Fort Triumph - Fantasy XCOM meets OotS

[DaedalusMkV]

Grabbed the last key on the list, looking forwards to giving it a try.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

New patch is out with the new campaign and strategic map. A *lot* of changes have been implemented since the game first came out and this post was made. Also added 3 keys in the hopes of getting more feedback, as this seems to have worked out last time

Thanks guys!

It sure has changed enormously. You guys have put a TON of work into this game. I really need to go back and do a full Let's Play of it on my channel at some point.

[adamzeira]

It sure has changed enormously. You guys have put a TON of work into this game. I really need to go back and do a full Let's Play of it on my channel at some point.

Thanks. Yeah, definitely been an eye opening and productive year

Definitely check it out again and tell us what's good/bad/can be improved :)

[Gray Mage]

I've picked key 4BFCW-87K9Z-FIR46. Will try to take it out for a spin as soon as I have more time, maybe later tonight or tomorrow.

[Alent]

Life's kind of crazy over here, but I'll give it another spin.

[Driderman]

Looks good, I'd love to try it out but all these people who are "totally going to actually try it out at some point" already took all the keys available

[deuterio12]

So with the new campaign system, what's exactly supposed to be the purpose of the cheap grunt troops in contrast to heroes?

Also a tutorial to help with base management may be useful since I'm basically going blind in what to upgrade.

Heroes (and enemies) having some lines when they drop or are dropped would be nice too.

[DaedalusMkV]

So, I was able to play for two hours or so. Not really as much as I'd like, but enough for some first impressions.

-The Ranger tutorial for grappling hook actually required me to miss a shot and hit a tree by accident to realize that the ability would pull trees down onto enemies. Maybe I'm dumb, but the tutorial could probably be cleaned up a bit to specifically point out that entirely necessary use of it instead of just saying 'look for opportunities to crowd-control'.
-You probably need a tutorial of some kind for the campaign mode. As someone who played many, many hours of Heroes 2 and 3 back in the day it was fairly easy for me to get into it, but someone unfamiliar with the genre is going to immediately flounder when thrown into a situation like that.
-Maybe it's just personal preference, but having a silly, bad pun at the centre of your gameplay ("beetcoins") makes me groan and shake my head.
-It feels like units are a bit too fast and mobile relative to the size of the combat maps. Two move actions pretty much takes any character from anywhere on the map to anywhere on the map. If the maps were bigger it would probably be okay, or if the units were a bit slower.
-Knock-back attacks seem disproportionately emphasized in the game. Maybe it changes later-on, but for now my melee characters use 'kick' three or four times for every use of any other ability. The fact that any sane use of physics attacks nullifies at least one enemy's next turn, guaranteed, makes them utterly necessary to combat in a way that totally de-emphasizes all other attacks.
-The difficulty scale on the enemies seems... Badly off. I ran into plenty of three skull fights no problem, just use environmental effects to take them down quick and painlessly. Then my first one-skull fight against a group of spiderlings got two heroes killed because there were six of them and they're horrendously fast, allowing all six to attack my melee hero and kill her in one turn after my shooter missed. I really wasn't expecting an 'easier' encounter to be dramatically more dangerous than a 'harder' encounter, and that event was pretty much the end for the night (and that run of the campaign. I'll start over again the next time I play).

Overall, I do quite like it. X-com meets Heroes of Might and Magic is certainly something that appeals to me personally, and things look and feel smooth in gameplay.

[Gray Mage]

I've also managed to play a while, did the tutorials and started the campaign. I must agree with Deadalus, as someone that has played X-COM but not the games he's mentioned, I must say that I'm quite a bit lost about the whole base thing. It kind of reminds me of a RTS game, but by only being descriptions and the way that the buildings and upgrades are placed I have to admit that just throwing the player that way is very confusing.

I've also missed on the ranger tutorial and hit the tree.
In retrospect it seems logical based on the previous gameplay and information on the thread, but maybe a hint would be nice. I love how fragile the trees are and I agree that crowd control seems way too strong.

I also feel that not only the move per map is off, but the characters move way too fast in the animations. It seems like when they are moving or attacking that they are weightless (I know it's EA, but it's something to keep in mind).

And beetcoins is a joke that I think will age very fast, if it hasn't already.

All in all, I've actually liked it. Based on the description on the thread the "open world" threw me off a bit, but I'm a sucker for turn based, strategic games. Will mess around more, and looking foward to how it shapes up. It has potential and the focus on destructible terrain is fresh to me.

