18 replies to this topic

[Michael_Regina]

QUESTION: For the commander, will there be a research tree for technologies like Sins of a Solar Empire? Will it differ depending on the commander chosen?

ANSWER: Yes, Commanders will have research trees that are designed very similarly to Sins of a Solar Empire. Like Sins of a Solar Empire, when you decide to improve your research, you will click a research button on the HUD that will open a new window showing you the research tree. If you have sufficient gold and all the appropriate prerequisites you can choose to begin researching a new subject which after the appropriate research time, will become available to your Empire. Most take effect immediately, but modifications to Wave composition need to wait for the next Wave spawn. For example, I've decided that I would like to use my Wave to push on the enemy (which isn't always the case so it should be timed strategically). I decide to replace one of my-low level basic melee units in my Waves with a tougher and harder hitting  Assault Solider (name not final). I also decide to improve the damage and armor of my Commander Minions and my Wave Minions. I queue all three research subjects up by paying the appropriate gold. When they all complete I signal to my team that its go time and we begin our push.

As for the second portion of the question you may have noticed in the last couple days (IGN, Gamespy) that there are some changes happening with Commanders. As with Sins of a Solar Empire, we constantly experiment, try new things and we very much pay attention to what you are all posting on the forums. There was a lot of great analysis (even without playing the game). We do this to make sure we are rejecting bad ideas and keeping the good ones. Its probably a topic all on its own but our current implementation (which may change before or during beta) is that players will no longer be choosing Commanders. Instead, all the faction and Commander capabilities have been refactored into a large pool of selectable assets. Before the game, Commanders will choose the powers they want to have during the game and will unlock them as they play. The pool of powers you come into the game with will be large relative to the number we expect you to unlock in one session so you will need to choose powers from the pool that best complement your team, implement your strategy and counter the enemy's play. This introduces a lot more strategy to both the meta-game and the in-game experience. I will talk in more detail about how all this works at another time. But more to the question at hand: it doesn't look likely that the research trees will be unique per Commander because you won't be choosing a Commander - but as the system above indicates - this doesn't mean there won't be varied experiences when you choose to play as Commander.

Do you have a question for a Dev? Post it here!

[IanD967]

So, does this mean when it reaches beta we wont be playing with 10 Commanders but instead we all have our own personal commander tree to customise?

other than that I am liking what I hear!

[Sayan]

So if we can't chose commanders? We can all have these trees?

IAN Man why u steal my thunder, been

Also, the assets you unlock are similar to how you buy items in the shop or pick heroes in dota, right? Its all ingame I presume and it will vary game to game, that is cool...

Can we have a profile page for commanders? What if we specifically like a commander build? And want to exploit, I mean use it all the time, I'm bad at remembering builds?

Also you might wanna Pin/Sticky this all important thread and post answers for other questions in your Original Post in this thread with Edits...

Edited by Sayan, 11 May 2012 - 11:04 AM.

[Jeru_Sorrin]

Ok no comanders, but instead personalized tech trees.Ok that works due to the fact that we won't have faction comanders that will have similar techs but different names. However now the new question is how many such tech tree's will there be? And how many techs do the dev's hope to implement?

Oh, also what happens to the comander pic's? Do they get recylced and reused as heroes? Or will they be used to differeinate between diferent comanders in a match?

[ChrisK]

Sayan, on 11 May 2012 - 10:27 AM, said:

Also you might wanna Pin/Sticky this all important thread and post answers for other questions in your Original Post in this thread with Edits...

The original pinned thread containing the questions will be updated with links to the answers. There will be a new topic per answer so you can discuss the answers in it and leave the original one for the questions only.

[Sarudak]

Won't this eliminate a lot of the options for making dynamic and interesting commanders? Like with heroes you can give them one really OP ability bu balance it out by having their other abilities weaker or low health or something. With the commander what's to stop them from just picking all the most powerful abilities? You're only option then is to make all the abilities of equal power which means you can't have any abilities that really stand out.

[BlairFraser]

Sarudak, on 11 May 2012 - 12:38 PM, said:

Won't this eliminate a lot of the options for making dynamic and interesting commanders? Like with heroes you can give them one really OP ability bu balance it out by having their other abilities weaker or low health or something. With the commander what's to stop them from just picking all the most powerful abilities? You're only option then is to make all the abilities of equal power which means you can't have any abilities that really stand out.

You don't have all the information and as I alluded to above, I'll be going into far more detail at a later date. Here are a few more tidbits but certainly not everything:

A.) He won't be able to deploy them early in the game so he'll be sitting around forever waiting to get the gold to bring them into play. Without low-level powers to help him scale up to that level he is likely going to be bored and vulnerable. Ofcourse, it that is the strategy he wants to try - go ahead.

B.) If he did survive long enough to be able to purchase his high level powers he'll find that they are on very long cooldowns so if he deploys them and they fail to win the game, he's going to be waiting around and extremely vulnerable while the cooldowns complete.

