Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - Beta Beta 1.0.149.9727

Hello everybody,

Big update today with plenty of goodies. As always, let us know what you think. We're especially interested in your thoughts re: strategy map to RTS unit count ratio & balance.

- New campaign map
- 4 new skirmish maps
- Variety of minor balancing fixes
- Rebalance of pricing on strategy map
- Rightclicking a buildsite will no longer show "Can't attack target" message
- Fixed hold position for priests
- Added combat reserves mechanic: units coming from strategy phase are put in the "reserves" when support is overflowing. These units are build for free and without build-delay in their respective building.
- Pathfinding improvements
- Fixes to battle-result screen
- Tooltip in the combat hud show more information about active bonusses on selected units
- Added range indicator for turrets and devestators
- Sub-selection is no longer reset when a unit dies
- Fixed lockup in prepbattle
- Made turrets and buildsites smaller on the minimap
- Battleships should no longer miss their targets when standing still
- Units will not flee when holding position
- Reduce stop distances for battleship and hunters
- Restructured main-menu
- Bombs dropped by balloons should continue to their target after it dies
- AI fixes when playing on an island map with no available building sites
- Show correct icon when hovering over sea tiles in strategy phase
- Added "Last call for dragons"-mechanic: when the population on a map drops to zero each player can spawn their dragon one last time
- Fighters can attack ground units again
- Autoresolve will play-back now. No skip button yet though! Comes very soon...
- Fixed mouse mosition when playing on non-native resolutions in fake fullscreen
- Zeppelin weapon damage fix
- Fixes in unit descriptions
- Turrets can be affected by statuses
- Several, small and large, stability and performance fixes

Cheers

You...made a change so that the game would contain less dragon?

No, I understand it just means that when you are out of recruits, you can spawn the dragon once more to do a decisive attack (or lose if the dragon dies).

New maps? I no see now new campaign maps...

nvm i think my game failed to update to this new patch... weird i have steam set it to update automatically.

That's how it works. Unfortunately, this does not care how many Recruits you actually HAVE in your account. You could have 1000+ Recruits in your bank, but if the map's population is gone, and you have spawned the Dragon once, you cannot use those to spawn your Dragon again.

I would prefer this to be "If the map is out of recruits AND your account has < 20 recruits (because you might not be able to produce units to get it to exactly 0), you can spawn once more and that's it, even if you later sell buildings."

I mean, that cannot be intentional at all, right? with the map populations as they are now, it's quite possible to run out of recruits without it being a stalemate, and then you basically can't use the Dragon at all?

That's not fixing a endgame stalemate problem, that's actively interfering with late-game strategy. It's pretty easy to not even NOTICE when a map's population is depleted.

******

I really like new maps! A lot of them are islands, so let's hope the AI knows what to do with water now. The change to show the range of Devastator and Turrets is also really nice.


Detailed Changes:

(I might have missed some stuff, but here should be most of it)

Balancing:
- Shaman Speed increased from 100 to 105
- Warlock Damage increased from 75 to 76
- Hunter Health increased from 1850 to 1940
- Hunter Damage increased from 41 to 42
- Armour Health increased from 2400 to 2440
- Devastator Damage increased from 318 to 324
- Transport Health decreased from 4500 to 4000
- Juggernaut Health increased from 6400 to 6500 (from patch 142)
- Imp Fighter Damage increased from 136 to 138

Skill Rebalances:
- Grenadier “Enhanced Explosives” Radius increased from 70 to 75
- Grenadier “Chemical Warfare” Damage increased from 3.0% to 3.5%
- Warlock “Death from Above” Damage decreased from 375 to 365
- Devastator “Besiege” Range decreased from +100% (2600m) to + 40% (1820m)
- Imp Fighter “War of Attrition” effect duration increased from 2.5 to 3 seconds
- Zeppelin “Fly my Flaming Pretties” Damage increased from 245 to 248

Campaign:
- Trooper Gold cost decreased from 4 to 3
- Warlock Gold cost decreased from 7 to 6
- Hunter Gold cost decreased from 9 to 7
- Armour Gold cost decreased from 14 to 7
- Devastator Gold cost decreased from 14 to 9
- Ironclad Gold cost decreased from 16 to 12
- Juggernaut Gold cost decreased from 25 to 20
- Imp Fighter Gold cost decreased from 14 to 10
- Bomber Balloon Gold cost decreased from 22 to 16
- Zeppelin Gold cost increased from 6 to 7

Bug: On the "Center Mass" Campaign, all activities apparently are happening in the country "Orcha". When you mouse over countries, they also say "Orcha". There doesn't even seem to be ANY "Orcha" country on the map.


