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

Honestly, PA has struggled with exactly the same issues as Supcom - how do you design an RTS that is engaging and fun in a 8x8 small map setting AND engaging and fun in an 40x40 setting? Not only that, but if 90% of all your online games are played on tiny maps, should you even bother making it fun on large maps?

I believe they have made it pretty clear that it's the smaller games they are designing for, '1 million unit' and '40 player' claims aside. People keeps saying "You wouldn't want a huge map, because, like, it'd take 20 minutes to drive across the map and that would be boring!" of course it would be - the game isn't designed for that large scale, and so it falls apart. Heck, we all know how damn near impossible it is to have a coherent battle on more than one planet at a time.

Anyways, it doesn't make PA bad that it's like this - but don't expect the game to get 'better' just because we can throw more hardware at it. Maybe if they manage to scrape together enough money to really polish up the concepts they've introduced (orbital, multi-planet, Galactic War, etc) then we'll see an expansion pack that does for PA what FA did for Supcom.

The game plays really well in large systems *if your playing shared teams*

The individual planets themselves aren't massive, but have 5 or 6 spread out, with players spawning on multiple planets, get a few gates up and all of a sudden you have something so much bigger than the single player game

1 million was actually an engine goal, not game play goal!

We did a 40 player match once in beta, it was TONS of fun.

probably by build '80,000'

I don't think you can ignore the fact that the game plays poorly as a single person controlling multiple planets, by waving it off as 'it plays well with lots of players'.

Yes, if you have to worry about 1 planet, it plays fairly well. 2 planets are somewhat manageable even. The game control interfaces fall apart after that though, and it's by design. So more hardware thrown at it doesn't change the fundamental design, ergo, don't expect better gameplay simply because we have better hardware.

PA doesn't address the failings of the previous large scale RTS games, and to be brutally honest, I think Uber bit off more than they could chew by choosing a spherical, multi-planet battlefield. They brought industry veterans, yes, but who was a veteran in spherical planets? Who knew the ins and outs of flowfield pathfinding on a sphere? I'd argue that nobody did, so PA is a tech adventure into new territory, and the money spent up to this point has not (yet) produced a true successor to TA.

My point is, PA tackled some really really new areas in terms of RTS design, and nobody gets it perfect the first time around. So at this time, more hardware isn't going to let us realize the full potential of PA - more development will. I'm hoping that will shape up over the course of the next few months, but it may require a full on 'Version 2.0' like FA was for Supcom.

You are right, that text was from maxcommander here:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...l-of-pa-be-unlocked.64266/page-2#post-1001681
I flattened the quotes a bit, apparently I cut out the wrong quotes brackets.

Why not? GW uses only systems with a planet count between 1-4, with 1-3 being spawnable. With the AI count being 1 at normal, 1-2 at hard level, 2 at relentless and 1-3 in faction leader systems.
With pip & orbital radars you can easily keep an eye on the AI's bases or ip-space. Air force on planetary patrol can counter all AI-level invasions attempts.
That leaves skimish. And if a player chooses a big system without a multi-faction FFA it is his own fault for doing so.

But the same applies in a multi-faction FFA. At some point there will be one player with more than 2 planets fighting another, and the gameplay falls apart. It's like Supcom - you can't argue that it sucks because 81x81km battles are slow and painful, since the game isn't designed for enormous maps.

I'm saying I see that Uber had to make a choice and they picked the scenario that fit their time and budget the best (teeny planets with multiple players), but there is a lot of improvements on the upper scale that still need to be made before it reaches (imho) the same depth and complexity and ease of use as Total Annihilation. I don't blame them for it or claim the current iteration is a failure, I just believe that the full potential of PA won't be unlocked until we see at least another year or two of development and a refinement of concepts like Orbital.

My sincere hope is that they unfold from their current seeming post-release exhaustion and start to bring the community in with proper modding APIs, and we get a thriving community of offline/online players who keep the game alive and kicking until they get to version 2.0.

what.... really? well thats me leaving this thread.

Thaught Orbital wars was pretty cool in fa, must get around to checking out faf dous anyone know if it works ok with steam vertion? ( don't matter if not as i still have my boxed copys....

I see no reason why it shouldn't. Granted, I don't have FAF installed and never played much SupCom 1.

Cool Downloaded Faf the other today and wow, can't believe what I've been missing, Now if only I could figure out how use the map editor...

You must be using some mod for it, I played the vanilla (faf) version today with unit cap set 1000 on 40x map verses 1 a.i. The game slowed down quite a bit and when I checked my cpu usage I saw 1 thread at 95% with the other 11 between 0% and 20%




The second bar is mem usage at around 4gb,whilst overall cpu usage read at 4% at the time of taking the screen shot.

Pa still has 1 thread heavily utilized but lots of other threads show much heavier usage which tell me it's a lot better at multi threading.

Still not up to level of my music software tho which makes much more use of those cpu core's and can use a lot off ram at times...

i have an idea for larger games, what if the unit sizes were to be scaled by half?
would have something of the same affect as in supcom2? maybe?
modders get at it

there is a mod for the multithread on multicore processors, i dont remember the name but its out there, since the game isnt intended on multicore cpus but actually found it easily search for * Core Maximizer *

All that does is reduce the fps in favor of simspeed or the other way around, can't remember.

for me it distributed the threads to all 4 cores, but idk what it do xD

@cola_colin actually already made a mod for that.

I doubt it has any performance implications as long as unit prices stay the same.

pricing would be the same but more metal spots would need to be implemented for a more immerse experience. But idk how they did it on sc2 but it seemed to rum smoothly on huge maps (user made since basic maps were kinda small.

where tell me? Make for an epic scale war

Necromancers!!!