Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - Beta LordCrashs Beta Thread

Hi guys,

I will add bugs I found in the game, questions and suggestions here over the time!

1) It seems like there is no proper feedback when you try to build something (building or unit) and don't have enough funds. I would appreciate a little on screen message WHY I can't build a unit or building. I get a message (which I don't understand when I do it with a shortcut but not when I do it per mouse click)...

2) Are the big letters (shortcuts) in the thumbnails there on purpose? I mean it's good to know the shortcuts but they take away from the artistic style the way they are implemented right now.

3) Is there some ingame wiki about the units? I don't know what each unit does exactly (strengths and weaknesses) and it's not really displayed in the unit selection window in the respective production building.

4) I guess the decision to not being able to produce units and build new buildings while being a dragon happened on purpose? Atm being a dragon in the heat of the battle is a little bit frustrating because your replenishment dries out and the fast-paced gameplay does not forgive not producing anything for even a small amount of time. So being a dragon for more than 2 or 3 minutes is almost suicidal.

5) Imo the game is overall a little bit too fast-paced. I mean it's fluid and everything is working but it gets quite a bit confusing and hectic in mid- and end-game. Based on my experience this has two reasons: single units are quite weak (so you have many weak units instead of few strong ones, even tanks etc are weak) and the production time for new units is very fast (just seonds). These two mechanics lead to serious damage if you don't produce new units every second possible.

6) It's sometimes kind of hard to select air units because they are quite far away from the ground and the ankle is sometimes difficult to measure in the heat of battle (but that's just a minor thing).

7) There is an extensive research option in each building which should enhance the features and capabilites of certain units. But: I couldn't use any of this special abilities so far because single units are too weak and die too soon in battle and you have to manage so many things simultanously that you can't just "babysit" a certain (type of) unit in battle (at least that's my impression, of course I also suck at these games so my skill will become better with more training).

8) At the first startup my Avast virus scanner marked the .exe as a suspicious program and I had to make an exception for it to get it running. But now the game runs stable and fine, no major bug or crash so far.

I will add some more from my own experience :

1) On a Nvidia GTM 555, you have to manually ask the game to be launch with your true graphic card. I think it may occur for everyone using a notebook graphic card like mine (any GTM from Nvidia).

- To solve it, you have to go in your steam file and ask your computer to lauch it.

2) When you are a dragon, after using a skill, like healing or whatever, it's pretty hard to come back to your usual shoot (I used the Lizard Dragon and his healing breath... but I encounter enemies and wanted to switch back to my usual fireshoot, it was pretty hard).

3) Sometimes (Sorry, I didn't screenshot), the animation of the dragon's disappearing stay, leaving a trace in the sky

4) The "go to" line asked for the buildings goes in the texture of the land

That's all I can remember now, tonight, I will give more feedback.

Hi! And thank you for your feedback, it is very appreciated. I'll be around for the coming time to give some insight in things or answer the feedback.

1) I agree, there will be more specific messages popping up to say exactly why you are unable to do what you are trying to achieve.

3) Some general information will be added on tooltips or on the unit itself, detailing what its use is.

4) This was a design decision because we did not want the dragon to be TOO powerful. It needs to be a clear-cut choice when there is the right timing to enter the dragon as a well-played dragon can turn the tide of battle by itself. If you would be able to do everything from the Dragon, then there wouldn't really ever be a reason to leave it.
In singleplayer the dragon will be considerably more powerful, as for MP there is a more delicate line of balance.
However we will have a higher amount of build queues to produce units so this will be less of an issue in the future.

5) We wanted the game to be fast paced in the RTS portion since the RTS is not the only part of the game - there is also the Strategy Map; if we had RTS battles that would take 30 minutes or more all the time, then people would have a hard time finishing a campaign in MP in a timely fashion. Naturally, since currently only the Skirmishes are available, it may indeed seem everything is too fast.

Also, MP is supposed to be on "Hard" difficulty, where unit HP is on the basic level and as such have the lowest HP values (meant for balancing MP).
If you play on normal or easy in SP, the units their hp will scale with difficulty, making the game slower paced and easier for beginners to act when units might require micro and the likes.

Granted, even when mentioning all this - the pacing might still be too fast and we are looking at things to improve this. A higher amount of queues to produce units is one of the things we hope that will (partly) combat this.