Odd Map Feature: In the Center Mass Campaign, there are a lot of tiny neutral land pieces that are connected to countries, but aren't part of the countries, nor can you move units onto them. It's strange.

I like the new tab that shows you the list of what everyone did on previous turns, that's good stuff!


EDIT: Autoresolve is broken. 1 Transport and 1 Trooper should NOT have a 51% Chance of winning against 1 Hunter, even if the Trooper has "Enhanced Engines".

The autoresolve seems to really dramatically favour the AI a lot more now.


Bug: Playing the "Center Mass" Campaign, there was a battle on the strategy map, against an AI, and it went to the "Choose how to battle screen". I clicked away from the Dragon/Autoresolve buttons, and that made those buttons go away. They would not come back. I could bring up the other menus, Research, Cards, and the Options menu, but I could not get the option to go to battle, thus rendering the game unplayable and forcing me to quit the campaign.


Bug: When creating buildings on the strategy map, it seems a bit sensitive and tends to place a building before you are allowed to choose it. I was able to get around that by rapidly moving my mouse to the side the second I clicked "place building".

I'll be ok with the fact that turrets are effected by status effects now, but in my opinion their considered buildings, not people.
I could imagine this being helpful, as well as overpowered. Stunning a turret with fear seems, overpowered but could be useful, while using charm on a turret would simply seem strange and weird, as well as it being overpowered. Ultimately if the turrets will allow the turrets to gain status effects, I think here should be some effects that can't target buildings and such.
I haven't tested the new patch and I doubt that I'll get to the turrets any time soon, so this is early opinion on the latest patch update.

Create buildings on the burn-based campaign map is partly broken. When you click on the button there is a random building created from time to time....

There are still translating issues and placeholders in the settings menu of the German version.

I very much like the new animation when auto-resolving a battle. This improves the atmosphere of the whole thing.

Medium difficulty on the campaign map is quite weak. You can beat it without a big effort and it's not very aggresive after all. I still wait for selectable AI settings like offensive and defensive enemies.

Music on the campaign map is kind of boring and the very same all the time. Is this on purpose or is it just a placeholder for later Kirill-greatness (I hope for the latter.....)

Yeah, only certain statuses should affect Turrets. The bug I reported to Larian was that the Dragon Skill "Sabotage" did not affect turrets.

I'd say that Aegis/Immunity should affect Turrets, and Sabotage of course should.

I'd say that Charm, any roars, Fear, Polymorph, Chemical Warfare should not affect turrets.


The auto-resolve calculations are much harsher than it seems like it should be, but it seems like you really can tell the difference now between entering a country with a 50-50 low chance to win, and entering with a 67% chance to win. I did a match where it was a Hunter plus a Transport and a Trooper (plus some mercenaries) and my odds were 50%, and it was a real scrap. There was another fight where I entered with a large number of troops, and had a 67% chance and the match was over much more quickly.


Bug: The Grenadier's "Chemical Warfare" thin is listed as having a cooldown, but it doesn't show up when you activate it. EDIT: No, I was wrong about that. I see the cooldown timer.

If possible, think it should also act more like the Warlock's "Death From Above", when you have a group selected, you need to hit the button multiple times to trigger it for multiple units. This is because I don't think the Chemical Warfare effect stacks with itself, so having all the Grenadiers in a group fire it at the same target at once is kinda a waste.

It's not random but rather the screen just reads your click as two clicks (or at least that's what it seems like) and you automatically click the building that's under your cursor when you hit buy building. This is a major problem as I can rarely actually build a building in the campaign!



I think the AI isn't used to RTS units actually mattering at all. Back when the conversion was so much less then it was now the AI was pretty good as it spread fast and threatened many areas at once slipping past your lines in transports or things of that nature. It still does that, but now that it can't beat 5 armors and 3 shamans with 2 troopers it seems lost.

It needs to not spread out so much because the human can just build a huge force and smash it's units piecemeal. It needs to prioritize getting a decent force a bit more and spreading like the plague a little less.

Alot of interesting changes but one bug that hasn't been mentioned yet above is that the hunter with "bird in the hand" doesn't attack air units anymore. (might try rebooting and see if its just me but I flew my dragon right into a cluster of idle enemy hunters that the A.I. controlled and nothing happened.)

Amazing patch!New maps,disappearance of some bugs-excellent!!!

My compliments to Edgar. The AI is really good now. It's really great at countering my moves and responding quickly. I really need to be thinking and planning ahead at all times now, because it will aggressively be sneaky and nasty.

