Unit Variety

Whenever I play or watch PA, I see a lot of interesting interaction between the units. Did you watch today's 2v2 tournament? There were plenty of examples of teams recognizing that they needed to change what they were doing and taking advantage of the weaknesses of their opponents by switching the units they were making. From these posts I have to wonder if you have played much PA in the last several months.

I have said several times in several threads that I stopped playing and casting PA a while ago because it was so repetitive and boring.

Just because there are a few examples in top tier play of people changing what they build doesn't mean PA's units have character or dedicated roles.

Right now the units are pretty straightforward, generic, and boring. Things may be changing to have more variety and interesting components, but that doesn't change the fact that they are generic and forgettable. And I can guarantee you that there are many other RTS games that have so much more going for them when it comes to changing units to take advantage of weaknesses of the units that are being built.

We have our tank, and our more powerful tank. We have our bot, that is a little different than the tank, and then we have our more powerful bot. We have our slower tank with less range, and then we have our more powerful slow tank. We have our standard artillery unit, that doesn't change differ much from our artillery structure. We have our missile bot, which doesn't differ much from our missile boat, missile defensive structure, or missile plane.

All of PA's units are pretty obvious, generic, and run of the mill. Most of them have pretty generic catch all roles.

One of the things I've been slowly changing my mind on is experimentals, or super units rather. I think PA is great, and the lack of cheesy supers invalidating land armies is cool, but looking at the outside, people are saying that the game is similar to Supcom, but without any experimentals. It seems like having experimentals in the game might end up being a big draw for people. They don't even have to be good, they can be totally inefficient for competitive play, but if the casuals and AI-stompers can have their toys it might improve the game's appeal.

There is plenty of space for more unit variety. Not all of them viable for competative play but should be quite fun regardless.

Stealth units: Self explanatory
Magneto tank: Sucks enemy units (including air) towards it so no pesky kiting of my infernos
EMP artillery: Disables enemy for 1 second (maybe a different kind of tactical missile?)
Hover units: Low health unit that can attack on land and water
Continuous Laser Bot: Like the monkey lord beam but with no splash. (no overrun on damage could be quite efficient)

I do feel though that most the units look boring due to most of them firing projectiles. We need more lasers and rockets and other flashy effects to give them more personality.

I'm still stuck on what could be done with orbital without going too far into full on space battles ala homeworld.

Diversify all the coms!

Like @neutrino's original idea for commanders but was scrapped because people said too op.

There's a place to start.

That can work in team games but I think it would be impossible to balance for 1v1 or ffa.

Another reason why the community should not necessarily make all the design decisions.

I'm not entirely sure what this thread is about, I'm just commenting to say:

• I highly disagree about PA units being too similar and not changing what units you're building to react to your opponent. I would however, like to see more units I can mix with Dox to make my Dox blobs more interesting and the unit composition more reactionary to my opponent.
• I massively agree that PAs units lack character, with the exception of maybe the Boom Bot (which still has some issues like the death anim being the same as the self destruct.. even though originally they were different). More interesting sounds, effects, unit descriptions, more varied movement types, more units having "special abilities" like the new subs stealth, or secondary fire like the commander, or things like personal shields, and some cool cutscenes in Galactic War, could really help to give the units more character and fun-ness.

I'm starting to think lack of diversity and personality of unit is due to "the cult of balance." This behaviour of not liking things because it potentially could "unbalance" stuff has a detrimental effect to PA. For reason that Uber will not take risks and eventually manifesting in comment like TotalBiscuit on unit variety in PA.

For more information: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/commanders-and-what-we-know-so-far.43415/
- me emphasis

Edit: this would have added more depth to the game but you know. "Balances" E.g. Oh, it's this map. I should probably use a commander with amphibious capabilitys or I think you use a commander with a beam rifle. That be sweet.

More units would be cool but I'd like to see more ways of destroying planets first. Unit variety isn't just tanks and bots, it's also those superweapons. Remember how hyped we were seeing the Annihilaser? More things like that could really change the game. After all, the name of the game is Planetary Annihilation. There's no reason to call it that if there are only 2 ways of doing that. I was thinking that since we'll eventually get different missiles to build in our nuke silos, one of them could cause a planet to collapse on itself or cause a singularity. Once launched, everyone would get a warning message just like nukes do, but because this is a planet destroyer, once players realize that it landed on their planet, they'll work together to find and destroy it and possibly even the person who launched it. The reason why it would be so important to work together is because it won't cause any landing effects or anything, it'll just crash into the ground and wait maybe 15 seconds before it starts digging. It'll be very weak so the only huge problem is just finding where it landed. However, once it starts to dig, that planet is SOL. It will dig to the core of the planet so the timeframe players have to escape will depend on its size (so lets say 1200 sized planet will take a 2 minute dig). So players will be forced off, throw everything they've got at their attacker, possibly team up against said player, and truly change the way that game is played.

I'm a little confused at what you're trying to say.

You're saying there is plenty of unit variety, but you wish there was more unit variety to mix with your units to make them more interesting and reactionary?

More unit variety to mix with units to make them more interesting and reactionary was one of my original intents of this thread.