7) Once more, in SP this will be a lot easier to do because the units their HP will scale with difficulty making them live a lot longer.
It might be useful for beginners to start on Easy to learn some of the basics. But as mentioned above, we are looking at pacing - can you believe the game used to be even faster paced? :p.

Again, thank you for your participation & feedback, we'll be monitoring this forum closely!

3) In-game, not that I know, but there is a manual in the beta directory, which has information on the units role, their strengths and weaknesses, and what the upgrades do.

4) From my experience, two minutes is FAR too long to spend as a Dragon. It is best used for surgical strikes - wiping out that column of infantry, hitting that group of fighters, supporting your troops in the battle. You are not supposed to be playing for two minutes straight as a Dragon, its normal attack is not very effective at taking out armoured units. It's only in the end-game with resources constrained that it's safer to spend more time as a Dragon.

5) The game is indeed very fast paced. I'm not entirely sure yet if it's too fast-paced, I want to think about it some more and get used to it before I decide if it really is too fast-paced.

If this intended to be the normal pace for multiplayer, then multiplayer in general might be too fast. From the Strategy map screenshots, I've seen population counts for countries in the campaign mode are in the 800-2000 range. Skirmish mode has a population cap of 5000. That 800-2000 population will deplete much faster, and there will be less time for clever strategies. Of course, I am forgetting that unit upgrades will carry over, so units will be pre-built for clever strategy usage.

8) When I first launched the game, Windows Firewall told me it had inhibited the app from contacting the Internet. I had to tell Windows Firewall to allow it full public access.

Hey, thanks for the fast feedback.

I appreciate the information that the units HP will scale with the difficulty level in SP. I think you should make that information accesible to everyone playing the beta, especially when you add many more people to it. Otherwise people could think that the game may be way "too hard" for them even in SP. Perhaps some kind of "release note" or "version note" delivered with the beta would be good in which you state various facts about the current version and the elements already implemented and not. This way you would answer a lot of questions before they are even asked and you would have more time for just the bugfixing.

to 1 and 3: Highly appreciated, especially for beginners. Extensive tooltips and messages for beginners which could be switched off for experts would be perfect.

to 4: Yeah, I guessed that. But I think a higher queue amount in the production buildings would support the incentive to turn to dragon after all. Atm all four units in one building are built in less than 20 or 30 seconds which is VERY fast. You can hardly enjoy the "dragon time" if you have to transform back every 20 seconds. I agree that it's probably a tough decision how long to stay in dragon form but I think 20-30 seconds may be too short to have fun with it, but 2 minutes may be way too long to stay in battle with your normal troops and replenishment. I will explore this matter in future matches....

to 3) Thanks, I haven't noticed that yet.

to 4) As I said in the post before: I understand why there is a limit to dragon time for balancing reasons. But the reasonable time in dragon form should be long enough to have fun with this mechnic. I fear 20-30 seconds may be too short for that but yes, perhaps 2 minutes are already too long. But you can't forget that it costs much to transform to the dragon form to it also must be worth to do so. For only one attack on a group of enemies it's almost too costly. But I will test that thing out in future matches, for sure.

to 5) I have nothing against fast-paced gameplay and I appreciate the short matches arising from that policy. But nevertheless I would appreciate a slower gameplay when playing against "easy" AI enemies and a faster gameplay when playing against "hard" AI enemies to appeal to different types of gamers, beginners ("casuals") and experts ("hardcores"). I don't know if there will be some kind of matchmaking/suggestion system for human enemies later in the final version but as a beginner or someone who is not that fond of games like StarCraft or Warcraft in MP the actual gameplay speed could lead to too much hectic, confusion and "stress". I know that speed is king in strategy games in MP but there should be a nice trade-off between different playstyles. Otherwise different difficulty levels in MP are kind of useless....

Well, I have one very basic question:

Is it right that the population does not regenerate itself and that there is a strict maximum of units and buildings which can be build during one MP match? So if you lost a lot of units you won't be able to come back because you'll lack funds? IIRC the round buildings turn passive population into active population (what is the exact rate per building owned?) but the passive population only diminishes.

So the way it works now you can retreat quite early if you lost too many units in early- and mid-game...?!

At this point one recruitment center outputs 5 population to recruits every 5 sec. If you have more recruitment centers they start outputting 5 recruits every 5 seconds from the moment they are built.

