Initial Thoughts on the Pre-Alpha

Glad you're enjoying it.

Did you buy and open all the crates (Founder's and the 3 you can buy after you do the tutorial)? Did you get anything you liked in those?

The game has a "slog" problem ATM with some of the recent upgrade changes we made. We're in the middle of sorting that out, so this is a perfect time to get this type of feedback. We're interested to know what your buildup is. Are you jumping straight to Rank 2 for the second Servo or going with bloom wells early? 

We are looking at the AOE stuff. I think we're likely to give everyone some missiles at the start. One of the challenges with the game is figuring out how much we "start you at 0" vs. "give you stuff".

It's also entirely probable that the AI is tuned too hard. Give Easy a shot if you don't mind.

The game is great ! Congratulations, I am already having a lot of fun with it !

I did open my crates Godgib, I got a whole bunch of head, torso, and leg parts, an emp fist, a shield, and a cluster rocket launcher.

Things are better now, I got another crate last night that had a grenade launcher and a missile launcher which has made things SIGNIFICANTLY better.

As far as strategy in PvP I've been doing early bloomwells and then going T2 as I drop a few factories and an armory. I've been captaining with Blink, so in the first skirmish I'll drop my piston Servo on one of their gunners and try to instagib it 

As for your last question, the AI wasn't much of an issue. I did my first round on easy, and the fact that the AI straight up sits there for several minutes at a time meant that I lost more units to the turrets that start on the map than their actual units. By the time the AI had hit T2 and built a decent army I was completely upgraded T3 with like 6/7 factories with a mixture of drones and just rolled over them. This game was on medium, but I had pretty good map control before the AI got set up and this began. It was little more than an endless line of drill drones with the enemy servos dotted throughout whenever they respawned just continuously pushing at one spot. I couldn't push back against it because I didn't have enough AoE to keep the drill drones from balling up on a servo and annihilating it, and the AI couldn't push through because I had a wall of turrets and beacons that could kill everything that came near it.

After a while I started sending drones around the long way between our bases to try and backdoor a way in, and they were killed off by getting stuck in a fight with the drones that had just spawned in the base until a servo spawned in to finish them off.

EDIT:

So after playing another Normal PvP and to another late game slog, I have several ideas to throw out for overcoming this. These may not apply to online play, as I still haven't been able to find a match yet, but this is what I've seen in offline.

1) Make Servos take longer to get a calldown in the higher tiers of tech. In this most recent game, I now had the AoE to kill drones without a whole lot of issue, but now I had a new problem. The enemy AI had two of the Juggernauts (I think that's what they're called, they are the huge ones with no head or shoulders but massive miniguns) and I could take them down if I unloaded all of my abilities on them without losing more than one servo usually. However, in the time it then took me to walk across the map and begin to push their base, at least one would be back, but my abilities weren't off cooldown, so I had absolutely no chance of killing them now. So I'd retreat, get my lost servos back and the drones, draw them out or wait for them to leave their turrets and it would happen again. I finally won by sending Reece in on suicide missions to convert and then destroy their bloom mines.

2) Make turrets either have less HP or deal less damage to Servos. Late game, everyone has turrets everywhere around their base. When you push an enemy base, you have your servos and your drones versus their servos, their drones, and their turrets. Because of how the game balances the numbers exactly, if you push, you do so at an inherit disadvantage. In my most recent game, the only way I could win a skirmish was to pour all my abilities on the Juggernauts because they have such a ridiculous amount of health. In a skirmish, that works, I win the battle. But I could never push their base because if I used my special attacks on the turrets to knock them out, I would be torn apart by the servos. They have too much health for you to quickly take care of them and then reengage the enemy servos, but they deal too much damage to simply ignore them.

3) Make turrets take up drone population. If you want to turtle, go ahead, but you do so at a lesser capacity to attack. In that game, I was constantly out and about so my turrets went pretty under-used and under utilized. If by not building them I could field more drones, that would help me in finally putting down an enemy that I had complete map control over.

Good to know on the crates. We had some problems with people noticing them before, so I've learned to ask to be sure;)

We are working on the turrets vs. drones vs. late-game stuff right now, in fact. We're seeing some good results with some of the changes we're trying out. Servos are better against turrets in late game, for one.

