Annihilation. Not Planetary. Better.

no offence taken ... i´m writing in a lazy way that i´m not intrested of capitalising or propper punctuation ( with exeptionc of abrevations and names )... also i find it amusing how people interprete someones writing ... HEY I AM GONNA SHOUT BECAUSE ALL CAPS EVEN THOUGH I`M JUST WRITING AND YOU CAN`T ACTUALY HEAR ME ... (repeat the sentence reading out but with normal or silent voice if you failed reading with what i would call mindvoice)

the thing with the "..."is that i kinda write in thoughtpieces if you get what i mean ... not the best thing but meh i kinda got used to it over the years on the internet ...

that wasn´t against you it was a explanation of a general rule ...

rule 2: don´t be a **** ...

*time passed...events happened*
Ok. So, yeah. I was right all along.

Planetary annihilation is a half-arsed Total Annihilation with planetary mechanics strapped to it's butt. Then again, what can you expect from a team which made half-assed mix of dota and teamfortress 2 (monday night combat) and which mentality lies in casual mobile market.

http://zero-k.info/
Play zero-k. It's free, and authors did not abandoned it halfway through development (quoting Yahtzee in Yahtzee's cynical voice) "Because making games is hard".

Do you realize there are still like 2 dozen people working on PA? That's probably considerably more full time workers on PA than on zero-k.

"working", more like saving it from community backlash with unit cannon after recent events. Face it - they promised far more than they delivered. And what was delivered, was o.k. at best.

ZK core team is split - half is SY core team which working on springrts engine (8 core devs+4-6 on-again/off-again'ers)+zk core team which is 6 core guys which work on balance and features, 2 artists + any number of contributors who contributed to it in the past. And, unlike full time developers, they work out of passion for the project, which, sometimes, results in quadruple development rates.

Zero-k and springrts in general represent quiet rare occurrence in opensource world- coordinated team with 'alright' level of quality control delivering product which can compete and surpass commercial competitors on market.

That's a "nice" way to ignore any further improvements

Like what? Besides asteroid belts what big feature is missing?

Terrain. Varied, height dependent gameplay. Unit variety is **** as well.

Well that sure makes your previous statement sound hyperbolic.

Were was height dependent gameplay promised?
The "terrain" issue btw is an issue that Uber is well aware of, which is why the are working on the system editor and have delivered a first usable version that allows to make quite interesting maps already.

Erm.. Many if them also worked onTA, and Supcom... as well as CNC...

Just want to point out a big logical falacy here.

Yea right, and many of Westwood developers worked on dune2 yet they still delivered that sack of **** "Emperror: Battle for dune", and many of Rare games developers worked on Banjo Kazooie yet they delivered another sack of **** which was "star fox adventures" , same goes for Bullfrog - all because core game designers left, taking vision of their games with them - case of bullfrog that was Peter Molyneux, in case of Rare that were Stamper brothers.

It's not about which developers worked on specific projects the past, it's about who was the coordinating game designer of all that.

And i bet my *** none of Uber entertainment core developers/designers of PA include Erik Yeo (Westwood, C&C), or Chris Taylor (Cavedog Entertainment, Total Annihilation).

http://allenchou.net/2013/07/bending-solid-geometry-in-planetary-annihilation/

Yeah I know that article. I even know a bit about mapping in PA and how it works and I've played around with that exact function. No idea what you want to suggest with that article really, PA has the functionality promised by that editor and uses it even in random maps.
The current system editor is on track to become a very powerful tool and is already quite good, albeit still needs a bit polish to be more noob friendly I guess.

Let's talk about elephant in the room. Where's campaign? What was the point of hiring original TA narrator if nobody bothered with campaign? And don't call that crap biscuit of disappointment a campaign, because it's not.

a) I do not care about single player at all. Yes that is my personal thing. But it's a thing for me, so don't expect big arguments about the campaign from me.
b) a story driven campaign easily costs millions and therefore was never promised at all. In fact the initial kickstarter campaign clearly stated "No single player beyond skirmish" and the GW stuff was just a strecthgoal. The current GW thingy certainly has issues, but from my perspective all single player stuff in RTS always was rather boring, so I can't really compare xD

A good game is always the product of a team of people working together under certain circumstances. It's never about a single name like that.
I mean how else would you explain SupCom2, which has that name on top of it yet is considered rather bad?

Not to mention that it's rather clear that a game of the complexity of PA cannot be made perfect within just 2 years. It's certainly all about how long Uber will continue to develop on PA, as we've all said since month. Now Uber is working full steam ahead on PA and has shown no sign to stop whatsoever.
So why complain as if the game would not improve anymore? It's certainly improving, as one can see by looking at recent patches.

Nobody asked for a starcraft2 level of AAA campaign. Total annihilation level of campaign would've been nice, and by modern standards that is - render some unit battles with in-game models, hire narrator once more to voice all intermission speeches, and then just design maps and objectives. Shouldn't be that costly.

Also if you think that SP stuff is boring - you missed out all of C&C games. Play some Red alert 2 SP.

I also want a better campaign.

But yeah, at the moment the devs are essentially mp focused as there has been literately no SP development since GW was introduced.

So I wouldn't hold your breath.

That's a daring statement or have you actually done that kind of stuff before?
From what I hear and understand it's not "just design a bit of this and that" more like "have a dozen people work on it for a few month at minimum".
I mean for example before you can design maps you need a map editor. PA got the first version of a usable map editor only after release (as making such an editor alone isn't exactly easy if you want it to work together nicely with the csg stuff. csg is powerful but certainly not the easiest way to do maps) and it's still being worked on. Without such an editor you cannot even design maps. Then you need a scripting system for gameplay logic that is flexible enough to deal with whatever the level designers come up with. Then you also need a way to script those video sequences and then you need to actually build the maps and add the scripts to them. Then you need to playtest the whole thing and debug it. Then you'll also need a lot of 3d and 2d art and you'll need to build UI stuff for the campaign.

... and that's only what I just came up with. I am sure if we were to sit down and actually make a full plan for "let's make a full blown really fun story telling single player campaign" we'd end up with even a longer list of things to do.

There are other kinds of games I like to play in SP, mainly RPG and FPS.

I've never understood the hate PA gets.

I've had a massive amount of fun with every build, even the alpha ones. The only thing that ever sucks is interplanetary combat, and you can easily avoid that with a single planet system.

Spherical maps, by themselves, are one of the coolest strategic elements I can think of for an RTS. By itself, it provides significantly more freedom than any other RTS I've played.

We're being bitterly critical of everything, right? That is what we're doing here?

Please tell that site that they can't design a website