Forged Battalion - Petroglyph, RTS, make your own army

Offers a “persistent tech tree” that carries over to new matches.

Hitting early access in 2018.

I don’t even know what this is yet, but I’ll beat the hell out of @tomchick in it.

Sure looks like an 8-bit army clone from the preview.

Aren’t there already about four or five versions of 8-bit Army?

-Tom

There are. And the sad thing is that I will buy this as well. They had me at the manga explosions!

Early Access!

It looks like they doubled maybe even tripled the number of bits used to make the game. :)

It’s no 8 bit army clone. Watch their release stream.

I just refunded. After playing for an hour and half, it’s too micro heavy for my 60 year old hands :) And it doesn’t have the unit AI that Warzone 2100 had, one of my all time fav RTS’s. You have to babysit your artillery for example instead of it automatically hanging back. Maybe when it comes out of EA it’ll be better.

The locking of the tech tree behind xp seems like it would be a pain in the ass.

I’ve read they are re-balancing it, but right now there is a ton of grind.

It sure looks good though. :)

I’ll wait for 1.0 or positive word of mouth later down the line from a braver QT3er than me.

I’m sure I will pick it up at some point, but going to hold off for now.

Has anyone continued playing this, or played recently?

It just went on sale on Steam and I was wondering if the updates have pushed this in a positive direction.

I haven’t played in the last couple of weeks. It seems pretty quick to get the points to unlock things.

People in the steam forums have been whining that they haven’t heard from Petroglyph since the last content update, and think they are dropping the game. I haven’t seen anything to indicate that is true though.

I haven’t played it super recently, but did the first mission of the second part of the campaign after it came out earlier this month. Petroglyph has been a bit quiet as to what they’re doing at the moment, with all I’ve been able to piece together from periodically stalking their Discord server being:

  1. They want to add at least one more layer to the tech tree.
  2. They want to add at least one more set of five missions to the campaign (total of 15), though I’d guess they’d prefer something like 20 total.
  3. They are working on more multiplayer maps.

As for whether the game’s in a good place right now, I’d say it’s not. The campaigns are fairly rote skirmishes with quirks tacked on, the faction designer is currently chock full of options that are outright obvious choices and a whole pile of comparatively inferior ones, the game mechanics encourage you to blob your entire army together and smash it into the other player’s blob rather than use any real tactics, and the economy swings so wildly all over the place that you’re either drowning in money or flat broke with no middle ground.

As an example of something that’s fundamentally broken with army design, you are allowed to pick an armor type for a unit. You get choices like Refractive Armor (stealth), a Detector Field (stealth detection), Regenerative Armor (health regen out of combat), and then a whole stack of various armors that are effective against a single or a subset of damage types. That includes things like Thermal Armor, Chemical Suits, and so on. Each of those gives you a 50% damage reduction against the type of damage you’re vulnerable to, and some of them have other minor benefits.

That’s neat. It really helps you to counter certain picks that your enemy might take. The first issue is that each of these specialized armor types generally increases the Build Level (Tech Level or Tier in other RTS games) of the unit, meaning you need access to higher tech to build that unit than if you simply left off the special armor.

The real problem is that someone thought it would be a good idea to put in an armor called Improved Armor, which gives a flat +50% HP to the unit. It is also less expensive to attach to a unit and has less of an impact on the unit’s Build Level, meaning you can generally build something with Improved Armor at an earlier phase of the game than someone with a specialized armor. Oh, and if you put it on infantry then they can no longer be crushed by vehicles.

You get something that has effectively 33% damage reduction to everything instead of 50% against 1-3 types of damage (out of about 12) for less money at an earlier phase of the game.

They still haven’t fixed something that obvious.

Thanks for your thoughts @vyshka and @Otagan!

I think I’ll wait on this to see what the 1.0 release looks like. I am still quite spoilt for choice with RTS (including ones I need to get to in my backlog). Empires Apart releases tomorrow so that might be the better choice if I want something shiny and new.

They definitely need to work on the balance. I’m waiting to see what Siltherine charge for Empires Apart. Some of the AoE2 folks have been enjoying it such as Tatoh and viper.

Yep , waiting on 1.0

I eventually seem to buy every Petroglyph game, damn nostalgia.

Waiting paid off, got it for pennies on the dollar in the recent Humble Monthly. At this point its best to never buy any games ever, just bundles.

Ok so what can be done to save this game? It’s currently not very much fun , but it does look good. :|

Petroglyph keeps hawking an old formula thinking that people actually played c&c for it’s ‘deep’ mechanics.

I’ve exhausted my capacity for ranting about this game, but the core issues really amount to:

  1. Extremely poor balance among the various unit customization categories
  2. A lack of individuality among upgrades, with various weapon types amounting almost entirely to differences in DPS
  3. The highly front-loaded economy which tapers off very quickly as the game proceeds (when it should instead be ramping up)
  4. The persistent engine-related issues that have plagued the 8-Bit games and remain in FoBa

It would really help if the game had been consistently patched to address points 1-3 over the last few months, but, well, one look at the game’s update log tells you how that went. Its early access period to-date has been completely squandered.