Quote:
Originally Posted by Foronisus
yea but when is Beta??? you said 6 days and passed 15+ and more days than you told us.So when can we expect?
|
Things always turn out to take longer than expected. The only thing we are waiting on is to polish some minor things and to make one important major change: modifying the way that uruks spawn troops. With a bigger map, we realized the old spawning system we used would be too inadequate.
Basically we want to automate the spawning of uruk-hai troops. Something I was not happy with was the amount of time uruks spent clicking the train order button. We want them to spend the vast bulk of their time on micro and actually commanding existing forces. That said, we are not eliminating the macro element completely. Here is what we are planning: Instead of repeatedly clicking to train a unit hundreds of times, troop spawning will be automatic. As soldiers die, they will automatically be replaced and automatically walk up to a rally point ready for deployment. Uruk-hai players will be merely control the composition of the army in terms of percentages which can be seen via multiboard.
For example a player can set his or her army spawns to be
50% regular uruk-hai soldiers
25% beserkers
15% warg riders
10% shamans
Based upon tactical situations, the player can adjust army composition. If there are a lot of archers which easily cut down beserkers in a few hits, an uruk-hai player can just order less berserkers to be produced and more warg rider/regular uruks which are more arrow resistant.
Of course the automatic spawning only applies to basic units. If you have played older versions of Helms Deep Total War, you will know that there are two tiers of units: basic and elite. Elite units are more powerful versions of basic units that cost money. In the new version, elite units along with units with special roles such as cave trolls and ladders will have to be manually bought.
The layout in which you control production will change also. In the old version, we had multiple buildings each with different units. this time you will able to order every unit from a single building (representing all the functions of your base). You will be able to pick from a several sub-menus such as:
-Soldiers
-Beserkers
-Calvary
-Ranged
-Siege
We will also be introducing some more unit variety thanks to the flexibility of the new system. For example, in the category "soldiers" you will be able to:
-control the amount of basic uruk-hai soldiers produced automatically
-purchase special units like for example:
--uruk-hai legionarres which are super arrow resistant but do not do a lot of melee damage to heavily armored units
--men of dunland which are balanced in terms of being arrow and melee tanks
--Uruk-hai Officers which have very powerful aura small radius effects
--cave trolls which are super hard to kill in a melee situation due to their large hp but are very vulnerable to being focused fired by arrows due to their slow movement speed
This is why map devopment will take some more time. We made that guess on the assumption that we would release beta without these uruk-hai changes but it turned out that these are necessary if the game is to have an enjoyable playability whatsoever. At the same time, we want to continue to further push the boundaries of making the map more strategy oriented and less mindless zerging (although zerg swarms on their own still have their uses).