founders: walkthrough

What sort of feedback do you want from this, if any? Looks like I wrote some anyway

I saw some bugs like the Sentinals not firing, (if not finished being built needs to be more obvious), and the same sound bug at the end, and I was surprised the overcharge only worked for 10 seconds, I thought it was meant to be the 3rd tier resource expansion which stacked and allowed you grow economically all through the game? (EDIT: Looks like the ability was actually called Boost so perhaps it is a different ability to the stackable persistent Eco upgrade) 

You made the mistake I have made before where you have shift clicked an engineer to build a bunch of things but because it is assisting a factory it never leaves it. That is why your Quanta Array buildings didn't come. Might want to make it default that shift clicking an engineer in such a position will leave the factory straight away if the factory is not building anything, and when the factory is in operation will leave the factory after current unit under construction is completed.

By release I hope the Nexus gives a nuke like/satisfyingly large and beautiful explosion when it is destroyed. 

Avengers seem to be particularly brutal.

I think the call down unit graphics (orbital ability) should ideally be different from the PHC graphics for the same thing.

Few other things I want to address but I'll leave it there for now. Thank you for sharing the video, shame we couldn't get to see the nuke-like orbital, but might be fun to experience it first on our own anyway.

Cheers!

Hey Frogboy (Brad) You really need to do something about the Structures HP, when you sent a few units of T1 and T2 Units to their base, they took down really fast the structures, So my recommendation is to Boost The Structures HP by at least 100%, (you took down an Advanced Factory in what? 5 Secs? and then a Factory with T1 and T2 units... that's really sad and bad, those Structures need to last some more.. How About 10 seconds? lol

And you lost your first Attack because you did let those Smarty's attack you, If you went directly and attacked the Defenses, then I think you may have won the game with only T1 and T2 Units at 17 Minutes.

It's looking good, ready for a beta quality game with two months of development to go. Visuals look good, especially on your system which is clearly on higher settings than I can pull off. The gameplay seems rich, with a variety of approaches to the middle and late game. I still think there is some balancing between units and structures as well as quanta costs that should be done. And we know the AI is going to get some love.

There are two things I noticed in this walk through that I believe need to be addressed prior to release, otherwise you risk getting some negative reviews for unit responsiveness. I and others have mentioned these elsewhere. Maybe these aren't big problems for most people so I could be off-base here.

1. At 2:25 you tell your third squad to go to a resource node. That squad never makes it because, while in transit, your other squads take the node. When that happens the third squad's order is cancelled. Is that a bug or intentional, I don't know. I do know that when I tell my units to move, and the capture order is mostly a move order, I expect it to carry the order out. Consider this at a larger scale. If the units' order gets cancelled half way across the map, you pretty much have no idea where those units are. Later on you might be searching the map for stragglers and have no idea what the original purpose of those were. No, it would be better if the capture order changed to a defend order for captured nodes, and the units moved to defend it.

2. We keep hammering this, but it's important. In your final battles, and I'm sure others, a large percentage of units are hanging back in formation not actively firing on the objectives. I know the reason is "the AI has decided this is the correct thing to do" which is probably true, but it is the incorrect action. Let's be real, the reason they are hanging back is because either A. The units are hoping to defend the flank of the lead unit, or B. The leash prevents them from moving forward. In fact those might be the same thing. What is the result? The battle takes longer than it needs to, so the front-line units take more damage and you have more casualties. If the units were not in an army, they would all attack, the battle would go quicker, and there would be fewer casualties. When you said at 24:25 "the army will know how to work really well, like I said the computer can do APM  beyond any human" that may be true but the difference usually is that the human can differentiate which actions are best and prioritize them. When the units are not being attacked from the flank, protecting the flank is a waste of force. Instead all units should be attacking, individually falling back only when their damage is critical, their effectiveness has waned, or if a flank attack does start to happen. And the leash is probably an artificial construct to ensure units stick in close proximity. But proximity isn't the core point of armies, cohesion in satisfying objectives is. The leash isn't bad. It might actually be necessary from a programming perspective. But it's also quite restrictive if it cannot be made more dynamic.

Anyway, keep up the good work, I'm looking forward to the beta. Cheers!

To Eviator's points,

1) Dead on and needs to be fixed.

2) Dead on again. You could see some of the enemy Brutes also hanging back at points for no reason. As it stands I can see it being useful to use meta units when moving around the map but when it comes to attacking a position it may often be best to disband the army.

I think nodes could give a little more sight around them, you can see nothing in your own supposedly controlled region doesn't seem right.

Sounds like units gain back energy faster in regions controlled by them? That's good if true I think.