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You guys put a big smile on my face with every upload. Great to have someone realistic discussing the issues surrounding stormgate and rts in general. Lots of drivel out there as you've said yourself. Appreciate the content, thanks!

legion td 2 and squadron td are both based on a wc3 map as i understand. Also ltd2 is really awesome

btw I disagree 110% about "rts needs to change to stay alive". Literally all you need is a modern well polished aoe2 and it would be incredibly popular

Can't wait for the intro to grow to 20 minutes and "shit gaming article" to become an hour :) Looking forward to hearing what's on your minds. One of the better parts of Stormgate was finding this show.

Thank you for the episode, haven't watched it yet but i know i will love it

Wheres bar episode?

Hell yeah new episode! Always enjoyable guys

:)

where is the grey goo content you frauds

Yeah, even back in the "patchzerg" era of bl/infestor sc2 I hated when commentators would make a big deal about players only winning because of imbalance. Like the fact of the matter is that doing well or winning a major tournament requires massive amounts of time and effort and to ever imply that a player just burger flipped their way to an imba win is super disrespectful.

where is the ATRT patreon page? ;)

thank you so much for your content i miss the pylon show so much and i feel like this content is providing for a need that is severely lacking in the RTS community. Twitch and reddit atm for stormgate are so toxic that you can't even get reasonable discussions about the game going anymore just too many people complaining about dogs and creeps.

I agree

What a great video! After watching on 32x speed I can confidently say I completely agree with everything Lobo and Hurt said about Dune 2000 and Command and Conquer mobile!

These videos raise my T levels

game is garbage

5:31 Lmaofao out the blue that was! never change guys.

decibles People should stick with Stormgate, which will get better and better IMO

Watching the SG section two weeks later is brutal.

Hey Lorimbo! Super interesting video. One thing that really stuck out to me about the discussion that happened around 1:45 ish with the creep camp balance changes was two things(and this is just my impression on what exactly happened from what I'm seeing from here as well as stormgate's general update cadence, correct me if I'm wrong). First, that it seems like the design iteration to playtesting time with the community generally happened at a pretty slow cadence. There would be a lot of discussion, followed by some changes, and then a ton of playtesting, and then a lot more discussion, and then later some changes down the road. It doesn't feel particularly right to me, because when it comes to game design, you need to be time efficient. What this means is that you have a spectrum with two ends on it: 1. You have the end where stuff feels bad to play with. Players know fairly quickly that stuff bad to play with, and things need to be changed. This is where you need to break down why exactly the gameplay feels bad as fast as possible and then iterate very quickly. In my experience the amount of turnaround time for changes on this end of the spectrum is measured in days to at most a week or two. Having a patch in order to change a few camps on a map, a few units at a time, etc... at this rate is completely okay. Having the developers interacting with playtesters on a daily basis here is important as well in order to just see what is going on. Often, you don't need to see too many games before you can make a judgement if this is a step in the right direction or not when it comes to stuff in this area. 2. You have the end where stuff feels generally pretty okay, or maybe even good. This is where you want to be very thoughtful about what your changes are going, as you don't want to accidentally blow up the good thing that you have built. If there is truly something better, you want to have those hours of discussions in order to understand it better. This leads into the second thing, which is that as a result of this slower cadence, I feel like the designers may just be struggling with understanding the possibility space and what particular changes *do* when it comes to camps. What happens if you go too far one way? What happens if you go too far another way? How do you make camps feel good? Etc... And this is where I think that it's important to recognize that knowledge, discussion, and theorycrafting is no substitute for experience. The correct thing to do in this case is to try something with camps for 2 days, have players play with it, and then try another thing with camps for another 2 days and see what happens again until the designers involved understand the implications of particular changes and can create themselves both an intuition and a set of guidelines that are able to help them to make future content. That's ultimately what you're trying to do as a game designer - build yourself a "good content creation pipeline" with rules, as well as an understanding of what happens when you break those rules such that you can break them in a good way to create interesting, different game scenarios. Mapmakers are a great example of this in sc2. Players still remember golden wall to this day as it was a rule break from traditional, good starcraft 2 maps. As that designer you're exploring spaces that no one else has explored before, experiencing things and teaching yourself what happens with them in order to best enable yourself to build a good video game. Ultimately, I think that's something of what Stormgate's team is missing, that understanding of how to explore and teach oneself. The fun part also is that if you do that with the community, then they can learn along with you, and then they are more capable of coming up with effective solutions to problems that they see in the game. Just my 2 cents. Love the show.♥ (Also - Showed my dad the IODIS from Harstem about how mech is OP with Raynor. He thinks you're awesome.)

