Hi, I wanted to give you some constructive critique about what Divinity Dragon Commander does wrong and what you can do to improve the experiance, but first of all let me say, that this is a really great game. I'm a fan of the RTS genre and what Dragon Commander does it rips the best parts of the best RTS games, puts them together in one game and does so pretty well. I've seen elements from Pretorians (Ressources), War of the Worlds (general gameplay and some units), Sacrifice (Dragon), Command & Conquer (Units) and Supreme Commander (icons & zoom). These are all games I really enjoyed and to have them combined in a single game that adds that extremly good and funny RPG part in a strategy game is just great. So even if my critique sounds negative sometimes, it's really just because there are things that really kill my longtime fun with the game and I want to enjoy it even longer. Oh and thank you for beeing one of the very few RTS titels with a working pathfinding system.
[Tutorial]
Well the Tutorial ends when it gets interesting, I wished it had some extensive part about what happens if you are in Dragon Form and have units selected, but it just doesn't. You have to figure out these things for yourself and every friend I'm playing the game with asks me what to do there and I can't direct them to a good tutorial.
[Combat Phase "C&C Mode"]
I do have very few issues here, I think the mode is done quite well. One problem I have is that the AI never uses a dragon. You can't even enable it. I recognize that that would take an extensive amount of work to implement that feature, but you could also think of options to compensate for that, like giving them a titan unit or a ressource boost or something like that. Currently it's after two minutes the human player has the advantage which almost guarantees him to win the game.
Oh and a selfdestruct-option for units would be great. (I invaded a country and had transports using up all my supply and wasn't able to build land units)
Also a diplomacy option would be nice to ally up with players. Imagine you play a four-player-free-for-all match. Red and Blue are competing for a territory. Green and Yellow join in just because. It would be their interest to kill both red and blue to annihilate both armies or let the weaker of both win, depending on the situation. However they have no gain from attacking eachother. So they should have the option to ally up.
[Map Phase "Risk Mode"]
Here come my major points of critique. The first problem I'll adress is that the AI doesn't use vehicles proberly. You can use vehicles to get two countries in one turn, the AI never does that.
The second problem is the survivablity of units. If you have a a combat with a small amount of units, the system works just perfect, but once the scale gets bigger, the bigger army always obliterates the small one without or with very few losses. Ironically, if you would go into C&C mode, you would have your army size limited by support and put the remainder of the army put in reserve. However this isn't true in the auto-resolve, making it the better choice once your army is big enough, since this way, you can attack in full force.
Also, if you win in C&C mode, even with your entire start units destroyed, they'll still survive after the battle is resolved. I wish for a greater impact on losses.
Here comes the biggest problem I have with the game and unfortunately, I must say, it's a game breaker. Every strategy game has the problem, that the first person to capture the most resources has the advantage. If the skill of all players is equal, that person is bound to win. In other words, the desicive battle about who wins is the very first one, the rest of the game is just wasted time until the game ends, without a real chance of winning for the other players. Now every game has a system to counter that to a degree. Risk had these reinforcement cards, where once you use them, the next person using them gets even more. Starcraft has supply. Rise of Nations has dynamic costs for everything which increase the more units you've got. Battle for Wesnoth has upkeep costs for units and much luck involved in batles. Supreme Commander has the power system. While DDC has a support system in the C&C mode, it hase none in the Risk Mode.
Okay, the cost of buildings increase, but these aren't that relevant to the game. You basically need just gold mines, and to some extend taverns. When it comes to war factories, you can can sell the old ones, and build new ones at the front, so no siginificant cost increase here. And that's it. There is no penalty for having a big army. So the player who gets the greatest army first, wins. No way for others to catch up.
I see two possible solutions for that problem. One is to make units actually cost an upkeep. And the second one is the introduction of support on the risk map. Simply put, as in c&c mode, if you run out of supply, you can't build units. Supply is gained by building supply buildings which increase in cost as normal buildings do. You need to experiment whether it's good if the "supply depots" are influenced by the resource output of a country or not, i think it's a good idea, but this needs confirmation. If your depots get destroyed or captured, you might have one turn to fix that, otherwise you'll lose the units or maybe they defect to another player with supply left. Again experimenting if the one-turn rule is good or whether the results should be instant, is required.
The Kohan II system may also help here, bacially if you have enough supply, nothing happens, if you have not enough supply, the units cost upkeep money.
To give you and example just how game breaking this can be: On my last playthrough through the campaign, I didn't go into C&C mode once, because in any battle I made, I had 75%+ win chance anyway. I couldn't really get to the beef of the game because it just would make much sence.
[Raven Phase]
No issues here, but I do have a suggestion. If you bet the game once, you should be able to enable an optional "scrying mode" which would be basically a tooltip to see where which political descision would lead to. After beating the game multiple times, I found myself comming back to the campaign just to see what descision does what and experiment and so on. Would be nice to have optional support here.
[Options]
More difficulty options please, I still find the game much to easy on Hard Mode. Oh and a tooltip, what each difficulty actually influences.
[Multiplayer]
Two words: GOG version. I'm not a steam user, in fact I refuse to use steam. DRM issues matter to me, so I'm using the GOG version. Online Multiplayer is pretty much inexistant to me and I'm wondering why you would want the most effective way of advertising you game to be cut out. Give out an optional multiplayer key for GOG just as for example "Unepic" does and let your customers have access to it.
In the lobby you can't change your avatar or your starting positions, this needs to change.
[Further Things]
I noticed some crashes during the loading screens and the savegames sometimes get mixed up. Aside from that the game runs stable.
On some maps, you need to fix the building placement, if you have pre-build devestators, they sometimes get stuck between buildings right at the start.
Release the map editor. (But i've read this is planned anyway)
3-player maps and campaigns are missing.
In Dragon Mode, make the e.g. the middle mousebutton able to select units. Just as in normal mode the left click would do.
I found it rather odd, not to get the intro movie or the cutscenes in custom campaign mode, yet still get the outro-movie after winning.
During camaign, it's possible to just don't take the last country on a particular map, then research everything, horde gold and then take the last country and go to the next map with a surplus of ressources that guarantees you the win.
