Tooth and Tail - RTS, Monaco devs, formerly Armada

I don’t think there are any hard counters. Anything can attack anything else! Except the bobwire, I suppose. Bobwire only attacks things that walk into it.

But you’ve definitely got a legitimate concern. If it’s any consolation, the devs have been running competitions among their community as far back as, gosh, a year ago? It seems like that long. When they first announced it, they were putting up videos of tournaments. I don’t think it’s e-sports caliber or anything, but they’ve definitely been banging on the balance for a while. And you can see everything in the replay mode to see how things measure up.

Also, I think we’re burying the lede. The unique selling point is that it’s a competitive RTS that plays in five minutes. Seriously. Five minutes. Maybe eight minutes if it turns into a long drawn-out slog to see who starves first.

-Tom

I had to search for the meaning of “lede.” :O

The idea of picking just 6 units out of 20 sounds pretty cool to me, might imply a great deal of second guessing and mind games :).

So it features Jewish looking rats?

…great.

Let me tell you, as a Jewish person, this is just what we needed.

Edit: I went looking for analogous Christian headgear, and pretty much just found the Pope, which does not at all fit the Eastern European motif, or, uhh, the Syriac Church? Which is also pretty far away. The various Russian and Greek Orthodox churches wear hats, but they do not look like a skullcap, being floofier and more mushroom like. The easiest assumption to make, given the Eastern European background, is that they are Jews. Swell.

I thought the jews were mice and the nazis cats…

Well there is a pic above, the rat in yellow.

To be fair here this is subtle stuff - I doubt the average gamer would notice - and there doesn’t appear to be direct association. Just because it “felt” Eastern European to me I noticed this.

Respectfully, it does not seem subtle to me.

Oh I wasn’t sure if you had seen the pic above or not. At least all the teams are rats! But yea it struck me almost as soon I saw the theme of the game and yellow team’s fluff art. I think they’re called the Civilized faction?

I added the photo to show the comparison between the image and his kippah and talit- skullcap and robe covering (like a scarf draped over your shoulders) and the yellow rat. While not identical, it is far too close for my comfort.

edit- I should add that there is a history of portraying jews as rats by anti-semites, as well as accusing them of cannibalism.

A corollary to my post above. I was making a reference to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Not contributing anything truly meaningful to what is actually a meaningful conversation. Apologies to any offended.

No worries, man. No offense here, and I got what you were referencing :)

@tomchick, @Jason_McMaster: Is this a candidate for some Chick & McMaster episodes?

I believe so!

Gameplay question here. Can someone better explain “Click to Attack” “Hold to Retreat”?

Are you supposed to hold down the mouse button while you’re walking around to get your troops to follow you without attacking?

Or while your hero has backed of, do you hold down the mouse to get your troops to break off the attack and return to you.

Also, I’ve noticed on occasion, when I release the mouse button, my hero tells the troops to attack. Is this by design?

Neat game so far. Working my way through the single player.

The way I understand it is that as long as you hold down the button, your units will prioritize moving to your position over attacking. Releasing the button switches the priority, so they will attack first and move second. That works out so that holding the button forces your units to disengage from a fight (and thus makes it possible to “retreat”), whereas releasing the button frees them from that behavior (allowing them to “attack”).

You really get to learn that feature in one of the later Commonfolk missions where you can abuse Chameleons and their stealth by forcing them to “retreat” past enemy defenses without revealing themselves so they can wreck the enemy mills instead.

EDIT: Maybe not so much, actually, since they just patched that mission today and made it about half as difficult.

Roadmap:

Are folks still playing/enjoying this? It seemed to have an initial burst of excitement and then…poof…

I tore through the campaign to get all the bonus objectives and found that the achievement for getting all of them is broken. Then I watched a tournament that weekend which demonstrated that the Fox was imbalanced as all hell, which killed my desire to step into ranked.

They at least made some balance changes yesterday, but now I’m knee deep in Stellaris so I can’t be bothered to switch gears again at the moment. Fully intend to at some point.

Tom and I have been playing. I believe he’s putting up our first MP game today on his YouTube Channel.

I really, really like this game.

Good to hear! I’ve been very tempted by it because I’m also an RTS junkie.

It’s the best RTS released so far this year, so you can’t really go wrong with it, especially after the patch yesterday. Distilling the conventional RTS to a sub-10 minute experience helps to keep all the meaningful decision-making without any of the tedium and unnecessary macro (while also limiting micro by the very nature of the design).