Uncapped Games showed off gameplay for Battle Aces, its action real-time strategy (RTS) game for PC and is launching a new closed beta test.
The company’s ambition is to unlock the core fun of RTS games for a wider audience. I got a chance to play against AI opponents in a preview this week. A larger but still closed beta test starts on November 7.
Uncapped Games’ goal is creating a design that’s truly easy-to-learn (and difficult-to-master) for any player, even in something as complicated as pitting one high-tech army against another army. A team of around 40 people has been working for about 3.5 years since 2021 on the game, said David Kim, the senior game director at Uncapped Games, in an interview with GamesBeat.
The sci-fi setting
The game depicts the future of warfare in the 26th century as humanity experiences strife amongst the planets in a desperate struggle for limited space and resources. High-tech drones controlled by mercenary commanders, or Battle Aces, fight explosive, large-scale battles in the front lines of this war.
Battle Aces sets itself apart from traditional RTS games, by allowing players to choose their army composition and customize their play style through Unit Decks. With over 50 units to choose from at launch, Battle Aces offers an immense variety of potential in-game matchups, and near-limitless strategic potential that begins before a match even starts.
In-game, Battle Aces delivers a combination of design innovations such as automated resource gathering, instant unit-spawning, and preset expansions that keep players focused on the fun of controlling and maneuvering massive armies in battle, even as they manage the moment-to-moment strategic decision making of when to expand to new bases, and when to tech for more powerful units.
User interface innovations allow players to quickly swap between unit production and army control on-the-fly, without the need to look at home base or manage production facilities. The combination of design and UI elements makes it easier than ever to build and reinforce armies and keep attention on managing the intense battles that are concentrated in each of Battle Aces 1v1 or 2v2 matches.
With matches limited to 10 minutes, players can complete a series of satisfying battles even over a short amount of time, with the ability to swap Unit Decks to adjust strategy and play style in between each match. With the innovative control options available, Battle Aces is a strategy game that MOBA players and strategy game curious players can all enjoy together, including old school genre stalwarts looking for the next frontier of RTS with high skill expression, the company said.
Previously, the company did a closed beta test a few weeks after the time of its unveiling at the Summer Game Fest last June.
This time, the beta will add four big units to the mix of possible units in a given deck. Kim hopes that with every new season, there will be new units arriving that can change the game and the strategies that good players embrace. Players will also be able to customize how their characters and their units look via cosmetics.
There’s a tutorial that will help players learn how to fight against AI one-on-one, but the mode that will be playable beyond the tutorial will include two human players against the AI. There is will also be one human against one human (1v1) and 2v2.
The full game is expected to debut in 2025.
The preview experience
I only had a short time to spare for the playtest, but I saw enough to see that the AI (in a one vs. AI match) was pretty good at countering my choice of units. I also saw that an overwhelming number of units could take out my piecemeal forces which I was building too slowly. After that experience, I interviewed Kim.
Kim worked on StarCraft II for almost a decade while he was at Blizzard Entertainment. I interviewed him about how he designed the new game. The startup gathered a lot of real-time strategy experts from the industry to design the right game and bring RTS into the modern world. The team has grown to 40 people.
During the StarCraft II days, Kim was a skillful player and his colleagues would always ask him how to improve their skill level. Kim almost always told them to build more workers, focusing on it every 30 seconds or so as if they had an internal clock to remind them. But that part wasn’t fun.
The fun lay in the battles happening in the middle of the map where you could watch the action and see whose units had the upper hand. So Kim and the team focused on designing a game where you didn’t have to do the boring stuff like focusing only on building units.
“For Battle Aces, our main goal is we are focusing on just the fun part, amplifying the fun parts,” Kim said. “You can focus on just the strategizing and decision making as the army commander. That’s the type of fantasy that we’re trying to fulfill.”
On top of that, they built a game where strategy matters, where you can counter the units that the enemy is building with the right mix of units.
“We want to bring back strategic decision making,” Kim said.
And Kim said the team simplified the strategy so that you could tell how to visually counter enemies. If there are big units being sent against your small units, you counter them with anti-big units. If there are small units
Unit variety
In each season, Kim wants to add brand new units that can result in new strategies and brand new ways to play.
In the strategic part, players can reduce the element of surprise. They can use the “intelligence bar” to review what kind of deck the enemy has brought in and what they are building at any given time. If they are building one type of unit, you will succeed if you build a unit that is a perfect counter to that unit. When you mouse over one of the enemy units, you’ll see quickly what you need to build to fight it.
“This is very different from traditional RTS games, as we try to reveal as much information as possible so the players can make the right decision,” Kim said.
Some games reward randomness, enabling weaker players to beat better players, like in a game like Hearthstone where you never know what cards you will get. But Kim said that a game like StarCraft II was more based on skill. The goal, he said, is to find a happy medium in between random and skill.
More time for strategic thinking
Asked about strategic possibilities, Kim said players will have to make a few major decisions. They will have to decide how many resources to acquire by sending units after resource spots on the map. That means they will have to take and hold these spots against enemy attacks. If you can hold these resource spots, you’ll have more workers automatically built and will be able to produce more units. That new base will automatically build units and you just have to defend it properly.
They will also have to decide which units to build, with the knowledge of what kind of units the enemy is building. If you build the right units in a kind of rock-paper-scissors strategy, your units will beat the enemy’s units. All the while, the players has to keep an eye on the income level and whether or not they can afford to spend on certain strategies.
In all of the decisions, there is a resource factor, a time investment factor, and a kind of attention factor. One base is easier to manage and defend than two, but two will give you more units so you can go on the offensive. The player has to decide if they have enough time to build out their army as planned before the enemy builds out a better army.
“It’s not about who has more units at a given fight,” Kim said. “It’s really about who has the right mix.”
In the past, as a high-level player, Kim said he could not afford to look at a fight. He had to be so busy managing workers and building more of them.
“Now I’m freed up to not only look at the fight, but throw moves that I could never do in something like StarCraft,” he said. “Like, I’m going to attack two locations at the same time, and then I’m going to control both armies at the same time. This is something that I could never dream of doing, but now I can.”
As for flying units, it’s good to build them to take out big units that are more like melee fighters. But those flying units can be taking down by shooting units. So no units are invulnerable.
The overall pattern is that small units can counter anti-big units. The anti-big units can counter the big units. The big units can counter splash units (like artillery), and splash units can counter small units. It’s like a big square in that sense.
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