Is there a Discord? Or only a Reddit forum?

Aoe that (only)copies enemy buff/spells "bottles them" and is able to recast aoe on friendly units. Apologies if this is a common idea, and niche af, thanks for all the work, I havnt played but I'm excited. Glhf

*I still think in SC, The inspiration is seeing goofie combos like a probe w stimpack, blinking ravagers, a tank that has charge. Players at all lvls could create some interesting scenarios. You'd prob have to make some modifications, such as If the unit has no energy already it can't take on an ability which does require.

I am sure many have seen the recent news that 87% of all video games prior to 2010 are "commercially unavailable": https://gamehistory.org/87percent/

Though not really surprising, i do feel it is an absolute shame that so much hard work has been effectively lost. Though i do not agree that we should force the games industry to constantly maintain old games, i would love to see more old games being released into public domain for enthusiasts to maintain forever.

Does Frost Giant have a position on this? For example; will StormGate be developed as a one-off development process that will eventually be lost to time? Or do Frost Giant like the idea that one day the game, and their future games, could be archived as part of history?

Tim squared hire you to design a third race for stormgate. What do you design? Give some details about the the unit style and art direction. Be as lame or creative as possible.

I think it's very likely that they have already considered this, but since they started talking about Stormgate, the idea of how to create a tutorial for people to differentiate the significant difference between playing a PvE campaign or content and PvP has been on my mind.

I believe a game that found quite an interesting solution to this is Age of Empires 2, where William Wallace's campaign teaches the basics, such as resources, troop movement, and base building. But for people who want to play PvP, there are the Art of War missions. One of the problems I had for a long time while playing PvP compared to PvE was the concept of build orders, which I didn't know existed for a while (you can call me a noob). Because of this, I couldn't understand that the reason I was losing in Age of Empires 2 was that my first 10 minutes were not optimized. The Art of War missions are designed to teach the basics in that regard. To give an example related to Stormgate, Starcraft could or should have a series of missions where the objective could be as simple as training 6 Zerglings in less than 2 minutes, giving instructions on how, when you have X workers, you should build the Evolution Chamber or the first Drone should go to scout the enemy base (as you can see i´m not a zerg player).

Missions of this kind, whose purpose is to teach new players the first steps to improve, should be based on the most basic strategies used by the community. However, once the new player has learned this basic knowledge, they will feel much more motivated to try new build orders or strange strategies, knowing that they understand one of the basic concepts of PvP that PvE generally cannot teach, which is the optimization of the first few minutes of the game.

TL;DR: The Art of War missions are a series of tutorial missions in Age of Empires 2 that focus on teaching basic strategies found in PvP, such as early economy and fast castle. I consider that a series of missions like this could be useful in Stormgate to teach new players about the game. Of course, each faction would have to have its own set of missions due to the asymmetry of the game.

WELL DONE TEAM WOOOO! NOW TAKE A BREAK YOU ALL DESERVE IT! 💜

PS. Not you Kevin, you need to work on that micro. (Whip crack)

One of the frustrating parts of mirror matchups has to do with the fact that virtually anything you can make, so can your opponent. This makes countering the opponent's army difficult since any unit switch you can do, so can they, which puts the losing player in a tough spot since they will always have less of whatever mirrored composition is occurring. Oftentimes, mirrors turn into an arms-race up the tech tree until you both get the "general purpose" composition and then your goal is to get *more* of the general purpose composition than your opponent. This makes it incredibly difficult to come back from a deficit. Starcraft 2 tried to solve this in part by making units quite fragile, giving the losing player the ability to make a single big play to come back if they took a good enough fight. While this has a place in the discussion, I think it would be prudent to provide some units that are expected to be used in mirror matchups abilities which benefit from increased attention.

One failed example in Starcraft 2 was air superiority. Vikings and Pheonix, for instance, are the basic air superiority units for each respective faction, so without knowing anything about the races one can make an informed guess that if one player is making these units, the other player might be too. This means it will be a numbers game and the fight will come down to an a-click, which is not interesting and does not give the player with less of the unit great ability to come back.

An example of a hypothetical ability to correct this issue would be having a unit that "fires up" its engines for only a brief second directly after being issued any command by the player manually, increasing the attack range of the unit by 2 for just that single second. In the example of a basic air superiority unit like the viking, if both players are sitting behind siege lines, the "losing" player has little opportunity to try and chip away at the opponents' viking count with their own because all of the opponents' air units have the same range and speed, meaning engaging them will just lead you to trade evenly (something not good to do if you are behind) because you cannot outrange or try to disengage without taking losses if it starts going badly because you can't outrun them. With an increased range triggered by manual control, a player who is explicitly issuing manual orders to the unit would have the opportunity to kite the opponents' units if the opponent had lapsed attention on those units, rewarding the player with more attention to spare rather than the player with more resources to spare.