Edit: Another thing that I'm not sure if I'm playing wrong or if my expectations are off, but the melee classes seem very fragile. In something like X-COM in which every human unit is ranged this is ok, as it enforces good positioning, but melee wanting to be up front and the small maps means that I'm getting crowded easily as it seems like I already spawn in range, I think. I'll try and pay more attention to that. Also, I don't think I've seen a Medic/Cleric hero yet? Someone with heals.

Also, not sure how I feel about the minions, they seem very disposable compared to heroes (probably intended in some way). It also seems like I need to treck back to the base in order to refill them if they were to fall in battle.
Also, something of a thematic nature, I'm not sure about having the initial hero units be plot focused or "important". Again, comparing with X-COM (sorry about the constant comparisons) and Darkest Dungeon (an all time favorite of mine) the units you play, while important assets are never critical and while they are not "spendable" they are more distant from the plot and virtually interchangeable between each other.

[DaedalusMkV]

So, I played a fair bit more. Finished chapter 1 of the campaign, as far as exists currently. I did quite enjoy it, as I figured I would. Mostly, my previous thoughts were pretty much confirmed. Physics attacks do get replaced to some degree as your heroes get more powerful and you can just kill weak enemies rather than stunning them one turn and finishing them the next, and in particular once the Wizards start picking up AoE attacks and the Barbarian gets the ability to stack AP gain effects to great proportions the breadth of strategy expands a lot beyond 'knockback is all you need'. With that said, it was still very, very common for me to end most battles with far more damage dealt via knockback effects than anything else, often by a factor of 2-3 to one, and challenging enemies are all about disabling with physics attacks all day every day, which does make it feel like the game might get a bit repetitive over time.

So far, I really question the value of minion recruitment buildings, both in the towns and on the map. They were amazing in the Heroes games since assembling the most powerful stacks of creatures possible was how you won, so any boost to recruitment was a big deal. Here, you really only need one or two minions per party and you only need to replace them if you mess up and get them killed, so I found that once I had a minion or two available more recruitment just... Didn't matter. Building up to the highest-tier units might have made a difference, but I started the game able to recruit Priests and never got access to anything more useful than a unit with a repeatable ranged heavy debuff plus damage with a healing ability as a bonus.

Hero balance seems nice and solid. Paladins are great front-liners that provide repeatable party-wide healing and help lock down annoying enemy ranged units. Barbarians are quick and great at picking off weaker enemies, and can be used to cause some serious damage to nearby enemies with a bit of setup. Both have Kick, which is the single most useful attack in the entire game overall. Rangers are the god-queens of ranged physics attacks, especially once they get to ignore direction and just bounce enemies into each other constantly. Once they're levelled up they provide all the crowd-control you could want. And Mages get unique access to AoE attacks which is just great. Overall I found myself wanting a nice balance of heroes at all times, since they play nicely off one another.

The game seems pretty decently polished aside from the lack of tutorials. Units look pretty good, visuals are appealing. It's still very clearly incomplete, but what is there seems promising.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with the game so far, and look forwards to coming back to it once there's more to play.

[deuterio12]

So far, I really question the value of minion recruitment buildings, both in the towns and on the map. They were amazing in the Heroes games since assembling the most powerful stacks of creatures possible was how you won, so any boost to recruitment was a big deal. Here, you really only need one or two minions per party and you only need to replace them if you mess up and get them killed, so I found that once I had a minion or two available more recruitment just... Didn't matter. Building up to the highest-tier units might have made a difference, but I started the game able to recruit Priests and never got access to anything more useful than a unit with a repeatable ranged heavy debuff plus damage with a healing ability as a bonus.

So, you went for lots of mixed hero-minion parties? Because I basically just got two three-heroes parties rampaging accross the map and didn't see much use for minions besides garrisoning the main base.

[DaedalusMkV]

So, you went for lots of mixed hero-minion parties? Because I basically just got two three-heroes parties rampaging accross the map and didn't see much use for minions besides garrisoning the main base.

