Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - Beta Bugs, suggestions, impressions.

Suggestions:
1 Default camera position + hotkey to go there. Would be useful after zooming in on combat/unit to see the pretties and after dragoning.

2 Destroyers could show a range radius when deploying, would make it easier to gauge if the enemy fortifactions are shootable.

3 More detailed tooltips. Currently all they say is "Build/Research X: costs Y resources". Imo they should say something like: "Trooper: Basic scout/combat unit. Powerful in large numbers" and "Shaman: Troop support and healer" (while also including the cost somewhere). Yes all this information is in the manual, but it it's good to have reminders in the tooltips.

4 Automatic building/reinforcements. Currently, the basic troopers/nadiers etc feel kind of hard to get a critical mass of, because it requires constant building which prevents unit micro and dragoning.

A dozen units shared over all 4 teams seems a bit low. Some mutually exclusive upgrades maybe? Custom dragon builds would be cool too, altho very hard to balance I expect.

Balancing:
5 The hunters and armors feel a bit too strong.
6 There should probably be a penalty for dying in dragon mode. Make the next transformation a bit more expensive or something.
7 Naval combat seems rather unimportant in general.

Bugs:
Desyncs, desyncs everywhere.
8 in game chat cuts off after 20 characters or so.
9 Lobby chat seems to displace the line sometimes when bringing up the steam overlay
10 It seems you can do some animation canceling with Devestators since it seems they only do the 'slowly aim gun upwards' animation the first time you deploy them.


[img]http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197985252976/screenshots/[/img]

2) They mentioned Range indicators as a likely possibility.

3) Unit descriptions in tooltips just seems like something you're not going to need after about 10 matches and are used to the roles of the units.

4) They've also mentioned possibly increasing the queue depth so you can build more units at a time. I would be interested in knowing if there will be mutually exclusive upgrades as well, but I'm not sure there will be. The manual has a bunch of singleplayer and campaign information so it doesn't seem like it's just for the beta version. It is odd, the last time I heard, Larian was saying there were 60 upgrades, but this version only has 39. Maybe they were counting Dragon upgrades as part of the 60.

5) I'm not sure enough to comment on this. The hunters seem a bit weak to me, but I'll try them some more.

6) There's already a cost for spawning in, and I'm not sure that a penalty for dying would improve the gameplay. It sounds like that would encourage retreating from a fight and letting your units hang.

7) That's pretty true on a lot of these maps, although Juggernauts have the longest range in the game, and can hit anywhere on a map with the Imp Buster upgrade (although it doesn't seem to do a lot of damage to structures). I hope the full version has levels where there are bridges so you can send land units across and sea units underneath, instead of them being restricted to one side or another. The restricted areas you can move in water mean that naval battles aren't as important as land or air ones.

Hm, I still think the fast-paced style of the game makes the updates rather pointless. You need every single unit and penny (person) to produce units to withstand the enemy. There's no time to think about making updates and no time to use them in battle properly with single units in multiplayer because they die so quickly and the battlefield is quite confusing with many units on the move.....

I've found upgrades only good in slow moving games too. Most of the time you're trying hard to repel enemy dragons and units so upgrades generally come at the very last moments when you have a second to breathe. To be able to deal with upgrades you need to have multiple factories of the same type and a larger base income of recruits. The upgrades looks good, but I've never had a game that I can actually build upgrades and use them.

I would not mind or object if the pace was lowered. I certainly had to turn down the AI to easy from the Default AI setting. I definitely remembered feeling exactly the way Lord Crash did about upgrades being pointless when I first started out.

I actually recorded some footage in Fraps, just hovering over the tooltips for the sole purpose of being able to see what all the upgrades were, so I could read them later at my leisure outside of the game. It's a good idea to decide on a general strategy before you start to play a match, and pick and choose the upgrades that will support the strategy.

