WAR Mode, Full KAG and the fairly immediate future

You're dependent on your home port for coins and imports, so unless you find a way to optimise your economy and research to rush the island, outcompete any of the other team also rushing the island, set up infrastructure allowing spawning and farming there and do this while somehow stealing the enemies ability to tech siege (in other words, unless you're an utterly fantastic team), a non-rushing enemy will have better tech than you (since they had more time and energy spent farming for spawns tech and materials) and will then be able to compete with you for mid with a stronger arsenal.

The trick is going to be in balancing the timing so both turtling and rushing handicap you slightly, so the best way to go is fighting over the middle island after teching and farming sufficiently.

Yes, funnily enough we do want the game to allow more than just one play style ;) we needed to artificially prevent rushing in classic because without a tech tree, even if you cant just spawn as military classes you can get an armoury up in 30s and be at the enemy's base in a minute. With techs and more resource dependence (as well as a deep body of water in your way) there's going to be a little more thinking required to execute an effective rush than E->Knight -> hold WD -> spam attack to flag -> WA -> cap -> 2 5 2 5

I spoke with Contrary at some length about this last night. Essentially, you get a bonus from staying home (easy access to technology, the ability to export anything, spawning without having to construct quarters for every unit or farming food, pre-built defences...) but you also get a bonus from rushing (more materials at centre, early set-up letting you get some walls in place to prevent them rocking up in a dingy like you did, and so on). This means that:

• Expanding to mid too early (without sufficient tech and material build up) means you can't get a strong enough foothold there - without military (-> ability to repel attackers) or masonry (-> ability for your walls to stand up to siege at all) or enough wood to build quarters (to spawn and heal your units), your frontier will be very fragile, and you won't be able to put the materials at mid to any proper use, and you'll likely get pushed back.
• Expanding to mid too late (once the enemy have set up a good fort there and have had sufficient time to get their tech in place to use the materials) means that you won't be able to stand against them when they push against you, and will have a hard time breaking their guard, due to their material advantage after holding the ground for so long.

The game balances more like an RTS than like current KAG, which is both good and bad. I'm sure we'll have to do a few balance patches once it's through the door either way ;)

On the subject of tutorials, they're something we'll likely be working on a little later (SirSalami in particular is very keen to work on them), but the community are good at educating anyone who wants to learn in a matter of hours as it stands. It's the people ingame asking "how to shield?" that a tutorial just will not help, unless we make it mandatory.

 

Just as an addendum: rofl you think you'll be able to play knight with bombs in the first few minutes of a War game. How quaint ;)

 

That might be possible in the smaller maps that you play on atm, but when Geti talks about 'boats needed for crossing sea', he really means what he says --> the big, blue, wet thing on both sides of the middle island will be big enough that anyone wanting to cross will require a boat. ;)

 

I think you misunderstood: in current KAG there is a bug where it falls more to one side than the other. It will not fall accordingly to which side the most weight is because we aren't going to do a soft-body architechtural physics simulation through the building, i'm afraid. MM posted a video of how the blocks fall on the youtube recently, look there.

Re: Crossing the sea - as FBB says, with the default maps you'll need a boat. No you wont be able to bomb jump, no you wont be able to catapult, no you won't be able to insert-hare-brained-scheme-here. Technically you'll need either a boat or an airship, but that's enough spoilers for today.