Post-Beta feedback

Context: I played for 50 hours and ended at rank 30 on the leaderboard. I played almost exclusively a heavy turret deck, initially turtling on 2 bases into valkyries when they had 12 range and were an instant-win vs most decks, then with recall + advanced recall defensive macro into katbus. I got 10k with this right before the beta ended, then played for a couple hours with scorpion + king crab + raider and won almost every game, shooting up 300 mmr

My expectations before playing: Based on marketing and gameplay footage, I expected this game to be fast-paced and focused on multitasking and micro. I expected a lot of fighting for map control, skirmishing, and harassing. I expected to enjoy the core gameplay loop, but expected to not like the deck-building aspect, which I expected to feel very similar to tooth & tail which I have 170 hours in and did not like the deck-building part of.

Assessment after playing: My expectation of how the game plays did not align at all with how the game felt to play. Possibly this is because of my deck choice, but it felt like Battle Aces did not encourage fighting for map control or skirmishing and harassing. My current view on the meta is as follows:

Expand to natural when safe (in certain matchups have to delay or risk losing to 1 base all in). Then depending on the matchup you have 3 possible cases:

case 1 (the most common): your decks are evenly matched as a whole, but you would rather go foundry vs one of their techs and starforge vs the other, and the opponent vice versa. This leads to a situation where both players want to counter-tech. If the t1 matchup is even, then both players stay t1 until all bases are taken, and sometimes even the entire game. If one player has the t1 advantage, the other player has to tech first and typically loses.

case 2: you have a tech option that counters both of the opponent's tech options. You go 2 base tech and win the game

case 3: the opponent has a tech option that counters both of yours. You hope they go 3rd base instantly or pick the wrong tech, in which case you may be able to win by 2 base all inning, but otherwise you lose

In some cases, the tech advantage is so large you can afford to go instant 3rd base and give it up for free if the opponent goes 2 base tech. Parting does this a lot with 3 base into mass dragonfly vs 2 base foundry

So in summary, the game is pretty much decided by deck matchup, and I found multitasking and microing mattered very little as long as one player doesn't completely outclass the other. However, the core game loop is fun and the units are fun to control, so my original expectation that I would enjoy the gameplay and dislike the deck building turned out to be accurate.

QOL/Control requests:

1. Bigger unit selection hitboxes. It's very difficult to shift-deselect individual units or control click a unit type because you have to click on the unit model itself instead of just in the space the unit takes up. Makes it needlessly difficult to control.

2. Flexible focus fire from sc2 would help a lot. I guess you could argue adding this would make focus fire too easy, but without it focus firing feels really bad

3. When an attack-targeted unit dies, units should switch to an attack-move at the unit's location instead of going idle. I frequently have all of my unit selected, including those rallying to the fight, while focus firing enemy units in the early game. This results in my rallying units halting constantly each time I kill a unit. Again, could argue it's a skill issue, but that seems against the design goals of the game.

4. Default army hotkey. This was already mentioned as planned in a patch note, but I want to mention it anyway for completeness since it wasn't in the beta. the easiest way to build and select new units during combat is to build them then hit select all army. The fact that this also selects all your existing army makes this nonviable in a lot of cases. Having units just added to a default army key instead would allow you to use this workflow without grabbing all your spotters or harass squads or flanking armies, which would make it easier to be active on the map

design feedback: I think the game would much better if one of 2 things happened:

1. a unit draft was added. Personally I would go with a parallel blind pick approach, where players pick units at the same time and then see what the opponent picked before picking the next unit. Maybe do 2 units at a time to speed things up, would need testing to figure out what's best. If you time out and don't pick something, it selects the first open slot from your "default deck" that you prepare beforehand. You can pick units in any order, don't have to go t1 then t2 then t3 or whatever, though I expect a meta would develop that would result in a similar pick pattern most games. A lot of players are asking for bans, but I don't really see what that would accomplish other than potentially checkmating the opponent if there are only 1-2 units that fill a given role (a problem early in the game's lifespan when there aren't many units, and irrelevant later when there are many)

2. Units were less specialized. I know this option will be declined because it's been very explicitly stated that the design goal is to lean into hard counters. However, if there isn't going to be a draft phase, then super hard counters will result in a large proportion of games being decided by luck of the deck matchup. Yeah you could make a spreadsheet and track how often each deck is played at your mmr and build a deck that plays the odds and wins on average, but this is supposed to be Battle Aces not Eve Online. Even as a dedicated spreadsheet fan I don't think this is a good outcome, it feels really bad to load into a game, check the opponent's deck, and know you've already lost unless they make a massive blunder. When I was playing my heavy turret into valkyrie deck, I would know from 2 seconds into the game whether I had won or lost based on whether my opponent was running one of the 5 units that could fight valkyries (heavy hunter, predator, turrets , or their own valkyries, with blink hunters being a soft counter). Maybe this is on me for playing such an edge case deck, but I think if units are too specialized this situation is unavoidable, even if it won't be quite as extreme as the valkyrie was.

Additionally, I really don't see why we can't get actual unit stats in-game. Hide it behind a menu setting like focus fire if you want, but we shouldn't need someone to decompile the game just so we can discover that the base hunter actually is strictly worse than the blink hunter and it's not just our imaginations (personally I was in denial on this one until I saw the stats, since it seemed ludicrous that a unit would be strictly worse that another, I assumed it must have higher health or damage or something).