Game Balance and Matchmaking - We want your feedback!

As someone who only plays Solomon, unless dailies require a different commander. I find Dr. Liang to be far more troublesome then Jackson/Oxanna. Personally, I feel Dr. Liang should be a mid-late game commander, I don't see a reason why his drone needs to be effective during the early stages when it would add more thought to the player on how they should play against certain commanders.The current state of the game is extremely stale, I've had way too many Attack Bikes/Tanks vs Pitbulls which with proper grouping and micro, the Pitbulls will eventually take control of the map.

I don't see a issue with the amount the harvester gives, scouting before you build your harvester can solve a early rush on it.

I'm sorry, but you cannot call this an RTS in its current state. I'll explain why. 

My opponent and I start off with harvestors into vehicle factories.  He spams pitbulls and I counter with bikes. He spends all his resources zerging my harvestors while I cost effectively take down his pitbulls. But the 1 to 2 shots they get (certain maps is unavoidable) allows him to score a harvestor and now he is vastly ahead. 

There's no strategy in this games state (ONLY ON CERTAIN MAPS). I love this game but I wont hesitate to drop it for the insane harvestor award. 

The current state of harvestors makes missile control pointless. If you are able to be the harvestor hunter, you win the missiles by default. 

Please tell me another RTS where killing harvestors/ workers gives bonus resources.  The fact that you killed it is a huge blow in and of itself. The 100 tiberium reward is extremely excessive. Please realize this. At the very least it should only occur once. 

I love this game and it is my favorite mobile game but I seriously cannot get behind this mechanic. In my matches once a harvestor is down thats it. 95% of the games are lost at that point. The fact that I dedicated all my resources to defending it MEANWHILE I am punished for that fact is nonsensical.

The death of a harvestor means the match is decided. The only way the killer can lose is by a HUGE blunder on his part. (Which does happen) Do you really want to create an "RTS" where the ONLY way someone who is behind can win is if the opponent makes a gigantic mistake? The potential to comeback is what makes an RTS. It is the reason starcraft broodwar spawned all of ESports.

I don't necessarily disagree/agree with how harvesters currently work but if we assume the other design, where killing a harvester offers no reward but requires the player to rebuild the harvester for the original cost, the snowball effect would be drastically worse since if they kill your harvester, they already put you behind and if you have to spend the 60 tiberium to rebuild the harvester, you put yourself even further behind while they continue to apply so much pressure that there is nothing you can do to fight back since they now have economy advantage as well as unit advantage.

I think the 2nd harvester should ALWAYS cost tiberium, while the first remains as it is (Cost first build, free afterwards). This would make double harvester extremely risky since they risk putting themselves behind in order to get ahead but removes how heavily the game could snowball since the player isn't heavily punished for the first harvester.

@Mavster07 I am unsure what design you are referring to. But I don't agree with that either. Just make the harvestor free to build upon death without the reward. The time it will take to get back to the ore field will result in the opponent yielding an extra 50+ Tiberium over the player who lost the harvestor instead of the 150+.

Developers,

If you believe this mechanic has a positive effect on gameplay, I must say you do not understand what incentive's you are creating here. 4/5 of my games opponents completely disregard the missile pads AND ME until they kill a harvester. If you make harvesters faster, then this mechanic is more manageable. But people straight up sacrifice attack bikes just to get the 1 single volley off. Despite my harvestor being almost 100% on the next tile over, it does not matter = He is rewarded the volley before my 2 laser rocket troopers can do enough damage to kill him.

And the fact he used 2-4 attack bikes is irrelevant. He is rewarded for his poor play and I am punished for successfully defending my harvester 3/4 times.

Please reread the last sentence again as I cannot state the results of this mechanic any more clearly.

This mechanic either needs a tweak, or to be removed. Here are some potential suggestions:

• Harvesters heal faster over time. That way the defender is rewarded for successfully defending them.
• Harvesters move faster to actually escape the initial lock on of volleys because currently on most maps they cannot.
• Remove the 100 tiberium reward.
• If you keep the reward, harvesters should never be free to rebuild (you still make the game all about harvesters instead of missile pads.)

Does it not seem a bit off that the best chance to win is harvesters instead of the missile pads? Missile pads are irrelevant map wise. It is all about attack paths of the harvesters that dictate game play and unit decision.

If you want to argue that I need better positioning before hand, I understand. But realize when you are defending a pathway to your harvester and a well placed jade missile comes, your units don't move fast enough. At most you can save 1 or 2 units before it hits. And then he just rolls in and gets the 1-2 volleys he needs to down the harvester. 

