Here's a collection of my current thoughts on Alliance. No pictures, no TL;DRs, just a lot of text. You have been warned.
Gamemodes:
General:
Overall it seems to have slowed down from the alpha. Maybe it's just me, but the smaller attack ships seem far more aggressive and damaging than before You can be killed very easily by two lone ships, so there's a much bigger emphasis on clearing out any attackers rather than rushing objectives. Compared to the boss, the boss will rarely if ever kill you. It is the 3 small ships that spawn with him that will slaughter you over and over and over.
All small tri-gun ships ram now, making most of them basically overpowered versions of pyramidions. Small disable ships can carronade your guns for massive damage from an absurd range, making them a huge priority. The long range sniper ships are much easier to deal with due to the fact that they don't ram you constantly.
Assault:
Slow. Was slow before if you didn't plan a rush, and is slower now since you really can't rush. The refineries have a ton of health, I've been sitting there with two gatling reloading after dumping their clips, wondering why the armor still isn't broken. This is enough to force attackers to clear out the much more threatening Pyramidion swarms.
Base defense guns are also extremely tough on Normal, tougher than heavy guns. It's to the point where they might as well make them invincible since it is not worth your time to try to disable them. Just get to a spot where you're out of range of the mines and the big guns can't hit you.
In my opinion, the option to rush the base should still be possible, but risky. Reduce the health and armor of the bases somewhat, but put pre-deployed mines similar to Infiltration (or have the mine guns pre-deploy mines when you are sighted). This makes a rush still possible, but if you screw up you either eat a fatal number mines or you get set up as prey for the Pyramidions.
Whatever is done with this mode, the "Enemy Kills" counter should be renamed to "Deaths" like Survival.
Retrieval:
The one speed mission in Alliance, where if you go slow, you lose. This makes it rather fun in my opinion. It is also an extremely confusing mission story-wise.
Your goal is to destroy the enemy convoy and secure their cargo "before they escape". However, the enemy is also playing Assault and trying to destroy your refineries, and if they do that first, you lose. You must deploy the cargo at the stations they are bombing before they are bombed. If they are bombed afterwards, there is no consequence, you already did that objective. The devs have said that the story doesn't make sense, but it just works play-wise. Which means this mode was likely conceptualized in a rather short amount of time in development, or was rushed to meet a deadline. Whatever.
In my experience, this mode is "take fast ships or lose". If anyone on your team takes a Junker or Magnate, you better have taken a fast one yourself and be ready to hard carry your team. Clutch saves can be done at the final base, but that requires your team to actually be there. The slower ships need to take the shortcut of flying overtop the mountain to be able to reach anything in time, as the convoy is simply just faster than them.
A way to improve this might be to severely lower the health of those destructible walls (slower ship is more likely to destroy it by the time it gets to it, whereas a faster ship would just go for the direct chase) or make shortcuts more obvious.
Defense:
The most overhauled mission from the Alpha. It is no longer a mission that could just have its name swapped with Retrieve and make more sense in the process. Drills still need to be destroyed, but the cargo balloons are now
optional mandatory to prevent the base from dying. Destroying all the drills now activates a timer where you must defend the base until it runs out or destroy all enemies (seemingly excluding the boss ship based on one run I did).
This mission has the problem of chip damage against the base. And the boss rushing the base. The drills give balloons that help remove the chip damage, but it doesn't address the problem itself. Some possible ways to address this are:
- Give the base a thin layer of regenerating armor. This helps deal with gatling plane chip damage.
- Put a final defensive gun that is not attacked/is indestructible. This helps chip down attackers on the base itself.
- Make enemy ships prioritize players if attacked. This allows players to "taunt" ships away from the base.
As for the boss, I really don't have any ideas on what to do about him.
Infiltration:
I think it's great. Captains naturally communicate more, and are given heavy incentive to cooperate (VIP must cap, but if VIP dies you immediately lose). This is a slow mission just by the fact that it is basically an escort mission.
The walls, pre-placed mines, gun towers, and swarms of enemies in a location (but seemingly with a slow spawn rate after the initial spawn) puts emphasis on treading carefully, clearing the area, and advancing as a group.
