First playthrough - impressions

Hey, welcome to the game! 

1) ikr, Quanta is so easy to miss. Took a game or two for me to notice it. But it has a massive impact in long games. I was in a 3 hour match and let me tell you, an anti-dread dread had 40k hp @@ Tanky as hell. That was before I started spamming quanta generators lol. Lost 4 dreads just to kill that one.

2) So, what the Army does. An Army combines all the units in it into one super unit. They work together. Like, fodder at the front, armor just behind that, ranged behind that, and long range way at the back. And they attack which ever units they counter. Like the armored ones go for the T1 units, the anti-dread go for the dread and etc. basically, it's an easy way to manage a large amount of units doing the same thing, like pushing the same path.

3) I agree, Dreads are hard to click Sometimes when all stacked on top of each other. Haven't seen this issue with any of the other units.

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1) I like the recon idea. I'd also like letting an army go explore on its own too. Like Earth Assault had.

2) not sure what you mean tbh. could you explain more?

3) A lot of people have wanted this, and if I'm not mistaken turtle players get a big bone thrown to them next update. They're working on new buildings that help make this viable, and not to mention new, upgradable defenses. Like, the smarty is a T1, and it can be upgraded to a T2 which is a stronger version of it. Plus they're going to add artillery structures.

In warzone 2100 (which you can play for free now at http://wz2100.net/) a commander would have its own army (size tied to experience), could command them to attack a specific target (bonus to accuracy), set when units under him would retreat for repairs and could spot for nearby artillery structures.

Hmmm, I think I kinda understand. Some of the Dread upgrades give buffs to the entire army, such as accuracy, damage, attack speed. These are the first ones I thought of, probably more out there. Something like that? But, more in depth. 

Spotting: I add a scouts to each army, which give radar and artillery units fire on radar contacts. 

Each faction has a sort of repair unit. For PHC its a T1 unit that flies around and repairs units even in combat. For the Substrate it's a Dread that has the ability to replenish shields for units around it. 

I am liking self-organizing units when I've grouped them together as armies, but there are glitches, some already acknowledged here, others elsewhere.

1) There is too much glitchiness with armies and control groups.  My control groups eventually get confused, where the computer displays one number but they actually respond to some other number, or several other confused behaviors.

2) As mentioned, dreadnoughts are nearly impossible to select when they are stacked on top of or substantially overlapping each other. Last night in a game near the end I had about 7 or 8 dreadnoughts that were acting together (even though only one dread per army, I had two or three armies and several unassigned dreadnoughts there by themselves) doing some heavy fighting with an AI, and I had at one point 6 up arrows indicating that they were due for some upgrades. I literally couldn't upgrade many of these because I simply couldn't select them, and I had no way of cycling through them to get to the ones that were upgradeable.

3) You need available, unassigned units in order to create an army. This actually can be a problem in the fairly early to mid part of the game, where I've got armies with T2+ units assined, and I've got them all set up with reinforcement assignments, so that all available factory output comes off the line already belong to an army. It can actually be a problem finding units that are unassigned to select and use as the basis for a new army. This should be so easy to work around, but they would need to allow the game to think of armies as things themselves, and not merely as an organizational property assigned to units. In a game that's supposed to be army-focused like this, I should be able to design an army template and then instantiate one through some sort of interface, and have it come into physical existence as factory output begins to be assigned to fill its various unit slots.

4) There's still way too much micromanaging of things that I have to do. For instance, I still have to select individual or groups of engineers and have them go around specifically building all of the mine improvements, lay out each and every radar and AA gun, etc. In Civilization versions from many years ago I could select a worker unit and tell it to auto-improve, and it will go around and mine everything that can be mined, etc. I'm not 100% sure how much engineer work could be automated, but surely at least some of it could be. And be innovative, find ways to automate this stuff. What if there's a slider that says I want 1 AA gun for every 30 tiles under my control, and the engineers just go out and start laying AA guns at the requested density. I want one Smarty missile launcher every 30 tiles too, so in between the auto-laid out AA guns some auto-laid out Smarties are built.

