Unit Deck of the Week: ft. Walter Ferrell, Sr. Full-Stack Server Engineer

In celebration of Beta launch, we’re featuring a weekly series, Unit Deck of the Week, where our Community Team brings you the Dev team’s hero Unit Decks or superstar Unit Decks designed by your favorite Battle Aces content creator.

For our inaugural segment, we’re delighted to introduce Walter Ferrell, Uncapped Games’ Senior Full-Stack Server Engineer. 

Before we spill the beans on his secret sauce to Victory, let’s hear more about Walter and his role!

Can you share what your role is at Uncapped Games? Any cool/funny anecdotes from working on the game you can share publicly?

Walter: Although my main discipline is Server engineering, my workload nowadays is closer to 50% Server & 50% Audio. On the Server side, my responsibilities are focused on programming online features & maintaining database systems. For Audio, I focus on getting our one-man-audio-army Mason the tools & audio engine features he needs to make Battle Aces sound so good. Depending on the week, you could find me knee deep in Golang server code or tweaking our audio mixers in Unity to make those crustacean chainsaws sound more satisfying. 

My favorite moments on this team all revolve around our full team meetups. Being a remote-first team, we put a lot of effort into our events together to make up for the lost in-person contact. There are always at least a dozen memorable moments during those events – one of my favorites was during our first internal tournament when we had around 20 people on the team: 

I remember being pushed back to my Core and being forced to turtle up with Mortars to hopefully run out the last few seconds of the clock in my favor. With my Workers gone & resources spent, I got up from my desk and sprinted to the main conference room where Technical Director, Michael Skacal, was shout casting the end of the game. Everyone was so excited & focused on the action that I was able to grab a seat to watch myself lose without anyone noticing. The room exploded into a cheer for that last-second comeback - I knew at that moment that we were building something incredible.

That’s a really awesome keepsake! From all these matches you’ve played, do you have a favorite Unit?

Walter: Why would anyone want any other unit besides the Hornet?

Jokes aside... my favorite unit is the Locust. It’s so satisfying flying a swarm of them overtop your enemy’s armies and leaving nothing but scrap. The VO is just so sinister, too!

Can you tell us what your preferred Unit Deck is? What’s your playstyle approach with this deck? 

Walter: 

• T1: Wasp, Hornet
• T2: King Crab, Destroyer, Dragonfly, Stinger
• T3: Sniper, Locust   

Thank you to Discord user, Shushan, for creating this awesome Unit Deck building tool. Visit https://crablab.gg and design your own Unit Decks!

I like to play aggressive & fast to (hopefully) force the opponent to make mistakes. I try to put as much pressure as possible on the enemy during key expansion/tech timings to trick them into overcommitting resources to units. Picking up timing advantages from these engagements allows you to tech up and build a better army while your opponent is on the back foot.  

What advice would you give players when trying this deck? 

Walter: Build a ton of Wasps & annoy your enemies as fast as possible! Take the Foundry upgrade path if the enemy tries countering you with Splash damage. Consider going Starforge if you feel you’re ahead and want to double down on offense. Go fast & have fun! 

WILD CARD! If you could pick any Uncapped Studio team member to be your teammate in 2v2, who would it be and why? 

Walter: Oooh this one is tough! There’s a small (but mighty) group of Wasp rushers at Uncapped & each one of them would be a glorious ally – but if I could only pick one, it’d have to be AJ Badarni. As soon as he joined the team, he studied the circular blade and has risen to the top of our ranks. You’ll be sure to find us on the ladder... if you can keep up. 😊 

Walter is just one of the many incredible members of the Battle Aces dev team at Uncapped Games, and in coming weeks we’ll spotlight more individuals from the studio. We're excited for you to jump into the Beta today and we'll surely see some of you at the top of the ladder.  

If you haven’t signed up for the Beta yet, we’re still accepting registrations at https://www.playbattleaces.com/signup.  

Tune back in next week to catch another hero Unit Deck from a veteran RTS content creator!