Neutral capture points also give you recruits, but at the moment they are bonuses and not deducted from the total population. This might change.

And yes the perceptive player can retreat early when he notices there aren't enough resources to force a victory. However the retreating player will retreat at a penalty, the player has to decide if that penalty is worth more than damaging the other player while he's still in the game.

I hope this answers your question. Values will/might change during beta.

The cost to transform is pretty minimal in terms of recruits, only enough to keep you from transforming for every little problem. The Jetpack lets you minimize the time you spend by letting you swoop across the map to deal with a few spots in one go. The real cost is the attention it takes from your macro.

Yes it absolutely is right for the population to deplete to zero so there are no more free resources: It's the entire point of the population system! Yes, if you do poorly, you will lose - it makes sense to me.

The game is a balance between spending your population immediately and saving it for the endgame when the population has been drained. Too little spent and you get crushed, too much spent and you risk running out of funds.

In the match I had against Tovarah and Death Knight (Forktong), I won because I still had an army and spare recruits left after Tovarah and Death Knight exhausted themselves battling each other. I tend to win against the Easy AI because they send their entire force at me. If I can survive their attack and have funds left, it's only a matter of time.

The buildings turn population into active population at a rate of about 5 per Recruitment center owned.

There's a bonus people might not be aware of: Capturing a white (never claimed) building site gives you bonus population: 2 for a turret site, and 10 for a building site. That's a true bonus and does NOT subtract from the map's population count. That rewards those who are fast to claim new sites.

If you turtle up, cede the middle of the map and let other players capture the other recruitment sites, your endgame will be harder because they'll have banked the recruits faster than you will, so they'll have more to spend on things like siege, and if they have siege (and who wouldn't, turtling won't save you.

Ah ok, good to know.

I think that way it's hard to have longer matches than about 30 minutes or possibly 45 minutes.

And this fast-paced limited-funds mechanics makes the game very different from games like C&C and StarCraft, it's way more "arcady".

I hope that's a good thing

Hehe, first of all it's different which is a good thing, yes. Otherwise there would be the risk that it lacks in comparison to games like StarCraft.

It only depends on your actual taste. I have to get used to the fast-paced gameplay first before I can say which way I prefer (long base-building vs. fast-paced action strategy). I think both have their strenghts and weaknesses and both deserve to be played.

I have a graphical bug on the campaign map. There is a really annoying horizotal bar/distortion when scrolling right in the middle of the map.

And the translation is kind of fucked up atm. My German version consists of 70% German and 30% English stuff..... :P

Oh and I had one crash to desktop the moment a new MP campaign game should be loaded (right after the loading screen).


System specs:
i5 750 @3.6 GHz OC
Radeon HD 7870 (Catalyst 13.4)
8GB RAM
Win7 Pro

I have one BIG issue/suggestion:

Atm when there is a battle on the strategy map you have no indication of the probability of winning the battle BEFORE you have to decide whether you want to auto-solve the battle or take part in it yourself(playing it out in RTS mode).

This is really a big flaw because it's very important to know how big the chance is to win a fight. There is no motivation for me to enter a fight if I have a 90 or 80% chance to win the game. But if there is a 50/50 or even 40/60 chance to win the fight, I would personally engage in battle. Without an indication BEFORE choosing whether to auto-solve a fight or fighting it out in RTS mode it's only rough guessing.

Please take a look how Creative Assembly solved that problem in the Total War games. The system in place there works perfectly fine, no need for experiments here.

And we definitely need to know how the units on the strategy map and the units in RTS battles are connected. There must be some sort of algorithm, calculating how much units you take into battle and how much units you take out of them (transfer rate of units from RTS to strategy map). I think the Total War games solved that problem very well, too. Game mechanics should be clear and understandable or people get confused and frustrated.....

Hover your mouse over the territory in which the battle will take place. You get a chance to win % in the territory's description.

Ah, ok. But that's not very intuitive if you ask me.....

If you ask me, I figured it out pretty quickly. But yes, putting that basic ratio in the screen that lets you choose who fights would be a good idea.

Game crashed with newest beta version 1.0.133.9727 after the loading screen of a skirmish match against a single AI enemy.



Bug reporting tool didn't work either, I'm afraid.....

The beta information reporter might be blocked because it seems to have changed between versions, so windows wouldn't let it connect for me until I gave it permission to do so.