After playing both Aliens and Humans with 4 friends this is some feedback regarding gameplay and the user experience:

Aliens:

RTS -

• The placement of nodes to extend the reach of available building space was frustrating due to the placement of the resource nodes on some maps. The nodes were placed a considerable distance away from the starting location which meant that there was a 20min period of needing to build nodes. The placement of the nodes was too close which resulted in an excessive amount of time spent needing to build one after the other until a cache could be built close to a second resource node.

Increasing the about of available resource nodes would assist with minimising this. Alternatively, reducing the map sizes would assist.

*Provide the Aliens the equally powerful equivalent of the Rocket launcher vehicle. A number of games were won by building mass rocket vehicles and spamming the Aliens at long range. The Alien player was unable to move out from their base due to the limited available resources due to the available placement of resource nodes and suppression.

• The resource trail is fragile and can be stopped easily by the humans. Once the main line of resource nodes and bio caches are found there is no way for the Aliens to recover. Adding the ability for resources to increase over time would help with this.

• Lots of potential for a variety of units. More ranged units or flying units.

Humans -

• Pathfinding for the harvesters are broken. Most games stop in their tracks because harvesters are either stuck on the crystals, continuously reversing into each other or trying to access the same refinery. The only way arounds around this I have found is to have a player drive the harvester all game or try and space out the refineries. While spacing them out works sometimes, they will run into each other or get stuck at some point which requires a few minutes attention to sort out the path.

• Overall the humans are great and fun to play. The ability to upgrade troops with equipment such as grenades, mines or binoculars would provide them more utility.

Overall experience:

• The move indicator and attack indicators need to be more prominent and obvious. Most of the time, to attack a unit, you must click near the attack location or zoom in to select the small maker on the unit. While the attack and move marker is there, it is too small. Scaling this up and confirming an attack command should be obvious and would benefit with an audio prompt of "yes commander" as an example.

• Game Speed: The building speed should be increased as it feels as if it takes 2 - 3 minutes to build a vehicle and to build troops. Age of Empires caps their unit build time at its base level to 21 seconds. This should decrease with upgrades and to allow rebuilding basic units easier. Higher tier units feel that they have the right amount of build time. Decreasing the build time on the starting buildings would assist with early game progression. After a refinery has been built, it can take up to 5min for the harvester to return. This leads to a boring and frustrating experience.

• The varying levels of the maps is a lot of fun and adds to the immersion. Having humans struggle to see Aliens when their line of sight is broken helps balance the game.

• Add the ability to let FPS players to control and commander a group of gifted units. The FPS players grew bored of running out, dying and spawning back. Allowing the commander to gift units to a FPS player can provide the opportunity for FPS to work independently and allow the commander to focus on resources and building units and defence.

• Game progression - The early game should be spend acquiring resources, building troops and light vehicles and starting on upgrading units. A decrease on build time for early game would help accelerate it to the midgame where players have access to second and third tier units. I feel that this issue can be solved by improving the harvesters pathfinding and creating a more stable and efficient resource gathering option for the Aliens.

FPS:

Aliens -

• Aliens feel good but need ranged units early game. While crabs are fast, they are easily countered by light vehicles. The addition of an ability to freely change between units without needing to run up to them would help gameplay.

Humans -

• Adding utility items such as grenades, binoculars, drop ship support, or the ability to command gifted units to move to a location, fire at will, hold position and follow the player would help with the experience. The major complaint from all players that played FPS was that they were to just drive around and shoot.

Overall FPS experience:

• The game needs to be optimized for first person. It may have been an issue with the power of our computers however, the initial experience after spawning was janky, frames dropped considerably. The experience didn't feel smooth, it was if you were playing a test game in unreal 5.

• Additional objectives to complete - The ability to capture secures of the map to build special units would provide benefits to the commander player. This would also provide FPS players a job to move towards to outside of following the commanders markers or driving around.