This is the game's biggest fault game play wise. Because of this mechanic, strategy goes out the window. It is not an RTS in it's current state. I do hope the dev's will play this game enough to realize this.

I have uninstalled the game as I wrote this, but should the devs remove this mechanic I will come back running. But until then this game is nothing more than at C&C Harvester Hunting Simulator.

Best of luck to all the devs and everyone else involved in this project. Thank you for letting me partake in the closed Alpha. Also thank you to all the players on the forums I got to banter with. Peace & love to you all.

- JPie_

You can defend against bike spam, it just takes a ton of really silly pathing-abuse micro. You basically have to take advantage of the way that your units can move through your own units and the Bikes inability to be moved onto hexes where you have a unit that's still partially atop. It's not so much a matter of racing the damage as it is body blocking.

However, in practice this is a bit frustrating because the simplified controls of the game don't exactly lend themselves well - if you make your units overlap each other it becomes impossible to select the one you want, and when you're trying to hex-block movement it can get finicky as to whether the game accepted your move command or saw it as an attack command (which might result in some really terrible pathing). Given how crucial pulling off and/or defending harvestor rushes are right now to the outcome of the match - having it come down to a lot of fiddly pathing is understandably frustrating. I can only imagine newer players getting turned off when matched against higher ranked folks that not only have stronger units but have gotten a lot of practice at making this movement system work for them.

Losing a game in the first 45 seconds because your opponent's got a better grasp of the wonky movement/attack stuff and can basically leverage that to win the first engagement even with a worse composition of units (and kill a harvestor to snowball the match) puts way more emphasis on micro than strategy.

The problem is that there's no real cost to trying a rush strategy. I'll say that high-level matches typically don't have harvester-rush as the go-to strategy, because it is defensible if you know how, and if I know you know how then it's not worth risking my units. However, there's almost no opportunity cost to send my first few units at your harvester field. I can immediately tell whether a rush is going to work by what units you've built and how you positioned them, and if you're set up proper I can pull back and we'll be fighting over point control. I remember back in the day in Starcraft when "Zerg Rush" was a thing that basically meant an all-in early tactic where as the rusher you needed to get a ton of advantage from the assault as you were sacrificing your tech and economy to get a larger initial force for a quick attack - if your rush got defended well you probably lost. But the thing was you had to gamble by doing a rush build before knowing if it was a good choice. In this right now, it costs me nothing to go probe whether you could defend my rush, and I can switch to rushing on a dime.

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@JPieSON wrote:

Scarabs. I understand you are trying to create units with unique relationships with eachother. Scarabs are the the worst unit gameplay wise in the game.

The counterplay is being where the opponent is moving to before he decides to move there. Well that is the soft counter play because even if you catch it in transit - the player can just make the last scarab crash and kill pretty much whatever you had.

Oh and if they mess up that is fine, they will just spam scarabs until they finally hit your harvester.

If I deny their scarab rush and save my harvestors, that should be a considerable advantage. But what ALWAYS happens is the enemy spams scarabs until they finally get a harvestor down and then that is game. They have a few tech lab unit and they start busting out cyborgs supported by scarabs.

Scarabs should not hit air.

Scarabs should not one shot nearly everything.

If so make it something that you actually have to skillfully do - not just spam and profit. It is 5x harder to defend against a scarab than to wield one. Not only that it is 100x harder to stop scarab spam. It's WAY TOO EASY.

This unit punishes strategic play. Why try to outplay your opponent when you can just win off of one good scarab hit to the harvestor?

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Yes this. Can I plus 2 this

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@JPieSON wrote:

Oh yeah, this should go without saying, but the way you have the unlocks set up is absolutely devastating. You are punishing GDI players because Nod units are simply overpowering earlier on when you don't have everything unlocked.

Especially when used with Kane - Nod is vastly superior. If you guys decide to go through with this system, you will lose the majority of your player base before they even unlock half of the units.

Being punished simply because important cards are locked behind RNG crates is infuriating. It makes one want to uninstall the game. Why would I play a game when I a doomed to lose from the very start. It is not much of a game for the GDI player if the only chance the GDI player has is if the Nod player makes a grave error.

One should be rewarded for outplaying the opponent, not punished because of the faction they chose.

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I would also say because someone has leveled a certain unit type up to a crazy level should not completely negate game skill. Just saw someone with level 7 units that destroyed my units that should have countered them. My units were level 5. 

The scarbs are too powerful for too cheap. If you don't have them you're just as good as done. This game is becoming no fun due to this. Also the flying ship for gdi is powerful too. If you have one you pretty much win.

Fix this please. Or else no one will continue to play it.