Generals.io – Capture enemy generals to defeat them
generals.io
generals.io
Such a beautiful blend of tactics and strategy. Elegant, simple, and extremely engaging. Makes me think, and keeps me on the edge of my seat.
One suggestion - I think it would be really cool to be able to talk to other players using microphone. Chat doesn't work so well, you can't get too distracted on it, the game is pretty fast paced once you get the hang of it. But it would be really awesome to have a conversation while playing.
Thoughts on strategy so far:
- Sending out small groups of "scouts" at the beginning of the game, finding and capturing others, before they've managed to gain any resources worked really well for me.
- It comes down to finding the opponent's "king", and hiding your own. Once you know his position, defeating him isn't that difficult. Therefore, there's a lot of value in exploring as much territory as possible in the fewest amount of moves.
- And that really reminds me of Go game. You want to find balance between protecting your territory, and exploring. Start by exploring as fast as possible, then - gather resources and build an army. Once you have a sizable army - venture into enemy's territory, and explore as fast as possible, trying to find his king.
The game servers are a bit overloaded right now so the game is running kind of slow, but the congestion should improve soon - thanks for your patience.
If it's not a secret - can you share with us the tech stack behind it?
As a dev myself, I'm wondering what's the tech stack behind it too.
When the game first starts you want to make a straight line with room to grow on one side. Then when you get your first resupply you can expand your territory very quickly. Quickly generating surface area is really important because it gives you more vision and it helps disguise the location of your HQ.
if you have vision you can pay attention to the leaderboard and go for a timing attack when someones army count drops.
In general attacking is kind of bad because the inability to chain commands on offense is a huge disadvantage.
I'd love to play more but this aggravates the shit out of my RSI lol.
A feedback point: while playing, the absence of any kind of animation of fights make me wonder whether there are bugs when playing that lose points, or if someone attacked me without me losing. Something like a blip, with/without noise, when a fight happened might be great. Another one: the stronger the position, the stronger my hue would be great to quickly find big positions on big territories.
(if you didn't see my comment i'm the creator of generals.io)
But it would be great to see the game evolve without fog, once you are killed.
And also (if you dont know what discord is, discord is a website where people can chat live), Join the Diep.io discord made from the moderators of the Diep.io subreddit: https://discordapp.com/invite/YDSF2wD#discordbutton
And please be active on Reddit again.
Do not let Diep.io die.
Also, the screen you show when a match ends seems like a good place to stick another ad.
The biggest problem, I think (not sure) is that queuing is client side so latency matters.
What is the sequencing problem? It's just 4 bits per square (send armies N,S,E,W).
* In the tutorial, if you capture the city before the message about capturing it comes up (which is the most intuitive thing to do), the message just disappears instantly and you don't learn what cities actually do.
* I didn't realize you could queue up WASD moves until like halfway through my first game, and it's pretty essential to good play. Would be nice to put in the tutorial.
Didn't see it in the tutorial either. Here I was thinking there was no advantage to WASD and just spam clicking everywhere :P
The starting position makes the game unbalanced at times. Starting close to a border in a corner is a major advantage. Had one enemy whose base was located inside a area that was only accessible trough a narrow valley. Super easy to defend.
I have a suggestion: What about making it easier to see where your troops are concentrated? Like making the tiles with more troops darker, with a stronger/heatmap colored border, or something.
Also added the remove frame button, that really should be there.
Obviously i tried to maximize ad income, but i did not had that (overlay, to close to button) in mind.
Edit:// Fuck that ad, added social buttons again.
I also whitelist ads on sites i like, not on mine because thats against the adsense rules anyway.
2. It is against the adsense rules to do that and could get me banned
I dont know how others do that, but you are supposed to not create ad traffic on your own account.
Edit:// I realize how stupid this all is. Internet advertisment IS stupid. But it makes me money and keeps me interested making new sites and fixing old sites.
http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simula...
For me, clicking the tritanomaly button doesn't really show a difference, but my friends say it's a drastic difference.
I've lived most of my adult life not knowing. I previously thought there were just a lot of designers that picked poor color palettes. Humorously, I thought they were color blind!
Decided to play a 1 vs 1 anyways. I started out behind as I warmed up to the mechanics, but had a lucky streak into enemy territory and found the opponent general faster than he found mine. Even though my opponent had a larger army by double, my smaller army was able to move faster, and I captured his general when his army was one tile away from mine. Intense!
I want as little downtime as possible in my movement, so being able to use the keyboard to not only move my army after I have selected it, but then keep them selected so I can command them to move again would be great. Use the mouse to jump to a new tile to select it, and then use the keyboard to move it.
Bonus feature! Allow me to give a number to an army (control group), so I can quickly jump between my armies and move them with the keyboard!
