GrimToadstool’s Feedback guide

Overview

Extensive feedback addressing the issues of the game.

Foreword

I had given some extensive feedback in the past. Now after a couple of days more have past, I’ve revised some, picked up some stuff that’s circling around in the community and compiled everything into this list. I try to give credit so some users who’s opinion I valued in the discussion, but that’s not a complete list. So don’t feel offended if I forgot you.

I’ve trimmed the fat and distilled the list of stuff to do to things that I consider essential. I’m trying to give solutions to problems, so it’s more important to address the underlying issues than to exactly stick to my suggestion.

The biggest fumbles are the progression and the blobbing issue. The blobbing cannot be solved by a single action, but it’s rather a combination of several – economy, lacking unit diversity and how the fog of war is handled. I’ll address these problems as well.

Interface and UI

• Missing Control Options

  – The options to make control groups exclusive needs to be added, that is to make units only be able to be in one control group at a time.

  – There’s an attack move key-combination, but no attack-move button, that needs changing

  – There’s no “move” option to run over infantry.

• Building buttons

  – Buildings in the UI are rather randomly placed. The following order would be ideal:

  Top row: refinery – power plant – comm centre – superweapon
  Bot row: barracks – buggy factory – tank factory – air factory

  Production buildings are in the same order as the unit production tap is
  Tier 1 buildings are on the left
  Top row progresses in building order

  – The unit icons don’t represent the names or modifications that went into the unit. Having two units with the same weapon makes them look identical in the build tab.

• Power

  The power indicator is rather confusing, it’s not clear whether a building would have power or not before you build it. I recommend showing power as a number.
  Additionally, building icons could show little lightning bolts – the colour depending on your current power. Green = two buildings of this type will have power, Yellow = only one of these building type will have power, red = there’s not enough power for the building.

• Superweapon launch button

  The Superweapon button is needlessly large, this space could be used to show what the other tap is doing. If the Unit tap is select, it can show whether buildings and turrets are being built – as well as the superweapon launch button.
  On the building tap it can show which units are being produced and the launch button.
  In any case, there’s a lot of space wasted.

• Unit production behaviour

  The production of units still follows an old controls scheme which might not be appropriate for Forged Battalion. In the flow of the game you’re usually in situation of wanting to mass produce one unit, but occasionally switch to another. For example, you might want to spawn 2 or 3 glue tanks to aid your army in battle, but no more. Or an unexpected airstrike is hitting you and you want to spawn some rpg-infantry to take care of it.
  In effect this means you have to cancel your whole unit mass production, then queue some of the needed units, then cancel any units you might have queued too much – the airstrike might be over – and the come re-queue your mass production. That’s a lot of clicks. There might be a better way.

  Currently a left click queues a unit, this unit is moved to the back of the queue. A rightclick pauses production, another rightclick cancels the production.
  A rightclick on a field that does nothing does still nothing.
  Now we could cram more control behaviour to these two mouse buttons, but I suggest the following two alternatives:

  A:
  Leftclicking put units to the front rather than the back of the queue.

  B:
  There are two queues, one for “mass production” and the regular queue.
  Leftclicking adds to the regular queue
  Middleclicking adds to the mass production queue
  The same unit may exist multiple times in a mass production queue.
  If a unit in the mass production queue has been build, it get’s immediately queued again.
  The newly queued unit will go to the end of the mass production queue.
  (This is very similar to how it worked in grey goo)

  If a unit gets added to the regular queue and the same unit is currently being built, it gets moved to the regular queue, continues building and another is queued in the mass production.
  If it’s a different unit, unit that is being mass produced is cancelled and then re-queued in the mass production queue.

  The regular queue always has priority over the mass production. Only if there are no more units in the regular queue the mass production continues.

  Rightclicking pauses and cancels the production as it does now.
  Cancelling a unit that is in both queues, will cancel the regular queue first.

• Notifications

  There’s too little feedback on the map if something important happens, especially when you’re attacked. Improve the notifications

• Zoom & Field of View slider

  Usually FOV sliders are a thing for first or third person person games. Forward motion can cause migraines and nausea – this isn’t the case for RTS games. However, some people are complaining that the game is too “zoomed in” and I have to agree, I’d like to zoom out more.
  This can be done with camera distance or FOV manipulation. So I suggest options for both. More power to the player customizing his experience

• Additional info in the unit builder

  The unit builder gives you insufficient information on how much damage a unit actually does, how much vision range it has, what’s the damage per second, reload time, firing rate, etc.

