Dev Blog - State of the Game

Senior Game Director, David Kim shares his thoughts on the first Battle Aces Beta.

2024年7月25日

First, we wanted to say thank you everyone for playing in our first Closed Beta! We’ve learned a lot through playtesting, feedback, discussions, etc. and wanted to provide some of our current thoughts on various Closed Beta topics. Also, thank you so much for so much more feedback coming in this week, we are still in the process of going over them, and as we try and make decisions, we will try our best to keep you guys updated on our progress going forward.

Unit Changes from Alpha to Beta
The biggest changes was with unit counters. During Alpha, the meta was always very stale and 1 deck focused due to unit roles/counters not being clear enough. This is something we really wanted to try tackling quite hard for the beta. Both on the ladder across various skill levels and the “tournaments” that happened over the past weekend, we look to be in the right direction so we will be making moves to refine this new direction that we’ve found during alpha and proven out in the beta going forward.

Unit Changes Going Forward
We will be tuning/iterating based upon how the unit testing went in the Beta. For example, King Crab looks to need some nerfs, but we did like the role change with the movement speed increase so we are looking towards nerfing their Health to maintain this new role it has that really differentiates this unit compared to other tanky units such as the Crusader or Mammoth.

At a high level, one interesting realization we’ve had is: Do defensive units really have to be under-tuned? We had the Turrets under-tuned because we feared that stalemates will cause for boring matches. But after leaning more into having very distinct roles that can be countered with other options, we’re now in the headspace of what if we make Turrets and Heavy Turrets good vs. specific units and get countered by specific other units. This is one of the things we’ll be exploring internally going forward.

We’ll be digging through and discussing so many things that came up on this front and expect various iterations on units before the next phase of the Closed Beta.

2v2 and 1v1 Modes
This was our first time testing 2v2 with the public and interestingly enough, what we’ve been seeing as the differences between the two modes did in fact turn out to be similar in beta. One question that came up for us during this first beta test was what happens if we push 2v2 a bit harder on new players? For example would that help with players easing into our game?

Another thing that came up often was even pro players commenting on cross region play latency being quite amazing for an RTS game. (If anyone’s curious on details Michael Skacal can explain more in depth… He’s told me many times but I just don’t understand engineering/tech). But more importantly, we did wonder in future beta tests if we should try at least once just having 1 region that all players connect to in order to greatly improve match making quality. We don’t need to decide this today, but it’s an option we can explore going forward.

Unit Tooltips
This is an area that we want to try to do much better. To us, the unit descriptions looked clear but learned that this wasn’t the case during beta. The stats pips also didn’t do us favors. They were intended to be more for fun than be informative, but many beta players were confused due to them. We are already looking to do a rework for this, it’s still early stages, but we wanted to at least give you the pitch to see if we can get some more thoughts on our current line of thought.

Here’s the pitch:

  • Set up a general unit traits (or unit labels):
    • SMALL, BIG, SPLASH, AIR
      • SMALL units would be units such as all tier 1 units, Assaultbot or Advancedbot
      • SPLASH units are units that deal splash damage and AIR units are units that fly
      • BIG units would be units that visually look the biggest in the game such as: Heavy Ballistas, Crusaders, Katbus, Kraken, Bulwark, King Crab, Mammoth, etc.
  • Set up a simple ruleset. For example:
    • BIG counters SPLASH counters SMALL
      • Eg. If I lose to a unit marked SPLASH, I can look to add a unit that is BIG
    • ANTI-BIG counters BIG
    • ANTI-AIR counters AIR
      • These last two are pretty straight forward, if I lose to AIR or BIG, just look for ANTI-BIG or ANTI-AIR
  • And here are some examples of what different units’ tooltips might look like:
    • Shocker
      • Unit type: GROUND
      • Attacks: GROUND
      • Label: SPLASH
      • Counters: SMALL
      • Countered by: BIG
    • Destroyer
      • Unit type: GROUND
      • Attacks: GROUND
      • Label: ANTI-BIG
      • Counters: BIG
      • Countered by: SMALL
    • Assaultbot
      • Unit type: GROUND
      • Attacks: GROUND
      • Label: SMALL
      • Counters: GROUND (Except SPLASH)
      • Countered by: SPLASH
  • And the one last thought is, maybe we can list out the specific units that each of the units counters and get countered by as icons.

Ranking System
Minus an exploit we’ve located (which we have plans to fix going forward), the general progression looks to be working well + players’ journey towards Top Ace looks to be on the right track as well.

New User Experience
We have learned quite a bit from this experience. First, we were able to check that the no focus fire by default does indeed to be the way to go compared to our previous tests with different versions. But we do wonder if we can improve this for both RTS players using it as default as well as players new to RTS. We are still actively discussing this so we’ll share more once we start testing something solid.

Second, we were able to learn the potential gaps that may exist that we’d like to look further into such as how to smooth out the game to game experience as well as rewards tuning to get players started with unit exploration.

Ground Anti-Air Unit Targeting
We are looking to test a different version of this very soon. We’re already in the process of making the change. How it will work is instead of chasing down air units when they run away, they will prioritize ground units that are a threat to them if enemy air units move out of their firing range. And when air units enter again, they will target them again.

Automated Control Groups
We have tested and decided to put in this feature, so we’re excited to test it out in the next Closed Beta test. It will be an option players can turn on, everything you build will automatically go into control group 1, so you only have to go back and grab the units that wont be a part of your “main control group” to assign them manually.

Let us give an example to show what we mean. Say the situation is I’m using Scorpions and Swift Shockers. And I want to split off a very small group of Scorpions and Swift Shockers for harassment. Then:

  • Every Scorpion and Swift Shockers automatically get assigned to ‘1’
    • This is completely automated and I never have to manually set my control groups for my “main army.”
  • I manually just pick out the small group of Scorpions and Swift Shockers I want in ‘2’ to assign them there.
    • This will naturally remove them from ‘1’ because this is just how our game works. Each unit can only be a part of 1 control group.
    • I use 2 to harass, continue using 1 for main army.
  • So we’ve simplified from having to control group every additional unit being built if I want to control more than 1 group to just needing to set control groups for “side armies only.”

We’d like to continue testing this internally while we wait for the next time players can play and see where this goes.

And please look forward to some fun beta stats info coming soon from Tian Ding!

Thank you again for your help and support through our game announcement and our first Closed Beta. We will try our best to keep you updated on next steps as they get confirmed and we hope to see you in the next phase of our Closed Beta Test! Thanks!