Initial Thoughts

Gratuitous Tank Battles Beta feedback
1

Hey look! Fresh meat! Proceeds to light a smoke in plain sight

Well anyway, immediately grabbed GTB upon seeing it had released (as beta). Just some very initial first impressions (and a couple bugs).

  1. Attacking is hard. Considerably harder than defending - which I suppose is pretty true to life for the most part. But still. HARD.

  2. The interface is a tad clunky. Maybe it’s just familiarity with the game but GSB seems much more user friendly in that respect - I guess you are still working on it, and it does function well enough.
    But please add filters or categories. Thank you.

  3. One weapon? It certainly simplifies the design process but I always liked being able to stuff more guns onto my GSB designs. Still, there’s plenty of room for fiddling and does encourage one to choose carefully.

  4. Fun overall, just a tad more unintuitive than GSB. I like the more tactical style and the look/sound are both appealing.

Not much more than that as of yet, just first thoughts. Haven’t really gathered my impressions into a coherent whole at the moment.

As for the bugs I’ve noticed so far:

  1. GTB hates having no audio device available. I use kernel streaming with Foobar so if I’m already listening to music when I launch GTB it bombs when it can’t find a sound device.

  2. Crashes on selecting empty designs in battle. Can’t even remember if it’s the supply truck I’d somehow made without being stopped or if it’s the game’s predesigned one.

All for now, tally ho.

2

I’m not sure I agree that attacking is harder. I’m actually starting to find attacking a bit easier than defending in some cases. I think it depends a little on the scenario (level 3 being one where I think the attackers have a bit of an advantage, and level 2 where the defenders have a bit of one). I did, however, initially find attacking more difficult. I think it’s mostly that it’s the most different to other games that I’ve played, and there are some things about it you really need to realise before you start to get good at it.

I also think the one weapon thing is a good idea, because otherwise working out how to deal with units and what they do would be incredibly difficult with so many possible permutations. At least at the moment you can get a basic idea very quickly (it’s a mech with shields and cannons), which allows you to counter it.