Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - Beta Really?

So i thought i'd check how long a match would take in 2v2 me & normal cpu vs 2 normal cpu's. Since the strategy map phase doesn't really have depth, on the new map, i did the following: built units, sent it in the general direction of the enemy, did auto combat, to see how long the match would take without entering and playing a single combat myself. Well, i think i'm a bit disappointed. the match took 30 mins and 20 turns. Way too short in my opinion. The strategy phase needs way WAAAY more depth OR larger, much larger maps. in most games with strategy maps, even skipping manual combat, the match usually takes about 200-400 turns or even more against normal cpu opponents.

Since the SP game is supposed to take place over multiple maps, I don't really mind the time it takes (I've heard 20 hours for the SP campaign tossed around. Can't remember where though). As for increased size I don't really like that idea. As it is research goes so fast that it's easy to max it out. Maybe if research was slowed down considerably I would like bigger maps, but MP is supposed to be quick and dirty. I am a pretty big 4x gamer (my second favorite genre after RPGs) and one of the things is you never see the huge maps with tons of people in MP. It's always the quick start small maps that get played (one of the main reasons I tend to avoid 4x MP). So long as research is slowed down in SP I think they have a nice pace for maps. Plus those 30 mins don't count 1 10-30 min RTS battle and 10 mins (at best guess) on the raven each turn. When wen did his LP it took almost 30 mins to do a single turn. Just my 2 cents though.

Oh and the strategy map is supposed to have a ton more depth in SP. Your reputation and politics makes a huge difference in the maps (Undead hate you? have fun fighting in their territory with low support. Enabled conscription? have fun with more men at your disposal who are fighting but aren't happy about it). The MP campaign is fairly barebones because much of the depth is in the SP.

If you want a challanging 2v2 with A.I. you should try with insane difficulty A.I. That will make the MP campaign last a lot longer with the A.I being more aggressive and strategic then. (though the A.I. still isn't very tough in my opinion then. its a GREAT improvement, but all it needs is a dragon and it would be a real challenge. still fun to fight against at this time though.) Also, if you go up against other people in multiplayer campaign then it probably will last a whole lot longer as well. With two or more skilled players facing off against each other the battle could last for hours. (look at twitch tv's master vs apprentice on Larian's channel.)

http://www.twitch.tv/larianstudios

And, as Ravenhoff said, the Single player campaign will have diplomacy and choices and consequences and much more. so there will be much more depth then. Also, notice that there is "custom campaign" greyed out on the main menu. That likely means that we will have the option to play the "multiplayer campaign" with single player campaign features mixed in, which would be AWESOME!

Also, there will be many more maps, skirmish and MPC, and that can add a lot of variety and strategy to the game. A while ago on a previous patch there were a list of the skirmish maps but you couldn't access them, but the list was HUGE! No preview map either.

I am looking forward to the release of the game.

I agree with both sides in a way, but not entirely. Some maps should be larger, but not all, in my opinion, both the campaign maps, and skirmish maps.
Similar to starcraft you'll have the small maps which are based more into rushing, or faster games, lower in resources, or the larger maps for your bigger macro games, although dragon commander doesn't offer that much for macro other than selective factorys and unit choices... :P

I've found in some cases, doing the skirmish maps from campaign, I won't need to even bother with getting the dragon out every turn, as it's over and done in less than 3 minutes. However that isn't always fun of course, I enjoy playing the dragon, but I also like the short games too. A mix of both in my opinion would be great, and with the limited map pool, or stance on campaign maps atm, the shorter games tend to be at the end when there's no units for my enemy left. lol

I'm no balance master so I'll leave most balance up to the pro's and Larian, however the game time generally could be shorter in some way, but I don't mean to add more to Larians plate with the impending launch time, as this is perhaps one of the more trivial of issues, at the moment...

The new map center mass is a symmetrical multiplayer map with higher tempo than little rivellon. There will be all kinds of maps on release. They range from 2 player to 4 player large, medium and small. Both maps in the beta are medium but obviously the new one has higher ipc values, which increases the pace.

Will at least the "real world map" of the Imperial Edition be HUGE?

I would like to see almost ALL 200 nations of this world to be integrated with their respective real world strenght (so big countries like China should have a huge population, countries like the US or the ones in Europe massive research and so on).....

Or/and: map editor on the medium/long run where we can create our own campaign maps! That would be so awesome!

It might get a little hard to fit Luxembourg in.

What's an IPC value?

I do indeed like the new campaign map and higher tempo. if only because it's new, but the different AI's definitely did expand in many different ways, which was quite surprising. Unfortunately a bug where clicking away from the "Choose who goes to battle" menu lost that menu completely, which ended my first campaign attempt on it.

Yeah, perhaps not every really small country but at least the sufficiently big ones.

Oh, and I can see the "classical Risk" map as a map of Dragon Commander. That would be awesome, a new take on Risk....

Especially if you forbid sea transports and crossing oceans for any unit (air units included) and only use the traditional risk crossings over the oceans (along the lines).....



Oh, and a "battle for Europe" map would be cool.... :P

omg I live in 2!!!

Bah Hungary is missing from it. xD

Still, making units and sending em out in the general direction of the enemy with the occasional use of cards isnt much of a gameplay to be honest.
And as i remember, you guys always say that you made the battles so fast paced, because it wasnt the only feature of the game.
Well, as it stands, multiplayer strategy map isn't much of a feature atm, which leaves battles as the multiplayer feature.

Also please don't say that the cards give depth to it, because it really doesn't most of the time, it can sometimes, but 70% of the time i dont even need to use them (tested against hard ais match took me 54 mins and 37 turns). Used strategy cards 0 times, used advantage cards(increase in strength and health reduce in enemy strength etc.) 2 times, used mercenary cards 5 times, match ended with me having 150+ unused cards and over 800 unused gold(which i spent on building units on the very last turn, because why not). Report over.

Note: once you take over the enemy capital, you get their territory and units, this is a bad design choice, because you can just go around with transports and units and capture it, than use some mercenary cards if they attempt to recapture it and bam you just took all of his territory and units. Did this twice during my playthrough against the hard ais.

Now if it was something like the single player campaign, that would be epic.

Not that the game is bad, in fact i really enjoy it, but the multiplayer campaign's strategy map phase is a bit, well, shallow.

But with a bit of polish that can be fixed
The game is looking good so far, keep up the good work.