Discussion on how to make PA more tactical

I was thinking what we also need to have more tactics in PA. I have a few suggestions:

Directional damage
There should be a difference in hitting a tank in the back on the side or on the front. This would make flanking maneuvers matter, detach a small force to hit the enemy in the back or the sides and their damage increases. A fast unit with lower damage can kill a slow one with more damage.

Inaccuracy based on speed
Also inaccuracy is great concept IMO should be based if the unit that is firing is moving or not and at what speed. So u have options: the enemy is attacking, do you hold your ground and get more accurate fire but risk being flanked or you keep moving? You are attacking, do you keep your shellers moving with your main force but lose accuracy, or you keep them still, but with that more exposed and losing range.

Heavy units hold the line and are slow, but fast units can position themselves to hit them where they are weak.

Make unit acceleration actually matter

Also i would like to see more play with acceleration and top speed, right now units even heavy ones reach their top speed too fast usually in less then a second. I think that could be a major difference between bots and tanks, as it is in the real world. Legs have very fast acceleration but lower top speeds, wheels are the opposite. This also inserts diversity within the units roster: levelers are just upgrades from BOLOs? Give them different accelerations, top speeds and accuracy and instantly they will fill different roles and feel very different.

How these thing combine

You couple these changes together and we have tactical gameplay become important, it's just not how many units you build but also how you use them. No more death balls, no more sending units to attack and not watching them, no more wining by just outproducing your opponent, no more building just one unit type and getting away with it. We get real high level micro that is fun to watch (not how fast you can click to use a special ability, but how fast you can react to your enemies movements), more diverse battles with a chance for the underdog, scouting becomes real critical, those blips on the radar wont mean as much, units would have much more situational roles in witch they excel.

What do you guys think?

I like it for the most part, except that it might be hard to claim WYSIWYG on the front/rear armor thing for tanks. Maybe a better option would be to have the tank's turret rotation be slower so that they couldn't keep up with certain units if they got close enough.

Well that is how tanks are actually built, the strongest armor is in the front, with weaker armor on the sides and even weaker in the back. So when i see a tank that is what I expect, but maybe i just know too much about tanks and because of that I'm not a good measure for WYSIWYG.

I know what you mean, don't worry! But most people don't expect an RTS game's units to have that much realism.

I find that I am usually already able to get an advantage over my opponent by army positioning:
Clump units together, retreat Tanks versus Dox, make a nice arc (especially at chokepoints!), using a clump of Dox to pick up stragglers/reinforcements, etc.

See also: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/sc2-strategy/187892-positioning-formations-and-tactics
It is written for Starcraft 2, but the principles are universal.

Though maybe at a high level of play (I suck) this is not deep enough to really gain an advantage with? I don't know, I feel people underestimate army positioning.


EDIT: I'm not trying to come of negative though.
Directional damage and inaccuracy while moving are great ideas, but I think that these aspects will be difficult to communicate to the player, as emraldis already said. But I also agree with his idea of making tanks weak to flanking by lowering their turn and turret-turn speed.

I am also very interested to see what happens when the top speed of tanks is increased, while their acceleration is decreased. (I just played a game on a Metal planet, and I feel it took age for my tanks to reach the enemy base.) Then also, as the defending player, you can stall the approach by attacking the tanks with Dox, causing them to slow down. Very interesting indeed!

I like the combination! Then really the tanks become the strong backbone of the army, but are really dependent on the Dox to protect them! It will need a lot of testing to get it right, but I feel there is something beautiful here.

EDIT 2: Another thought I had: If (/when) the balance is adjusted and T2 becomes more common, then also the gameplay will become more tactical with the T2 specialists.

Since I've been playing with the better projectiles mod there seems it would be easy to see your units missing their shots.

I hope you are right about the t2 balance but I'm not getting my hopes up on that.