OK, first off, some things that I thought were really great about vamp blood
1.) invulnerable feeding owl is a great idea. It will keep humans from fighting (i think) about feeding the vamp, because you actually have a unit specifically designed for it.
2.) individual stat upgrades for the slayers and workers is a pretty good idea. I'm not sure how many people will waste wood on the mana upgrades for their slayers, though. The ideal situation is that every upgrade would be something useful.
3.) researchable abilities for humans to give them temporary invulnerability and mapwide teleport to other people's bases. GREAT ideas.
4.) Cost of big gold mine is 40000, just about right. In beast, gold wells cost 100000 lumber, which is just a bit too much.
5.) smaller buildings for smaller bases. this is a great improvement over other vampirism games i've played, which just left the size of buildings as they were, which often made base planning EXTREMELY difficult.
6.) THE MAP THE MAP THE MAP. Brilliant map design, so many good hiding places, and humans could set up just about anywhere. Great improvement over other vampirism games because it gives the humans so many options.
7.) moon wells are a great idea. a slow firing stun tower is brilliant. great job.
8.) WISP WORKERS. Great, amazing, legendary. When I saw wisp workers, I jumped for joy. they will be a crowd favorite in no time.
9.) recipes for vamp are a good idea. I like the auras and the swords and stuff, although they may be over-powered.
NOW... i've given some praise, and now I'm going to state some areas that need improvement if you are going to have a sucessful version of vampirism here
1.) Fatass graves don't have a healing aura. In other versions, the point of the healing aura wall is to counteract graves. In blood, vamps can easily grave humans to death while they try to repair their walls.
2.) in the process of building up gold mines, I came to the point where I was switching out my murloc workers for super uber workers. Murloc workers are the only unit in that stage of the game that can build gold mines, and once you switch them out, you are left without any way to expand your gold base until you get a citadel of faith. (suggestion for this problem: allow the militia to build gold mines like in vamp beast, and get rid of the militia's ability to build feed boxes. you have an owl for that). Also, you super tower builder should be able to build big gold mines instead of regular. by that point, you don't even want to waste the time on regular gold mines because they just don't give enough gold.
3.) Citadel of faith does not provide food for your population. or rather, it doesn't provide enough. In vamp best, upgrading to a citadel of faith allows you to destroy your tents because it maxes your population limit anyway. There should be something similar in blood, only maybe with the "heart of base" building. Once you build it, you should be able to destroy all your tents in order to make more room in your base.
4.) the final workers are lame, and don't harvest lumber quickly enough, even with the upgrade. also, they are a step down from the wisp workers, because they human player goes back to a reliance on lumber houses as a depot for wood. My suggestion is that you switch the wisp workers with the deforestation spawns, making wisps the highest worker.
5.) which leads into my next point: not enough endgame content for humans. or vamps I guess, but I didn't play vamp. There was a point when I just had to step back and say "now what?" I had lots of gold, and there was nothing to spend it on (except the vamp items for my slayer. I bought auras, the swords, combined them all, and then I killed the vamp in 10 seconds). I had lots of wood, and nothing to spend it on except more gold. there will come a point in the game when the vamp caps out to be much stronger than the humans. which leads me to my next point:
6.) for balance between vamp and human, the humans probably need 2 things: stronger towers and faster level ups.
7.) stronger towers means this: there wasn't much room to grow for any of the towers. you got to a point where they were just as strong as they were going to get, and you would have to build 50 of them to even dent the vamp. and he could destroy them with 1 rain of inferno.
8.) by faster level ups I mean this: if humans can't upgrade their walls faster, then there will never really be any hope for them. humans just don't get to a higher level fast enough to stop strong or smart vamps... even a pro human would never be able to build a real base untill the 15 minute mark. Any wood is spent to buy goldmines, which in turn is spent to get better workers to get wood faster, but humans just cannot collect resources fast enough. Even with the ability to buy 1 gold, its lumber harvesting that probably needs a boost in the early game.
9.) you have the ability to trade lumber for gold, but no way to trade gold for lumber.
10.) ghoul worker seems forced and kind of unnecessary. maybe you could make it slightly better, but make requirements for building it (like: you must have a certain type of tech building or tower, or maybe you have to research production)
11.) Slayers need work. best had hammers with which you could customize your slayer, but in blood all I can find to make your slayer powerful is to buy stats tomes and items at the vamp shops. maybe come up with a novel way to customize your slayer. Also, the superslayer has a enormous food cost. so I never tried him out... lumber harvesting was more important.
12.) my last and most important criticism is this: the game just doesn't move fast enough. if you don't add a faster mode, or just make the game faster, then vamp blood will go the way of vamp fire, and we don't want that. I want vamp blood to be the next vamp beast ("poular and dangerously fun"), but people aren't going to sit around playing 1 game for 3 hours because it takes that long to win. I feel like the main problem with vamp fire is that it is both very long and very easy for humans to win. I don't want to see vamp blood like that.
So, I gave some criticisms of the game, which you can take or leave. but I only put them out there because there was plenty that I really liked about vamp blood,a nd I want to see it succeed. peace.
-basewood220
Subject: Praise and Criticism 
Sun May 11, 2008 7:54 pm
