Savage XR, Savage SR. Whats the difference?

[Moffin Bovin]

Aside from having different graphics and a new engine, whats the difference?

Savage 1 had alot of problems. I played the ♥♥♥♥ out of that game and i loved it, but im wonderng if this new game has all the same issues. some which come to mind are:

Intentional team stacking in public games. When you joined a server you started in spec and then everyone picked what team to join. Most noobs joined humans because to new players the human units seem alot stronger, while the good players waited to see who joined what team and just made sure they joined the same team as other good players. Making games horribly unbalanced games that were only about farming noobs and dicouraging new players from staying.

sacrifice: winning due to a cheap sac rush was basicly how beasts won 9/10 games. It was also super easy to use to troll people by saccing their legos. is this still a thing?

Dependence on the human team commander to be perfect at building placement. I assume that the new engine stops people from climbing up a narrow intersection of 2 buildings. right?

Rediculously OP com buffs that can be set to self buff. All these did was encourage ppl to abuse them for themselves to make their score look good rather than considering what will benefit the team.

Games that stagnate and never end. Beasts move fast and gain early control of the map. Alot of the time if the human team could turtle in and the Beast team couldnt kill them, then it was a slow process for the human team to push back and take out the beasts sublairs and base with slow moving seige that was easy to take out.

Blind gates. Because they were cheap. Sure they made games end, but they were still cheap.

Hitting people through walls and buildings + 360 degree Behe spins. Alot of people talk about how high the skill cap was in savage 1, but there was often no skill required when using a seige weapon to get cheap kills. Mosly though this kind of crap would turn small choke points into areas that were impossible for humans to get through if 1 or 2 noobs camped the area with behemoths.

Theres other stuff, but those are the things that bothered me the most. Are they in this new title?

[Ilsyde]

- Stacking is there as it was in Savage 2. There were a couple of ideas on how to get around it (by player score or predefined race preference)
- Sacrifice runs can still cripple or confine humans, and thanks to the stamina stone you can't stop beasts pouncing toward your buildings/units seconds before they explode. In S2 the unit using sacrifice at least couldn't leap, had less hp and had a lot more visible glow while remaining powerful against expensive units and buildings.
- Humans need to bunker down but beasts have nothing to exploit I'm aware of.
- No self buffs (yet), beast flame aura is incredibly OP against small units.
- Game ends in favour of the least damaged main building when timer hits zero so turtling is the new tactic.
- Gates are hardly used but very powerful still.
- Behemoth still one shots legos, same as in any Savage game but you can't camp or you get shot to pieces. The human siege unit KONG is almost as good at killing preds as it's capable at destroying buildings.

[Moffin Bovin]

Originally posted by NMI:

- Stacking is there as it was in Savage 2. There were a couple of ideas on how to get around it (by player score or predefined race preference)
- Sacrifice runs can still cripple or confine humans, and thanks to the stamina stone you can't stop beasts pouncing toward your buildings/units seconds before they explode. In S2 the unit using sacrifice at least couldn't leap, had less hp and had a lot more visible glow while remaining powerful against expensive units and buildings.
- Humans need to bunker down but beasts have nothing to exploit I'm aware of.
- No self buffs (yet), beast flame aura is incredibly OP against small units.
- Game ends in favour of the least damaged main building when timer hits zero so turtling is the new tactic.
- Gates are hardly used but very powerful still.
- Behemoth still one shots legos, same as in any Savage game but you can't camp or you get shot to pieces. The human siege unit KONG is almost as good at killing preds as it's capable at destroying buildings.

so,
players have a SF rating or something similar?
sac is the same as in savage 1?
buffs are the same, just no self buff?
behemoths can do savage 1 style 360 spins that flatten every unit around them with 1 single attack and attack through buildings and terrain?

[Pneuma]

I agree with pretty much your entire list, and I've brought up those points before infact. Behemoth can not 360 swing anymore thankfully, at least not that I've ever seen yet.

Sac is an issue still, the massive difficulty ramp being human commander is still there, fire buff OP there etc. On that note the problem is from what I've played most vet coms go beast, while new player coms go human. So they constantly keep their pro players buffed all game while the new human coms don't even know what a buff is making it very hard to counter and fight back, especially with no self buffing.

Only stagnent games are when vet coms command again, and bring the same ole tired tactics and rushes from S1, aginst new players and commanders which gives typically the human team no chance at all to fight back. I am a long time vet and I know this game inside and out, and my human win record as of now is within 30%. So yes stacking still happens, and Sac needs to move tiers. This game is slowly turning back into the mag shield tower vs sac rush boring gameplay we had in S1. Humans should NOT be forced into building mag first based on it's dependancy to keep...anything alive. Not even just from sac, hell I even seen tempest beast take down our towers without proper shielding and won. No siege, no sac, just constant tempest.

[Robbo]

The thing is S2games is going to address these issues after more important things are done. I beleive this as they have already gotten rid of power mining and nerfed tempest, flux and some others.

XR devs are too scared to change a thing or powermining would have been removed years ago.

