Battle Aces Development Update

First, let’s start with some updates since the previous update.

Tier 1 Unit Slot Change Proposal from Last Week

We saw the great feedback and counter points towards the suggestion we made last week. While we’re not decided on what the best move is here quite yet, we wanted to at least do our due dilligence to explore more options on this front. So this week, we’ve been trying a clearer differentiation in strength between the Tier 2 and Tier 3 Anti-Air unit options in order to be able to keep the flexibility of choice for players to bring in 2 Matter only units in tier 1. We wondered if we can hit the right tuning of Tier 2 units, we can also make sure tier 1 Matter only units choices can work out well. Our hope is to try various ideas out and locate the best solution that helps make Battle Aces be the most fun game of this type that it can be.

Automated Control Groups

Testing has been going well so far for automated control groups. We feel that it either doesn’t impact players much (if players didn’t rely too heavily on Control Grouping) or helps save quite a lot of clicks for players like myself that uses control groups every single game. Because everything gets auto assigned to ‘1’, we are now able to just auto control group majority of the units built, and just need to manually assign units to different groups when we need to form additional groups.

And just pointing this one out again because it’s come up in discussions internally + we wanted your thoughts on this as well. In the past, we have tried things like “all dragonflies get auto assigned to 2,” but what felt clunky about this version was often times when we are using dragonflies for harassment, say like at the enemy’s 2nd base location, then reinforcing dragonflies would rally into the enemy army getting killed. Whereas with the current, simpler version we’re testing, all reinforcing units end up with the main army which places them at a safer location, and when I’m ready to safely add them to a different control group, i can manually do so. And we believe the main reason this issue doesn’t happen as much in this version is because for example if my main army is attacking the enemy 2nd base, chances wise enemy has to react with their main army too, which makes it less likely that my reinforcing units get picked off easily.

Focus Fire Changes

We’ve been iterating quite a lot on this one. General TLDR we’ve found with what we talked about last was we felt the con of players needing to learn a new method of controlling that’s different from all other RTS they’ve played ever before vs. the gains aren’t worth it. So we’ve iterated forward towards a slightly different version.

So the default option right now intended for players brand new to RTS is similar:

When a player focus fires on something, it will attack it only if there isn’t something that’s higher prio in that area, and units won’t chase enemy units to be able to focus fire either. The reason why we strongly believe this is important is for the same reasons as before.

In the “enable focus fire” option, now this is what we’re testing:

When I’m focus firing on a unit, it works identical to what we had in the CBT1. The main difference, however, is when I issue a move command to my units, they will remember what they were focus firing last and will continue to focus that unit as long as that unit is within range. This means units that fire on the move (every single air unit in the game + Raider), will maintain their focus fire target as long as ‘S’ or ‘A’ command isn’t issued. So we can now execute precise commands such as issuing my falcons to focus fire a specific enemy shocker while kiting away from their AA units.

Change to How Fast Units Build

We are also testing a change where if you hold down a build unit command, units build 5x faster than they did in CBT1. We realized the general unit building at a given moment can be boiled down to 2 main types:

1. I want to build a very precise number of units (eg. exactly 3 destroyers then remaining blue on something else OR Exactly 6 Blinks so that I can save up 400/400)
2. I just want to build as many of the Energy cost unit as I can, then want to dump all Matter on my core unit.

So the thought process here was for building precise number of units, we need to press precisely anyway + can’t hold down to build exactly X number of units I want. And hold down command is generally to dump all Energy or all Matter that I currently have. And because we have such a fast paced game, there are situations (especially with lower cost units such as Wasps or Gunbots) where even just holding the key down takes away from my ability to focus on combat. Therefore, we’re trying out a change where it’s extremely quick to dump all resources, and we’re finding this quite interesting of a change so far.

Next Dev Update: Unit Changes

We’ve been iterating quite heavily on units, so we’ll try to focus the next Dev Update on unit changes so far, as well as our reasoning behind testing them.

Thanks as always for your continued support through discussions and feedback!