Uber pls: in-game clan controls

In my upcoming review of PA I describe the game as "the Counter-Strike of RTSes", and one of the points I make is that it is far less important to have good communication and thought-out strategy in Counter-Strike compared to PA, because CS's tactical and strategic depth are laughable compared to PA's.

So please, Uber. I am tired of having to play 4v6s against randoms and even give them eco boosts to get a decent challenge in the MP lobby, while simultaneously being clobbered under 10 minutes by the major clans which vacuum up all the good players in the tournaments (lookin' at you RLM and BRN!) If you put in some simple clan controls in the game, we'll get dozens of new clans within mere HOURS, and that will encourage people to get on voice chat, and that will mean my friends and I will finally get some competition at our intermediate level in large team games (a no-man's land that we presently occupy alone precisely because there aren't enough clans).

I vote for clan controls to jump right to the top of Uber's priorities (and tournament announcements on the main menu to jump to number 2).

Full disclosure: I am butthurt that Team Burning took sechastain from us, a gold-platinum player who, if BRN hadn't invited him to join them a full week after he joined us, would have been the highest ranked player in our clan. You dudes want us to improve, but that's the second (if not the third) player you have taken from us. And for what? So that instead of 75 gold-platinum players you'll have 76?

I almost made a thread about this, but I decided instead of whining to put the energy into something positive, hence this thread. But I couldn't resisting adding a little whining to it in the end, so please bear with me and try to sympathize. And if you care to hear more whining, knock yourselves out: http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=25570#p25570

Dude.. It is and always be a person choice where he or she want to be. If Sechastain wanted to be with BRN than deal with it. If some guys here in Promethean want to be with anyother clan than they are free to go. Who am I to say that they need to stay or not. It's their choice. We aren't running any dictatorships here.

I am dealing with it. And the way I am dealing with it is to ask Uber to put in-game clan controls so that there will be dozens of clans for me to play against instead of 5 monolithic giants that vacuum up all the players because people are sheep.

PA has almost no tactical gameplay, while CS is almost purely tactical.


Clan controls would be fairly cool, in fact the whole social menu needs a bit of a revamp.

How would clan controls fix your issue though?

Yes, clan interface in game for casual 2vs2, or any format would be amazing. Random games are not bad, but many players are weak comparing to good clan players.

I don't think you have any idea what the word tactics means. By definition, army clashes have infinite more tactics involved than 5v5 engagements.

PA have no tactics? What about fast reactions to unit attacks, building walls, flanking, harassing etc.

That's why a team in CS can almost get by without voice chat and still do well, while with PA no voice chat is a death sentence. Because the latter includes an immeasurably deeper tactical aspect, and hence stands to gain far more by proper communication.

Lets not get over the top, you can still know what to do with pings or overall by looking at the game. And in CS mic is a must in comp, so its not that easy.

Not only are they bad, they are TERRIBLE when faced with a clan team on voice chat -- even if it's only my clan. Multiplanet games especially are impossible with randoms. They don't reinforce each other with teleporters, they don't go for the gas giants, they have no coherent strategy that might conceivably win them the game (and strategy rules the day in multi-planet games).

I am not going "over the top". This is the reality I am faced with everyday. You just don't see the magnitude of the issue because you are not in a clan yourself.

@icycalm you're talking strategy here, PA has very little tactics, CS has a LOT.

(Aldo a completely different genre?)

I'm not currently in a clan, I'm not a bad player and prefer to play against good players, what are the benefits, where do I join, and who's best for someone in the UK?

Again, I don't think you understand what the word tactics means. For example, EVERYTHING in a 1v1 match is tactics. Strategy only comes into it in games that last for 1 hour plus on multiplanet systems. 90 percent of PA is still tactics.

https://forums.uberent.com/forums/looking-for-a-clan.80/

Strategy is long-term decisions that affect the course of a WAR. A WAR, and not merely a couple of engagements. Even in Clan Wars there's little strategy. I am going to explain this in depth in my review because no one seems to understand it.

I said "almost" very intentionally. Micro is very tactical, however,there's a reason that PA is a strategy game and not a tactical game. Strategy is, very roughly, large scale planning while tactics is usually small scale. CS gives you the strategy, it's up to the player to execute the tactical side if it.

In any case, I have no intention of derailing this further.

Once again, what do you mean by clan controls?

The difference between strategy vs. tactics, from my upcoming review of PA:

"A funny example of what a huge mindfuck the existence of 4 layers is, and how they interact with the multiple-battlefields aspect that is, again, unique to PA, to create scenarios that no one could have predicted before the game was up and running and we could stumble onto them (they are emergent!), would be what happened in a recent fight between my clan and some Team Burning guys (southern hemisphere represent!) on a war that began on a water planet. After all 4 of us in our team concentrated our efforts into kicking the BRN guys (along with some randoms) from the water planet, we turned our eyes to the moon and the metal planet that they had in the meantime expanded to and now completely controlled, and began thinking about an invasion. And it was then that we realized that all we had were naval units, which meant we couldn't invade sh*t. What would we send to the moon, after all, a frigging boat? We did have significant orbital presence, however, since we had needed it to capture the water planet (precisely because the BRN guys were good, and countered our huge naval and air fleets with a heavy investment in the orbital layer), so I used that to personally take the gas giant from them, but our invasion efforts on the moon and the metal planet stalled because of lack of foresight, and they ended up frying our water planet with their annihilaser, and winning the game. All those glorious naval victories supported by orbital warfare went in vain simply because we were not prepared for the scope and design of the solar system we were fighting on, causing the BRN guys to outthink us on the strategic level, even while we routed them on the tactical level in every single engagement we fought, out of dozens. Do you see the difference between strategy and tactics now? Do you see how complexity, in the form of all these layers and battlefields that interact to create a gigantic, previously unheard-of possibility space, is precisely what CREATES the POSSIBILITY of strategic thinking in the first place? If you can grasp that much, it shouldn't be much of a stretch for you to grasp that it is no exaggeration to say that Planetary Annihilation is more or less the first REAL real-time strategy game ever. All previous games in the "genre" were merely experiments and rehearsals leading up to it, and all future efforts in the genre will necessarily start out from it and expand from there, if they aspire to be any good. Which is precisely the definition of a masterpiece; what, in this artform, I call Videogame Art."

Yes, and that reason is that no one knows what these words mean.