5) Maybe it's just me, but I haven't figured out how to easily just assign fighters to go out and patrol over my whole area. Maybe I'm doing the interface wrong, but so far it's been very cumbersome holding the shift key down, using the mouse to select the Patrol button, and then adding a new patrol point, and sliding my view around trying to do this for all the points I want. And then how to add new fighters? I tried created an army of fighters so I could just hit V while selecting new fighters to add to it, and it didn't seem to work. The new fighters didn't join the specified patrol route.

6) I start out the game with T1 units, of course. I take over my first 3 or 4 resource nodes with pure T1 armies, till I get my first cruiser factories online. Often by the time my first T2 units come off the factory line, my first T1 armies are quite far away. With the T1 army selected, I click or drag over a T2 unit to add to the army so that I can define a bunch of reinforcements and start building out the army automatically, and all the T1 units leave their posts and wander all the way back to form up around the T2 unit. The T1 units are often at the location of my furthest resource nodes, dangerously close to AI units, and when they all leave their post to go a quarter of the way across the map to form up with the T2 unit that just joined, they leave the resource node unattended. If, instead, I manually direct the T2 unit to go join them before actually joining the army, I lose all the time they could have been grouped for having factory output automatically join as reinforcements.

7) Extremely often, when I join a T2 unit to a T1 army the control group number disappears, and I have to reassign it. This also happens when joining a dreadnought to an existing group. This is one aspect of the control group and army confusion I mentioned earlier.

Also, there seems to be some invisible limit to the number of engineers that can be building something together and still have their production output scale. A couple games ago I was trying to build quantum relays fast, and in large quantity, so that I could overcome some AI players with firepower, radar, and unit health improvements. I eventually had 20-30 engineers grouped into an engineer army and working on a huge build list of quantum relays. They all appeared to be contributing to the building, yet the quantum relays didn't seem to be popping up as quickly as I'd expect. So last night I had some small groups of 2-3 engineers working on their own build list of quantum relays, and sure enough, I got my relays up much quicker. It seems that 20 engineers working on 20 relays at once will complete their work much more quickly than 20 engineers working together and one at a time to build 20 relays. 

So how does this really work? What are the hidden rules that dictate how effective it is to group together engineers to work faster on something? Every other game like Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, etc. that I played allowed engineer build scaling like this. How does it work in this game?

There is a diminushing return as more engineers are assign to a same task. Here is a steam guide that explore that a bit

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=549485829

About  dreads impossible to select, select the whole pile with a box and assign it to control group, open the control group in the empire tree to the left of the screen, there you can easily select each one. You can also see which one has an available upgrade.

Ah cool. Thanks for pointing out that guide. Yeah, that looks right based on what I have run into so far in the game, at least qualitatively. Haven't measured anything, I just noticed there seemed to be a rapid diminishment in returns once I added more than 3 or 4 engineers to any build project.

I'll play around more with the control group interface to see what you're saying about selecting stacked-up dreads more easily.

Thanks for the dread upgrade tip! I didn't know about this one ^^

Where is the empire tree exactly?

Along of the left side of the screen. You can see your control groups there click on the tiny triangle in front of their number and you can see icons for the units in the control group. Dreads remain visible even with a lot of units in the control group.

Ok, a few more quibbles along the way:

Campaign: Holy difficulty spike!

I'm stuck at the first branching, where in one mission you have to rush the Turinium generators (I admit at being bad at rushing) and the other where you have to rely on incursions.

While the rushing one is probably a matter of player skill, the other mission imho needs some design rethinking.

It feels too much "on rails", as disabling most quanta upgrades plus sentinel turrets means you're forced to win only on the arbitrarily designed way instead of allowing for some creative tactics. It really reeks of 1990s C&C clichè instead of good design imho, so it could use some touches.

Game in general:

- audio cues should be more informative imho, sound effects seems almost like alpha placeholders, especially in interface and unit creation events.

- Pathfinding (especially for armies) could use some improvements as in maps with choke points units seems to get stuck quite a bit (maybe it's also related to collision?)

Dreads don't really feel special enough.

The concept is great but in a prolonged skirmish you can produce them by the dozens and imho they could be so much more.

I will post something from 1999 in a while, imho it could be adapted nicely to AOTS.