We'd like to leave the Servo respawn time alone just to avoid the tech-up penalty that would create, but yeah, that's on the table if the other options don't work.

Question: Are you getting the Servo-related techs in the Lab? Those greatly affect your Servo power late game.

@firephoenyx: Great, good to hear. Please let us know if you have any suggestions.

@BXP_Godgib: I have been getting them, usually after upgrading bloom mines but before the drones or turrets. I can win that first engagement just fine, it's the second one that inevitably pops up when you try to push after the fight that I can't seem to win. My servos are usually all shot up, my drone army is crippled, all my abilities are on cooldown, and now I have to overcome the servos that just dropped back in while their turrets spray my units. It may be I still just have to figure it out, but for now it's a massive pain to get that final nail in the coffin. I tried a new method that seemed to work a little better with almost a "drive by servo" that has my fast legs and runs in, unloads two volleys of missiles and runs out to try and wear down their defenses every chance that I get.

is there some kind of NDA in regard to this pre-alpha? I was hoping to see some utube videos of gameplay, but so far nothing... i guess its too early?

Yes, there is an NDA.  No videos or screenshots right now.

oh, too bad, thanks for the info.

Wow, just played my first skirmish... I played on medium, and it took about an hour to beat them. They had me pinned most of the game with their stupid boring drones. Made my Servos really close to worthless. Only way I beat them is several suicide missions with boring drones and my whole Servo team after I killed their Servos. By the time I actually made it to their base, they already had another Servo spawned to meet me. Really really hard. It kept me entertained, but at the same time frustrated I was constantly pinned. I will be playing on Easy for the foreseeable future until I get good parts.

I feel the servos are not strong enough, they explode way too fast to my taste.

The boring drones are a pain, the AI always send a pack of them and they manage to drill my servo in seconds.

I feel the drones are main units, and servos the support, and it should be the opposite.

Maybe it's because i'm very new to the game, but then, make the first plays better.

Overall i feel i like Servo, and i'm curious to see it improved in futur updates.

I agree with what Tchey says here,

I feel the drones are main units, and servos the support, and it should be the opposite.

Servos are definitely more powerful than drones but...it's weird. The balance with turrets is also odd feeling. I'll do a bigger write up of it some time.

Well The drones are weaker it's just they're so many of them. maybe too many.  If they increased the time it takes to produce a drone a bit it might help.  In the late game I'm just usually making a lot of the bullet drones and attacking their drones and use my servo's to generally battle theirs. 

Seeing as I started this post string, I suppose I should give my experience on this now.

As of right now, I have one servo set up for drone killing, one for sniping turrets/servos, and one general use servo.

My anti drone servo has a grenade launcher with a grenade head, a volley launcher, and an AoE sword that i picked up.

My anti-servo has a fire rifle and a missile launcher and basically shoots a servo until the fire procs and then missiles them.

My last one varies pretty wildly, but usually has a shield and launcher of some sort.

With this set up I can usually spike one/two servos and wipe the drones out without too many issues, and then clean up from there.

I then can charge in and fire off whatever abilities I still have onto their turrets and factories, kill as many as I can while basically ignoring the units, before taking off.

After three or four rounds of this I'm usually far enough ahead to end it.

So that's my late game strategy, though I'm still figuring out how to end games before they get there.

TBH, the AI is pretty frustrating to play against ATM. It's going to get some love in the next couple of weeks to make it more fun (and more of a challenge).

The drone model doesn't help. That's being discussed in plenty of other threads, too. Message received;)

Something annoying, when i select a group including one or several servos, i don't have access to the abilities of my servos. It would really be nice to keep small icones somewhere on the UI.

Also, my servos tend to collapse together when they move or fight or stand... It could be nice to set a minimum space between them when they move.

More, i'd prefer the servo to be "full", not "empty". I want to be able to use a servo to hold a position, stopping other servos or drones to pass until my servos is destroyed.

Yeah, that ability suggestion has come up before. We'll look at doing something like that once the game stabilizes a bit more. In the meantime, I'd suggest using control groups to manage it. Turn exclusive control groups off, put your servo on 1 and then put everyone (servo included) on 4 or something.

Movement will be getting better, too.

Thanks for the suggestions.