Fog of War

I’ll be referring to the fog of war that signifies unexplored areas as “shroud” and the more foggy fog that obstructs everything you currently don’t have sight to as “fog”.
The classic Westwood games had the idea of only using shroud, but there was no fog. There’s an argument to be made that the fog of war was later established in Blizzard games, usually seen as superior and Westwood failed to adopt that concept in time.
However I will put to you the idea that there’s also a design decision to know when to prefer the one over the other. Westwood games used to be more simple and streamlined, building just one building at a time, producing just one unit type at a time and also usually having only one base.
Now with only shroud, you’d just need an early scout so you can basically see the entire map, which is not really desirable, since you would want to remain some guaranteed secrecy towards your enemy. If not any game would be the enemy produces a unit, you build the counter units, he builds the counter unit to yours and so on. So we don’t vision to each others basis and there was stuff like the “gap generator” to do exactly that – prohibiting base vision.
So let’s assume in the Blizzard version you have only active vision where your units are and in the Westwood version, you’ve got vision to the map you’ve scouted, but not the basis.

After your initial resource have been used up, you need to take resource spots, which are far away from your Base. With Blizzard, you’re building a forward base, in Westwood, you just send your harvesters further. So there’s a constant need for an escort. Now the enemy will have to do the same.
You are now in a situation in which you either have to protect your base or your harvester or have to split your forces to do both. Now this is perfectly fine if you have vision to the entire battlefield as you can make an informed decision to where your units are needed.
If however your vision is limited, you need to take a guess. If you split the forces, you gonna lose either battle. If you’re defending one or the other, you’ll guess wrong in 50% of the cases and in the cases in which you guess right, your chance of winning the battle can be assumed as half. Meaning that a defensive strategy is gonna fail in 75% of the cases. So the only reasonable course of action is to attack. Consequently, the armies either evade each other and are competing over who destroys the enemy base the quickest or they gonna clash and kill each other.
So attacking will have a 50% success chance, defending only 25%, meaning attack is always preferable.
Now if we further assume that a base can fend off harassment attacks on it’s own, yet can’t stand a full assault and harvesters are similarly not easily destroyed, the only reasonable action is to produce more units for your main assault, resulting in these two blobs fighting.

There’s an argument to be made that constant scouting is a must and if someone doesn’t scout it’s their fault. True, but here’s where the production limit and the cost of scouting come in. Every scout is an attack unit less and thus the chances of winning the blobbattle decreases. If you’d have cheap scouts to be build in an idle factory that would change, but that isn’t the case. So that’s severely limited.

In the current state of the game, the vision range is so low, can only see stuff which is already standard in shooting range – that’s far too low. There is certainly the concept of the weapon range being inversely related to the vision range, that is unarmed units can see the farthest, and artillery units are basically blind. So there needs to be some sweetspot in the middle, where both weapon range and vision range are identically, but I will argue that that should be exactly on the standard weapon range, but in fact more shifted towards long-range attacks.

There’s even an argument to be made that stealth is currently a bit redundant, because the vision range is so low and thus units that aren’t engaged are cloaked anyway due to the fog, while units which are engaged lose stealth.
Only a handful of cases exist, in which stealth actually gives you an edge, like an aircraft passing over a stealthed scout.

• Changes to vision range

  What’s the takeaway here? Shall we go back to only-shroud and no fog of war? Well it’s certainly a possibility. But there’s an even simpler solution and that is to just drastically increase the vision range of units and buildings, which can be easily increased by 50% to 100%.

• Radar Tower

  Have one building type that has a giant vision range – for example the commcentre or a “radar” turret variant.

• Radar “weapon” for units and turrets

  A radar mod for units and/or turrets would be welcome, increasing vision range even further.

• HQ Scouts

  It’s also possible, to have the HQ be able to produce not only harvesters, but also cheap unarmed scouts. There’s still that empty slot beneath the harvesters icon.

• Mind Air Units and Unit speed!

  Other propulsion systems for Aircraft have been requested, if Aircrafts are to go any faster, you’ll need bigger vision radii to spot assaults in time. The faster units are, the more vision radius is needed to defend against them.

