Yeah, I think it’s pretty great. It’s VERY fast. Tom and I have fallen prey to the “one more game” think because of this.
I am so going to buy this…
So why isn’t this on Xbox?
I thought we had this whole windows gaming thing going.
Oh, my sweet summer child…
-Tom
Oh you’re really going to hate me then, because I’d actually love for this to be a switch game. It’s available on ps4 I can use a mouse with my xbox supposedly so why not? Also I love that the designers demoing the game are playing with an xbox controller.
Why would I hate you for wanting it to be a Switch game? I’d love for this to be on as many platforms as Pocketwatch can get it on! And I use a game controller to play as well. There’s nothing about the gameplay that prefers a mouse and keyboard.
But anyone holding his breath for the whole Windows for Gaming thing, or for any hope that Microsoft will be relevant to videogames again, has long since suffocated. :)
-Tom
Not holding my breath for crossplay etc.
I just thought it was odd that it was on pc and not xbox arcade considering it’s also on ps4.
What’s weird in their roadmap is that Xbox isn’t mentioned at all. Coming to PC and ps4, absolutely not coming to mobile or switch.
Bump… so is this worth $10?
It’s worth $20.
The multiplayer is the best thing since Herzog Zwei in my opinion (there is even split screen local play!), but, but…
It’s tough to say almost, now: they switched their server infrastructure to GOG with regions and stuff, making hosting a game with a friend quite a hassle, and I have experienced network issues (but I am in a remote territory, so I guess the experience is US oriented now).
The single player campaign is trying to be original but is mostly uninteresting, and the skirmish mode is super lacking, so I’d definitely pass it if you don’t intend to play it against other players.
Disclaimer: I hate RTS.
My RTS skills are rusty. I suck at this.
How do you beat the first KSR mission, the one in winter with campfires only? I was going for the “no building” extra objective, but that’s not going too well.
Since I’m a bit of a dolt sometimes and forgot to put a link in here, the next RTS multiplayer tournament I’m running has open signups over here:
Up to three games a week against a total of four different opponents, so a fairly minimal overall time commitment for anyone interested in some friendly matches.
So I started playing this this week and… I’m not really enjoying the campaign and the overall gameplay I’m still suspect of, but I keep returning to it. I think it’s a mix of pig-headedness, the feeling that I’m not ‘getting it’, the Qt3 tournament compelling me to get better, and being able to fit a few games in per session. Granted, almost every time I rage quit out with the same kinds of criticism but… I keep firing it up again.
I feel like every level has been designed to be as thoroughly annoying as possible, from unfair proc. gen. maps to warrens spawning everywhere with the AI controlling split units while you can only ever move them around in blobs. Most levels seem to have some sort of twist that almost always screws you over the first time you play then you just have to try and work out the rhythm of play to overcome it, provided the proc. gen. levels are kind to you.
The ‘real-time strategy distilled’ tagline is amusing because it’s been distilled so much that, like I said above, you have to blob your units around the map. You can move your whole army around together or you can give orders to all units of a certain type. It’s all or nothing. This is super simple but to my surprise I’ve found that it increases micro-management if you want to do anything other than mass blob things to death. There’s a lot of juggling involved.
There was one campaign level where you had to deal with waves of winged demons coming from behind and from in front. To kill the winged demons you needed long range shooters but they were very expensive and even if you bought two you could only move them around together rather than leaving one at the back and taking one up front. The only way to do it was to keep marching them back and forth until you’d amassed enough units to steamroll the final gristmill.
The comparisons to Sacrifice are on point but I do prefer this. While Tooth and Tail is a very blobby and messy RTS, it’s still easier to control than Sacrifice which I found incredibly frustrating. I prefer Sacrifice’s art direction though, as pretty and Tooth and Tail is!
Some of the missions are designed to have inherently unfair map gen scripts, mostly because the AI is simply not capable of competing with a mildly experienced human player in a straight-up fight. The devs are planning to add in the option to play each campaign map on a fixed seed, though, which will help address some of the edge cases in map gen that you run into when you get further into the campaign and replay levels multiple times.
As far as that mission with the falcons attacking you from both sides, if that’s the one I’m thinking of, the best approach is to just bumrush the enemy with your entire starting force and just kill their mills before the first falcon wave shows up. The defenses in the current build of that KSR mission are about half of what they were on launch, so unless they gutted your starting forces (haven’t played it in months) it should be workable.
Generally, your army composition should have units that you can leave to their own devices (squirrels, lizards, skunks, falcons, etc.) and then a unit that needs to be micromanaged for maximum effect (toads, snakes, fox, badger, etc.). Between that mindset and the maps’ small size, I don’t really ever find a pressing need to split an army in nearly any situation, and that’s the case in a lot of modern RTS games. Bringing your entire force to bear against a divided army results in a disproportionate victory for you most of the time, which incentivizes having a death ball. T&T just makes that a necessity of the way the control scheme works.
I am unsure of what I do and it is over pretty quickly, which is everything I want to experience in a RTS!
While I appreciate what the campaign aimed to do, I didn’t care for it either, and I ended up playing skirmishes mostly. It’s a bit sad that, since they share their interface with the MP setup, those aren’t very intuitive to setup and play until you really look into them.
Yeah, the campaign is terrible.
I feel about Tooth and Tail much the same way I feel about Banner Saga. At first I was: “Whoah, look at that cool art style and concept, in a genre I like too!”
And then: “Wait a minute… this isn’t distilled, it’s dumbed down! I remember games from that same genre from 15 years ago where units had special abilities you could activate (sometimes more than one!), you could make build queues, create unit groups and manage your base whenever you wanted, etc.”
(…or in the case of Banner Saga, units were more than one special ability and one passive bonus, where you could change class, equip a full loadout, where speed meant something for unit turns, etc.)
Being able to mix and match your army from all possible units is a nice touch, though. And the implications of this game’s story are just… something else. Wow.
Yeah, like Red Alert 3. I think most people since then agree that kind of micromanagement sucks all of the fun out RTS games, which is why most strategy games no longer do that sort of thing. Petroglyph certainly moved away from it with e.g. Grey Goo and the 8-Bit series.
What some people think of as “streamlined” others consider “dumbed down”. I don’t think there’s a way for a developer to win that particular argument. For what it’s worth, I think Tooth & Tail is a great example of an action RTS like Sacrifice, but made to be playable with a controller. My own main point of criticism is that it’s difficult to fine-tune your selection, which leads to just dragging the whole of your army along across the map in a giant blob. (The game’s mostly about scouting and positioning, I feel.)
I do appreciate the inclusion of a campaign, though. It offers a good challenge.
Big patch just arrived with a map editor and community balance changes as well as some pretty big gameplay modifications. Gotta get back into this.
It has random map generation doesn’t it? Not sure how much use the editor will get.