Now that I am a bit familiar with what the upgrades are, I'm coming into games already with a strategy for what upgrades I need in mind. That helps a bit. Without a second production facility, you have to shoehorn in your upgrades between units. Units at least build quickly.

Yeah that may be the case. I'm no hardcore stategist and I more or less play in a flexible manner to be able to react to the actions of the opponents but I can guess that the research could give you indeed some kind of "advanced strategy" if you really understood the mechanics and all the options and effects.


One suggestion: why starting with 0 active population? You are forced to wait 15 seconds at the beginning of each game in order to build a barrack and you don't have any unit (apart from a boat) to move or conquer building spots. So the first 15 seconds of each game is pure idle time. No big issue, but I noticed it after starting a few games with early desync issues....

So I have noticed some more bugs

1)Zephyr dragon doesn`t have scale of overheat when he using Purifying Flames(maybe it was supposed to be)

2)When Zephyr Dragon is out of limits of Combat Zone and after 10 second countdown then dragon does`nt die instead It`s heath reduses only on 50%

I dont`t actually know about regenerating of the dragon(without using ANY skills)But you can see that if dragon have been already harmed after few second

Suggestions about Difficult modes

I know that everything cannot be pleased that`s why I have Idea to suggest reasonable(to my mind) settings
You`ll understand what I`am talking about

So at
1) Easy mode

- Enemy units are taking minimum damage for dragon
- You should sacrifice 5 units to engage dragon in the battle
- Dragon skills refreshing very quickly
- (When you`ll be able to choose Bonus card for the battle) You can use 4 cards for one battle
-You have Huge reserve of recruits (5000)

2)Normal mode

- Enemy units are taking normal (default) damage for dragon
- You should sacrifice 10 units to engage dragon in the battle
- Dragon skills refreshing quckly
- You can choose 3 cards for a battle
- You have Very Big reserve of recruits (4500)

3)Hard mode

- Enemy units are taking quite lot damage for dragon
- You Should sacrifice 20 units to engage dragon in the battle
- Dragon skills refreshing normally (default)
- You can choose 2 cards in the for the battle
- You have normal reserve (4000)

4)Survival HORROR!!

- Enemy units are taking a LOT damage for dragon
- You should sacrifice 30 or 35(I don`t know) units
- Dragon skills refreshing is quite low
- You can choose ONLY 1 card for a battle
- Your have not so big reserve (3500)


I`m bad in balancing but it`s just my suggestion))
Actually I don`t know about how many cards We`ll be able to choose
I hope Larian is reading this also
Thank you))

P.S I don`t know if my previous posts was already took into account
and have I no idea about duplicating these ones for this section.I think if there necessity moderators could rearrange them into there

I have a question- What about a Demon room ?At control settings you can see the hotkey is 7
But there is no description in manual. Maybe it`s BIG SPOILER about demon room who knows...
Personally I think it`s relates about Architect))
And another question.Is Architect the same person as Engineer from DD\Divinity 2?

10 matches is a long time and RTFM is a dangerous thing to say in this day and age, for not entirely shitty reasons(just mostly).

4) To clarify, I don't want increased queue length, I want automated building of units. Not every game has to be starcraft: there's plenty of strategy to be found while not having to micromanage training, I'm a commander, not a bad manager .

6) Yes, there is a cost for spawning in, but at least early game I have thus far found that the only reasonable response to the enemy dropping into dragon form early game is to do so yourself, and after the current battle is over the victor will still have to morph out to rebuild, leading to a very small gain even if he is significantly better.

I like starting with 0 resources. Lets teams strategize somewhat and the after-loading lag stop.

Edit: Another bug I just noticed. Sound volume resets on loading the game, although the settings menu displays correctly. Goes to user set values as soon as the sliders are touched.

You have to be able to, as the host, change the faction of the AI's.

Please explain that position better, or why expecting players to read the manual of a complicated strategy game is asking too much of them.



