Force Selection in Patch v1.0.10 feedback

[Dizzy_slith]

1st I'd like to thank the devs for releasing such a comprehensive patch and for addressing so many issues, the game is moving in the right direction and getting better. It was already good to begin with, so this is just fantastic.

Now, about Force selection, you reorganized the list to show the better units at the top and grouped them up which makes selection easier. Nice. And that's the only thing good I'm going to say about it. Look, we are ALL giving you guys the benefit of the doubt here on this game. Its a good game. But your force selection is sh!t. It really is. You're NOT giving us what we want. You still havent addressed the issue that most of the negative reviews on Steam all complain about.

Let me spell it out for you very clearly. In multiplayer and Non-campaign Skirmish, we, as players, are TIRED of seeing foot- slogger army selection in the list. (Do you know what foot-slogger means, Straylight? It means the force selection is almost exclusively foot troops and contains little to no mechanized units).

1.) We want an ARMY BUILDER where we can build a custom force.
2.) We want custom force repeatability where we can build the SAME army list more than once on different maps.
3.) We want access to ALL THE UNITS of our faction, and not just one, but multiple units of every type.
4.) We want to choose the enemy units that we will fight against.
5.) And we also want a random mode where the list is completely random and we are forced to choose whatever is provided, coincidentally this mode is already the way the force selection works.

How much clearer can this be? About 80% of your negative reviews are about the above paragraph I listed above.

Let me make it even more clear. I tested your new patch. Let me repeat that. I tested your new patch. And I ran Five non campaign skirmish missions on large maps with 6000 points. 4 of the 5 times I ran the test I got a force selection barely over 6000 points. One time I got 640 points LESS than 6000 points. How about you give us enough units to choose from so we dont get short changed? How did this even pass through quality control to make it into the patch if 20% of the time force selection is short changing us?

In further testing of 5 non campaign skirmish missions, I had 4 games of 6000 points where I saw only TWO yes, 2x mechanized units with every other unit being a foot soldier. Unbelievable. One of the five games had 3x mechanized units. Thats pretty sh!tty.

TL;DR: Look, just make us an Army Builder where we have 50,000+ points of troops to choose from for 6,000 point battles, include 3x of everything at least and dont leave any units out. Also make a random force selection which, ironically, is exactly the way it is now to appease those players that like random battles without having choice, as they dont yet know how bored they will eventually get with this game when they cant construct their own mechanized assault games. The Army Builder is all about replayability! Its about giving the player more choice which will increase the fun factor. Its all about letting us try new things, or the same thing battle after battle. Its about keeping us from getting bored with the same damn selection each time. Ive got 180 hrs into this game and Im bored as f#ck with your crappy force selection foot slogger army. Please fix it. Thats like the last one big thing ya gotta do to make this game great.

[HolyTerra]

1.) We want an ARMY BUILDER where we can build a custom force.
2.) We want custom force repeatability where we can build the SAME army list more than once on different maps.
3.) We want access to ALL THE UNITS of our faction, and not just one, but multiple units of every type.

Amen. I want this for multi player. When I play 40K I take my army to play against whatever my opponent has brought to the table, I dont have to make due with whats there.

4.) We want to choose the enemy units that we will fight against.

But I disagree here. The Scenario or the AI or the other player in multiplayer should be chosing our enemies. I am pretty sure we can already build a custom scenario where you have exactly the army you want against exactly the army you want to fight, with the editor.

[ImperialGrunt]

All of the above AND the ability to save army lists so a player can select a particular saved list with a click and presto, it's loaded up and placed into a deployment zone.

[Dizzy_slith]

4.) We want to choose the enemy units that we will fight against.

But I disagree here. The Scenario or the AI or the other player in multiplayer should be chosing our enemies. I am pretty sure we can already build a custom scenario where you have exactly the army you want against exactly the army you want to fight, with the editor.

Ack, my bad. I should have said have the OPTION to choose the enemy AI units. Ya, good luck doing that quickly with the editor. Trust me, non-campaign skirmish missions on the fly with a crazy enemy force of your choosing arrayed against you would be loads of fun and offer huge, YUGE replayability. Replayability = a game that has longer shelf life.

[GCCRacer]

Agree. Should be up to the player how he mixes support and infantry. It's not CMBB where there are "realistic OOB" to constrain us.

