Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - General An in-game tutorial on the roles of units?

It's hard not to notice the trend of people saying that they're feeling overwhelmed, they don't know what they're doing, they don't know how best to use their units.

The manual isn't immediately obvious to find, and was accidentally removed from some releases of the beta. It's also not completely obvious that you can play against "No AI" to see what units do. Some people jump right into the deep end and are expecting to have their hand held.

I'm past that stage and onto "maintaining a spreadsheet that keeps track of the balance tweaks between beta versions", so I can't really comment on whether more information is needed.

Forktong commented that Larian really "need to get a guide out quickly that shows off all the unit types, and skills, how they counter each other, how they can be combined, etc."

I know that comparisons to Starcraft 2 may be a bit unwelcome, but that game did make a point of giving each unit a brief introduction when it first appears, and introduced them one at a time. However, that game used custom maps and custom enemy unit mixes specifically tailored to show off the strengths of the unit they were introducing, so that exact system isn't going to work in Dragon Commander.

There's also the trick that unit roles are changing slightly. Just the other day, Warlocks Cloak was switched to any ally target, then back to self-cloak only, and casting distances were increased, and farther back, Shamans and Warlocks became water-traversing units. When things are changing that much, it may not be the best time to shove a guide in.

How many people here want that guide to be an in-game tutorial on how to use unit types? Do you think that would help people get into the deeper side of the RTS mode more and push blobs less?

Stabbey - thanks for this post. It made us come up with the idea of doing something similar to Divinity 2 where each skill had a little movie to show what it did. We'll try adding something like that to the research/buy interface so you can see what does what & how.

Thanks.

Those could probably be added to the new tutorial section of movies as well.

What would be really neat (but admittedly not necessary) is if that Tutorial section had an option to play on a practice map, similar to playing against "AI = None", but maybe with groups of hostile dummy units to practice on. (I liked those unit test maps in Starcraft 2 that let you control both sides of two hostile factions).

Making something like that could be a bunch of work, but it might be quite helpful to ease players in and let them learn how things work at their leisure.

Also the wiki can be of some help there is a description of all the units and their strengths and weaknesses:

Dragon commander: Units

The key words in the title were "in-game". People are jumping into the game and are feeling overwhelmed. If I were feeling overwhelmed, I would prefer that the game itself provide help, instead of me having to visit a third-party website.

Plus, at the moment, the wiki is just copied verbatim from the manual, so it doesn't offer anything the manual doesn't.

I definitely would like to see exactly what you mention here. It would probably be way too labor-intensive and the crew is rightfully focused on D:OS right now, but with the games already in my backlog, there's no way I'm touching DC anytime soon unless something like that is added.

I probably wouldn't have picked up DC if it hadn't come as part of the D:OS Kickstarter anyway.

However, I think if DC2 were to ever happen, I might be willing to give it a go if enough devotion to clarity, polish, and responsiveness evident. I know the story behind DC is that it was originally a horribly ambitious finale to Divinity 2 that was taken out and later buffed up and polished, and it sort of shows a little. It just felt a little jerry-rigged in some ways that I find a bit hard to put a finger on. I wish I could articulate it better, but I think DC2 could potentially catch my interest better than DC did, and it probably would make more sense to start fussing with intro/tutorial levels the second time around as opposed to now, as improving DC1 may not give very good return on investment.