Changes to the techtree

Having the tech tree tied to an overall account progression is a bad idea. It creates an uneven playfield in multiplayer, it’s hard to get players in who don’t have the time to grind through. It has also sparked some controversy in the community, because some people claim they lose due to being underteched, to which it was responded that they aren’t underteched, but just bad, therefore techlevel is irrelevant. Which is a pretty fallacious argument.
There are some key techs you need and that are good and if you have an experienced player telling you what to pick next, you can make a good enough loadout with a few techs and to a level where the a good player with less tech can beat a bad player with good tech. So far that is true, but that’s like saying a good driver in a Beetle can outrace a bad driver in a sportscar, which is true if the bad driver is so bad, he’ll just run into the next wall.

They playfield is uneven and it keeps players out. Even the players who enjoy grinding may only do this once and then it’s over. So, it’s even a bad system for those who enjoy the grind. Losing in mutliplayer, which you will, will award you little progression, so you’ll keep out of that and rather grind against AI.
The faction creator needs to be independent of any progression. And the progression should take place in separate gamemodes, such as “multiverse”.

• Progression changes

  Units and factions can be created independent of techtree progression
  Techtree progression is not account bound
  Some future gamemodes will utilize techtree progression
  Multiplayer has access to the complete techtree

On a different note, there seems to be a lot of rebalancing with the tech tree going on, which often changes build tiers, forcing players to change their loadouts every time, meaning returning players will not be able to get into the game immediately. This is a huge problem. Imagine your friend who is an active player persuades you to join for one or two quick matches and you are a returning player – you can’t quickly join, because all the build tiers of you previous loadouts are f’d up and you need to reconfigure your loadout.

I’ll suggest a method in which that cannot happen. Too little diversity on the different tech tree different build tiers has also been noted and reported to be a problem – that will also be fixed.
(Credit to some user, who’s post got lost, I think they were called Supershep?)

• Power cells

  The efficiency of Weapons is depended on the number of “power cells” a given unit has, the more power cells, the better. A unit can have 1 to 5 powercells. The power of the weapons doesn’t need to increase linearly and it doesn’t necessarily need to affect just damage. A weapon designed for earlygame might be very powerful with 1 power cells, and having more will only have little effect, while other weapons might have their sweetspot elsewhere.
  It is important that power cells don’t grant a flat +20% bonus to every weapon or so, but rather each weapon has an individual progression tied to the amount of power cells. Power cells will not affect the damage multiplier against unit types.

  Each mod a unit takes, will grant 1 power cell and will raise the build tier level by 1. Note the one obvious exception that the default weapon like the MG still grants 1 power cell while not raising the tier level.

  There’s a mod for armour and movement each, doing nothing but granting 2 powercells instead of one.

So with this concept, you will retain the ability to created early and lategame weaponry, every loadout’s will no longer “expire” with patches, on every tier a huge arsenal is available, players will have tons of customisation options. Glasscannons become a viable build as a 5 powecell build will force you to take no armour or movement. You’ll also be able to balance weapons more precisely. It’s win-win on every level.

In a recent patch, individual elemental resistance armour has been buffed and a nice bonus effect has been added. Which is a neat idea, but the armour is still pretty useless. Now why is that?
The space in a loadout is limited and a lot of units are too important to keep out. You need tier 1 infantry for the initial 3 free infantries. You need a stealthed scout. You need proper assault troops. And so on. leaving you with little room. So why take a resistance against and individual element which you might encounter, when you can take just bonus hp?
For resistances to become viable, the additional hitpoint armour needs a heavy nerf, so it only provides about +10% hitpoints and the elemental armour needs a buff, so it can provide around 80 or 90% resistance. However that’s still not really desirable, as it comes down to pure luck whether you’ve placed the correct elemental resistance type in your loadout.

• Unified elemental resistance and on-the-fly adaptation

  There’s only the option of unifying elemental resistance into one general elemental resistance. However, there’s an interesting feature that might be added to keep the idea of warding off individual elements and that is being able to change the resisted element on the fly. During game, you’ll have buttons for each element. Whichever button you press all units who have elemental armour, will switch to resist the element you choose with the press of the button.
  So if you’re facing a lot of flame units, you’ll switch to flame resistance in game. This forces opponents to diversify their arsenal and makes elemental resistance viable.

  On a sidenote, there still may be different armours, with those neat effects like the flameshield, but you’ll be able to switch whichever element it resists. The button to switch resistances should have a cooldown, by the way.

