anything. I know it's only 12 seconds.

I like the idea of the interface telling you when you can spawn the Dragon. There's a button in the center of the UI which has a Dragon on a team-coloured field. Pressing that summons the Dragon. What would work there would be to have it greyed out or dimmed until the timer expires, at which point it flashes once.

After trying the Dragon breath skills, the armour-piercing one is great, the healing one is good for its cost and purpose, but visually speaking, it's hard to tell what the acid one does. The description says that it the fireballs continue to add damage for a few more seconds, so I guess that I am using it right, my tendency is to shoot a unit until it dies, but for the acid, it's probably better to shoot as many different units as possible.

If you hold the button down, you can't really hit the overheat cap because the firing rate is so slow. If you rapidly click the button, you can hit the overheat cap. I wish that the hold-the-button fire rate was increased to match the button-mashing firing rate.

I think that dying as a Dragon is pretty cheap, especially with population counts so high. It's only expensive at the start. A respawn penalty for dying might be a good idea, something like 10 seconds or so.

- The crash-when-entering-RTS-mode-from-campaign seems to happen when there are 3 or more factions. Play with only 2 factions (1v1, 2v2, 3v1) and it shouldn't crash so often.

- I really would like the Victory/Defeat screens to have stats, although it's not critical to put in at this point. (A super-duper extra bonus would be to change the Defeat screen to show units being destroyed and shot down, but that's incredibly not important at all.)

Have to agree with this. Doesn't make any sense to sit there watching the counter go up doing nothing.



I've actually had the problem or maybe bug where the button doesn't work. But the hotkey does work. Seems to be since the last patch.



Figured this just wasn't implemented yet. Seems like a no-brainer. Units produced, Units destroyed, lost. Same for buildings. Amount of resources used. Game time.

In a casual game: It is not applicable.

In a competitive game: I could agree, 1-3 seconds of building faster over the other can be advantageous, but is going to be redundant anyways. It is better to increase it to something that could make you actually build something for starters. Even better if there is an option to change the initial value of recruits.


I agree 100%

My revision: Actually tell the interface what is the % progress of the research when hitting multiple buildings/single building. If already complete, mark it w/ a huge green check mark. That way, it is easy to tell that it is complete and if you are currently researching the technology/upgrade.



It is now 20? It was 35 when the game initially started. I think a lot of people are dying with their dragon with this nerfing. IMO though, 20 is very cheap.



It is even better if you can customize your dragon skill with an allotted research points at the beginning of the game. The said research points can be changed depending on the host.



I think they are working on the statistics after battle.

The individual buildings actually have a little 10-segment progress bar for when they're producing units or research, although that is hidden from the interface, and useless when selecting multiple buildings. You have to move your camera to go look yourself.

I forgot about the individual units.

By the way, what I meant was that it is showing on the lower right boxes where the research icons are present that shows the progress of the research.

Well this actually nullifies a lot of my concern over the dragon's basic attack. Despite playing for shooters for years it never occurred to me to mash left click. It might be nice for this to be increased to match speed, but it is satisfying to lob a ton of fireballs. Personally I'd like to be able to see the fireballs in flight before they hit a target, but it's a minor thing.



It's mostly so that you're not just sitting there for the first five to six seconds of a match.



I agree with this.

Pre Skirmish Interface:

-It'd be nice if you could, as others suggested, modify your dragon before a skirmish game or to me at least see their abilities before you're in game. If you're a new player you're not going to know what any of the dragon abilities do, and even if you've played the campaign map you're going to have to try all three dragons to know what abilities went where. Also notable is that the dragons seem to have passives in skirmish mode, which makes sense but can be hard to notice and understand at a glance.

Bug:

-I've noticed that, at least in my game, every time a new unit or model spawns into the game, there's a quick half second of lag before the game recovers. This only happens the first time of that play session, as long as the game remains open you can go in and out of skirmishes and not experience it again. Usually I wouldn't think this is a big deal, but that half second when you're controlling the dragon can mean the difference between life and death.