However, you should put more emphasis on the objectives that if the VIP dies, you lose.
Survival:
An interesting mode, though survival doesn't actually seem to be the major focus. This is essentially a variant of Assault where objectives are more random, more emphasis is put on ship combat, and the boss is required to be killed. The only gripe I have is how the small ships can snowball against you really quickly, since they constantly respawn. As I've mentioned earlier, they are the most dangerous ships in Alliance right now, so it's a pretty big problem.
Personally, I would have guessed that a survival mission was simply a timed mission where your goal is to live up to that timer (successfully surviving the enemy attack).
If there are other modes running in rotation, I don't know about them. I haven't seen Ambush, and haven't played it enough for a well-formed opinion on it.
Ideas for modes:
Interception:
Reversal of assault, a defensive mission, a variant of retrieve. Here, there is a troop of attacking ships that are out to destroy friendly refineries. Their commanding ships are leading the charge, and need to be stopped. You start behind them, and they already have a head start.
After destroying the commanding ships, a set number of their remaining ships needs to be destroyed. After that set number, the capital ship that the devs love throwing into every mode spawns and tries to finish the job themselves. The mission ends in victory if the capital ship is destroyed, and defeat if all bases are lost. Rewards are based mostly on number of surviving bases.
Tug of War:
Retrieve with more focus on retrieval of cargo. Kind of like Skyball with AI Pyramidions. The AI has just finished a successful raid on a friendly base, and are running off with their spoils. Your job is to get those spoils back before the enemy gets away.
The enemies have a head start. You need to retrieve the cargo before the enemy gets away. You start out at the friendly base, and your goal is to return that cargo to the friendly base. The first convoy carriers must be destroyed for them to release the cargo. After that, ANYONE who is rammed is forced to drop the cargo. This turns it into a game of tug of war, where outmaneuvering the enemy ships becomes more important than getting kills, and where you aren't forced to wait around and kill to reobtain the cargo if it was stolen. There should be no boss, as why on earth would they risk losing a capital ship on something so trivial? Especially since speed and maneuverability is far more important than applying pressure.
If needed, you could make a wall at the end that only ships with the cargo will damage, and have the lose condition be the destruction of that wall.
The keen may have noticed that these two are heavily based on Retrieve. This is because I believe that while Retrieve can be fun, it is messy and doesn't really make sense story-wise. I believe that PvE content is about making a story and having the players experience that story.
Ships
Heavy Guns on the Magnate and Corsair, and the Crusader to an Extent:
There seems to be a shift in design based around heavy guns and their relative placement on the ship. On every Skirmish ship that carries heavy guns, of all the available guns they are the furthest away from vital components (Hull, Balloon, Engines, in order of vital importance). This means that for these ships, the repair penalty for having a gunner over a third engineer is lessened. The big guns are far away from vitals, so you don't lose much ability to survive if you have a gunner on heavy guns.
On the Magnate and Corsair, this is not the case.
On the Magnate, the two heavy guns are the closest guns to all three engines and the balloon. Only the hull is closer to the light guns. Since you want an engineer on each major vital area, this means you want an engineer up by the hull, and an engineer in the back half of the ship. Where does the gunner go? In the front. All the guns that are most distant from large numbers of ship vitals are up there, so the gunner does the least harm to his own ship by staying at the four frontal light guns and helping tank the very weak hull on occasion. The rear engineer fires the heavy guns for the kill. Alternatively, since you don't really need a gunner on the front for the light guns, you run with three engineers despite the heavy guns.
On the Corsair, two of the three heavy guns are the closest guns to the hull and 2 main engines, and are not that far from the turners. Because of the configuration of vitals on this ship, you want an engineer down by the hull and engines, and an engineer on the second level for the turners and balloon. However, that means having a gunner down by the hull, harming your survivability. So you want three engineers, or the two engineers below and the gunner on the middle (most isolated) section, and hope the balloon never catches fire. This strange configuration is why so many players find this ship's layout to be daunting.