Gamemodes and the like

When the game came out, I wanted to stream it, but it turns out, there’s little to stream. The playerbase is too small for multiplayer and the AI is so week, you need to send your unit blob in the general direction and go afk and still win. Friends with limited time can’t be with you due to grinding, so opportunities to play the game are actually very limited. There’s no observer mode, no replays or anything either.

• Stronger AI

  This is pretty self explanatory. The hard AI cheats making has tons of units early and doesn’t produce over a certain limit late. I often play against multiple AI players, but there are few maps in which you can setup uneven teams properly.
  It would be nice to have some kind of challenge.

• Observer mode and replay

  I personally don’t care that much about observer mode and replays, but it was strongly requested by the community and I agree that it’s a feature that’s needed. Probably not the most immediate problem, but a long-term must nevertheless.

• Multiverse

  I found the multiverse mode in 8-bit a bit too fiddly. However the general idea of having a campaign in which individual territories are conquered really lends itself to Forged Battalion, especially if you put the research tree progression in there, so instead of barring players out of the game, it actually provides replayability.
  And make it coop as well.

• Community Server mode

  There’s a game out called Windward, it’s a pirate and sailing game, in which you can make a community server and create factions with individual pros and cons for that server. Players can join the server, join a faction and fight over territories and rewards.
  A community mode, in which a server can be setup and individual factions be created to which’s progress the players will contribute would be very welcome. Again the research tree lends itself to a progression system for such a mode.
  Red Alert 2 had a similar mode, just not community driven. Making it community based is a nice promotion opportunity for the game, as there are very few games out there with such a mode.

• Matchmaking

  I say it over and over and over and over again. Have a good matchmaker, even outside ranked play. RTS is more than just 1on1. The player needs to be able start the game, hit the play button and get a match. It is best to offer the player customization options for what he’s queueing. DoW3 did this good, Battlerite did this good.
  It needs to be one queue. Who wants to reduce his wait time, queues for all options, who wants to be more specific queues for just those. Don’t split the playerbase into different queues, that has never worked, unless with a huge playerbase.
  The amount of input the player needs to do, till he gets to actually play the game needs to be minimal. If would even remove the logos and intro before the menu.
  With the exception of Age of Empires 2 HD, all successful games have a proper quickmatch button. To establish a playerbase, you’ll need to lower the barrier to entry and you need to address the casual audience.
  Fast and simple.

  It’s also extremely important for a low player count. For example, I want to play Forged Battalion and would prefer a multiplayer game, yet would also play against AI. If I don’t find a game or the host takes too long fiddling around, which is usually the case, I’ll do an AI match instead. Then I should get a notification if a real match has been found and the match should be Forged Battalion, not endless discussion about the lobby setup.
  It needs to go faster. Playing the game is more important than letting the game be a glorified chat client.

Resource Management

The resource gathering in the game causes a lot of problems. Harvesters are notoriously stupid and unreliable. There’s almost just one build order which works early on. Recent cuts in the resource income have made the unit blob smaller, but the underlying issue was worsened by high-health harvesters as harassment is no valid strategy any longer. A game that carries on too long will have no resources left on the map.

• More starting resources & possibly less income

  The resource income has been reduced recently, now you occasionally have to make choices of what to produce. I think this can be reduced even a bit further, like ~15%.
  However more important is to give the player more starting credits so other opening moves are possible. At least 1000 should be added, up to 5000 I think. Too low will result in too little opening variety, too high will cause new players to lose track of the economy.
  (Credit to OliBeau for this)

• Oil Derricks

  At the end of the game, the game can result in a stalemate, when all resources are gone. An easy solution would be to reintroduce an old staple of command and conquer – the oil derricks that could be captured around the map and produced a steady income of money. Now capture works with infantry instead of engineers in Forged Battalion and that’s perfectly fine.
  I would add that the resource production of the oil derricks could be dependant on the surplus power you output. It’s to resolve stalemates after all and if every player has his one derrick and all income is equal, it’s gonna be a stalemate after all.

• Harvester Technology

  This is pretty easy, was requested by the community and I agree, I’d love to see some loadout options for harvesters. Cloaking, a machine gun on top, improved armour and so on. This was requested by several individuals in the community and I agree.
  If you’re doing the HQ scouts I suggested, these should have a similar possibility to be modded.

