r/PlayZeroSpace

I’ll preface this by saying I’ve mostly been messing around with legion.

First of all, fantastic feeling RTS straight from the demo. Very fast, but the Time to kill feels fun and makes the different abilities feel powerful.

The game flow feels great as well, I think you’ve done a great job with the control points and resource degradation to push people to interact. Staying back feels like a meaningful decision.
I think the factions feel good. They feel distinct from one another, and all are fun to play. Top bar abilities are well implemented in that they feel great to use, and unlike other games that have had this feature, this encouraged me to use them. 

The controls take a bit of getting used to, but work well. I do often find myself scrolling across the bottom of the screen to find the building i’m looking for though. Maybe they don’t all feel distinct enough (talking about the hero ones here I think) to make it easy to distinguish and remember what is needed for what. I only mention this at all as the game is so fast paced pausing for any reason feels a bit terrible. 

I also definitely think that having production mapped to f3 but merc to M feels quite unintuitive and a bit clunky and leads to the same minor quibble.

The upgrade system feels really good - split upgrade paths (where they are)  and costs make them feel meaningful. I’d say the thrall upgrades don’t necessarily feel like they do much, but I could be dead wrong objectively. Just how they feel.

I’ve played the legion most, so I’ll talk more in depth about how it feels to play them.

They certainly feel fun, but I often feel like super aggressive play is much more comfortable than taking an expansion - it feels very easy to get run over when doing so, and even if I manage to reach late game, I’ve certainly struggled on the maps in the pool against siege, feeling like I don’t have an effective answer against high ground, long range units. 

This might be because most of the legion units are key, expensive specialists (I do love this) and so can be deleted very quickly by things that outrange them.

I'd also say it's not always clear in the game as it is what some things actually do. I'm not sure what damage type the terror tank is (with the range upgrade, for example), and I have no idea what benefit mounting a unit on the big dino does.

The terror tank and dreadnought are awesome. They don’t always feel worth the cost, usually as I feel I have better options and they cost SO much, but they are awesome.

The terror tank in particular feels quite risky to use. It almost doesn't feel worth it for the dps. Flame turrets are super cool but also feel too risky to get as it puts my 600 flux units right at the front where all the anti heavy can easily right click it.

I'm super excited by this game though and will absolutely continue to learn!

i think the demo version now is just going to be a small version of what we will get during EA but because it don't look like anything much and due to that I have a hard time telling and if anything major will happen then.

Played most of the day single player without issue (campaign and survival). Trying to play with my roommate (me hosting) crash to desktop within 60 seconds of the match starting. Not sure what the deal is with that given I don't see other mention of that but tried multiple times but certainly doesn't give a good demo impression.

Let me preface the rest of this by saying yes, I'm having fun and I'll probably be buying it. But I do think it still needs a lot of work. Most of this below feedback is from playing survival coop with the AI. That said, in no particular order.

The UI in general needs a lot of polish. There's a lot of overlap and just in general it feels very unpolished. I'm not sure it was a good idea to release a demo at this stage. Gamers are exceptionally unforgiving people and as the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Escape key doesn't always reliably bring up the pause/settings menu and if you enable a lot of modifiers, they're blocking the button to get to the menu (playing at 3840x1600).

Given how ground focused the game is, pathing needs some work. It's most noticable playing coop survival with the AI. It mostly follows your hero around which is questionable behavior to begin with but once they get larger numbers or large units (IE Striders) it's just one giant roadblock. Related to that, there's not enough air units.

Combat and pacing just feels off in general. Given the games clear SC2 influence and assuming that's the feel and pace you're going for, let's give a quick and easy example. These number come from their respective Wiki's so I'm not 100% sure on their accuracy. Base numbers:

Stinger 90hp, 9dps
Thrall 70hp, 5dps
Zergling 35hp, 10dps
Marine 45hp, 9.8dps
Zealot 150hp (Combined), 16dps

Or high level units:

Reaver 1100hp, 51dps
Reaver (Infused) 1650hp, 77dps
Dark Template 120hp (combined), 37dps
Ultralisk 500hp, 57dps

This doesn't carry over to defensive buildings however.

Sunken Colony 300hp, 13dps
Cultivator Defender 400hp, 17dps

Not saying copy SC2 should be the goal but 10:1 HP to Dmg was about the spongiest you get in SC2. That's basically the starting point here. So if you're going for faster paced game, that's problematic. This just makes units feel useless/unsatisfying, especially because a lot of the AoE's don't have this problem. The various nukes will one shot most of the weaker troops (as they should) but this is a problem when you start talking kill times for regular attacks.

A base Zergling would take 30s to kill a sunken colony. A base thrall would take 80s to kill a Cultivator defender. A stinger would still take 44s. These higher kill times are a problem because of the aforementioned AoE's. Your units have to spend a lot more time sitting in one place which makes getting nuked by AoE's far harder to avoid. In general this means you can't really do quick hit and run attacks.

Speaking of cultivators... Their inconsistent base size is really annoying. Placement says it's a 2x2 but it frequently blocking more than that.

Lastly, I think this is specific to survival, but you don't get any biomass spawl/spawn in the starting zone at start. You effectively can't actually build in your starting area until you clear the closest rocks outside the base and build a second Bloomwell which makes them wildly inefficient at start compared to the other options. Since you don't have biomass that also means it takes forever to get you first buildings built because of how slow the movement speed is.

Again, I am having fun with it. But it does feel pretty rough right now. People generally expect demo's to be more polished than an early access release so I'm not sure it was a good idea at this stage.

The game stutters on my PC, every 15 seconds or so the game stutters and my cursor freezes for ~1 second, I cannot play the game like this. I downloaded it on my much weaker laptop where this issue does not come up. Is there any known fix for this?

Edit: Tried on low settings, updated drivers, reinstalled the game, tried to start it with DX12, non of these helped so far.

Edit 2 - specs: GPU: Zotac GeForce RTX 3070, CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6 core

Tried some more demo play. It feels like the Legion is extremely weak, especially against Grell. If your opponent let's you build Terror tanks and Carriers it's ok, but how are you supposed to hold first 10 minutes? The thralls just die, you can't build enough of other units. Melee beasts get kited and cost quite lot of the purple stuff. I thought it's supposed to be hero faction, but the heroes can be focused down and killed pretty fast. Is there any mechanic I'm missing? E.g. am I supposed to camp in my base with obelisks and tech up? Any good mercs I can use to complement the weak Legion army at the start? I usually start with Galavax to quickly clear the creep camps.

Apart from that I'm still disappointed by the optimization. My PC get's really hot and the game has lags. Even during campaign cutscenes. And they don't look that great. Overall I'm not a huge fan of the UI, it seems minimal, but misses a "soul" and the control buttons look to similar.

The game overall brings absolutely no new mechanics, that make the gameplay interesting. It feels like Starcraft + QoL stuff with different factions. Regarding controls, I don't like how units clump a lot which makes it hard to select specific units and micro them.