If we get DLC, example Imperial Guard, this will be even more important. As I would assume we ought to be able and mix IG and Wolves on the same side, as per the SR tabletop tale.

I do feel the devs are listening, so I'm confident we'll get there.

[Mophead]

.) 1) We want an ARMY BUILDER where we can build a custom force. 2.) We want custom force repeatability where we can build the SAME army list more than once on different maps. 3.) We want access to ALL THE UNITS of our faction, and not just one, but multiple units of every type.4.) We want to choose the enemy units that we will fight against. 5.) And we also want a random mode where the list is completely random and we are forced to choose whatever is provided, coincidentally this mode is already the way the force selection works.

All possible with the editor from what I can tell. Once a few examples of custom single- and multi-player custom maps come out, it will be clearer how easy it is to customize the lists. I have both single and multiplayer maps with custom army lists. There is another player working on a mod for chaos. I haven't gotten to setting up random map generation for a custom setup though I think it is fairly easy to do too. Again, an example would be the most useful.

A more user-friendly way to go about it exclusively in-game would be cool, don't get me wrong. I'm with you on that. I'm looking at what we have and think that currently getting what you want is less difficult than you might think.

[Dizzy_slith]

All possible with the editor from what I can tell.

No one wants to spend the time to figure out how the editor works. Everyone that complained about the game on Steam not having custom force organization and Army Builder like choices want that in multiplayer and non campaign skirmish. No one has complained about the editor. Except for maybe one person on steam complaining it crashes, but thats been fixed. Why do you think that is that no one complains? Because NO ONE wants to use the editor! We want fast skirmish option army builder choices. Im really looking forward to Straylights next patch notes because Im about to update my own steam review...

[IainMcNeil]

It's not a question of not understanding what you want here. What you want is many months of work and for one specific task and would require significant rewrites to the engine and make saved games incompatible. However there are tens of thousands of people playing and they all want different things and we have over 100 requests on the wish list. Suggesting this is the thing that everyone wants is very misleading as there are a huge number of other major tasks being requested by lots of people that are totally unrelated. What we have to do is find ways to move in the right direction in a sensible time frame on as many issues as possible.

Suggesting nobody wants to use an editor is also greatly misguided. Editors are a must have for a significant part of the audience. I understand you are not interested but this is exactly the issue - everyone wants their own specific things. With a 4 man team they doing an amazing amount but there is a limit to what is possible! Please bear this in mind when making comments like this

[Principes]

I am going to have to agree that the current force selection mechanics in skirmish mode are a major negative. If for AI balance reasons you don't want to give the players the ability to choose any combination of units, then the least one could do would be to publish the characteristics of each army and enable the players to buy from the specific army lists. Given the way the game plays, I do not understand why you would have difficulty with this. if it isn't possible, could you please explain why not.

[IainMcNeil]

You seem to be misunderstanding. Nobody is saying it wouldn't be nice. It is possible, its just a lot of work. Without explaining to you how the code is structured and how the scripts run its not really possible to explain why its a lot of work and clearly we cant do that. There are many conflicting priorities and the team are balancing moving this ahead with the many many other requests. Just look at the change log! That's not to say we wont be making further improvements, just that the team are not going to drop everything to make this one improvement.

Imagining something is easy but implementing it is not. Many people think that game development is all about great ideas. Sadly that's not true. Ideas are cheap! We have thousands of ideas. Making them happen is the tricky part. That's why developers don't go looking for game ideas and ask for pitches, as ideas are pretty much worthless. Its all about the execution and the detail.

[Dizzy_slith]

That's unfortunate.

When you get a 6,000pt game, which is the max points you allow, and the force selection is filled with basic units and at most we see 2 maybe 3 mechanized units to field in battle, the game gets old FAST. So with as many universal complaints about the lack of an Army Builder, one would think you'd be smart and implement SOMETHING that can give us more choices of the units we want to see. In this patch its even worse than it was before. Prior to this patch I was seeing more mechanized units. I hardly see them at all now. Unit variety is low as well. Its awful, really. Im tired of fielding foot slogger armies. There's no incentive for me to play the game anymore after completing the campaigns because every battle is the same. Poor unit choices and not enough unit variety combined with having to experience the SAME type army each game, which is almost exclusively fielded of foot units.

