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"That thing's operational!" - Atruejedi's Star Wars-themed thoughts on Alliance

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Baelfire Ender:
Just read the entire thing; I can whole-heartedly agree. First note: I sent an email about the boss ship and a new bug I found on it (not mentioned here). So yeah, I support that. Jedi has already mentioned pretty much everything I could say, except for the fact that the boss ship (yes, it has big engines) IS TOO MANEUVERABLE. It's the size of Rhode Island and moves like a Squid on steroids. Not much else to say except PLEASE JUST READ MY EMAIL ABOUT IT.

Second, yes, for the love of God, FIX THE UPGRADE SYSTEM. I have been flying my Squid for months, no problem. First day of Alliance, whoop-de-flippin-do, no Spanner for you. Because my engineer had a maxed mallet, he refused to take the spanner and instead took his upgraded buff hammer (which has a bug, by the way. If you upgrade it, it takes more hits to buff.) My engineers/gunners don't wanna take Charged or Lochnagar anymore because Greased ammo got powered. Okay, yeah, it's pretty damn effective these days, but what's gonna happen when we need the extra EXTRA damage from Lochanagar to rip apart the boss' health? Greased isn't the best at it, even if you are hitting it's weakpoint. Okay, yeah, it's probably more effective than charged at this point, but Charged was easy to shoot because you didn't have 20 bullets ejecting from your gun every half second. It wastes the volley because half the time, too many bullets pour out of the gun and exploded before they can reach their target, since Greased is short ranger ammo. This, with experience, frustrates captains because that overpowered greased gatling gun can't hit the freakin' target, therefore no hull break. And then no kill. Also, tar barrel. I got murdered by it because a troll tarred me on purpose (I reported him). I've also been accidentally killed by it because I was trying to get ships off my ally's ass and he decided to tar them. I was in the wake, oi.

I do kinda like these new items you've added, the fail-safe and armor kit. I don't have any complaints there. Adds another level of judgement into the mix to determine when you should buff something, where to put it, how often you should check it. The one thing I advice is to make these things a little easier to buff. I don't know how many times I've died on a Corsair because an engineer wanted to use fail-safe/armor kit on the balloon instead of get on a gun and shoot back/help repair the hard to repair armor. Just make these new things vary on where you buff them like you did with the buff hammer, except maybe a little LITTLE easier. That's all I request, thank you.

The new ships, yes, great, awesome, love their layout. One complaint per ship, though. My deal with the Magnate is that I sometimes glitch.... When I'm on a light gun, I get thrown off of the side sometimes. No idea why.

I like the Crusader, but god damn if I haven't had trouble going up those stairs from the heavy guns. I feel like the hitbox on the railing for the Crusader's stair case... isn't there. I've relied on that railing to be able to get me up the stairs because I have those days where my hand doesn't move the mouse fast enough to get me to face the exact middle of the top stair, just so I don't walk off the side... All I can ask is... Hitbox on that railing... please?

Corsair, holy crap, the ultimate Engineer's test. This ship is spacey as all hell and I love it. I love the theme of the ship, cold metal and steel, sophisticated and crafty, but brutal and deserving. You fear this ship and how it looks, and I haven't even gotten to it's layout. The guns, spread far and thin, all have great purpose. Your front gun can be the armor breaking, balloon popper, or disabler. Sides guns are disablers and killing. Back gun is your sneak gun that helps you get away or just make some attacks that assist in the long-run. While the balloon is in a touchy spot, it's a brilliant spot that lets the gunner help out in the repairs as the pilot can also help. Single complaint, single: please for the love of god fix the hit boxes on the ladders. I have run into those things and not climbed. I have reached the top only to be thrown back off. I cannot, for the life of me, make the jumps between the ladders of the side engines without it throwing me into the wall or the main engine. Just please tap it.

The Shrike is an interesting one for me. I feel like it does need another gun, but other than that, I have no real fix to it. The gaps in the floor make it... unique? I dunno. Flustering and annoying for sure. The fact that only really one engineer works is annoying because the gunner and gungineer are always firing guns and usually the real engineer doesn't get to. Either this ship goes to hell because they're too concentrated on shooting instead of helping repair or it just doesn't get damaged because they're too good at shooting. Either way, it's hell for the single engineer.

I don't have a big problem with planes, other than to make them larger and faster. That's it.