Behemoth is useless right now. Gold is an issue (should just give to players not be a pickup at the very least) and unbalanced teams wiĺl be a thing until they get their rating systems in.

Sac i think is fine for these smaller servers but once servers get bigger will once again become an issue.

Buffs should mostly be replaced with savage 2 buffs imo.

KONG is incredibly op to the point it is hilarious to use it.

[Destro]

I only really played Savage 2 a lot, so this is actually my first time with 'savage'. But, in regards to this list, the biggest 'issue' with the game that stands out to me is turtling. Turrets are simply too good. You can get them early and then they do insane damage that is very hard to dodge. This has lead to stalemates in every match that I've played that isn't stacked. Siege units break stalemates eventually, but the fact that it feels like there is almost you can do solo during the time that a turret is up sucks. What's worse, there are no range restrictions on placing turrets near each other (like Savage 2 did), which means that solo expiditions in the late game become almost impossible. Again, using Savage 2 as an example, at least I could use scout, turn invis, and then place demo mines in the late game to do substantial damage. In this game, it's like 'I just have to wait until my team spawns siege or go siege myself'.

I personally think the game would be greatly improved if garisons/sublairs just had more hp (or armor, whatever) and turrets were nerfed... or just nerf turrets a bit so that small groups can rush them down more effectively. In Savage 2 there were the hell spawn to 'finish games' and 'demo/sac rushes' to end games. The rushes can still be done here, but with the no turret limit, they are generally much harder to pull.

I'm not sure how people feel about turrets, but that's my biggest grievance with the game atm. Hopefully as I get better with the game, I'll find ways to deal with them.

[Robbo]

You can solo a "turret". When there is a shield it is the meta and how the game works, you need to take out shield. Due to small servers this gets harder. Your issues are more to do with endgame and not towers. You don't need to completely ruin the meta and the base building to fix endgame. Some way to disable the shield could work for example. As for humans, well spires are compelely useless and you can easily take them out with a demo run as lego.

Hell spawn was a terrible feature and lowers skill and would absolutely not fit this game. Something endgame could still work though, but rest of the game needs to be fixed first. Savage 2 spawn portals could potentially help for instance.

Stop calling them turrets. And if you have an issue with them stop going near them. They are meant to be taken down with coordinated efforts. Spires can easily drop and need a buff or to simply be cheaper because they are too expensive for something so useless. Map design can also help your issues to allow getting close enough to get a shot on the shield tower.

I agree end game needs to be fixed but I don't agree it should be at the expense of towers. Savage 2 had upkeep which I never liked but maybe something less impactful could be used in a similar way and if requirements not met the shield tower loses power.

I think what I am saying is the issue is bigger than you think. You could remove all towers and by late game on bigger servers still get a stalemate.

[Pyon]

From what I read, they are recreating Savage XR was it was and are then going to build on top of that.

So yeah, all those things you mentioned are there except the bugs with movement in relation to buildings.

Yep, Sac wins 9/10 of games for Beast as long as people know how to use it, but if it didn't, how else do you get through a bunch of shields and mortars?

I would like to see Sac disable leaping like in Savage2. Maybe make it go off twice as fast to compensate for that.
As powerful as Sac is, often the only way it goes off is because you leaped from up a hill and hopped in super fast last moment.
And as powerful as it is, you had no other way to kill that shield tower without it... So nerf shield tower as well?

For Flame Shield, yeah it really should do %-of-max-hp damage to the target, to a maximum of the current damage. So it just doesn't eat up small units casually.
I feel like I really liked the commander abilities in Savage2 more, but eh. At the very least, I want Dispel back, tied to Monastary or something, so I can remove flame shields.

I also feel something has to change with towers, but I'm not sure what.
It mostly just seems that there is an excess of redstone on the maps.
And on one hand you want teams to have enough redstone to make sublairs/garrisons, but not to spam towers, no?
If a team is lucky, they might only make 2-4 sublairs. Otherwise they might need to make 10. That's a 6000-8000 redstone difference, and a deposit is 12000.
Maybe if redstone deposits were 9000 each and Sublairs/Garrisons cost more gold but only like 250 redstone...
At the very least, I like the 60 minute limit and sudden death feature, but something more needs to be done about end game.

I'm no Savage XR expert though. Just basing off my few hours in this game.

[H3027]

SR is based on the latest official S2 Games 2.0e patch for Savage: The Battle for Newerth from January 2004 (they applied already a bunch of massive changes though):

http://savagexr.com/savage-the-battle-for-newerth-download.html


Savage XR is quite similar, but went through over 10 years of community patching, improving and balancing (SEP, SFE, XR). Savage was released with 18 maps and ended up with over 2000 playable maps and docens of game modes (including duel) in Savage XR. Besides many little balancing changes resulting from the experience of over 40 large competitions, Savage XR also features 2 new AI units for the commander and 2 new types of outposts that are disconnected from the base.: http://savagexr.com/human_techtree.html

The Savage XR feature list can be found here: http://savagexr.com/about.html
More information on mods, competitions, combat: http://savagexr.com/gameplay.html

[Pyon]

Thanks for the correction :)