Originally posted by Ajoittaissade:

I personally think it's bad. It has thrown skill mostly out of the window and turned the game into a button mashing contest.

I agree. The addition of autoattacks gives everyone the option to constantly deal damage, mostly without a real chance of dodging it (PA's glaive for example is extremely fast and just feels weird as a consequence) That changes the game from carefully testing the opponents strength while looking for opportunities into a game of spamming autoattacks and "outdamaging" the opponents, since dodging spells doesn't grant the short period of safety anymore and using a spell to get away just means giving up some power, which allows the opponent to safely throw more stuff at you.

Through having more health, dealing or receiving damage also feels less rewarding/ important.

I'll address the point of actual spells having less impact than intended ASAP.
Same with an ability to dodge.

I've stickied this thread so I could get some constructive feedback, thanks for creating it.
If anyone wants to express rage/frustration this is not the place, so I'm gonna be deleting all the non-constructive comments from there.

I feel torn about the new update. I can appreciate the fact that with more health to play around with it gives more freedom in spell design and balancing, however I too feel that landing a spell just doesn't seem to have much of an effect on the opponent's healthbar. I've seen several games where 2 melee heroes just go up to each other and start spamming basic attacks, and using their abilities whenever they go of cooldown. It kinda lowers the skill-ceiling by a lot.

I guess I just liked the formula of the old CIA, where spells had a big effect and the HP-pool was low, so the game was short, intense and with high stakes. Maybe playing around with damage numbers and cd's of basic attacks will salvage some of that feeling, but I will just have to wait for an update to really know.

In free for all with 6 players (my first game), it was really chaotic with all spells and autoattacks flying around, which led to me being quite frustrated.
In 1v1 ranked however this chaos became manageable and I enjoyed it alot more.
The new hero mechanics are really nice as well, but I'm not sure about drow rangers q, since she gets 3 dashes in total with this change.
Also legion commanders shield is really clunky since it is targeted now.

Gonna address LC shield targeting today, I'll try to make it apply to yourself if no target is selected.
There are some quite rough edges, it's impossible for me to release a polished product without a dozen of testers at hand.

TL;DR: The road to hell is paved with good intentions, i.e. it's bad.

There are a lot of really neat new features. The way abilities detect holes, the way the edge of the map works, it's a much crisper experience, and feels more polished.
The problem is that it's no longer the same game. The introduction of 20/24 hp (which do not have "blocks") removed the transparency and simplicity of the game. CIA was my favorite game for so long, I spent months trying to convince friends to start playing, and they were hooked for its simplicity. It was super easy to get in to, and investing time resulted in skill, which resulted in more fun and more options!

I like the idea of basic attacks; they do add something interesting, and makes the game more "quick" - the problem is that the "balance" to those basic attacks is more health points which makes the game a grindfest.

What the old game lacked was polishing, balancing, heroes and, arguably, variety. The polishing was added thsi patch, and the balancing was... sort of added. The hero-pool is reduced, and the variety is nullified with basic attacks that require nothing more than a left-click.

The whole agenda is based on my opinion that the previous iteration was "shallow" and in a way "solved", especially on a higher level of play.

This update does reduce simplicity and the streamlined gameplay design which I tried to achieve in the original release. However this was the same design which made the balancing a nightmare, especially with more and more heroes being added. I've seen players leave after getting stunned once and get demolished in the next second, all happening in the first 10-15 seconds of the round.

What I didn't say is that I was always trying to find a way for basic attacks of sorts to get in the game, I always disliked the 'void' which you had when your other abilities were on cooldown, often heroes were just running face to face in circles having nothing to do. I also really dislike how some of the heroes never use their seemingly main weapons, but that's probably minor.

What I also did not mention is that I first considered 3x health increase before I started implementing basic attacks, just to balance some things out. Any hero concept with more than 2 damaging abilities was pretty much doomed before.

Also try to consider this: every hero HAD to have a spammable ability in previous version, which could not be mechanically intensive and had to deal damage and in the end I had only 3 real ability slots to play with which is extremely limited, now I've moved most of these things into a separate slot and can finally consider interesting stuff.

I also heavily agree on the HP-bar point, I hate the way it is right now and it might seem like a minor visual fidelity thing, but it's not. The problem is that this thing is HEAVILY hardcoded aka we have no way to alter it and changing player-local hp-bar settings persists when you end playing the game, not good. The only solution is to hide health bars completely and draw your own but there are serious issues with projecting such thing on a screen in a good way, I've spent a fair amount of time tinkering with it but to no avail yet.

I hope I will be able to address the grindfest issue in the next update. Hero pool is obviously gonna grow back and then further.

Thank you for your post.

I think the patch is kinda bad, but it is far from being completely lost. Just needs some balance changes to have back the old CIA feel. I am not really sure if there needs to be max HP difference between ranged and melee heroes though. In my mind 20 hp on all heroes would work fine too.

My main issues with the patch is that all of hero DPS was switched from high burst attacks with medium ~2-3 sec CDs to miniscule sneezes with 0.5 sec CDs. For PA this was an excellent change and has turned the hero to way better direction. But because there is no way to burst down heroes real quick, heroes like Storm get to the lategame without any trouble to do so because every hero is equipped with a peashooter missiles that can be avoided with his 0 cd mobility skill.

With 25 HP pool we can finally have proper DOT heroes implemented someday, besides QoP. Or a ranged hero with lots of spammable projectiles, but I don't think not even half of the old heroes should have their skills the way they are now.

By the way how are projectile counters going to work in 2.0? I haven't really noticed that much of those because there have been so many projectiles flying around. Projectile countering with melees and own projectiles have been one of the coolest elements of CIA.

In general I feel like complete projectile countering mechanics is impossible to achieve with projectiles having very different power levels, but I was considering having attack projectiles destroy each other and attacks destroy attack projectiles, how do you feel about that?

Right now attacks are probably too much of a powerhouse and I'm adjusting this shortly.

Proper DOT/HOT is pretty exciting to have, in fact sniper/jugg Q, jugg W are another examples where that kind of stuff works.

Originally posted by vocal:

For PA this was an excellent change and has turned the hero to way better direction.

I don't like how extremely fast the glaive flies out and changes direction, it doesn't feel like a boomerang anymore, but instead like a yoyo with an invisible string. Also I liked keeping the glaive in the air to gain momentum and range, but that's impossible now.

To me it feels like the previous way of the glaive worked was way too gimmicky and pretty much impossible to intelligently control.

Originally posted by Mahou Shoujo:

To me it feels like the previous way of the glaive worked was way too gimmicky and pretty much impossible to intelligently control.

Maybe it was just me, but I loved throwing the glaive backwards, then running ahead and flinging it to the other side through a jump to the side. In good games with her it felt like being a dancer when controlling the glaive.

Hey there, thanks for the map and your efforts. While I personally dislike the new version I hope that with later updates it might grow on me. I've read that forking your project is fine as long as you get proper credit, can you confirm that?

Yes, it's fine. Though if your version gets dedicated servers please refrain from sending stats to my server.

I have loved the simplicity of the previous version. I loved how it was about carefull planning of your cooldowns and strategy instead of button smashing, which would get you killed very fast. It was something new and different. Now all I can see is a new moba/battlerite clone. Maybe I should not care so much and find myself and my girlfriend a new similiar game... :/