A key to success will be how you move through your powers during the game. Its perfectly viable to save up and just purchase high level ones however most of us are moving the tiers so we aren't caught with our pants down.

If anything, the new system creates far more dynamic and interesting Commander play. Its essentially "build your own Commander" similar (but not completely analogous) to how Heroes experiment with various builds, build orders and timing of purchases.

[Sarudak]

Yeah that's cool but it's not what I meant. What I meant is that you have to balance everything at a power level and not at a commander level. Like to take an example from LoL Kassadin has one of the best cheapest teleports in the game in addition to a spammable ranged silence. Both of which are plain better than comparable move on other heroes. But it balances out over all because of his lousy hp/mana stats and his other two abilities being rather mediocre. I'm sure you can imagine the game breaking combinations if people were able to pick their abilities from the available pool... Say you took away kassadins mana blade and gave him nidalee's spear? The only way I could see you guys getting anything like an interesting balance is if the abilities each have a kind of 'design points' cost associated with them such that you could pick a really good ability (like say a cheap spammable nuke spell with decent damage) but then the other abilities you picked would have to be more mediocre. Are you going for something like that? Because it sounded like you just had a limited number of slots and any slot was equal to any other slot.

[idyemyhairbrown]

@Blair - that doesn't provide an adequate solution to Sarvdak's problem. When a Commander has the option to choose between 10 low level skills (because, as you alluded to, he should choose some low level skills else he won't have anything to do most of the early game), he will ultimately choose the best of the low level skills. Essentially you will have to be balancing all the low level skills against each other, and all the mid level skills against each other, and so forth. This seems awfully like the mechanics in World of Warcraft, where each class can invest a level point in an array of different skills. While seemingly this allows for much autonomy, it is quite illusory, as there will inevitably be a best way to level up. Boiled down: it looks like this might result in cookie-cutter builds.

When you keep the skills in disparate groups attached to distinct Commander themes, it allows for you to balance the skills much more easily and not result in one unit being distinctly better than the others.

[Ekko_Tek]

So the research trees will not be unique to commanders (as there won't be unique/different commanders anymore) but they will still be unique to factions though? Right now as I understand it - there will be various (how many?) factions that have their own unique heros unavailable to other factions and their own unique commander research trees - is that right? So even though we won't be choosing a particular commander, we will be choosing a faction and then the particular research techs, powers, minions, etc. as a commander.

Edited by Ekko_Tek, 11 May 2012 - 02:56 PM.

[murdeoc]

ive read a lot about factions but i don't actually recall reading or hearing about them from any of the relevant articles...

anyway about sarudak's issue, i think the idea is mostly about what kind of commander you want to play. you can go for low tier dmg spells, some mid tier military units/upgrades and then some high tier support spells. or go all tiers in of these 3 things (dmg spells, military or support) im hoping there will not be a best low tier spell because they will depend on the kind of commander you want to be. which in turn should be decided by the team of hero's on your and the enemies side.
if your team chooses to be focussed on dmg dealing hero's, you might want to go full support commander. if they seem to have a good balance of dmg/tank/support hero's you might go full military and so on...

Edited by murdeoc, 11 May 2012 - 03:35 PM.

[MonsterMetroid]

I really like this idea though i feel that this means that we will have to do a lot more testing on powers to ensure balance otherwise i feel that some powers will become so core to the meta and others will hardly see play except among new players (siege dragon i would imagine fall among the latter group).

[OwnageDaPwnage]

Is a possible strategy to just amass a lot of gold and summon a BUNCH of troops at once possible? And does the commander have to find a balance between upgrading and buying troops?

[CWheezy]

OwnageDaPwnage, on 14 May 2012 - 02:17 PM, said:

Is a possible strategy to just amass a lot of gold and summon a BUNCH of troops at once possible? And does the commander have to find a balance between upgrading and buying troops?

Well, if you get into the beta, you can try it out!

[Ranorian]

The concerns around balance with each power are minimal, I think. If the original plan had gone forward who is to say there would not have been a "best commander" instead of "best abilities"? I actually prefer this idea; it reminds me sharply of the deck system from Age of Empires Three, where you would choose a specific faction but then build a deck as you leveled up. Some of the cards were specific to that faction, but most (60-70%) were general cards which anyone could get. It was the combination of general and unique cards which made each deck interesting. The Ensemble Studies team did an excellent job balancing the cards, and I have no doubt the Ironclad folks will do just a good a job.

....I hope that made sense. I just finished grad school and I think my brain has officially shut down for the summer.

[Vatticson]

Thank you so much for answering my question! ^^

I found interesting the revamped commander system... we´ll see how it works!

[FleurDeMur]

That made quite a bit of sense, actually. I hope they include something like that; it sounds interesting, even if I have no experience with it.

[BlackenedScar]

sounds interesting i get what your saying very different cant think of a game like that.

[raphd]

love the locations: the internet and within the void