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.
