Plasmans Misc Suggestions

[PlasmaDavid]

In no particular order, as I alt-tab whilst playing the pre-release! No idea how much you guys can change the actual gameplay at this point...

1. Tone down the frequency of the Commando voice lines! Whilst it is hilarious and charming, it loses effect when he is yelling something every 3 seconds. Getting a line or two PER LIFE would be plenty!

2. Camera control for units (ie to zoom view in lower and closer behind or further above and behind) is currently bugged with WASD. I suggest changing it to work with the CTRL and SHIFT keys, and also the mouse wheel.

3. The altitude adjust controls for Helis are currently Q and E. CTRL and SHIFT would be more intuitive I feel. Or perhaps CTRL and SPACE.

4. BONUS GAMEPLAY CHANGE - Some turrets are VERY hard to get a multiplier with, such as Lvl 1 Anti-Tank or Lvl 2 Anti-Air. Perhaps giving them a slower combo-decay to offset their slower firing speeds? Or increasing the rate of fire when they get turbo charged.

5. Weapon aim recoil - Any thoughts on adding a mode or toggle where machine guns and the like suffer from a very subtle "kick" that makes the aim vibrate and wander? Just for fun and more of a challenge.

6. ANOTHER BONUS - A disable-the-HUD mode and still play the game live! Or the ability to have a MINIMAL HUD showing a small sized bare minimum of details!. ALSO you could disable the HUD temporarily when the bosses appear for more impact!

7. ANOTHER GAMEPLAY TWEAK - PLEASE increase the power of the Level 1 Anti-Air platforms! They are almost useless at present, and let's face it nothing is cooler than watching a stream of AA fire stitching the skies. As their "bonus ability" you could allow them to level their barrel and fire on ground targets with the power of a Level 2 Machine Gun! I feel that even with more power, their natural "bad aim" would make up for an increase in power. (And no I'm not asking they get a better aim, the very "human" way that the turrets function in TS is what makes it so cool!)

8. CONTROLS - If you guys really want to keep a new control scheme for TS:C, then perhaps offer a preset option for controls like in TS1 on PC?

9. AIM ASSIST - I WANT IT OFF. I WANT IT OFFFFFFFFFFFFFF! No, seriously, give us an option to turn aim assist off. It REALLY messes with the mouse control and ability to aim quickly and precisely.

10. Zoom crosshairs - Changing the "zoomed view" crosshairs from the generic, video-gamey simply black and red affair to something inspired by crosshairs from the real weapons would be fantastic. Imagine an overlay for the AA guns that was the complex AA-sights and surrounding protective plating! Or even something silly and GI Joe styles like it's a novel look-through toy piece "AUTHENTIC ANTI-AIR DESTRUCT-O-VISION!" stickers and such.

11. FORBIDDEN DARK MAGICS REQUEST - Resurrect actor Peter Graves and get him to record the steely narrator voice of a US general to dictate score-tally screen. "Excellent." "Excellent." "Great." "Nice job commander, you brought all our boys home. Dismissed!" See the Nickelodeon cartoon "Angry Beavers Halloween Special - The Day The Earth Got Really Screwed Up" episode for reference. SEND IN MORE PLANES!

12. CAMERA ANGLES - Currently it's "ground level view, mid level isometric" via mouse wheel, then press TAB for "super high birds eye" which can be mouse wheeled to "mid birds eye". Now maybe it's just the resolution or the FOV or something but I'm much less satisfied with the camera angles so far in TS:C. Maybe adding back in the "super high birds eye" as the default third mouse wheel scroll out might help, but for some reason I just want more of horizontal camera in the "mid isometric" view, it feels just a tad too downwards and constrained at the moment.

Possibly having a mid-way viewpoint between "ground level view" and "mid isometric" which is a blend of the two?

13. Can we get a noise to sound whenever a vehicle has recharged to capacity on its pad and is free to use again? Would help a great deal!

14. If you're adding more dialogue to the game, I demand something about the sanctity of our precious fluids to be involved.

15. Why not disable the HUD when you "zoom" on an event, such as watching a bombing run or a boss appears?

16. It seems like the turret voice clips aren't fully in the game yet (or they're bugged) when when they get put in reducing the frequency of the turret dialogue lines would be good. They're charming and funny, but from memory they get said EVERY time the turret reloads, which is way too often!

17. Related to above, the Level 2 Artillery for the USA has a soldier who fires his rifle every time you reload (to the beat of that well known soccer chant) which gets quite annoying if you're controlling the artillery for any length of time!