It's finally using Naval units - and correctly, too! I think I actually saw the BRILLIANT move of it easily countering my mines using a cloaked Transport and Minesweeper. (I'm not sure because I only saw the Ironclads.) EDIT: Oh, I guess that was probably just the Ironclad's Revelation ability. It uses the same effect as Minesweeper.


EDIT: Are Warlocks now allowed to shoot their regular attack while cloaked? Because they can and the AI knows it. EDIT EDIT: this does seem to be deliberate, the description of Warlocks' cloak no longer mentions "firing weapons", only abilities. Nice.

Are you sure they had that upgrade researched? I was able to order my hunters to attack my own air units, at least, so I assume they would have attacked enemy air units, had I tested it in a skirmish with the AI not set to None (so I could do other stuff waiting for build/research times and recruitment).

It was a hunter controlled by the A.I. but It did have the missile launchers on the sides which would be absent if it was not researched. Maybe there was an error when the A.I. was in control of them. Not sure. I'll need to try again and see if the upgrade is working or if it is just the A.I.

Nagging seems uncool, but now that there is a new thread and the emergency-dragon issue has been demonstrated, I wish to (and therefore do) repost my proposed solution:Proposed solution:

Make sure the dragon can be spawned at least once in a situation like the one Larian described. I would accomplish this with a "buy now, pay later" mechanism that kicks in automatically if you don't have enough recruits at the moment. Until the debt is settled, this mechanism cannot be used again, and all new recruits go towards settling this debt. During most of the battle, that debt would be quickly settled if it occurs at all. It has the same impact on unit production and base construction, but incidentally lets you whip out the dragon instead of waiting. I expect this dragon-advantage to be tolerable. (It would probably be more significant the greater the enemy's advantage was at the beginning of the battle, which makes it a slight equalizer for battles that would otherwise be hopeless.)

In short: Allow the dragon to be spawned without sufficient recruits throughout the battle, as long as previous debts from spawning the dragon without sufficient recruits have been settled. This is a seemingly unobtrusive rule that can persist throughout the battle.

Too complicated, Sinister. My solution just adds a second condition to the if statement.




Right now it just seems to check if the population is 0, but not if the player's recruits are under 20. (They may not be able to produce enough to get them down to 0)

This actually interferes with an active player, instead of being a "one last shot" thing that is INTENDED to help resolve stalemates. I got caught in this in my first RTS battle in the campaign, as I started the battle with even odds, and by the time I was in a position to crush the enemy, the population was 0. Even though I still had 600 recruits in the bank and was ready to go, the game wouldn't let me spawn in after using my free spawn.

Since it seems to be a flag, there's no need to worry about the "what if the player sells buildings after getting their free spawn to get them over the limit" condition you were worried about, because they still won't be able to spawn again.

Ah, but I really don't want the game to assume I am at the end of my tether when I have five recruitment centres to sell (as well as other buildings that are not so relevant when I have a large army and few recruits). I would normally be better off getting a no-go on dragon morph and then selling those than inadvertently triggering about-to-die mode.

Of course, after a few battles I'm wary of that number to the extent that I can usually avoid this situation, but so far I have not experienced any increase in fun from this new way to lose. (Dwarf Fortress fanatics may beg to differ.)

Also, I really don't get the too complicated aspect of it. To me, trying to determine a suitable contingency for being out of resources in a game where you can always find some way to get new resources is inherently more complicated than allowing you to spawn without enough resources, and just taxing your income until the debt is settled. I find the principle far more robust, and it provides pure advantage for the dragon, which I'm okay with.

There is another alternative, but I find it more complicated on the player end: Allow the player to choose an emergency-spawn manually (perhaps button next to dragon button in GUI).

If you say "complicated" in the context of programming (given that your counterpoint is the simplicity of your code), I really don't think it would be at all difficult to code. (But ... heheh... player_recruits < 20... You mentioned that, didn't you? EDIT: Yes you did, and you caught it before my snide remark, and you wisely referred to an assumed declaration elsewhere. Yup. I'm not retracting my statement, I'm extending it, apparently.)

*shrug* Too damn bad? If you're at that point in the game, down to 0 Pop and sub-20 Recruits in your bank, you should have noticed the dire financial straits you're in by that point.

At that point, it's up to *you* to decide if you want to use your last spawn now, or sell your buildings to raise money and save your last spawn for later. If you didn't actually notice, that would be your own fault.

It would certainly be less of a headache for Larian to implement than your overly complicated thing where a "negative person" can exist.



It is too complicated compared to an extra half-line check. Your way would need to add in a bunch of if statements and conditionals so that the "negative people" factor doesn't break or confuse things, which in my opinion, is more work than it's worth, considering how rarely the conditions come up where your negative recruits thing might work more accurately than the currently implemented and working non-negative recruits system.