Should land factories and units be scaled down?

Um... I thought the whole point was to make the planets seem bigger...

Although we do have a problem right now where if planets game above a certain size, players go for planes only.

Guys, I'm pretty sure its fine the way it is. Bigger planets can affect people's performance, and make games last too long. I like small planets. Not every planet in the universe is huge. Some of them are 20x bigger than your units.

That's exactly the point of this... If units are smaller you don't need as large a planet to get a big planet, you can always scale down planets... That's easy- but you can't always scale up a planet (as it'll use more resources.)

No men, by all imagination that is wrong. By the last discussion on astronomy definition of a planet, it needs to have a bigger radious than 1000 km. I don´t know how can your units be 20 times smaller than the planet. They woud be humongous¡¡

See, the only problem with your scaling mod is that I can't bloody see the units.

That's what icons are for. I removed them in this screenshot to show the size of stuff more clearly.

Man, planets are not small, robots are gigantic. Things just look small, because... perspective.

Go into free camera mode and dive closer to the ground, you will see.

If uber allows to zoom in more with default camera, maybe people would stop complaining.

I still like being able to see the units

Why should we care about the IAU definition of a planet or dwarf planet?
Beside this the IAU definition does not state any radius at all. The only thing that comes close to this is that a planet must be big enough to gain a round shape, but since all planets in PA are round somehow this is fulfilled.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet)

So instead of scaling all models down, it would be sufficient to scale planets up (not a bigger radius, but scale it up numerically)?

https://www.google.fr/search?client...&oe=utf-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=1U-TVL3ZB_DH8gf04ILQBA

I'll just leave this here.

IMO down sizing units mostly reflects the fact that there is currently not much relief on the planets in PA and players cannot use relief to their advantage (high strategic position versus low exposed valley).
I think that rather downsizing the units, the relief should be increased and rendered more useful!

The two parts of this i'm most interested in is reducing overall planet size, increasing performance, and making the features seem bigger without looking stupid. It could draw some more strategic attention to them. I don't dislike the current scale, I just think that a reduction could be very beneficial in some aspects.

Would love more 'intractable' props for planets, like the current plateaus for deserts.

They don't have to be complicated, just a little navigable prop/obstacle for creating choke-points or other interesting terrain.

Like:


Or:



Also +10 for more colours and foliage to bring planets to life.

One more thing, mountain biomes really need to have some more structure to their prop usage rather then being a grey splooge with a single derpy mountain.....not even in the middle.

Mountain biomes need to be more like a maze, and really be structured to block of large portions of their biome odd with rock, leaving a number of paths through the centre, being great choke points.

Like:


That would make planets bad ***.

Having hills and valleys and things being important strategic features is great, especially if the humble Pelter and not-so-humble Holkins becomes longer-ranged when atop a hill. Some hills might be too steep for tanks, but Bots would be able to handle scaling them.

Totally impassable mountains/crevasses should still be a thing too; but at the same time, TA players will remember spiders and crawling bomb attacks across such terrain features in that older game.

This will make the huge craters from planetary collisions much more unique and awe-inspiring of battlefields (once they work properly!)

So this whole discussion is based around people essentially wanting less detailed figures and planets so that you can have bigger planets without having performance issues?

Why can't you just lower the graphics settings to achieve this?

What? How would we have less detailed figures?The units would be a scaled down, they'd still be just as many polys.

I can't play a system more than 800 without getting terrible fps, lowest graphics. Besides why reduce graphics when you can increase perf and scale?

Not less detailed models, but less detailed planets. And yes the argument goes like this: By shrinking models by factor x, planets "feels" larger by factor x, so you can reduce the radius by factor x and get the same "feeling" as before.

I would suspect that the planet meshes in PA are somewhere between 10K and 100K triangles, so there is some performance to gain from this (definitely less then factor 1/x, because unit models will stay at the same complexity). But it isn't only graphics, there a data structures for path finding and probably some potential fields for AI and what not, by shrinking the models you basically decrease the "resolution" of those as well. This will lead to a reduced memory footprint but may cause issues due to the lower resolution (like pathing problems, etc.).

To me it's actually not as simple as that. I don't think we need much different game pace. The speed is fine. Units just look out of place. Too big visually. No changes to the unit movement speeds and similar are necessary imho.