How would that even work? That just seems like a recipe for frustration: "oops, I accidentally spent all my resources automatically building a ton of X and now I can't counter unit Y quick enough". Yes, it would make it easier to focus on micro, but part of the challenge of RTS's is the find the balance between micro and macro.



Apparently, there already IS a penalty for dying as a Dragon: If you die, you have to pay to respawn. If you leave Dragon form voluntarily (not dying), then it doesn't cost anything to respawn.



I agree, it gives a few moments of a breather at the start to relax.



None of the settings stick, not controls, not the Tutorial mode, you have to adjust them each time.

How automated building would work: I imagine as it did in Dawn of War/ Supreme Commander. Which was great. I like it because you're still making the same decisions, but you can have the ai handle the apm so you don't have to worry about building a new soldier every 4 second to make the most effectve use of your resources.

Accidentally spending all your resources on the wrong unit is better than failing your apm so you wind up with no units and a ton of resources banked imo.

Dragon penalty sounds fine, I guess I just didn't notice.

It's not asking too much obviously, anyone can read the manual. But isn't it better if the game can be picked up and played(although not as well for obvious reasons) and has reminders? Also, I'm not sure I agree that the skirmish mode is all that complex, there's only 12 units after all. Then you have the people who abhor manuals(plus manual is sort of hard to find if you use steam), and very few people start by looking for a manual, so there's also the issue with first impressions.

I suppose it makes sense when you explain tooltips that way. Speaking of which, the loading screen tip about not building a factory on a country with low income is cut off, so I have no idea what the actual advice is supposed to be.

I still don't agree with auto-building. It's a crutch for poor players that hobbles their abilities to get better at the game, and good ones won't use it.


Fun fact
- You can Charm enemy Transports and have your units board them. Once they revert back to enemy control, naturally, you can't control the transport, the enemy has control over the loading or unloading. The units inside do indeed remain allied to you even after the charm on the transport expires, so I guess that's working as intended?


Balancing
The Shamans, while useful, are somewhat of a pain to work with. They're the second-slowest unit in the game. If you have them in a group of other enemies, they lag behind, so you need to move your entire force in slow steps if you want the Shamans to keep up. Maybe a "move at speed of slowest unit" Formation would help.

If you do an attack-move on the ground, and enemy forces come between you and that point, your troops will stop and fight, but the Shamans, lacking an attack, will keep going, marching past your forces into the thick of the enemy lines. That's annoying, and forces you to micro your shaman's movement, not their abilities. If you have a group of units with Shamans and use the Attack command to target a specific unit/building, your troops will go attack it, the Shamans will stay right where they are, while your troops go die because they aren't being healed. Also annoying.

I almost want to suggest giving the Shamans an invisible, 0-damage attack, so they behave like your other units, but I suspect that would just make them sit there doing nothing at all instead of healing!


Request
- It's not critical, and I'm not sure how easy it would be to actually do, but I'd like a mode where I can control two opposite factions, to test unit matchups and build compositions. I know Starcraft 2 had a couple user-made maps like that which let you fiddle around and control the different races. It would probably be helpful in letting out players try out different skills before committing to them in the single-player campaign.

- I'd like it if when using the Hunter's teleport ability, you could click a spot on the minimap where a friendly unit is to make them teleport to that unit. At the moment, it just moves the camera to that spot, although I suppose that's almost as good.

just a bug I found that I don't think got mentioned yet. When you launch an Imp bunker buster in a multiplayer match it'll automatically desync

I use it, and I think I am pretty good. I think aids for 'bad players' that don't impact high level play are a pretty good idea in general, automatic building still teaches players timing and resource management.

I just have to comment on this. What Jae said is actually helpful. People are that lazy to go and read the manual. To be honest, I didn't read the manual when I first played. I didn't even know that there was a manual. I'm expecting that the unit descriptions or etc are there like in any other games.

Jaedar did indeed have a good point. The latest patch has added unit descriptions to the tooltips and units themselves, and it is indeed an improvement.

Who is this jaesun?

