Another set of thoughts on 110 and 118.

I like the new changes to the maps. The corners on Emerald mountains were neglected completely In favour of the central Resource CS’s, so adding another hotspot is good.

The second construction sites on Dragons’ pass help speed up the flow of units through the choke point, and the removal of the turrets makes it more reliant on player action to make sure the choke is held.

Frost Islands is much better with the second Shipyard CS on the islands for faster production, and a second RC for faster income. The extra turrets are good to help hold the islands as well.

All you need to do now map-wise, is fix Falcon’s Rocks (which half the QA team also hates, according to rumour). Unfortunately because Swen said there are no bridges, it means that my ideal solutions cannot be done. I'm not sure what to do about that map. Here's all I can think of for tweaking Falcon's Rocks:

  • No matter what else you do on this map, you really should put a shipyard construction site at all 4 bases, and let ground units be able to board transports from there. This will let you move units around the map a bit better, and it gives an opening to attack the enemy if you can seize a corner base on their side of the map. Plus, if building a ship is no longer reliant on controlling the center of the map, it will let you attempt to control the center via the water, instead of controlling the water via the center.
  • Remove the shipyards in the center, replace them with 2-3 Resource Control points. With the shipyards moved to the bases, they are no longer needed in the center, and what better thing to make the center more important to fight over than Resource control points. With shipyards at the corners, ships can be built to seize control of the center and fight back and forth.
  • The other non-bridge ideas I have for Falcon's Rocks are radical redesigns that even I think are more likely to make the map worse, so I won't bother with those.



- The population in the campaign seems too large. I thought that the idea for a multiplayer campaign was to have more, shorter RTS battles. At the start of the beta, maps had only about a quarter of the population they do now. The population pool at these levels tends to drag RTS matches out a long time, because resources don’t run out. This gets really annoying in some cases against the AI where you get forced back to your base, defending against a horde of weaker units. When I look up and see the counter for population still at 4 or 5 thousand, I tend to just surrender the battle (especially when the map is Falcon's Rocks).


- When it comes time to do the Single-player campaign where you have to spend money to hire generals, it would be nice on the screen where you decide to hire them to see your current gold + income per turn. In the Larian one-turn-Let’s-Play, that useful information vanished from the HUD just when it was becoming important again.


- I really like the addition of unit buff/debuff cards – those keep the matches pretty interesting because you may never be facing the same fight twice. One time I was basically forced to play without Shamans, because the AI played a -75% Shaman Speed card, cutting their speed from 100 to 25, and basically taking them out of the game.


I haven't tested all ground units attacking naval units, but I did find a couple bugs in 118.

- Hunters, when specifically ordered to destroy their own transport, board it. (Armours properly open fire)
- Bomber Balloons when attacking friendly units the bombs just circle endlessly and go crazy.