In how many years will the true potential of PA be unlocked?

Somewhere in 2006 I believe, a friend of my tried the Supreme Commander beta. He was one of the first guys in our group of friends, that bought the impressive E6600 Dual Core CPU. The beta was hardly playable, and for the guys with single core systems, it was painfull to even try it.

Many years later, in SupCom:FA, the game finally became playable in internetgames with a large amount of players on large maps. The 'epic potential' of SupCom was finally unleashed while still being very playable.

Now we have PA, I have spend time of testing and playing, and the only thing that I can see is a rough diamant with huge potential. However, in the current state the game is nowhere near what it can become one day.

PA is not epic. I'm playing something that sometimes feels like a hardcore RTS, but since I'm playing on small marbles instead of planets, I have a lot of trouble to take this RTS seriously. I need some kind of element that convinces me I'm actually commanding epic armies, tanks or commanders, but hopping from the one marble to the other marble while flooding the marble surface with hundreds of floating units cannot provide me this feeling.

I followed PA development since the beginning, and I did a lot of reading online. Therefore I think I understand Ubers limitations and choices. This game is released by Uber instead of a publisher. That fact alone I find epic! Also the video updates during development were epic! Too bad we don't get to see more of those...

But in the end I'm only interested in this epic RTS game that can entertain me for countless battles, that will suprise my by clever tactics or new strategic discoveries, that makes me calling my friends to join a game at Friday night...

To my opinion, PA has all elements to become that epic RTS game someday. CPU cores will increase in amount, RAM will increase in size. Just like the SupCom beta in 2006, I feel PA has to wait before it becomes interesting. In the meantime, those super-modders out there will add units, factions and mods. With that providing the much needed complexity that PA is missing at the moment. Only tricky part is that somehow Uber needs to find a way to keep working on this game. In other words: to find resources to keep their company running. I hope they come up with a good microtransaction system or something similar. See Path of Exile for example. During all these years that me and my friends played SupCom:FA intensively, we would have paid 50 euros a year with pleasure, even for cosmetic upgrades.

So in how many years will PA get to the point of a true epic RTS? In my view that requires complexity by expanded units/factions and gamemodes, but also huge solar systems with planets so huge they feel like 2D maps when zoomed in and many many players.

Personally I think it will take a year or 5. Hopefully sooner

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pretty-screenshots-page-6-12-08-14.59464/

Pretty epic pics there, but otherwise i think that when we get some better balancing, offline play, released server and polishing it should be most epic, hopefully within a year, i have absolutely no clue.

He means like... When will the games scale be truly HUGE, as maps are actually quite a bit smaller surface area wise compared to Supcom FA maps. Hopefully in a year, two, three, people will have the computers to utilize truly huge systems. Maybe within 10 someone can try out a earth sized map.

I disagree with the point many people already made and you make again about tiny planets:
This is actually a very wise decision both gameplay and engine wise.

• It fits the style of the game
• Huge planets would take huge times to travel (have fun waiting 30 minutes for your army to arrive at the enemy base)
• Huge planets (as in "real scale") would destroy any currently existing personal computer

Well he's a asking when we think it'll be possible to play on huge maps, none of PA's maps come close to the 81x81 maps by surface area if I remember correctly.

I'm not looking for arguments why playing on small planets is a good thing. It provides different play styles that can also be fun, of course I will also give this a try (and probably like it, just as I like 1vs1 games on small maps in SupCom).

This topic is more about when we can expect the real epic size battles. Personally me and my friends love to play large SupCom:FA maps where games can take multiple hours. It is a type of gameplay that I just like and hope to find one day in PA.

Agreed, once computers improve enough this game will be amazing.

40km and 81km map completely broke SupCom's Gameplay. They were gimmicks.

PA actually has a leg up in this department in theory, it can offset the issues faced by Supcom's Largest Maps by using many smaller planets instead of a singular big one. The catch is that you do need to transition between all these smaller "maps" just right or you end up doing more harm than good. Inter-Planetary Mechanics have always been since thier inception a bit of an "Ugly Duckling" as it were, we'll get there in the end but right now it still needs a lot of work.

Long Term Performance in regards to PA hinges on more than just computer tech improving, but many aspects of the game itself need improvement as well.

Mike

Of course it can improve but I feel they've done a nice job. Especially as of late with the RAM usage decrease. I have a terrible computer, 4GB RAM, i3 Quad 2.3GHz and an integrated HD 3000 graphics cip, yet can play the game very nicely.

