[Balance] How to re-work the Generals
Demigod Forums
1. Make them gain experience and gold at the rate of their minions. I.E. If you put all spawned minions in one lane, you get full XP and gold for that lane, as if you were there. If you split between three lanes, you get a third of each.
2. Remove all cool downs and mana costs for spawning Minions. This makes the limiting factor travel time. Some minions should travel faster than others. Additionally, for idol spawned minions, I think it should be a 12 overall cap, not 4 of each type. This especially makes strategy nonexistent. This means for example if your team was going to do a tower push, you could spawn 12 siege units. Alternatively, simply make them cost gold to spawn. 100 per Minotaur Captain or whatever the first level one is. For the idols, I just stayed at the heal crystal until the CDs were done, then did it again and off I went.
3. Add better minion controlling UI. I am looking at how many times I overspawned Yetis.
4. Nerf the Generals themselves.
5. Buff their minions. (If this is needed?)
6. Make the Citadel give special auras to Generals to improve them.
7. You have to make the cursor a LOT more distinctive. While I appreciate the new outlines and cursor colour changes, they make the cursor completely damned invisible in a big fight.
8. There really has to be more strategy to the minions. ATM it's just spawn the biggest number of the most powerful and lob them in. It feels very depthless. If you want to call this an RTS component, there has to be more of an S. The enemy Demigod should really matter. The minions you've chosen should really matter. #2 will help with this as well. There's no economy element, few choices of minions, and even fewer choices of how to use them, except replicating an Assassin's function, except with 20 minions instead of 1 hero.
9. There absolutely must be more RTS interface available. For example, not seeing group makeup. The selection rings are also very difficult to see with a lot going on, and aren't a lot more than the mouseover rings, especially at a glance. You can't select all your minions of Type X, and the hotkeys for your abilities are all over the damn keyboard. Each unit should be more directly controllable. For example, your priest type units, you should be able to manually tell them which other unit to heal, and when.
10. Finally, your ranged minions should have "ranged" as a bit more generous. At the moment they're about a second out from melee. Hardly justifies their weakness.
I just played a game as Sedna, and while I appreciated the work gone into the Demigod, it feels very.. an Assassin with minions. The bloody Idol cooldowns are pointless and irritating. I think a blend of the above factors makes Generals a lot more RTS. After playing, I get the distinct feeling that there is a good reason why nobody ever mixed RTS and RPG before. This doesn't even qualify as real time tactics.
Don't forget that as an RTS, which game have half your fanbase just come from playing? Supreme Commander. So we know you can do it. Hell, rip half the gameplay mechanics off, I really don't care. But when an interview said that playing a general would feel like playing SupCom instead of Diablo, well, that isn't really the feeling I get.
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