The spotting technique we learned in skirmish is useless because, only when we zoom can we see stats, much less the ship itself, unless the captains spot them. Just make the little glow a little bigger and I'll be fine, but if you can add stats to it, YES THANK YOU, PRAISE THE LORD.

I don't have much else to say other than the fact that I support Jedi's review in practically every way.

Unarmed Civilian:
Wish it had an index, given how long it is. Annoying to look through for points to re-read and make sure I read them correctly.

I generally agree, and will respond to the few points I find more iffy and that I have more to add to.


The addition of upgradable repair tools seems to be in response to keeping up with the raw damage output of multiple ships firing on one. To remove that system would require them to reduce the amount of spam a ship is taken, or reduce the pain of that spam significantly. Even with upgraded tools, it's hard to keep up with the raw pain of the boss ships already.

That said, I feel that the direction they've taken with upgrades in general is suspect, especially the 3 core repair tools.

Messing with the cooldowns as much as they did is a mistake in my opinion. I personally have been trying to get into a good rhythm and feel for the cooldowns, so messing with the pipe wrench and mallet cooldowns doesn't feel right. However I do think that it's fair to reduce the mallet's cooldown by a second or two, given how long it is and the potential harm it is capable of. Just not completely halving it.

The spanner's rebuild becomes much faster and the pipe wrench seems to be in a reasonable spot - though perhaps being too much of a "super spanner", given how its short cooldown encourages camping a part until it's fully repaired - but the mallet should've been further cemented in its role as the long cooldown, high repair, terrible rebuild tool, rather than turned into an upgrade of the pipe wrench. By that I mean it shouldn't get any rebuild bonuses at all, and instead should heal for more health instead, even if it would be overkill on most parts at that point. A even 9 second cooldown, 500 hp replenishing mallet would still be a fantastic tool, bringing high health ships from the brink of death, breathing life into balloons, and guaranteeing full repairs on every other component. A 7 second cooldown, 390 hp repair would also be great if your goal was reducing the cooldown.

The mallet's long cooldown itself, coupled with the highest overall rate of repair, is what gave engineers the ability to increase their effective rate of repair by having multiple simultaneous cooldowns and encouraged moving around to multiple components to achieve that higher simultaneous repair. It's also what let an engineer hit a part every once in a while, empty a clip from a nearby gun, then return to repairing with little loss in effective rate of repair. And at the same time, misuse of the mallet often lead to disaster, where using it on a tiny dent prevents you from being able to repair the huge burst you take immediately after. But that was always the nature of the tool.

That said, I didn't get an upgraded mallet to play with, so this may be mostly speculation.


As it currently is, the upgraded core repair tools overlap and overshadow the un-upgraded versions of their brothers, making it so spanners have higher rates of overall repair than an upgraded mallet and maxed out pipe wrenches are simply better than the stock spanner. The issue might lie in the fact that you are encouraged to max out one at a time to get the most overall efficiency, since the upgrades seem to approximately double the effectiveness of any of the tools, which is an entire problem on its own.

A way to prevent this might be to have all 3 of the core repair tools under the same upgrade: one upgrade upgrades all 3, meaning none of them become almost strictly better than the other.


Wow, that was a lot of stuff on repair tools. On to the other things.


I agree that the Shrike is awful to engineer on due to overuse of slowing stairs and feeling more cramped than a the gunner's nest on a Junker. On the other hand it's fairly good at rushing to objectives, quickly burning them down, and escaping, so it's not a terrible ship to pilot. In that role it is basically a Squid with heavy guns instead of a front gun. It could even be argued that the visibility issues mimic the Squid's horrendous right-side visibility as a balancing factor. Although the moving parts are a bit overkill.

That said, it gets no pots on it from the Traveler's theme, so overall it's completely unusable garbage.

Oh, and that thing on the Magnate appears to be a perpetual motion machine design, of which a rudimentary understanding of physics could tell you doesn't work and has broken any remaining feeling of realism I've tried to hold on to in this game. I didn't even notice how the plane's size made no sense after seeing that thing on the Magnate.

Chang'e:
jfc jedi just submit a job application already

The new tools are interesting, but upgrades are such an unnecessary pain in the ass...

I also noticed there are now STEAM ACHIEVEMENTS for referring friends. In-game 'chieves, sure, but official Steam ones? The fuck is this?

