...
I made some tests.
A warcraft 3 footman travels an entire screen in 6s at fast game speed (there are slow normal and fast game speeds, but despite the name fast is normally played), Glest units in comparison are very slow and to travel a screen an Initiate uses about 24s. This is the first thing that I noticed, it was a pain to see the units move so slowly. And the units size compared to the screen in Glest and warcraft 3 is almost the same.
Another thing that I tested is the time to kill some type of enemies.
In warcraft 3
1 Footman (not upped) kills 1 Footman (not upped) in 52s
In glest
1 Demon kills 1 Demon in 5s
In warcraft 3
1 Knight (not upped) destroys Town Hall (not upped) in 2:16
In glest
1 Behemoth destroys mage tower in 20s
So the glest unts are 2.5x times slower moving and 10x times as fast to kill the enemies compared to warcraft 3 (it's only a rough extimation). So it's almost impossible to micromanage units (they die very fast and move slowly).
Another thing that I did not understand is that I can make all the Initiates that I like and use them to mine gold (correct me if I'm wrong). So why should I do a secondary base? If I can just make more Initiates to mine more gold. In warcraft 3 there a limit of 5 workers in the gold mine. If I want more gold per second I need to build another base.
In warcraft 3 every player at some times can decide to build another base. This makes player scout to see if the enemy build other bases or not. And the battles are fought in the strategic points in the map (like bridges). It's vital to expand and to make the enemy not expand.
And the last thing, in warcraft 3 almost every unit has some special ability, some throws nets to entrap enemies, the heroes have all 4 abilities, others heal, others slow enemies, others buff your army, some can hide, others have splash damage, in Glest the units just do damage (just the archmage has splash damage). During the battles in warcraft 3 the most time I use special abilities.
First off, I agree about viewing units. I would like to see the mouse wheel control the zoom and middle-click-drag control the camera angle personally. There are time when one of my units has positioned themselves in a place where I can't quite see them under a tree or in a building or so. Having the "I" hotkey helps with stuff like that, but sometimes I would like to move the camera around and have it stay that way while I play.
I personally like the movement speeds. Initiates are supposed to be slow. In the Four Path Magitech, we're giving the necromancers (a subfaction of magic) an upgrade called "Shroud of Trepidation" that increases initiate's movement, build, production and repair speeds, but makes them mostly useless for combat/defense (reducing their max EP to 17 or so). We don't intend to offer such an upgrade for the nature sub-faction of magic. But again, glest maps have fewer "cells" than most RTSs (spaces where a unit can reside). If we have improved cameras, I think that larger maps with more open spaces will be feasible, although it may require altering the resource count of trees to keep wood balanced.
Some of the trickier aspects of how much time it takes to kill units are survivability of ranged units. The archmage, for instance, can kick your butt pretty fast, but he only has 450 HPs, so he also can die pretty quickly. Increasing the amount of time it takes units to kill each other would throw off the balance for archmages since they are so vulnerable that a quick kill is how they survive.
As for the behemoth quickly destroying a mage tower, keep in mind that the behemoth has impact damage and the mage tower has stone armor, which takes 1.5x normal damage from impact. I do often feel that units die too quickly, especially when you are hoping to level them up, but that may just be from playing MMORPGs too much, wanting to level everything up. I'm getting this a lot from the skeletons in our mod, even though they are supposed to be an improved daemon for melee "distraction" (as Martiño was explaining -- to allow ranged units to attack), but with slightly higher survivability and regeneration so they can get back to full health between battles. Although they have the tendency to die, they can level up quite nicely if they survive long enough.
I strongly agree that more diverse unit capabilities are needed. This is why I started the engine mod I'm doing that adds effects and such. I'm hoping that some of this can eventually get integrated into the mainline. Using this modified engine, we're getting to add lots of fun like Liches that have an attack that slows the enemy movement and does damage over time, but only effects the enemy and a monk who heals almost instantly (for Eps) and also cleanses negative effects. The Lich can also research an ability that allows them to steal the Hps of their targets. But since things die so quickly, it's hard to get the Lich to switch over to the life stealing attack before he dies. I was hoping to eventually address this in the engine by allowing units to switch to a skill that will allow them to survive when they feasible, like an attack that restores their health, but costs more EPs.
That's the cool thing about the Glest engine, it's expandable and there are an increasing number of tech tree projects.
As to the gold mining, the problem you are going to run into is that you run out of gold fast! There is also a limit to the number of workers that can operate effectively in a given area. You get too many, and they will get in eachother's way, or at a minimum, sit around until they get a chance to mine. The Glest Team has made a number of modifications to maps to address issues with resources not scaling well to multiplayer battles and I'm sure that more is coming, especially as more of the tech tree mods get played more online.
Another thing that I agree is needed (somebody else mentioned it) is the ability to create campaigns. From what I understand (and I haven't investigated it much) the main thing that's needed is the ability to add units (including buildings) to a map (I thought I read that on this post). I personally disagree and think that a scenario should define the units, scripts and rules separately from the map.
On the subject of buildings & maps, I find that the placement of buildings is often harmful, like putting energy source between the mage tower and the gold. On some maps, the choice of which slot you use makes a huge difference because of the advantages or disadvantages caused by unit placement (mostly the distance or your HQ to the gold).