Though the server load probably still needs quite a bit of optimization.

The point of my post was to point out that Tech issues are not the only thing in the way of PA's improvement, I didn't even say anything specific Tech -wise except right at the end.

Mike

Well I didn't respond to the beginning as there are people bound to disagree anyway, personally I loved 81x81 maps. I even wanted more than that. The game wasn't built for it though, so I understand how it broke some mechanics but it was still very fun.

From what I've seen / heard Uber have developed PA in a pretty forward looking way which is nice. Varrak even mentioned that the *render engine* is decoupled form the rest of the game (so if a newer better API becomes viable it is possible to create a new render system without rewriting the rest of the engine which is clever).

I think part of the issue with server performance stems from the number of games they run per server, the server is multi threaded (1 thread per planet I believe?) which breaks a large system down into a number of smaller games. When playing the PTE with minimal load it's possible to have a massive game with little lag, hopefully down the road we can get some dedicated 'big game' servers up and running that cater to these larger games

I do agree that PA's engine is more forward thinking than most, some of that simply stems from it being made in-house meaning that upgrades/expansions and what not are in theory much more feasible than if using someone else's engine, all that is alongside the obvious planning/foresight.

The thought of servers is an interesting one, We know Uber can host(at great complexity) Local servers, but we don't know much about the performance results, if anything really. Mostly up till now we've assumed that hosting a private server will have a fairly large increase in performance, which is probably still the case but the scope of the actual improvements might not fully match our expectations. Sure Local Private Servers will for sure cut out the Internet funny business that can happen but we don't know how the actual performance will pan out yet.

Mike

I agree that 81x81 maps can be seen as a gimmick. You really need to turn on some crazy mods to make that playable.

But 40x40 maps are very playable, especially with 8 players (or more). These kind of maps have given me, and many others, some of the most compelling RTS experiences ever. Therefore I disagree that 40x40 can be seen as a gimmick. Because of the large size, a whole new layer was added to the gameplay in terms of anticipation, unit use, tech level use, team tactics & strategies, etc. Especially on the FA map 'Shards' I have very very good memories.

give technology 3 to 5 years ... maybe less (is that too optimistic?) when quad+ core and higher ram is more common as it was almost the same hardwarewise back then in 2007 ... and we will be able to play on larger playgrounds ... but that said ... hardwarewise i would argue PA will take a lot more ... as the aformentioned maps might grow bigger to the point where players realy say when planets and systems feel too big ... and of course the modding stuff that comes with it ...
i honestly can see PA growing VERY big ... literally
also let´s not forget how long it took for Supcom to become a propper multiplayer experience ...
this stuff takes time ...

81k maps were only a gimmick because of the game slowdown.

That and uninteresting map designs for them.

The map of Earth was amazing.

That's just because it was earth!!!!!

In 2006, during the SupCom Beta launch, I think a Core2Duo E6600 2.4 GHz with 2x 2GB PC6400 RAM was considered a high end system.

Now 8 years later, a 4.0 GHz (turbo) 6 core CPU (also with a better performance per clocktick) and 16GB RAM are considered a high end system. So in 8 years, we went roughly from 4.8 GHz (2x 2.4) to 24 GHz (6x 4.0), which means it doubled at least twice in CPU capabilities, and from 4 to 16GB RAM means it also doubled twice.

So for 2022 (yeah, time is a bitch), I wouldnt be suprised to see something like 24 core 4 GHz system with 64 GB of RAM. With these kind of numbers in your head (and maybe even higher), I definitely see a high end computer, somewhere between 2014 and 2022, not having any problems with PA on a very epic scale.

I am not so sure about the maps truly being smaller. Sure the surface area in any 'unit' is smaller, but you have to take that in comparision to weapon ranges and unit speeds.
They could have made smaller units, but that only ends up uselessly overloading the server.

As I see it in sup com the huge map's serves one purpose: Giving you time to tech up to Tier 2+3. Because Tier 1+2 was effectively useless (Tier 2 could be better then nothing at least), you pretty much just rush to T3 where you can finally start to build usefull defenses and units.
PA does not need that, as it has only 2 Tiers and Tier 1 is quite usefull already. The pace is a lot faster at the start.

The game is uniquely set up to adapt to future hardware development. From the start it was not desigend for XP and clearly with x64 and Multithreading in mind.
The code unit limit is propably at 2^64 and the player limit at least 2^16

Also mod support was a core idea with this game, especially the idea of server side mods.