Now, first and foremost - These are going to be some radical and generally abit straying away from some of the general core-gameplay you might have come accustomed to, and it's important that you raise your opinion if you believe my personal take is justified, or reasonable.
Let's start off with
General Fundemental Gameplay from the 1v1 perspective
Now, first and foremost, some of the changes that I have listed in the tentative balance changelog will most likely have a larger implication and changes made to the 1v1 bracket, but I'm not expecting a large overhaul on how it's going to play out. I haven't posted the absolute recent changelog, but if you see the changelog now - you might notice some things are abit "rad", but some of them I have decided to remove flat-out because I've been undecided /and/or I don't see them transitioning well into overall gameplay.
So what's being changed?
I posted a while ago that I wanted to restrain some of the issues with how severely you are punished, from say - genbashes and alike. However, with certain proposed changes such as reduced costs on power, or less penalty on your commander. You're ineveitably also having a large influence in how 2v2 and 3v3 are being played out. Timings and overall factions will have a bigger pay-off from certain timings compared to others, so I'm not inclined to change those aspect of the game.
Instead, I'm looking into the overall settings based on 1v1/2v2/3v3 and reworking "less-used" globals and transitioning them into more "useful" ones. However, this also leads to issue - and that is replacing them with useful ones. Of course, you could make them buff-oriented, or you could try to replace them with another unit-global call-in, or make them more "unique", akin to the soon-to-be Chosen Plague Marines, or the existing Inquisitior Banewolf for an example.
These units define abit of the characteristics of the Hero. And an example I've been fiddling with is Loyalty to the End. It's a real hit/miss global - but largely, it's abit buggy in how it's being executed for the most part. It can remain for longer then intended for some odd reason, and that effects the overall effiency of the global. Now, to define the character of the Lord Commissar, I've been tinkering with replacing with it abit of "Guardsmen Conscripts", which are just going to be extremely cheap, but numerous Guardsmen. Of course, you could amplify their effiency through the execute. They shouldn't be a no-brainer unit however, but if you're a player who likes to utilize execute more then the shield, you've got an alternative playstyle.
However, that's probably now for the next update, and most likely for the future. But the general idea is that you've got abit more versatile playstyle esp in the 1v1 department, wheras in the 2v2/3v3s department, the somewhat cumbersome performance of the conscripts will be more an "oh-shit I need some repairs/more cannon-fodders", since Guardsmen would be more overall battle-efficient. However, with their respective cost being so cheap, you could easily cover alot of ground, and ease up some of your timing effiency on your T1.5 purchases, or allow for even faster T2 techs. It's alot of theorycrafting needed, but I hope you get a general idea of what the intended unit role is to be. Mere cannon-fodder that works well with the Commissar Lord assets.
I used this abit of an example, and it's something I started tinkering with the Plague of Undeath, and I'm fairly sure there's alot of other misc. globals/abilities that are just flat-out flawed by design that could do with reworks to make the games more fun, and filled with variety, yet flexibility.
1v1 compared to 2s and 3s in terms of gameplay
One thing to consider is that in 1s, you've got a harder time to reach T3, since the game is almost ultimately decided by how the early-game goes, and how the skirmishes in T2 plays off. 3s are ALOT more forgiving, and you can generally just get "carried" by playing passive and hoard up resources to field the super-late game units. These are both abit of a problematic thing to adjust. It's something I tried to fiddle with a few patches ago, but it's more of a babystep to adjusting things. This patch we're getting now is another step yet towards adjusting 1s and 3s performance and aligning them more with each other in how teching is done.
One faction that has generally alot of problems reaching late-game is Imperial Guard in 1v1s. Alot of that boils down to how their power-cost is dumped towards their mid-game in order to stay competetive. And of course, with their dumps in T2, you also pour alot of popcap towards their overall battle effiency. And if you end up over 85 in popcap in mid-game, there's no reason to go into T3, unless you purposefully sacrifice units (which results in feeding exp and levels) to field a Leman/Kaskrin/Baneblade. So, overall the effiency of the IG units in T2 needs to be re-adjusted so that they can stay competetively with less overall units needed. Now, this isn't to say there's just nothing but straight up buffs towards them - but the point is that, some factions work better design-wise, whereas some others just need to be brought up on par, not the other way around.
I'll try to add more towards the topic, but overall - I just want you to know, whilst the changelog may seem massive. I want to try to preserve the gameplay of Dawn of War 2 as much as possible without making it into a completely brand new "mod" that differentiates and alienates people who are used to the formula. It's always been in my best interest to add more variety and strategies for the players, without compromising the experience. Hench, why we've had some betas to see how things pan out, and some things have been a hit, but there are also some misses in there, such as the Brood mechanics.
So bare with me on some of the upcoming changes if they get added in. They can always get revoked, reworked or scrapped and we're back to normal. But the most important I can think of is that I recieve as much community feedback, becaues I'm not doing this for myself anymore, I'm doing this for the players.
*Claps*
)
