[2023] We are Frost Giant Studios, developers of Stormgate and fans of real-time strategy games. Ask Us (Almost) Anything!

Coming from the starting point of StarCraft II, we’re going to be tackling replayability from multiple angles:

The first is customization. StarCraft II had both the Mastery and Prestige systems of customization, which allowed you to customize commanders via four vectors with two to three choices per vector. In Stormgate, we aim to greatly expand the number of customization options you’ll be able to play around with. Combine this with a shift to three players and a greater focus on cooperation opportunities in Stormgate unlocks even more ways to play the game!

Second, we’re going to look at lethality in order to enable endlessly scalable difficulties. SC2 Co-op was built on the foundation of highly lethal SC2 units. And because of this high lethality, it became unintentionally balanced around deleting waves instantly either via your units’ high DPS or very powerful “nuke”-style calldowns. One of the side effects of this was that we could never make debuffs feel good in StarCraft II because “why debuff when you can kill?” Another was that it was difficult to balance endlessly scaling difficulty levels via strict number bumps such as with Torment in Diablo or Mythic+ in WoW, because many commanders were balanced around being able to kill enemies before they could reach you at all, and most calldowns would hit breakpoints where they would no longer be very useful. By designing our game with less lethal units, we open ourselves up to greater opportunities for micro within a given fight and greater opportunities to debuff, which is generally very effective on stronger enemies. These factors combined, as well as less of a focus on calldowns that strictly do damage, will help us achieve our goals here.

As for the naming of the Cooperative mode, you’re very correct in identifying an issue with naming our 3vE mode “Co-op” It’s something we’re still working on, but perhaps something makes sense within our universe? =)

As many of us hail from SC2, deathballs are a constant topic in our minds. First, to preface this topic, we aim to at least rival the crisp pathfinding found in SC2 that allows players to engage in the game with minimal frustration. That being said, we recognize that this style of pathfinding does encourage deathballs, so from this starting point, it’s all about finding strategies to mitigate these deathballs. Without going too much in-depth into each of the options, here are just some things we’re looking at:

• Designing units with “does this deathball” as one of the items on our mental checklist
• Relatively higher unit radii to reduce DPS density
• Reining in unit range to reduce DPS density
• Lowering the power level/providing strong counters to air units to reduce DPS density
• Territory-control focused units and structures
• Territory-control abilities
• Units that can be very effective when pulled apart from the deathball (Marines, Zerglings)
• Explicit bonuses to units that are operating alone/in small numbers

I'm a sucker for any new Pokemon release, so while I've had my fair share with Arceus this year, I still can't wait for Pokemon Violet/Scarlett.

Yes! Our current focus is designing fair, balanced, and interesting units for the versus modes. But along the way, we’ll certainly have wacky ideas that end up on the cutting room floor, which will end up in our PvE modes. This doesn’t apply to just units, but also for potential abilities as well, for example, how the Adept has slightly different abilities across all the various modes of SC2. For a new RTS that has multiple modes, I think the process you’re describing often comes organically.

In terms of base building, two key sources of inspiration include Warcraft III and They Are Billions.

In Warcraft III, the placement of all your buildings matters a lot, and different buildings have different levels of vulnerability, leading to varied harassment and interaction among the factions.

They Are Billions takes this concept to another level where every building has unique abilities/adjacency bonuses, and base-building is almost half the game. That being said, we recognize that They Are Billions is a single-player RTS and thus the player can be expected to pay a greater % of his attention to this particular aspect of the game. But it is interesting to think about how much of this we can translate into a multiplayer RTS.

Funny you should mention this. In one of our prototypes, we ran into a lot of problems where air units would stick together too closely by default when a-moving (no special microing required). This caused a lot of issues where the DPS density was too high against ground units, focused on a single point, and it was very difficult to target and pick off weak air units. So how air units stack and naturally spread while a-moving is something we’re looking at. That said, we think stacking air units has its place as long as the air units aren’t overpowering. For example, there’s very interesting play and counterplay against deliberately stacking Mutalisks that can hit-and-run in the StarCraft franchise.

In terms of terrain, we’re actively looking at air pathing blockers that “work”. Though air pathing blockers technically existed in SC2, units did not understand how to path around them, which led to odd behavior on maps such as New Gettysburg.

Your cloud idea is interesting, and I think it would help to mitigate the power of air. It’s something we’ve talked about, but not something we’re looking into now. My main concern here is the readability of units, both ground and air, under the cloud or any type of pathable terrain that lives in the air.