Also of note: On the Crusader, the hull (most vital location on the ship) is closest to the two heavy guns. You always want an engineer near the hull, and not only are the two closest guns to the hull the two heavy guns, but only an engineer can boost their jump to actually get to it. This encourages having three engineers on this ship as well, since the hull is rather weak, though running a gunner on these guns is okay if you have another engie willing to spend their game tanking that hull.
The fact that you have three ships with a lot of heavy guns whose designs encourage you to take engineers instead of a gunner is unfair to gunners. I suggest reconfiguring weapons and vitals so there are less vitals whose closest gun is a heavy gun, so gunners are less harmful to exist on their ships.
The Shrike and ramps:
Whoever designed this ship made the entirety of this ship a massive tripping hazard. There are small slopes and ramps and stairs literally everywhere on this ship, and it is not fun to walk around on. Bobbing up and down from walking around the ship is a bit disorienting, but the bigger problem is that stairs and ramps in this game are designed to slow you down. Walking up or down a ramp or set of stairs is always slower than walking on flat ground, since flat ground puts you into the faster running animation, and ramps always take you out of it. This is circumvented normally by doing running jumps from flat ground to flat ground, but the Shrike has nearly no flat ground on it at all. A jump is only faster than the ramp if it is a running one, but the running animation is cancelled constantly.
I suggest reshaping the collisions of the ship to make more of the ground on it flat, so the running animation is not cancelled as much, and so that skillful use of jumping is encouraged. This would make this ship more enjoyable to engineer on.
The hull point on the Crusader:
Move it to that spot at the top of the stairs, in front of the helm. As it is, the hull is far too weak to be separated that much from the other vitals, and its placement alone encourages triple engineer setups over gunner setups.
It would also do a service to those heroic engineers who, knowing this fundamental flaw of the Crusader, decide to sacrifice their fun to dedicate their entire time on the ship to camping the hull. They deserve better.
Stormbreaker: The Gamebreaker, the Throwback:
Based on my personal observations, this seems to be the most popular ship in Alliance. It has two mostly forward-facing guns, two left-facing guns, wicked acceleration, a largely protected balloon, good turning, and is extremely durable due to its very high armor.
Sound vaguely familiar?
It's the old Pyramidion! Well, close enough to it, anyways. It sacrifices the single-engie burn for being able to turn enough to use its side guns, and having very good access to those side guns. It is the most popular ship in Alliance for good reason: It is comparable to a much stronger version of a ship that currently dominates the public Skirmish meta, while lacking heavy guns it still has guns that have no significant drawback to a gunner using them, it has insane acceleration that lets it quickly retreat or rush for openings, and it has a very reasonable repair layout with a few good tricks and jumps (balloon repair from either low side, jumping on high gun from below, jump from center to hull) that make engineering on it fun.
In my opinion, this is what the Alliance ships should have all been. Ships that were a bit overpowered compared to their Skirmish siblings, but were fun to work on and allow a gunner on it without massive drawbacks. If the next ship is similar in tricks, component closeness, and friendliness to gunners, then I will be very excited to see it.
Alliance Main Theme
Probably the weakest part of this wall since it is mostly subjective, though if enough people have the same problems then it's a problem.
I am caring way too much about this game.
The Alliance main music is loud. It is big, it is brass, and it sounds good! However, it drowns out people trying to talk in Alliance lobbies. This is in direct contrast to the softer violins of the Skirmish main theme, which doesn't drown out anyone. I and others I have talked to have resorted to disabling music entirely.
I suggest having the music be deafened a LOT more when someone is talking, whether that be you or someone else. That way people can have the best of both worlds.
As a side note: I personally don't like the in-game music. I'm used to the general quietness of Skirmish and its associated battle music. The new music is much more noticeable and distracting to me, and more importantly tries to set a mood that I am not feeling. I would rather have silence if the latter is the case. It is like there is a different composer entirely compared to the older Skirmish music.
Wow, did I write a lot. I feel like I'm caring way too much about a game where a single troll can force 15 players to have to leave for another lobby.
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