The missions could use more detailed descriptions. Most of the time I'm not entirely sure why we're there, or if this mission is even supposed to be for my faction.



Some very minor quibbles, but I'm nothing if not vain; there should really be more options for painting ships. Especially the new ones. Sure, you can paint the Magnate's balloon, but nobody's going to notice with all the bright yellow sails. They're all beautiful ships(mad props), but I'd love to customize them. Come on, there's an entire store tab dedicated to tricking out your skyboat.

An accent option for clothes would be nice, being unable to change the color of brightly-colored accents kind of limits what you can use without making something that is a crime against all good taste.

Atruejedi:

--- Quote from: KeijoPertti on August 05, 2016, 02:25:16 am ---tl;dr?

--- End quote ---

I hope you're kidding. If you care enough to register and post on the forums of a-- actually, fuck it.

That being said, by popular demand, I have updated the original document to include an index, which definitely does help make reading it a little less daunting. At the bottom of the index, in two sentences, I explain why I wrote all this for the lazy bastards who probably shouldn't bother reading it anyway.

Thanks to everyone for their support and voices!

Edit: Actually, you're probably too lazy to even click the damn link, so here is the TL;DR:


--- Quote ---Guns of Icarus Alliance teems with potential but has fundamental design problems. I am here to offer suggestions on how to improve the game and make it a success.
--- End quote ---

Guagadu:
A monster response to a monster letter. I apologize in advance.


--- Quote from: Atruejedi's Email ---narrative deficiencies

--- End quote ---
Do you think this would be helped by taking a leaf out of a MOBA's book, and adding voice overs to what is happening? I don't play Mobas much, but from my memories, most of them have audio telling players that a structure is under attack. If voice messages saying things such as "Refinery A has been destroyed, or "Your team is attacking Outpost A", it would make sure that all players are more "in the loop".


--- Quote from: Atruejedi's Email ---Why not, instead, make those weak spots into areas that, when targeted, do significantly more damage to the enemy?

--- End quote ---
I am not entirely sure, but isn't it already like that?


--- Quote from: Atruejedi's Email ---We can take community-submitted ideas for names.

--- End quote ---
This would be very cool. The markers saying what type of ship they are (the "(kill)" or "disable)" at the end of the name) are not very useful to me, as I don't generally have time to pay enough attention to the ship name to read it. While I still wouldn't have time to read it, adding unique names/nicknames to each ship does sound very cool and would definitely help immersion.


--- Quote from: Atruejedi's Email ---I don’t think a boss is something that should be hidden

--- End quote ---
While a boss should definitely not be hidden, it should not be explicitly pointed out to the player at first. When you play a match in Skirmish, and the enemy team is completely unbalanced, do you get an indicator when the much more powerful spawns? No, you don't know until you actually spot them. It should be the same for a boss. While you might be able to visually tell where they are, there shouldn't be any special indicators until the boss is spotted. There is something unnerving about knowing there is an enemy, but not knowing where exactly they are. This uneasiness is what makes horror games as popular as they are.

That being said, I would like different types of ships to have different map markers. In Skrimish, there are no more than 4 enemy ships, and therefore only up to 4 map markers to pay attention to, each with a name attached. Thus, we know exactly which ship is which on the map. However, in alliance, all markers appear the same. I would suggest maybe 3 different unique map markers, one for airplane, one for boss, and one for the rest. Also, having names attached would be too chaotic with the large amount of alliance enemies, so maybe have a key on the left showing the difference between types of markers.


--- Quote from: Atruejedi's Email ---Will bosses be "worth" risking it all to destroy,even if the objectives can be completed and victory can be achieved?

--- End quote ---
There needs to be something done to make players actually consider engaging boss ships. The only reason I have seen so far is for the glory, and bragging rights. Boss ships are such difficult battles, and usually deliver a large majority of my team's deaths, and for what? A measly upgrade. I personally have never noticed any difference at all from getting the upgrades. The most effective strategy so far seems to be ignoring the boss ship and rushing the objectives, on all 3 gamemodes.

Also, once a boss ship has been killed, it feels like game over. Once a boss ship has been killed, the enemy will no longer be able to do much of anything to you.


