I really like Dragon Commander a lot, I think it is truly greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve done a few playthroughs, but I still haven’t seen all the content.

I haven't even played Ophelia's story at all, or seen all the faction arcs - especially since there are more than one arc per side.

I thought I'd give a big list of feedback. Not just negative, but positive as well. The positive things, because they are positive, tend to require little explanation.

Positive Feedback
  • The voice acting is excellent, the facial capturing really worked with the dialogue to make the characters come alive more.
  • The music is great as usual.
  • The different phases relate to each other very smoothly and logically.
  • It is interesting having to try and balance your personal beliefs with what will benefit you politically. The lack of options “in the middle” of the two extremes emphasizes the conflict, and adds shades of grey as you decide which is the least objectional, not which is the good and evil option. A lot of decisions were really hard to make. Larian even managed to make changing from a dictatorship to a democratic government sound like a bad idea (although maybe that was just because I was the dictator).
  • The different characters story arcs, and their branching are really well done, with some clever twists and surprises.
  • I like how the side stories also impact your political standing with the races – not just your laws, but also the kind of people your queen and generals are influence your popularity as well.
  • The mechanics of the game are simple to understand.
  • All the units have a distinct role, and the upgrades extend their usefulness even into the late game.
  • (Once the AI gets on with building advanced units instead of just Troopers,) the AI is quite good at building counters to your build, forcing you to stay alert and focused.
  • The Cinematics between acts are charming. Even the one where you lose is funny.
  • The custom campaign options are fantastic and help to change the gameplay quite a lot.
  • There’s an incredible number of variations that it will take a ton of replays to see them all. That’s a lot of replay value. I think that there are even two different Faction arcs possible per faction – one for if you approve the first faction decision and approve the following ones, and another arc for if you turn down the first faction decision and then get your popularity back up to 85% again.
  • Of course, controlling the Dragon is grea t, it is very responsive, very useful without feeing too overpowered, yet you can beat the RTS phases without needing to use the Dragon.
  • The RTS phases are optional for people who don’t want to play them. Most developers wouldn’t have bothered adding an option like that at all.
  • I like having to manage your card resources. Proper use of cards can change the course of a battle drastically.
  • The game has a lot of the standard RTS features. I found them intuitive, although I’ve played a few RTS’s before.



I do have a list of complaints and issues, which I am posting in the name of feedback, but I do understand the realities of having to compromise and work within a budget, and I saw how the game changed through the course of the beta. These are not all requests for things to be changed in a patch. A lot of these things are totally subjective issues. Some suggestions might be useful for Dragon Commander 2. Many of these I may have posted before.

