Strife: The Expanse Launch Reception and Brief Meta Analysis

It has been a stressful week on my end anxiously waiting to see what the general reception of the game would be. Overall the game has done better than I anticipated and I am very excited to see you guys/gals slowly acquiring the various achievements set out. Lets take a look at some of the stats so far:

Unit-Normalized Pickrate

Every unit in Strife

The Expanse costs some amount of points (as most of you are aware). This allows stronger units to be less frequent in an army and weaker units to be more represented and fill in some of the ranks. Because of this however a pure pickrate isn't a useful stat, instead you need to see multiply each pick by the number of points they cost so and then divide that value by the total number of points spent. This will let you see what the weighted pickrate of each unit is.

And I've done that

Currently the normalized pickrates are as follows:

• The paladin was corresponded to 16.7% normed pickrate as one of the highest picks. This makes sense as his stats are above average, his point cost is low and his healing is very effective. This lined up as expected, he is a key unit after all.

• The archer had a 14.1% normed pickrate which falls in line with anticipated results. It is a unit that requires thought and a team to be built around and played around. The 2% pickrate is on the level of noise anyway.

• The Assassin had a 19.2% normed pickrate which makes total sense in my mind. The assassin I still suspect is overtuned for it's point cost, given that it can one shot most squishies with the defence modifier the special adds (see manual). However I'm going to wait and see before nerfing or buffing it.

• The larvling as expected has a low normed pickrate of 11%. Its stats are underwhelming and its special is meme-strat on most maps. I'm unsuprised with this result. I do want to look into ways to improve it without taking away its identity going forward.

• The flame wyvern has a suprisingly high normed pickrate of 18.2%. In hindsight this makes sense as statistically it is one of the strongest unit on paper, as well as being a necessity in 4 player matches or CTF. Also its a dragon, who isn't going to pick the dragon?

• The one that surprised me most is the Shaman with a 7.2% normed pickrate. Honestly I think players are sleeping on this unit. The defence debuff is HUGE on enemy tank units. The burst healing is also insane if your team is comprised of tanks themselves.

• The Abomination had a 13.4% normed pickrate. This is a bit lower than what I expected as the unit can really carry your team if its passive goes off on a few larvlings early game. However it is the last unit in the list, and it is a bit harder to work into a strategy.

Future Development Plans

Currently at the moment I'm taking a step back, waiting for feedback and trying to ensure the launch continues to go smoothly. I'm also recovering from the extremely traumatic event of launching your game on Steam and curling into a ball of stress waiting to see if people like it or hate it. So far so good. If you are having issues please let me know in the community section! Your feedback means a lot.

Depending how the continued launch goes I plan on evaluating copies get sold and decide from there the next plan. Depending on financial success I have different ideas in mind for continued development, especially including new units (Assets are expensive!). The possibilities are there as well for different gamemodes (exploding chess version of Strife?) or matchmaking depending on population.

Some ideas for new units I've brainstormed so far is:

• Agro caster unit with a small AoE that increases adjacent units attack permanently by 1.

• A flanking unit that switches places of a unit within range.

• A high risk unit that deals more damage the lower their health is

• A trickster type unit that swaps stats with other units.

• A cleanse-type unit that resets the Stat Block of a target unit (removes all buffs and debuffs).

• Some kind of lightning based mage/caster whos attacks arc between enemies.

That being said, my life is busy, I do not want to make promises I cannot keep, so I will share more info when/if possible updates become more concrete and formed.

Closing

Overall I am very happy with how this release has gone. I want to take this time to, again, thank every one of you for trying out my game. I truly hope you enjoy it, and if not I'd really like to hear things you think would improve your experience. I may not be able to do everything, but I do want to make the game as fun for any customers as possible.