Are there any release notes? I haven't seen any

The Steam group announcements section lists some changes in Monday's update.

Yea I noticed the pace was slowed significantly.

Yeah, wouldn't happen to have any for yesterdays update as well?

The new tooltips are cool. Perhaps the unit skill tooltips should be copied to the ones in the research tab as well? New menu is snazzy as well. There's some weird loading screen shenanigans going on as I start multiplayer games since it starts by having the loading gears in bottom right, then goes to the skirmish loading screen with the map view and such.

The new build(from 10 minutes ago) moved the menu so it covers the dragons face. This does not look very good.

This is my thread, pretty nice huh.

Anyway, the pace right now(skirmish) seems REALLY FAST. I dunno if I messed up some option but you get ridonk amount of money and stuff. Too fast for my tastes.

It would be cool if minimap indicated if a building site was captured or built on. Hollow cube for captured, solid for built maybe?

I tried a easy skirmish match against one AI opponent and in few minutes the AI sended a army many times bigger than my few ones and crushed me without chance of defense. Some ideas?

And a suggestion, maybe put subtitles in the video tutorials

You can set the AI to 'None' rather than easy, to get a feel for the game mechanics. Some people find that speed capturing the nearest recruitment centre(s) and building up troops is key; at least one person mentioned taking to dragon form early to pick off the enemy scouts before they could start capturing building sites.


It isn't focused on beginner help, or procedural advice (use of hotkeys, etc), but you could check out the topic:

What tactics have people discovered? [Theorycraft]

You can't pick off the enemy scouts as a Dragon anymore - at least in Campaign mode - you need to wait like 90 seconds before you can first spawn as a Dragon.

Oops, I guess I should keep up with each build if I want to give advice.

Played some campaign with myself. Discovered one rather gamebreaking issue.

Every time a transport is in combat, they always die, 100%(looks like the max integer). In naval battles this is especially problematic since they take their cargo with them.


I think I even had a transport die, despite it not being in the combat, just for being in that region on that turn.

Also, the ai can't play the island map. It was hoarding 20 something troopers on its starting island and not even capturing its harbor point until several minutes into the game. The geometry also seems weird, on the southeastern coast of the main island, my troopers had to move to point blank range to shoot the 3 units the ai managed to move off its main base(it started with them loaded in a transport).

And yeah, the dragon timer is in multiplayer as well. It's a bit too long in my opinion, at least in skirmish.

I'm a bit worried dragon will make it trivial against the AI(in sp too), because the ai doesn't push its starting troop advantage at all(playing on hard) and it doesn't use dragon either so the player has a huge advantage.

I have this bug "65535", but with flying goblin, not with a transport.

They are IMP fighters, not goblins.

This bug happens most often with transports, I've had it happen with troopers too.

I recognized one thing. After a skirmish ends and shows the victory screen one cpu core goes wild while the rest stays normal.

A couple of things that somewhat bothered me, sorry if they were already mentioned (which is most probably), I only read a couple of feedback topics.

Map :

- After playing a card on a country, while the miniature on the map looks ok, the large card that appears when you hover over it isn't the same (in my case, after playing the 200% gold buff, it appeared a purple card with a dragon illustration, though the text was correct).

- The academy building is said to give "0% discout on research", both when building and when hovering over it on the map. Not that interesting.

- If moving the map around while hovering over a building or a unit, the text follows the map and not the building. Doesn't matter much I guess, but feels awkward to me.

- The cursor becomes a hand over ally units, as if you could grab them.

- When preparing for battle, I missclicked and used a card I didn't want to. I found no way to remove it, maybe I missed the obvious (or it wasn't obvious enough? Right click maybe?), or maybe there's none on purpose. If so, I'd love to know why, as it appeared somewhat annoying to me. CORRECTION : I didn't try, but I'm pretty sure now that the undo button will do the trick. I didn't think to it, as it wasn't on the forefront anymore with the battle window. Maybe some more obvious method would help.