The obvious good example of an ability which was done successfully in Starcraft 2 addresses not the range but the ability to trade "free" shields and then "freely" disengage in PvP using blink. If you are looking at your stalkers, and they aren't looking at their stalkers, you can avoid taking hull damage on yours while they are taking hull damage on theirs (at least until they re-dedicate their attention). Because the stalker is the main unit built in the PvP matchup and it was specifically allocated a utility-based ability, I would make the case that this is actually the reason PvP is the most preferred mirror matchup in Starcraft 2

It is my hope that Stormgate will try its best to allocate the few slots for utility-based abilities in the game specifically onto units that are anticipated to be built in mirror matchups

I think it was our illustrious Tim Campbell that said about the current RTS market "a rising tide lifts all ships", so the news out of Relic Entertainment is pretty disheartening. All I can hope is Frost Giant snaps up some ex-Relic RTS devs like a Cinnamon on catnip.

Hi Frosties! I was wondering if the rabid fans could get some updated behind-the-scenes general info (ish, dont want to reveal secrets) on how the team is going and what the team looks like now? 😁

Eg. How busy are y'all? Do you still have time for rock climbing? How many people (ish) are now working for the company? What are the dogs names? Are you successfully avoiding crunch? Does Tim's batcave have a fancy coffee machine? Are there any teams that you think "whoa that's a lot more people than i anticipated we would need" and why?

Can you pet the Cinnamon?

I was wondering if Stromgate would embrace the grid system completely, by allowing the player to reorganize the icons placement by menu/unit, in addition to also being able to change the hotkeys.

Ex with sc2 UI (even if you can't do that in sc2, would have been a great feature) :

And you could change it for every unit/building/menu per unit(workers) in the options (drag and drop)

I know a lot of hardcore player will say that you can usually change the hotkeys by actions, but I think this feature would add the same amount of customisation, with more clarity/ease of use/visual feedback.

And since there will be many players coming from different RTS games, I think it is the solution that would fit the most.

It’d be cool if you could watch replay files using other devices n stuff

Sc2 is a game who is hard to play properly and really do insane stuff because the moovement of the units are really fast.

Aoe2 now speeded toward in this direction too (macro simplified and speed added and pro scene instead of semi pro added.

You have pros and cons to a high speed , pro allowing stupidly insane combact mechanics push player to attack and not to camp all the game ; cons micros moove are more basic and "a moovy" and its harder to be better than patroll moove specially at low level (more parts of the armys are a mooved).

Ofc Rts arent games just of army controll but it the more evident ones.

Please please please, don't make the same mistakes like:

- give units so much damage that buildings can be destroyed in 3 seconds.

- replace buildable walls through natural cliffs

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Some features of other games are really great.For example are worker units that can build buildings a much better game design concept like the construction menu in Command & Conquer. Justin Browder recognized it while designing C&C Generals.For the same reasons are buildable walls like in some C&C games and Age of Empires games a really great thing. Not everything in SC was perfect. Even Warcraft 2 had walls and it was great! When you add walls don't make the mistake like C&C and make them weak. They should be like in Age of Empires. You want to buy time. How much time you can decide and balance.

Between WC2, WC3 and SC1, SC:BW and SC2.

Which game did you prefer for multiplayer?

Which game did you think had the best campaign as a whole?

What campaign specifically was your favourite?

Who was your favourite campaign Hero Unit?

What is your favourite faction of your chosen game?

What is your favourite custom game?

Questions open to everyone else aswell

Part of the problem with Starcraft 2 depth of movement/ depth of micro I think stems from the high deceleration since in fast-paced, high precision moments (such as a scrappy fight or a fight between units with incredible close ranges (such as a difference of 1 range)) having long deceleration can make them feel "floaty" and unresponsive which seems to be the reason for why the devs made deceleration so consistently high. I always found it unfortunate that the lessons from Brood War and its accidentally different behaviours of "patrol", "move", and "attack move" did not get passed down into a new generation of RTSs to solve this particular problem. It seems to me that Starcraft 2 should've treated "stop" and "hold position" differently in order to allow for a greater range of acceleration/ deceleration by having units treat "stop" with lower deceleration and "hold position" with higher deceleration. (or vice versa)

EXAMPLE: Banshees. If you give the banshee a low deceleration, a player putting a lot of attention into microing against marines will be able to continue moving away from the marines while still shooting at them. While this feels great in this scenario it makes the banshee feel just awful if you're trying to position it perfectly out of range of a missile turret but still in range of a mining SCV, since hitting "stop" while flying will cause it to "drift" into range of the missile turret or outside the range of the SCV. If you gave it high deceleration to make it easy to control in the missile turret SCV scenario, it makes microing against marines impossible because when the banshee shoots it stops moving, allowing the marines to catch up. Alternatively, if you keep the deceleration long but make the banshee decelerate *before* it gets in range of its target it just feels unresponsive to target fire when out of range of its target.

If you separated the treatment of "stop" and "hold position" you could allow people to do cool moving shots like banshee vs marine by default but also give players who need a more responsive unit in certain moments the ability to quickly grind the unit to a halt using "hold position" (or vice-versa if you'd prefer high deceleration by default).

This principle also satisfies the good game design principle of having features that allow experienced players to get more out of their units without casual players ever even knowing that they are failing in some way. (This is the best way to move the skill ceiling higher: without making those at the skill floor feel bad by being visually confronted that they are doing something suboptimal)

I hope Stormgate will provide a greater possible range in depth of micro by treating different stop (or move) commands distinctively, as it can raise the skill cap without overwhelming casual players from hopping on board since it does not interact with a casual player's core gameplay loop.