Curent Balance is too game-ender-y; UBER, how do you propose to support the famed week-long PA match

just turn this whole thing into full rts imperium galactica 2 already ...

Intel i9-10000k inbound. Give pa like 2 years for tech to catch up with the game and I bet some amazing things will start.

I think longer games could also be achieved by joining games in progress and hot-dropping your commander close to your allied base or uncontested territory. This would of course require dynamic generation of landing zones and team selection before landing.

Too spammable? You can't say that until after it's created and balanced.

The Astraeus wouldn't be redundant. It'd be used a lot less, but not redundant. The Astraeus is a multi-trip unit. Drop pods are a single trip. Big difference, two different purposes.

What's the point of asteroid belts? To give us a lot of smashable planets. They would behave very differently than what we have right now as it would give us a lot of orbital bodies to smash, making smashes somewhat commonplace, possibly even happing multiple times in a match.

Right now we'll maybe have one or three smashable planets. That causes a lot of issues for really large multi-planet matches and that problem will only get worse when we can start having 40 man games.

Not gonna lie, I'm damn sure they said things about week-long games. I remember for sure at least once, if not multiple times.

Now, whether that's changed at all remains to be seen. If they implement some type of 'join shared team game while game is running' function, then it's theoretically possible to have a 1week long game, and the statement I remember would technically be fulfilled? I guess.

of course not but this is my specualtavie impression of that

the fact alone that it gets used a lot "less" would make me wonder why i should use it EVER ...
to be frank i rarely, VERY rarely see one austreus be used for multiple travels ...
in that case pods would be far more usefull for any task other than the commander being capable of orbital travel imo ... yet again why have pods when we could have a unitcannon doing basicly the same ... it would be more macrofriendly ...

so is it a belt with finite or infinite smashable asteroids?
if it were finite other than performance reasons i don´t see why you couldn´t just go and built a number of tiny planetoids on the same orbit to do the same ...
if it were infinite ... not realy sure weither or not i would like that ... because with infinite asteroids there would be almost no risk for the attacker to lose territory or mexxes ...

That was about multilayer galactic war, they didn't mean one long game, they meant a week long series of games.

I don't know what bizarro world week-long matches were proposed on.

More suitably epic match lengths, however, do hinge on better invasion tools; drop pods have been vetoed in the past because they hide the units inside, which is just fine and dandy to anyone not from Uber.

"We cannot do transports which hide the transported units because of WYSIWYG - oh and we can't do transports which show the transported units because they are too time-costly to code"
But one of the two has to be done, Uber.
Maybe @jables could provide some information about what is planned on this front?

I'm.. pretty sure it was said 'the same game' but I could be remembering it wrong. I don't remember where I saw it, though, and without the ability to join into 'currently running game', then it's really impossible either way.

wouldn´t that rule out the unitcannon too then? because either they would have to use pods or they would have the units be massed toghether into a fancy cubething to which you wouldn´t either be able to see what gets thrown at you or what you throw at others ...
personaly i don´t think wysiwyg would neccesarily aply to droppods/unitcannon ... reason is unlike transports you wouldn´t be able to control them inbetween transfers anyway yet you would still know what is in the pods through strategic icons ... same could be applied to transports but the thing with transports is the time of touchdown and units disembarking from the transport which uber wants to show ... even CnC transports kind of did that ...

As long as there are ways to defend against it, it should be fine

100 droppods vanguardcombo midbase ... in that case they would have to be targetable by EVERYTHING antiorbital, antiair and antiground close before touchdown ... though the same would have to aply to the unitcannon aswell anyway ...

To be fair, this is (theoretically) possible now with mass Astreus drops, but most players don't know how to use the area commands involved. Those that do know are aware it's preposterously suicidal to be paying 600 per unit moved, as well as tying up orbital production that long, because every single drop can be shot down by umbrellas and anti-air in the interim.

But why would drop pods or the Unit Cannon be desirable, then, if they can be countered by the same means? Because you don't have to fiddle with 500 single-unit transports to do it. Same reason the teleporter is usable, even if it sometimes just leads to a fast way to get all your units killed.

the keyword is macroability ... transports are most usefull with automated transportroutes and assisting factories ... this is not yet in ... current unittransfers are to microheavy and as such few people realy bother or have the reactiontime to do so ...

You say "yet" like it's an eventual feature.

Maybe it's because I never played SupCom, but the whole "assist-ferry" thing doesn't appeal to me... however, Teleporters as they exist now are a fantastic example of an "automated" transport, in that you just point your factories at it and the rest takes care of itself. A Unit Cannon would be desirable if it had a similar ease of use.

that is the point with both unitcannon and transports
and believe you will find it comfortable to use ...

So we shouldn't add a new awesome unit because it'll make a mediocre unit obsolete?

There are lots of balance issues with the Astraeus. Its ability to be re-useable and multi-trip has caused lots of problems in the past.

If the Astraeus is a mediocre unit, then we shouldn't not add a new unit because of the mediocre one.

There's also plenty of balance options we could do. Make the drop pods travel real slowly between planets while the Astraeus moves quickly.

The unit cannon does not do the same thing. Not in the slightest. The unit cannon, from what Uber has told us in the past, can only be placed on small planets and can only fire units to planets that share orbits. It also looks like the unit cannon will only be able to fire bots. I don't know about you, but I'm not excited about using the crap Dox for invasions. It simply cannot square up against an army or defensive line.

The unit cannon is also multi-use, and fires unites in a stream. So units arrive one by one rather than all at once.

Drop pods can move any unit they want and can go from any planet to any planet and are one time use.

Drop pods and the unit cannon are drastically different.

As for the asteroid belt, it's debatable what it'll be. Most likely it'll have infinite smashable asteroids.

You don't see why we can't just create a bunch of planets? Go do that. Setup a system with four or five large planets and then 20-50 asteroids and get back to me what that does to your computer's performance. An asteroid belt would be mostly an artistic rendering and the asteroids wouldn't be loaded in like the current planets until you go and colonize them. This'll allow us to have tons of smashable bodies without the performance drain.

Asteroid belts will be drastically different than just putting in a bunch of planets for both performance and gameplay.

My guess is that week long games would have been the multiplayer galactic war... it seems the only feasible way to do it.

Am I the really the only one that can see a working week-long 20v20 in a system with 10 or so planets, asteroid belt, and with a laser that can't just zap every planet once you get it?

Ignoring the fact that laser is nigh auto-win if you build it right now, if the laser only shot once in a while, and asteroid fields being more tactical base strikes more than strategic planet killers (or mobile orbital unit carriers with several unit cannons on each), a 20v20 game with 10 planets could go on for quite a while. Combine that with the ability to join/leave a running game at any time, and you've got yourself a game of epic proportions.

That's definitely possible with PA's engine, something the game could break out and say it CAN do that no other RTS could. Ever. Noone wants that? Seriously? With technology advancing every day, I hope to eventually see this. "A scale like no other" indeed.