It is very disappointing that they did not even get lore right for campaign release. I can forgive graphics, cut scenes and such stuff but lore, it is not something that would cost them tone of money, just decision to put focus on that. So yeah this is let down. I am online PvP type of player, so I actually enjoy the game but I worry a lot about feasibility of the game based on how campaign was treated so far. You are right that it was the only chance for first impression, so now even if they fix it it will be super hard to bring onboard campaign players from this point...

This show gets me out of the bed in the morning and gives me a sense of purpose in a life filled with disappointing RTS

holy shit can you try being wrong on something for once ? it must be boring to keep being correct on everything all the time

I hope you didn't pay Lorimbo

New background hypeeee

You guys are getting really good at this shit sandwich format

My goats

Mediocre episode!

Great episode!

Now what indeed

Top Stormgate tip, which you haven't heard in this video. Don't play this abomination and go play literally any old-school RTS instead.

Pls make a video about the state of the game after the patch/ free to play release or Lorimbo will explode from high blood pressure 😜

I definitely learned a few new things while watching this, and I have been following the game closely! Awesome tips, especially the last one. GL HF out there 😈

Where the hell are the Infernal build orders!? It's been four days of stormgate and we are left out in the cold! I got the bell turned on, I know your playing, just turn on the screen capture!

Dont know what you on about lorimbo (@ 2:17:18 )but if you simple google "broodwar Terran/Zerg/Protoss build order " you directly get to liquipedia with all of the most commonly used build orders? I also wanted to get into BW since I enjoy all kinds of RTS games and it is not hard at all to find BOs ^^. I hated it way more in WC3 because there you gotta go to specific DC server to get the correct BOs and not wrong or bad ones. Also how are you guys confused about the BW numbers with the viewers in KR and CN this game is still gaining avg. numbers 3x 4x 5x 6x the amount of SC2 of twitch ( just counting KR streaming here if you add CN on top its probably even more) it is simply not that popular in EU and NA anymore but more popular than SC2 from a viewer perspective actually which is kinda wild ngl. Also disagree with some takes of you guys especially in regards to the criticism towards SG I do think a lot is justified and should be adressed even if I like the game it needs to be improved a lot ... still nice video guys ^^ see you on the SG ladder

The entire battle aces vs stormgate polish posts made me question my fucking eyes, because to me it doesn't look one bit better, if anything it looks far more unreadable when hundreds of units are on screen I can't differentiate which unit is which at all. They all meld together like grey goo and I never have that problem with Stormgate.

Honestly if they have to save money on artists to touch up a handful portraits, they're just cheap asf and don't care enough about the quality of the game. It's very telling. It really does not cost much to hire someone to do this, but also, no self-respecting dev who actually cares about their game would use low quality AI trash with incorrect proportions in their game. You have to be a real cheapskate to rely on AI art. I wouldn't blame some indie game thath as like 1-2 devs, though even then it's better to just buy stock assets, because at least those have some quality control. I've recently played an indie card game, not very popular, made by a tiny team and a lot of the icons in it, I've seen before in other tiny indie games. And you know what? That's perfectly fine. Those assets actually look good and for a small team it makes sense to not make hundreds of icons for status effects and stuff. For a larger company working on a remaster of a classic game like Age of Mythology, I would expect better though, I'd not actually be okay with them using stock assets anymore.