I started with two groups of two heroes and a minion, and added heroes to both groups when I got the party size limit to 4 and minions to both groups at party size 5 (though the game was basically over by that point). I found that having someone disposable in the party was very handy, since there are occasional circumstances where losing someone isn't really avoidable and it's better to lose a Minion than a hero that costs twice as much or more. Plus, frankly, some Minions just do certain jobs better than any hero does. Priests are a point-and-click 'nope' to enemy ranged attackers (just flank and blind them, they won't hit anything after that) that happens to have a panic-button heal to make sure your heroes never, ever die so honestly I'd much rather have one of those than a duplicate low-level hero. Hell, heroes don't even really surpass Priests in usefulness in any regard until level 8 or 10. I didn't bother to garrison my town at all. Why bother, you can recruit units instantly and will definitely get at least one turn's warning before being attacked. Building units that aren't going to be going out and taking over the map for you is pointless, really.

Heroes are definitely better than Minions once you've levelled them up a bunch, but the mixed groups worked very well in just letting me steamroll the map very quickly overall. I was never in any danger of losing whatsoever in my campaign; by the time I even ran into any enemy packs my groups just rolled over them without taking losses and kept going. It's a mentality I immediately settled into carried straight over from Heroes of Might and Magic: Move fast, never stop, take as much of the map as you can as fast as you can and keep going down the tech tree as fast as humanly possible.

[deuterio12]

Hmmm, yeah when you put it like that priests sound pretty badass with their starting abilities to support the actual heroes.

And I can also dig the "meat shield" argument, in particular against freaking goblin bombers that deal area auto-hit 8 damage.

Speaking of which the Nature/Troll faction has an upgrade that grants +1 max HP per kill (no cap) and seems to apply only to minions so seems like they could "level up" their minions kinda off.

[adamzeira]

Awesome feedback guys :)

It sounds like the start needs to be simplified in some way. XCOM is very simple in that it has no parties or world movement, just a list of soldiers some of which are "wounded" and others are not. simple. And Heroes is simple in that you start with 1 hero with 7 creature slots, and it takes you a long time to fill those slots, so your goal at the start is fairly simple - fill as many of the slots and make your hero stronger

But in FT you start with 2 parties, each with 3 slots and 2 heroes, and a town that should maybe have clearer "I want this" upgrades. Trying to think of a way to simplify this, but not sure what it can be


The other unclear thing (to us as well) is the role of minions vs heroes. It's a work in progress, and we're happy to hear suggestions :)

The idea behind letting people hire minions is that it makes it easier to understand what the AI does because it's paralelled - the AI conquers dwellings and amasses an army. you understand that because you can do exactly the same (even though their parties are composed of minions instead of heroes)

Happy to hear suggestions :)



In the meantime implementing these things. They're not big fixes but small ones to alleviate some issues until we make a decision on which real solution to go with
1. Changing it so towns don't open on minion purchasing, but on town building, then hero purchasing, then minions, to clarify minions are less important
2. Filling parties with a peasant to maybe make starting easier
3. Removing over-usage of the word beetcoin


I think you guys are finding physics attacks to be too easy because you're smart and should up the difficulty :) Yes they're overpowered, but a lot of players are not smart enough to figure them out. They're part of the fun, you have to look around and think about good ideas using the environment instead of the trivial "use X ability on Y enemy" like most tactics games do, in the same way that XCOM works

[Toric]

I think you guys are finding physics attacks to be too easy because you're smart and should up the difficulty :) Yes they're overpowered, but a lot of players are not smart enough to figure them out. They're part of the fun, you have to look around and think about good ideas using the environment instead of the trivial "use X ability on Y enemy" like most tactics games do, in the same way that XCOM works

Having tried out the game for the last three days, I can agree with this. I'm terrible at the actual XCOM and I have about a 1 in 3 hero loss ratio in the campaign. (Granted I save-scum so I don't ACTUALLY lose any heroes.) I started a skirmish as the Undead and was struggling to overcome three Goblin Rangers with my two lv1 heroes plus skele-peasant.

The overworld reminds me of the original Disciples game. Which I liked for the overworld exploration and not so much for the turn-based combat.

I agree with prior feedback that the paladin's skill tree seems lacking in variety compared to the others. The Savage's is set up as a series of plateaus and explosions, the ranger's is pretty consistent improvement, and of course the mage has too many good options. But the paladin comes across as more of a stay-in-full-cover bard than an armored lead-by-courage sort. This was highlighted when I got a trinket that gives any Paladin offensive power the Blinding property. This included... her basic attack, her kick, and her already-blinding ranged attack. And a ground pound at very high levels. Which made for a lackluster item in my eyes.