--- Quote from: Atruejedi's Email ---you are blurring the lines between different tools and different ammos

--- End quote ---
While I do like the idea of upgrades, I also agree that it does blur the lines. My solution for this would be simple: instead of making up for an item's weaknesses, improve their bonuses. For example: The spanner upgrades currently include boosts to it's repair power and the mallet upgrades include improvements to it's rebuild power, making them more usable for each other's purposes. Instead, the spanner should not get boosts to it's repair power, but more rebuild boosts instead. This way, the lines between those two items would be even more distinct, instead of morphing them to one.


--- Quote from: Atruejedi's Email ---What do those resources...do? Do you need to collect them to win? Should you? Do they provide bonuses? Should they?

--- End quote ---
This is my biggest problem with the map as well. I see these resources my faction has, but absolutely no idea what they mean, or what they do.
My suggestion for this is influenced by the board game Risk, the exact same game you mentioned that the map was inspired by in yesterday's fireside. What if each faction had a hidden objective they needed to complete in order to win a season, related to these resources? No player would be able to actually see them, so that no simple faction swap would show the objectives. On top of this, each resource would also apply some sort of buff that faction's players in some way. Maybe the pickaxe icon resource is metal which will increase the faction's ship's hull armors. The main concern against this would be that it might snowball the wars, such that one faction has more resources causing their players to be more powerful, but as the map is inspired by Risk, need I point out that that game is exactly the same? I recently player Risk for the first time, and at first it would be quite well balanced, but as the game went on, one or two players started growing more than the rest, in turn making them more powerful than the others. Players of a certain faction might start to get frustrated that their faction is losing, but that would mean that the game would start snowballing, causing the season to end much sooner.


I see tons of provinces on the map that I would like to fight in, but can't because the game hasn't generated a battle in that location. What if each province could be interacted in individually, while the markers still showed up at any territories in which there was a particularly close fight going on, or the majority of players are involved in? This would keep it simple for newer players or anyone who isn't too interested in strategizing, while the strategy gamers among us would have more options to work with.


--- Quote from: Atruejedi's Email ---battles are resolving themselves too fast

--- End quote ---
Battles currently seem to be taking only a few hours, which is a problem, especially with the amount of territories currently in the game. With this, we could have an entire faction swap land with another in just a few days. A territory should be valuable to a faction, and every time one is won, it should feel like a huge victory to that faction.



--- Quote from: Atruejedi's Email ---That fucking spinning wheel/fan/watermill thing. It's so god damn distracting, becauseany movement attracts attention from the pilot.

--- End quote ---
I piloted a Magnate for the first time yesterday, and I did not get distracted too much by the watermill.


--- Quote from: Atruejedi's Email ---The Shrike
"What a Piece of Junk!"

--- End quote ---
I can not for the life of me figure out what is more attractive about a Shrike than about a Corsair. Both ships have one side facing light gun and one side facing heavy gun, but the corsair also has an extra light and heavy gun on the front and back. The only advantage of a Shrike is the less complex layout, but any captain with any patience at all should be able to explain to their crew their responsibilities.

While on the topic of explaining the ship to a crew, there is not enough time at the beginning of a match to brief a new crew. I would recommend that enemy ships will not attack a ship until it has been moved, or a shot has been fired. This would allow time for captains to explain the ship to their crew, without leaving this up for abuse.





Aaand now to address the already existing responses:

--- Quote from: Chang'e on August 05, 2016, 07:23:46 pm ---there should really be more options for painting ships. Especially the new ones. Sure, you can paint the Magnate's balloon, but nobody's going to notice with all the bright yellow sails. They're all beautiful ships(mad props), but I'd love to customize them.

--- End quote ---
I do agree. I'm thinking about the new ships: most of them seem to balloons that are not really visible. What if the balloon is not what received the paint, but the largest visible aesthetic section was painted? For example on the Crusader, instead of painting the balloon, the large, red section of the armor is painted?


--- Quote from: Baelfire Ender on August 05, 2016, 06:13:08 pm ---I like the Crusader, but god damn if I haven't had trouble going up those stairs from the heavy guns. I feel like the hitbox on the railing for the Crusader's stair case... isn't there. I've relied on that railing to be able to get me up the stairs because I have those days where my hand doesn't move the mouse fast enough to get me to face the exact middle of the top stair, just so I don't walk off the side... All I can ask is... Hitbox on that railing... please?

--- End quote ---
I love the crusader, but it is right now VERY buggy to move on. I can only walk from the mid guns to the armor about 50% off the time, the rest I simply fall off.

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