  • Custom Campaign
  • The custom campaign is a great idea, letting you get all the story (except for Corvus) without the filler. A lot of people probably don’t know what that is exactly, and only touch the story campaign. A bunch of people don’t like the default RTS gameplay, and there’s no way to use custom settings in the normal story campaign. If that was in, then I think a lot of the complainers would have less to complain about.
  • In Custom and Multiplayer campaigns, you always start on the same place in the world map. It would be nice for a random starting location. I know it doesn’t seem to matter much when the map is symmetrical, but at least playing the same map would look a little different from time to time if you started in different places.
  • There could be more custom settings, like maximum tech levels, and maybe sliders to convert Campaign map units to RTS map units at a different rate.
  • The player always moves first in single-player campaigns, which severely limits the chance of being surprised or attacked at sea. I really would like a round-robin option like there was in the multiplayer.
  • Characters
  • The Generals story arcs get repetitive on multiple playthroughs. I don’t think that this can be fixed. Even if they all have the same amount of choice and consequence as the queens, because you always have the four generals storylines advancing at once, the four generals stories run out faster than the four queens.
  • (Subjective) The Generals don't have a big impact on gameplay. It's easy to advance cautiously and almost never need to use them. This does depend on how the individual player plays, though.
  • Generals salary is tied to your overall income, making them too expensive for what you get for using them. It can get as high as 30 gold a turn - far too expensive a price to pay to win a single battle. I think the price should be capped at 15 gold. You could also lower the cap more and allow more generals to be used per turn.
  • (Dragon Commander 2) It might have been nice for the Generals to be the ones giving you in-battle announcements and warnings instead of the generic announcer.
  • At the end of the game,
    there's no final scene with your queen she's just absent with a hand-wave from Maxos
    . From that it seems clear that your budget ran out, but it’s still disappointing to be denied that last scene.
  • Politics
  • It's pretty easy to keep lots of faction ratings high. I think one big cause for this is the faction decisions: they tend to be rather extreme, which often makes you want to turn them down. If you turn down a faction decision, you get a 10%? boost for all the non-faction races, which is huge. Maybe if turning down a faction decision didn’t do anything to boost your approval for the non-faction races, or at least only a 5% boost. It might not be strictly balanced, but it might be better for making decisions matter more.
  • Certain political decisions and factions are slanted and not given even-handed treatment. I’m thinking most notably about one in particular. I was doing basically a “complete jerk” playthrough, and for a Catherine decision, I opted to deny her request to execute all of our soldiers commiting rape. Her next decision was whether I should allow distribution of an abortion drug to the victims of our soldiers. My options were to agree, or to say “the more babies, the more conscripts for the army!” Notably lacking was an option to say something along the lines of “regardless of their origins, I do not agree with killing unborn children”. To be clear, I am not saying this because I agree with that position (I was personally in agreement with Catherine), but even to me, the wording of the option to turn her down was completely uneven-handed, which doesn’t reflect the opinions of anyone. There was a fairly obvious alternate reply that does.
  • Another lopsided Catherine decision: It was said that all decisions have both positive and negative consequences. If you decide to let Catherine execute rapist soldiers, she gets a bonus attribute, and you lose 10% of your total troops. That’s fine, but the next decision is whether to fire half the men and replace them with women. The positive consequence is that your total troops increase by 10%, and there is NO negative consequence. My complaints about that are two-fold. Number one, it renders the previous negative consequence pointless! It cancels it out! That’s too simple a solution. Number 2, there is no negative consequence associated with it. That breaks the guideline of each decision having a positive and negative consequence. I can easily think of one: it’s in the Dragon Commander’s decision options, where turning it down is because he doesn’t want to sack officers blindly, and officers should have their positions on merit. Therefore, one negative consequence could be a -5% Luck penalty, because the women replacements simply have less experience.
  • Genocide cards do not have negative political consequences in single-player (which Swen explicitly said was going to be in during a Q&A).
  • Interface
  • On the Campaign Map, the support listed for enemy countries is always shown as 250, because that’s what it is at permanently. That is unfortunately not useful information, because what really matters is YOUR support in that country. This is important when making decisions about who to invade. The support listed when mousing over countries should always display YOUR support level with the race, regardless of whether or not that country belongs to you. Listing the enemy support could be optional, but it’s not important.
  • Gameplay – Campaign
  • Wizard Towers aren't very useful, because they generate random cards, including already-researched skills.
  • There's no way to trade, transmute, or sell cards you can't use.
  • The AI uses population buff/debuff cards, but doesn’t know that those are only useful if you’re attacking or defending, so it wastes them.
  • Population regenerates to full immediately after a battle. That ruins what might have been an interesting wrinkle to battles on the front lines. There should be an option to let population regenerate over 0-10 turns (1 turn is default, 10 turns is 10% of max population per turn, 0 is no regeneration at all). That would also make population cards more useful.
  • (Dragon Commander 2) It's possible to get all upgrades in the game, there are no either-or upgrade paths like Starcraft 2. That would add more replayability to the game
  • Gameplay - RTS
  • (Dragon Commander 2) There are no AI Dragons, which would be another interesting wrinkle to battle. I am not expecting this, it’s just a feedback note.
  • There is no good "support" skill that can counter the Eye of the Patriarch. "Mass Restoration" comes closest, but you can't restore dead units. Maybe a mass shield skill could work – that could help mitigate the damage of Eye of the Patriarch.
  • The AI relies too much on the easily-countered Battle Forge units, to the point where they build a second Battle Forge at the start of the map. They take a very long time to build a War Factory. By the time they get around to that, they’ve generally squandered over 100 Recruits on Troopers that died fast to the War Factory units I had.
  • The AI seems to be a bit broken currently. It refuses to budge from its starting location (except to capture build sites in its base) until it has almost finished building a Battle Forge. It could easily spread out to capture fresh build sites and resource construction sites, but it doesn't do anything. I'm sure it used to be better. That 2-3 minute head start they give me makes it far too easy even on Hard.
  • Some skills aren't that useful or require a lot more micro than they're worth to use. Optional Auto-cast could be useful on Grenadier’s Chemical Warfare, Shaman’s Immunity, and Zeppelin’s Firebats.
  • Troopers capture turrets so fast they're almost worthless as a base defense, which seems backwards.
  • No formation options to make your troops move together.
  • The huge numbers of easily-killed units makes it hard to maintain control groups, there's no way to automatically assign units to control groups.
  • It's a bit awkward to manage your units in Dragon form. (Understandable because this feature was only added halfway through the beta.)
  • (subjective) I wouldn’t mind some higher difficulty settings. With all the practive, even Hard isn’t that hard anymore. That might be in part because the AI takes a long time to stop massing Battle Forge units and build higher Tier stuff.



I might cross-post this to the Steam forum as well.