Keep it up!
This is the internet, I don't know what I expected.
"Bruno", "Mvlo", "m", "Galactus", "jflorey", "Tobias", "Chef", "Bruno", "Popey", "Mvlo", "m", "Galactus", "jflorey", "Tobias", "Chef"
It's nice that an early army advantage doesn't necessarily translate into victory. Capturing generals changes things, and fighting the wrong war can cripple you.
So if you very quickly press, square 1 to square 2 to square 3 to square 4, the army starting in square 1 will go to 2, then 3, then 4, picking up all extra units along the way.
But, it turns out, I suck at this game against people who know how to play. I can usually come 3rd, but can't seem to do better.
I think I need to be a bit more aggressive in capturing other players, and a bit better at expanding my territory.
But, even though I'm not very good, I really really enjoy this game.
So new players, please do check back when the devs have had a chance to add capacity.
I am not affiliated, I just think it's a fun game.
We're pushing out new changes to generals.io! Check back in a few minutes."
I lost all control about 66% through my game. None of my movements worked with the mouse or the keyboard. I could only watch as others conquered my territory.
One great thing about it is that is very balanced. In my last match (http://generals.io/replays/HkfABJ9Xl, I'm bob, lower right corner), there was a player that had a very easy path to victory. But another player and I made an alliance, and the result changed completely! So very, very fun to play.
In fact, it's very similar to and old X11 game named "XBattle" I used to play. ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/x11/x.org/R5contrib/xbattle-4.0.README
XBattle has many, many parameters you can tune (growth rate of "armies", decay rates, as well as persistent movement on production, etc.) All of these can be combined in different ways to get some really great game variants.
So for xbattle if 100 armies fight the enemies 25 armies the losses are mostly on the 25 army side. Additionally if you attack an enemy from 3 sides simultaneously that's an additional advantage.
With generals.io it's always just even losses on both side, so it's basically about production and finding the queen. Not so much about defense, or more complicated strategies.
Biggest differences are orders don't decay, so you only have to click to change them. Also the weaker size of a battle has more losses. Oh and being attacked from more than one side gives an additional advantage to the attacker.
* Expand as fast as you can! That first resupply is crucial.
* This game rewards early aggression, especially if you've manage to get a big initial resupply.
* Flank! Large armies and particularly cities can be serious threats, but taking them isn't a victory requirement. Maneuver and look for your enemy's capital.
* Ignore AI cities until you're well established.
* Plan command chains so that you can move forces from several cities simultaneously.
Couldn't disagree more. Wait till your second resupply and then take a city. You get double creation everyone else gets in exchange for about 55-60 units. Although, I completely agree with how awesome this game is!
Sometimes I used the first, weaker one as a recon team, so that they give me the king's location before they are slaughtered, and then the second, stronger one comes in from an altogether different route and finishes them.
(I wish there would be a less-laggy version.)
heres a victory by me http://generals.io/replays/ByGnY2tXl
I find that games can easily tilt in your favor if you seek out the king square and sneak a capture.
Well, that's how the real armies work :)
I just had a game vs a stronger opponent, but I kept constantly messing with his narrow "supply lines" in my territory. Too bad he noticed my sneak attempts to get his general while he was busy fixing them.
It adds a lot to the strategy.
http://generals.io/replays/ryYQqycme
My wife was standing over my shoulder asking why I wasn't doing chores, so she motivated me. Also she gave me strategy advice.
To the author - keep up the valiant effort!
It looks pretty cool but I don't have the time to figure out the rules by trial and error.
The numbers are the "population" of the square. If you click a square you can then press WASD to move its population to the adjacent square. If you clicked the square once then you move all but one person, whereas if you clicked it twice before WASD then it displays "50%" and moves half the population.
If the adjacent square has numbers of its own (of a different color) then you're "attacking" that square, and if you have more people than it, then you take it over (but lose people in the process).
Ordinary squares increase population slowly, while "city" squares increase population quickly. So it's to your advantage to try to capture cities since you grow population very fast. But it's also good to spread out and capture lots of undefended ordinary squares, since each of those squares will also contribute to your population (albeit slowly).
The "king" square represents a player. If it's captured that player loses. It also increases population quickly.
Not really. I lost first two games with that logic. The third game I won without conquering any bases in the early game.
When the game starts all players are low on units. It's much better to use that small army you have to capture enemy capital (and get all their squares) or wait for an enemy to capture a city and then take it over.
Next time you suspect it watch the replay and pretend you are the winner. I do wish the replay would allow you to be any team and still have the fog of war.
I have like 30 moves queued, but the other guys gets 10 in the time I get 2.
A few minutes later....
Just played yellow, got down to light green and dark green. (I won.)
Any simple strategies you guys came up with?