If I have understood you then you aren't asking for more units just the existing ones to have more different functions. Is that what you are saying? The aim is to have more interesting tactical choices yeah?

Unit variety is a myth with very few exceptions. Straight up. Examples abound through every RTS ever made; all units have some kind of pew pew and are based, sometimes roughly off of real world past or current (or potentially future) analogs - because imagination only goes so far and at the end of the day they still need to shoot or slash, blow up, capture, disable or steal. Some games (supcom) include things like Experimental units to spice things up, but these too are just eye-candy as they are easily stopped by lesser units amounting to less than their weight in resource and amount to more dakka basically. (Incidentally I'd quite like these to be added somehow as some point by somebody).
I agree that the t2 tank (and others) could stand with looking different/swankier and have a more (perhaps only slightly) distinctive function, but honestly heavy tanks and light tanks BOTH exist and serve the comparative functions of the ant and leveler, military types don't stand around bemoaning the lack of unit variety and the 'straight up upgrade' of heavy tank over light, AFAIK.

For me there is a lot of unit variety in game and except for orbital, I could not come up with much I would add to the repertoire. My critic would focus on the creativity of units themselves, as they are very close to "real world" warfare and lack of really crazy ideas like in the newer Red Alert series, giving them are more unique touch.

But you should really try out the latest PTE, as there is some fantastic balance work going on by the devs. And since I saw you cast your last videos, PA has changed very much. The times that you are able to spam win only one unit, is quite under a rock now.

I was saying that balance-wise and "unit-role-wise", the units in the game are quite distinct and clearly designed to perform different functions already. So I am disagreeing that the current unit selection is "bland/boring/whatever negative word to do with roles and balance". However, in some areas like the speedy Dox that I mentioned, I would like some extra units added that would spice up the unit composition. So I'm not asking for the units that are already there to be modified drastically and given different roles.

What I was really asking for, and agreeing with, was that the units in the game currently lack character. This is more of a lore, fun, and interesting-ness request, that the units currently in the game could be modified mostly visually, audibly, but not so much balance wise, to make them more characterful.

'

I think you also need to look where he is coming from. TB is a bit of a crazy starcraft enthusiast (not that there is anything wrong with that), so his ideas about potential unit diversity are pretty damn high level. One of SC's strong point is just how absolutely ridiculous, overpowered and unconventional some units are, while they still remain balanced and fun to play with (mostly). There isn't really a standard unit, the 'standard looking' space marine is one of the most complex and skillbased units in the whole game.

While Grey Goo is indeed pretty great, the units tend to be relatively formalistic. Take the Beta's unit rooster: High rof light soldier, low rof light 'raptor', more expensive light walker with high alpha, artillery unit, siege unit, stealth unit, air scout, fighter, bomber.
Only the upgrades are very nice for differentiating your armies and strategies, there are also some neat tricks to their base building. Rare super units don't really change the meat of the game.

PA on the other hand has of course less issues with unit details, because it's more about macro and army movement/positioning than tricky splits or stutter step micro. Basic Scissor/Stone/Paper dynamics and some positional play would be more satisfying in that game than in a Grey Goo.
But if you look at current tournaments, it seems like it's mostly a battle between 4 units: Dox, Tank, Fighter and Bomber. Those are pretty standard units with pretty standard application. Dox have some unusual charachterstics (low AA-capabilities/deathblobbing Oo) compared to tanks, but there isn't much interesting dynamics between those units otherwise.
You don't get much need to switch or mix compositions, that's probably the main issue to the lacking variety. And it's not like there could be some interesting stuff: Grenadier are a cool units, they can shoot above walls and aoe damage. Which e.g. could make them counters to Dox. Tanks have especially a problem, because they don't have much of a counter. In that case PA might benefit by some sort of (slow+high range?) high dmg, low rof unit, which gets swarmed by bots but can deal with tanks.

Dynamics might change with the current PTE balance, though. T2 might actually become affordable.

I would also like to see moar unit types but I think core game should be first more polished and some more important features added before new units.

lack of charakter imo is a problem of aestetics sound and visualvise ... units got at least some character added to them when they got their bot voices or enginesounds ...
i still like the botvoices ...
but i think they could realy have a bit more visual touch as in weapon effects and lighting aswell as some lighteffects on the chassis .. just give it more time ...

still want doxes to have beams instead of bullets .. and the leveler needs a railgun ...



i too disagree on the lack of unit variety
this game's single unitpool already offers more units than other games 2 to 3 factions thogether and they behave all different even if only slightly between some ...

Infernos, Spinners, and booms get used too. There is also naval which is improving quickly and orbital, which can use more work but still adds at least a couple units to the game as it is.

Actually I feel like it's really the opposite. Good players are always paying attention to what the opponent is building and adjusting ratios as needed. This might be too subtle to come across to viewers in a tournament, but you can at least notice it with the land/air interaction, which right now feels excellent.

in starcraft you also see mostly marine, marauder, medivac with the mere occacional siegetank or viking thrown in ..

or stalker sentry collosus

or roach muta and ultralisk or infestor ...
every rts has its compositions to go with ..

in pa it is merely the case when to have t2 as a viable option not limited to its eco advantages ... then you would see more varied or even broader compositions ..