[2023] Official Stormgate Gameplay Reveal AMA Thread with Frost Giant Studios

Our attack/armor counter system will leverage a tag system similar to SC2. We found this to be a good compromise between an approachable system that doesn't require the memorization of an attack/armor chart and one that introduces granularity in terms of HOW hard units can counter each other.

One small difference is that some units will be able to gain bonuses against multiple types of other units instead of just one. This KINDA exists in SC2 where Banelings deal bonus damage to Light units and Structures, but it's done in a less systematic way.

Armor will grant % damage reduction instead of directly reducing damage by the armor amount. This is similar to systems that WC3 and many MOBAs use such as League or DOTA. Specifically in our game, 1 armor will grant 1% effective HP against physical damage. 100 armor will double your effective HP.

While we enjoyed the interactions we've seen throughout the years with breakpoints when you upgraded attack/armor (which we view as the coolest part of the SC armor system), they were not very noticeable for the vast majority of players, and this system had a couple of downsides.

First, as a game that aims to be a social RTS, we realized we really wanted to heavily leverage buffs as a way to encourage teamplay. Unfortunately, stacking SC-style armor via buffs can get very degenerate very quickly. In addition, we realized that while developing SC2 Co-op, because we wanted to scale enemies almost indefinitely, SC-style armor stopped mattering at a certain point. Why would you want 2 armor when your enemies are dealing 100 damage?

However, for fans of the SC system, I'm happy to report that we will still use this type of "armor" on one-off units, just not game wide.

1. Yes, because of our production schedule, we were only able to show low/mid-tier units in our gameplay reveal. We have lots of thoughts on how to balance these high-tier units versus low-tier units.

• First, we'd want all the higher-tier units to have definitive weaknesses. For example, maybe an end-game unit can ONLY break turtles.
• We'll have late-game upgrades for low-tier units that put them back into the game.
• While early-game units will cost a similar amount of supply as they do in Blizzard RTSs, end-game units will cost more supply. Our thought here is that extreme late-game viability (at the time when resources are plentiful but you hit the supply cap) in Blizzard-style RTS depends primarily on supply costs. At an extreme example, a Battlecruiser costs 14x that of a Marine but only 6x supply. To that end, we'll be balancing supply cost more on extreme late-game viability, which will allow "end-game" units to not be the end-all/be-all units you'll always want to build. (As another tidbit, our current max supply is 300, which allows for similarly sized armies to SC for end-game units but more units when you're massing low-tier units.)
• For the super late-game units, we may limit them to a certain count.

Ok, now rapid-fire!

1. Factions/Units will at least have implicit ways to uniquely interact with creeps.

2. Yes.

3. Yes, they already exist in the game.

4. Not every faction will have the same number of units. My personal thought is that both SC1 and WoL had a good number of initial units such that every traditional role was filled and there were not many overlapping roles.

5. Multiple isolated playtests.

To add to Aaron's comment, I ran the Teamliquid Map contest, which was the contest used to feed into SC2 ladder maps for many years, so this is a question near and dear to my heart. Though this is technically a level design question, I see it as very much a faction design issue as well. From this perspective, we'll utilize the following strategies:

• Taking into account map design when designing units. Reapers, Siege Tanks, and Liberators, early-game speed Zerglings, and the easy availability of drops were especially limiting to map design in SC2.
• Adding what we call faction-specific early-game defender's advantages. This allows players to more easily defend pushes (though perhaps with a cost) without overly relying on the map design.

how will the damage and armor system look like?

- more like sc system (just numbers) or wc3 system (percentage based) ?

- how many armor and attack types?

See this response for above!

- different upgrades for different unit types?

Though we tentatively have weapon/armor upgrades in the game to try out, I'm personally moving away from having them in the game. My personal philosophy with upgrades is that all upgrades should do one of two things:

• Changes the relationship between the upgraded unit and the units they fight in a clear, visible, meaningful, and specific way. (The upgrade itself is cool!)
• Gates power in a meaningful way. (The unit is cool and the upgrade exists in service of the unit!)

Traditional weapon/armor upgrades don't fall into one of these two categories. And though they have benefits such as committing players towards specific tech paths, allowing players to feel a sense of gradual progression within a game, and enabling cool timings in PvP, we're not confident these benefits are strong enough tradeoffs for the added complexity they add to the game. On this topic, we're curious to hear your thoughts!

- will spells ignore armor?

Funny story. They're intended to but I just realized we don't have this feature in-game at the moment.

-will there be negative armor?

Yes!

bonus question:

when an air transport ship dies what happens to the passengers?

will they die or something else?

Units currently die when an air transport dies, but I'm personally interested in testing different behavior on different transports!

Hi JonasHalle! As Tim said, we plan to show you more of the Infernal Host later this year.

We don’t have a date set for non-NDA testing or Early Access, though we are aiming to expand the testing pool and get Stormgate into many more players’ hands next year. We need to get through these initial tests first and take in player feedback before we can assess when the time is right to open the floodgates to the public or open the game up to streaming.

Unfortunately, I don't have enough answer all these questions, but I wanted to share some insight to my games vs TLO. TLO has been helping us playtest for a few months now. For some reference, at my peak, I was high NA GM in WoL. And TLO is TLO.

• On his first day, after playing around a bit and learning all the units, he took ~2/10 games off of me. I was going easy on him, but on that day, I learned I could no longer go easy.
• After 1 week or about 10 hours of playtime, he surpassed me, winning over 50% of our games.
• If we were both trying our hardest today, I don't think I could take games off of him.

I think it just goes to show the immense skill difference between a decent player and an actual pro and how those skills transfer over.

Hi everyone, thank you for joining us for our AMA!

Across the team, we were amazed by the quality of the questions from this community. We are lucky to have you with us on this journey.

If you want to express your support for the Frost Giant team, please take a moment to wishlist our game on Steam. Thank you, and we look forward to doing this again!

Gameplay

• On Speed by Frost_ChrisF
• Destructible Trees by Frost_Swifty
• Rapid-fire questions including Faction diversity by Frost_monk

Custom games and modding (answers from Frost_RyanS)

• We haven't build an extension mod equivalent system yet, but I am a huge fan of those so hopefully we are able to support them in the future. We do currently have an attribute system similar to StarCraft II's that does allow maps to add settings to a lobby that can then be passed through into the game.
• We have some strong ideas as to what would make a great tutorial system for the editor but it is not at the top of our priority list right now as we are still working on more foundational features.
• We are working on some basic UI customization options like flipping the minimap from the left side to the right side of the screen, but we do not currently have plans for massive customization.

Competitive

• On our plans for tournaments by FGS_TorcH
• On reconnects: Yes, but it's too early to share too many details! by Frost_AustinH