- Concerning preparation too, being asked to let the Imperial army lead the battle while playing as rebels is... Awkward.


Battle :

- In battle, though with a correct fps, lots of things aren't smooth at all : zooming/dezooming does it by huge increments, same for moving the map (travels like the 5th of my screen when hitting once a direction key), or clicking any button (skills, recruitment) : it doesn't work properly, most of my click don't do anything, I often must try 3/4 time before it works. Spamming or not doesn't change anything to that ratio.

- Something else that proves excessively choppy is turning into a dragon : it's totally mad for the few first seconds, whirling around, looking up, down, behind... Even if I don't do the sightest mouse move, and everything at low fps. So for the moment, I always turn dragon behind my units, and muyst wait these few seconds to have passed before engaging the ennemy. It's quite game-breaking as I loose all the blitz power of a jetpack-dragon. There were a couple of times where it didn't do that, I couldn't sort out what makes that happen or not. It still got very low fps (I have no indicator but I'd say 4-5) for the same time.

- I love artillery. In fact, I love all big guns. But especially artillery. I already got some fun in my first battle researching the siege mode in barracks, putting some arties and a zeppelin somewhere, and vaporizing those foolish infantries and defense cannons! mwahahah! Hm. Though, what constructive I can say, is : a range indicator for the siege mode would be really, really great. Some faint color disc, or a dotted circles... Something like the area of the shelling.

- Those lovely arties lead me to another thing gameplay-related : I got a ~300 recruits value army, neatly massed, with 6 arties in the middle of them. I started bombing their buildings, far out of range of any ennemy (the AI didn't build any arty, and even though, I got the Zeppelin), lolled around a bit as a dragon, came back... To notice most of my forces were depleted, with a clearing in the middle of the army. I'm pretty sure the 2 artillery behind got they shot 'intercepted' by the two in front of them, which made my bombing very effective... Against my own troops. Meh. The battle ended before I could make sure of this though, I'll do some testing.
Well, what I wanted to suggest is : a 'formation' system would be great, really great (too). Even something as simple as click-and-drag with right click to put the units in a neat line (instead of my already mentionned neat mass) would avoid such a problem and be overly useful in a large panel of situations (as a Total War player, I tried to do this tons of times).

- Also got the 65535 bug, with transport on the Obbrana country : after a battle, while I got 2 jeeps and 1 transport on the country, it reports 1 jeep and 65535 transports as casualties, with 1 jeep and 2 transports left. However, I have no transport remaining on the map (the jeep is there). Note that I didn't loose it during the fight, it wasn't even hit, nor any other naval unit (and if I'm not wrong, the loss ratio is distinct for air/land/naval, so it shouldn't have been destroyed).

Thanks for reading all this, I hope some of this feedback may prove useful. I'll try to read more of what has already been said to avoid redundancy, but I wanted to give my first feedback while playing -and was way too much impatient to read all before .

Suggestions:

1) Possibility to sell the cards at the shop (Ex: For the spell cards that you already have purchase).

2) A system that sorts the cards. When you got some Tavern on the map, it rapidly become hard to see what you have.

3) Possibility to see the spells that you already got when you select your cards. Since the multiplayer don't last enough to remember properly all of what you purchase, you may select spell cards that you don't need (Can be because you already have it or because you don't have the spell necessary for you (ex: Use the stealth strategy (become invisible and unleash hell on enemy) -> you select fire pillar card but finally don't use it because you forgot that you didn't bought yet the stealth spell).

In the dragon research menu, the skill "Friends With Benefits" says "hits inflicted on this shield heal you for a total of 0% of the damage done"

Sorry if someone's already mentioned this bug but in my last match, some ground units (both mine and the enemy's) were stuck outside the map and partially underwater. Neither juggernauts nor my dragon could get close enough to the enemies to attack them, and they wouldn't move, so the battle became unwinnable. Pressed restart battle and got a CTD.