On the video you said that everything has more or less been done and that there's not other ideas. ~67:00 I feel like a lot of ideas are out there that aren't used in RTS games primary modes. The examples I'll use is the All races PVP 2 mod. Some races you scale the units (Dragons). Some races have synergies between races(Wc3). Some races have particularly unique micro like echos and wards (Keiron) . Additionally, some games have operational aspects as their main gameplay elements that carry over from mission to mission (DOW, Mechcommander, Battletech, Xcom) Mobility, Intel, focused events, uptime, counter utility. Some games entirely have very constrained designed such as mission modifiers that nerf or buff aspects of the races (DOW:Realms or ruin). Some games have heavy intel aspects to them (command and conquer, tempest rising) Some games the units evolve over their usage(Veterancy, upgrades to specific units, ammo, unit abilities unlocks). There's a ton of ideas and often they require complex other ways of managing specific units or gameplay. There's plenty that is NOT explored in most rts games that functionally is really fun and requires very little apm to implement.

Is England still in the euros?

"every day's a shit day when you're Italian" LMAO 😂

Overall, I think your critiques of the SG beta are very fair, and I agree with most of them. For me, flying workers have to go, and unharassable workers have to go. I disagree with Lorimbo's conclusions about what the choices in this and previous beta mean about the developers and where they want to take the game. My impression is they were fairly willing to put in stuff that might be broken and to not patch balance stuff for the same reasons: they have tons to do, and every second spent trying to nail the balance now is a second not spent completing the long list of other essential things. It's reasonable to wonder "ok, but then what is the point of the test," (I think the answer might be "vibes") and also to criticize that approach from a community and expectations management perspective, but I'm hopeful it doesn't signal their long term approach to balance. I will be looking for more of a focus on balance during and post early access.

But but guys, I got an email from KS that informs me that FGS have hired an actual archeologist to write the lore! I love it when game companies hire someone with a "real" job to write the lore for fantasy/sci-fi games... Yay...

One thing on the lancer: they did sort of indirectly change it by making the gaunt glave bounce no longer proc speed on lances. Felt hugely different to me though it may still not be in a great place as a unit. Overall I had a lot less fun in the Frigate patch but couldn't really articulate why. The one silver lining was I absolutely loved the way they handle Random and that kept it way more fresh for me. Still hopeful EA will swing back towards the elements that made Elephant so fun.

I get your points and I agree on most of them. I do however think you are too harsh. I remember what a shit show SC2 was at release. Before some patches and people figuring the game out all my PvT games where 1 base making enough Sentries to force field my ramp until I got to Immortals. PvP was 4 gating and PvZ was can I kill them before they get to Infestor/Brood Lord. Even at the end of WoL the game was really stupid with Infestor/Brood Lord and the Archon toilet. Some might say HOTS was even worse, because of the Swarm Host. If you can think of an RTS that released without broken units/strats, please let me know. It is obvious that FGS thought they could get additional funding after showing the Beta, which was a reasonable presumption 2-3 years ago, but impossible after the latest developments in the gaming industry. I guess they don't have enough resources and have to chose where to spend them best. As a result they use us the players to play test the game, which I'm OK with. I have little knowledge about game development, but as far as I know in RTS it is the norm when you introduce new mechanics/units to make them OP on purpose, so people use them. Especially with the minimal internal testing I think its the right choice, because they already did introduce new mechanics/units in a new build, which were not viable to use, so you just wasted the opportunity to see how it works out. I did expect the game to be further along at this point and I do fear being "forced" to go EA can actually hurt the game, but I'm hopeful they can surprise us with the EA build. Maybe it's just me, because I always try to find the positive things even in the worst situations. Spending 1:20h to "shit" on the game is not really helpful, cause FGS need the EA to be successful to be able to develop the game into a good state and you might change the perception of players, so they focus only on the bad stuff. Maybe try next time to trickle a couple of positive feedback earlier ;) I do like the videos you are making though.

Really enjoy these videos. Great to watch honest discussions about the new RTS.

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7:00 HAHAHA ITS SO FUCKIN TRUE are bald people pre-conditioned to mald at woke? (ie woman)

It really works well with you two in one room. I am so exited about your decision to finally get married. Love you guys! <3

what a video, what a finale of season 1, can’t wait for season 2 guys this is sensational and groundbreaking

new episode when ???