“Speaking of the armies, this is by far the most diverse unit selection I've seen to date in a 40K game.”

For a game that designed so many different units and troops, but doesnt give you access to play them, you've really got a problem. You're shooting yourself in the foot. Its really a poor marketing decision. It shouldnt be hard to change the force selection screen in Non-Campaign Skirmish to offer us the selection we want.

You know what's easy to do? It's really easy to change my review. I'll edit this post and let you know what I write to be sure.

[Mophead]

6k LP is not a cap in custom, multiplayer or singleplayer.

Put up request in Mods Board for what you want. A complete army list of what you'd like to play. If it is just single player and not multiplayer, you could mod the game to pull from larger lists. If skirmish has 6k cap now, I didn't check, it will remain.

[WhiteTigerK17]

Some of you need to learn some respect, the rudeness of some of your messages to the developers is shocking.

They have done an amazing job.

Try to bring across your point of view politely as it may increase the chances of change being made, rather than venting the frustration caused by the selection screen.

A possibility to save army lists for multiplayer battles, and have the choice to play a game with a set point count for which you have prepared a set of units that cost that amount, but also have the opportunity to play randomly generated army games. In randomly generated games the opposing armies are very well balanced, something I think none of you have considered. Luck of the draw in a pre set army game could have either side annihilated in a rock paper scissors manner.

[zhukodim]

In randomly generated games the opposing armies are very well balanced, something I think none of you have considered. Luck of the draw in a pre set army game could have either side annihilated in a rock paper scissors manner.

Agreed. Played 40+ Multiplayer games already. Those random lists are balanced. And for me it is the only thing that keep game fresh. Free force selection? Better and more diversity you say? Im afraid you will see quit the oppostie situation where all players will use the same lists again and again.

[GCCRacer]

I agree that Dizzy could be a bit more tactful in his wording, but I think Ian would also agree that players want, in a Skirmish, to have the "cool units".

What good is it to have Dreadnoughts, Knights, Skimmers/Speeders and Tanks if we never get to use them when we want to?

If there is a way to mod text files, savegames or whatever by ourselves I'm sure willing to learn. All I want is to play versus the AI with some of the "Big Large Powerful" stuff the Wolves have. And the AI to counter with their own heavy machinery.

Maybe a simpler option is, as we have the "Army Lists" for specific commander selectable, to make some of those more mechanized?

[WhiteTigerK17]

Could have game types that spawn balanced armies with sets of units.

- Heavy Games, where the strongest units are Land Raider or Knight vs Ork Knight and everything below. Randomly generated by the current balancing engine.

- Mid games where the strongest units are predators, killa kans, drednoughts, land speeders, bla bla etc.

- Infantry based light tier with no vehicles, for infantry only battles, with maybe transport.

- Cavalry battles, with no infantry or heavies.

These options would work great with the current engine in my opinion, as the balancing at the moment is excellent, and these game types are already sort of produced, apart from the Calvary and infantry only ones.

The player could pick what type of engagement he wants and would be dropped in with another player who chose it also.

The game could then randomly put you in different sized battles, because allowing that as a choice would split the matchmaking up too much.

[pipfromslitherine]

If you want to play a skirmish with more mechanized units, then you can create your own mod campaign with an altered army list. You then access this from the Advanced panel in the skirmish setup.

That said, looking at the generation script, it looks like it wasn't really supporting custom skirmishes. But luckily you can customise the scripts for skirmish generation. I knocked this up which sets up a custom skirmish campaign which has its own army list. Hopefully you can set up the army lists to give you the unit selection you want.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q3va5ww5rotmy ... H.rar?dl=0

Drop this into your My Documents/My Games/SANCTUS/CAMPAIGNS folder. The armylist.txt file is the one where you define the units. I also upped the points level to 16000.

Hopefully this is helpful - I knocked it up during a meeting so don't tell anyone

Cheers

Pip

[SgtBootStrap]

Thanks Pip. Downloaded to Dropbox and will check out asap.

I downloaded it during a meeting so don't tell anyone lol

[pipfromslitherine]

I have just spotted (or actually been told) that it has a bug where it doesn't use all the points. But it's framework is still valid, but I will post an update once I have worked it out!

Cheers

Pip

[GCCRacer]

Thanks Pip!