Chronic Logic

A new ranking system and a reset would be nice. Is it possible to have separate rankings for constructed and random? Many people only play ranked random at the moment while some of us prefer constructed. Constructed is quite different from random so I feel the rankings should reflect this.

1)
During Single Player, an AI axeman deployed from his castle on my Hydra, removing Hydra from the game entirely.

2)
I was invited to unranked random, in the "You're playing against" -screen, it showed the name as a long string of chinese characters and rank was something like 2304324235. Then it got stuck, showed that the opponent surrendered, threw me back to the main screen and then put me back in the game when my opponent's first turn was over. After that it kept repeating the "next turn" -sound while flashing the screen black and then back to game. After a few repeats my opponent left the game and I had to restart it to get off. This was today, I guess something's still wrong with the game sync.

Relics are very useful if you want to win consistently around LVL760+ when you play alone. In co-op they can also make the game very easy.

I'd like to see the AI changed somewhat so that it would enable other strategies than an all-out rush. As it is now (at high levels), defense is completely useless and winning on turn 4-5 is pretty much the only way to go when you play solo.

Quote from: Chronic Logic - Josiah on July 25, 2011, 07:45:26 PM

QuoteHealing done by more then 3 units at once causes the game to freeze

Can you describe what this means exactly and how you can reproduce it?

What I assume he means is that when multiple healers or mourners trigger at the same time and the healing graphics effects start to fly around, the game may freeze. It has always done so randomly and depending on the computer. For me, it now freezes when 4 or more mourners trigger on multiple targets, around 8-10. The main screen stalls to a complete halt and is usually recoverable by restarting. Pre-patch, it required a lot more to crash, which I find odd.

If this was what he meant, reproducing is just a matter of getting a huge army with lots of mourners and then getting an unit killed. It doesn't do this on all machines but I doubt it's really a performance issue.

Thanks for the quick bugfixes, I'll report more if I find them.  

Another bug on Wyvern:
If you move and devour an unit, units that attack approaching units will not trigger. Moving to an empty square triggers them normally.

Mason:
A wall got destroyed in 2v2 while Mason was on it, the wall broke as normal but the texture stuck around. Me and my teammate could see it, the opponent could not. Not a big deal but haven't seen that happen before the patch.

Sergeant + Confessor/Templar etc (I had a chat with Gabe a long time ago on this one):
Sergeant's Rally can only target melee units, but cannot target units like Templar, which have a melee range attack and a ranged healing spell. It can still target a Confessor, which can turn into a ranged attack unit through a spell. While this is an understandable feature, Sergeant should either be allowed to target real melee units even if they have ranged non-damaging, non-offensive spells (they're still melee units) or disable Rally on a confessor with valid ranged targets (or just disable it even if there are none). When I talked with Gabe, his point of view was that Templar should be a valid target for Rally.


EDIT:
More bugs:

Mason:
Moving a mason on a wall owned by your co-op friend changes its controller according to the controller of the wall.

Warlock and probably other units:
Had a warlock's HP meter disappear, not sure what caused it. Was in co-op, unit still died.

RE-EDIT:

Random:
You can get a Command Relic in random, which is effectively a waste of 100 points since it won't do anything.

Summoner:
Summoner can turn even inorganic demons into archdemon.

I mainly play constructed and my experience is that most people don't like it because they are unable (or just think it takes too much time) to plan balanced armies with the current limits. The option of making bigger armies might help it a bit but it would also make even more overpowered combinations possible. A bigger board would definitely be needed with bigger (over 1500 point) armies.

I think one option would be to keep the 1000 point deploy limit but allow the army to have a total of around 1250-1500 points worth of units to deploy from. That way you could potentially have more counter units to many of the common "rock-paper-scissors" armies while keeping the army size same as before, forcing people to balance offense and defense more. In a way it would make army planning more complicated but it would also lead to more balanced games. It shouldn't be too hard to implement a counter for how many points worth units one has deployed, except maybe for revived units and scouts.


For co-op and single-player, I think it would be nice to be able to play more defensively. At high levels you're pretty much forced to use certain units (hydra, changeling) and keep rushing due to the infinite commands and units for the AI. Stalling for a few turns means getting flooded by units. For me, it started to get old around LVL300ish and now that I'm past 700 I rarely feel like playing co-op or single-player. In the current format it would be hard to keep the game challenging without infinite units and commands for the AI. The Boss mode might be one option, I don't like the idea of limiting unit options for players too much. It would be somewhat the same that it is now but with different units as the "cookie-cutter" armies.

One option could be something like a 3000-9000 (depending on level, for instance 1000+level*10) point army for the AI, with AI having around 10-30 (depending on level) base commands per turn and could deploy commanders and buildings. Some AI units could deploy special or even stronger than the current special ones. This would allow more variations in playing styles as you could also play defensively. It would also make the single-player mode feel more like playing against another player, which I see as a good thing.

Perhaps something similar to this could also be implemented in player vs. player, with two players playing co-op against a third one, who has a random army of 3000+ points. There's a lot of untapped potential in different game modes.