• Smarter Harvesters

  Harvester tend to clump on one resource spot or wander off into the enemy base. Often a dip in the economy is a result from bad AI. This needs immediate fixing. However, I would also add a notification if too many harvesters are waiting in line to gather from the same resource, so you get a prompt to fix the problem.

Additional Technologies & Unit behaviour

The resource system and the fog of war are pretty large contributors to the blobbing problem. The blobbing problem is the tendency to mass produce units into one big blob, pushing against the enemy, often in a tug of war fashion. Having a blob that’s composed of a variety of units isn’t the problem, the problem is the lack of reasons for your units to split up. A certain contributor is that units are still very similar in terms of movement to each other as well.

• Recap

  As stated above, I advocate harvester mods and mods that increase a units vision radius

• Turn speed & Gun behaviour

  A theme of the old c&c games that’s completely neglected is turnspeed of vehicles and their turrets. However, it used to be an extremely important feature that helps defining the units more. Though Forged Battalion has lot’s of units and weapons their variety is mostly just in animation and stats – which is really missing the opportunity to make the game stand out.
  It’s a difference if a unit can be outrun, because it can’t turn as fast. It’s a difference if it can shoot while moving. It’s a difference whether the turret is fixed or turnable. This is all incredibly important stuff to do in terms of unit variety.
  I cannot stress enough how important this issue is. It is the one important feature missing in all petroglyph game contra to all Westwood games. Look at Emperor: Battle for Dune to see how to get it almost exactly right. The variety in movement speed was too great in the game, but especially gun behaviour was perfect.
  (Credit to Lanceraad)

• More movement options

  The movement slot of the units is mostly unused. There are two techs currently, later three techs in the game affecting only light and heavy vehicles. Infantry and Drones don’t have anything. Here are some ideas:

  • Infantry

    – Kite: Infantry starts as a slow moving airborne unit, if it attacks or gets attacked the kite is dropped and the infantry becomes a regularly moving infantry

    – Bike: Infantry starts as a fast moving unit, if it attacks or gets attacked, the bike is dropped and the infantry becomes a regularly moving infantry

    – Stilts: Infantry moves slower, has less hitpoints, has increased vision and attack range.

  • Light vehicle

    – Trike: Light vehicle is faster, has less hitpoints and faster turn speed

  • Heavy Vehicle

    – Stilts: Heavy vehicle moves slower, has less hitpoints, has increased vision and attack range.

  • Aircraft

    – Wings: Decreased Turn seed, faster movement speed, decreased vision and attack range.

    – Balloon: Decreased movement speed, decreased hit-points, largely increased vision range, increased attack range.

  • Turrets

    – Sprout: turret is built underground and invulnerable while doing so. Pops up to the surface once finished

    – Grand: turret has a bigger base, more hitpoints, increased cost, buildtime, range and weapon power

    – Telescope: increased vision and attack range, decreased hitpoints.

    – Fast assembly: Decreased build time, decreased cost, hitpoints halved, decreased attack range.

• Superweapons

  Currently, most superweapons feel very samey, except for the damage type. So there’s need to spice things up. One such idea would be that the supers manipulate the environment. Napalm can remove environmental features, A glue-nuke that can create a permanent swamp and so on.

  Remember that you can also do the Dune-like thing and make Superweapons produce units, like the saboteur, who suicides but one-shots a building or a starport, which will deliver some random units to the battlefield (maybe even taken from an enemies loadout)

• Tall Grass / Cornfields

  On the note of diversifying units even more, an environmental feature could be added, like tall grass, which will stealth infantry and only infantry inside. Heavy Armour prohibits this effect.

Additional Comments

• About Defences

  There are some players out there, who like to play defensively, crying out for better turrets and walls. I disagree. Walls are problematic to implement, probably causing more problems then they solve, almost every game has struggled with them. It’s always a tough balance act between the wall segments, the wall thickness and so on. I wouldn’t add them.
  The only thing I will somewhat grant is that you could make a building with a Y or X shape that can easily interlock, but that’s about it.
  The cry that turrets are underpowered is completely false. I will say, that I would like to see turrets being build-first-then-placed like in old c&c as it makes them more adapt at reacting to threats and can offer various strategies, such like quickly placing three turrets to make a fast base creep. Aside from that, you could argue that turret need a little higher attack range than regular units, but that’s it. Stat-wise the balance is pretty good as it its.
  (Credit to xRetri for his opinion on the matter)