During PAX East the developers of Grey Goo showed us some
gameplay footage. We will not discuss the entire video in this article, but we will take a look at some of the things that particularly caught our attention.
note: click the images to enlarge themThe very first thing we see is that there is a map called
Lost Plains. There is not much to say about this, expect that the background image was also released earlier as a screenshot. The map itself is colorful and it somewhat matches the color scheme of Red Alert 3.
During the gameplay footage, we see the construction system in action on several occasions. For the BETA faction, you select a building and place it on a hub. From there it starts constructing on the spot, slowly increasing the building's HP. The Head Quarters has four connection ports. During the construction period, the buildings can be harassed and are easily killed due to their slowly increasing HP. On top of the building you see a construction timer counting down. The developers told us that small factories can build one unit at a time, where large factories can build three units at a time.
Catalyst fields have different kinds of intensity. On the rich spots, you will gather more catalyst per second than on the lower density spots. This creates some interesting map design options, where the developers can create easy to defend, low wealth spots as well as high wealth, hard to defend fields. That is something we are likely to find in the full game.
Walls can be placed as an entire row of segments, which build at the same time. During the gameplay, some segments are destroyed during construction, but only the attacked segment is destroyed and not the entire row under construction. It is also impossible to move through the wall while it is under construction. BETA units can jump onto the hubs on the walls to lay down fire on the enemy. Walls can be adjusted to create a gate for friendly troops to move through. It is unclear whether you can repair walls and/or buildings.
When a new hub is placed down, you can directly add new buildings to the hub. The hub, however, first needs to be completed before the attached structure starts constructing. It is important to know that you pay for the unit/building during construction: You do
not pay in advance. In the top right corner you can see how your income rate compares to your expenditure. On the top right corner you also see that there is a population limit in place. The current cap is set to 200 units.
As communicated to us earlier, the Human base consists out of one single structure, with everything attached. The BETA player did not attack the Human base, so it is hard to tell how the Human defensive buildings will work during an attack. One funny thing we noticed is that the Human base has two harvesters mining Catalyst, while the BETA has only one harvester. That could be a coincidence or a bug, but it might show us that the armies have different gathering rates.
Return to the Grey Goo Portal