Lots of love, your undying fan the Plasman

[PlasmaDavid]

Just a grab-bag of suggestions from the very first version of original Toy Soldiers content that has just been released!

(I'm ignoring a LOT of stuff because I'm sure it's very early days for things like rate-of-fire and accuracy on many weapons)

- First off, LOVE the hilariously inappropriate place-holder music in the levels intro I always really liked the silence at the start of TS1 levels. Either there was already some action going on, or it was just an eerie silence with the odd angry shot. Just as the Western Front may have felt before a big attack.

- I think an amazing sound for the artillery call in would honestly just be the continuous sound of the big guns firing. Giving a small taste of the horrors of sustained bombardment would be quite fitting for a WW1 game, as opposed to the action music Cold War used. Especially if you lowered the normal volume whilst it happened, and maybe had some tinnitus briefly afterwards.

- I think a temperature bar for the MGs instead of ammo counter would be better, and be another flavour point making TS1 different from TSCW.

- Seriously loving the more detailed level titles, give a much bigger tinge of history!

- Any chance of letting the player aim machine guns higher? Machine guns were used in WW1 for anti-air very often, and it's even thought an Australian machine gun team downed the Red Baron! Would be nice to be able to use it on planes manually.

- Love the lewis gun on the "commando", though perhaps you will be making him a scruffy looking trench raider instead of a cavalryman in a splendid hat? Then again, it would be amazing if he were the stereotypical pluck-Tommy, and the German commando were a slight parody of the spike-helmeted kraut brute that Allied WW1 propoganda posters often showed. Wait, no I have it! Make the British commando John Bull!

-My preference for the commando would be a bag on his right shoulder that he would pull hand grenades (or bombs) out of and toss. Hand grenades were the biggest killer in trench fighting in the war, much more than bayonettes.

-Also a simply cardboard box would be more fitting than a plastic pack for his call-in animation.

- IF anti-tank is going to be a turret type, it'd be very nice to make the mobile gun-shield enemies quite resistant to normal MG and small mortar fire. This would give anti-armour a chaff-target to be aiming for other than armoured cars.

- A great level 1 anti-tank turret would simply be infantry with a big game rifle, or an AT rifle. Anecdotal stories of German commanders looting mansions for elephant guns when the first tanks were encountered may not have a basis in fact, but they're damn good stories! They'd be a great turret too, two barrels of fun that lose damage and accuracy sharply over great distance.

- I think a great idea for an anti-tank turret would be maybe the firing speed of the TS1 level 2 MG cannon, except with shots like the anti-armour from Cold War. The projectile is fun to use, requires skill for the drop of the projectile and all round feels badass.

- Artillery would be SO much more amazing looking if you could get a flying shrapnel effect happening from artillery explosions. Either just as particle effects or as actual puffs of dirt being created in a radius around the shellburst.

- You could very much have a grenade launcher as part of the level 3 machine gun. A "trench catapult" was a large slingshot made of wood and jelly rubber that was used to hurl hand grenades greater distances than could be hand thrown.

- Alternately a handful of riflemen firing rapidly could be used in lieu of the Russian shotgun level 3 machine gun. The "mad minute" described the British rifleman tactic of multiple men firing as quickly as possible as a unit with bolt action rifles, producing a phenomenal saturation of fire.

- Really hope the crosshairs are changed back to the more simple original TS1 crosshairs.

- Any chance you are going to make artillery slightly inaccurate? Having battlefields with artillery raining destruction is amazing, but the pinpoint accuracy of artillery detracts from the mood. The gameplay would feel better too, since artillery has a massive splash and range, if it had a slight downside to every shot.

- The level 2 and 3 anti tanks are really cool, it's nice to have a "skill" weapon that isn't artillery. Hopefully you're working on giving it an aiming mechanism that is a cross between artillery and machine gun.

- Idea for artillery alt-fire - airburst. The shell detonates with a right click, doing a large splash of machine-gun level damage, great for scything down infantry.

All in all, what made TS1 such an excellent WW1 game is because of the restraint and subtlety it showed. Every WW1 game that I've seen (outside perhaps flight games and of course number-juggling grand strategy games)typically tries to jazz up WW1 or just make it stylish and exciting. Toy Soldiers 1 certainly has lighthearted and exciting moments, such as the bosses and the period music, but overall it preserves the horrible waste of historical WW1 in a very digestible format. I truly hope that the TS:Complete translation keeps with that fantastic tone!