PTE build 79270-pte now up

I was going to make a mod that reduces com energy production to 1500 (same energy build arm) and 21 metal. This seems to be a very funny flavor of that, for the same purpose: To encourage not building 2-3 factories at game start, then fixing your eco after you have a very decent army 1st minute to harass enemy. That sort of prevents anyone expanding, as 10 feet from your base your first fabber is toast when that army finds him.

The mex cost was always too cheap anyway.

The turrets are also pretty powerful right now. They OP their alleged counter, the grenadier.

That leaves lack of expansion, likely to be player intuition actually. Building a proxy with a turret quickly before the army smushes the fabber, hasnt been done as widespread as the swarming mob strategy. People might should just play and try some rush-expansion and/or a proxy close to the enemy and then creeping.

Another note on this PTE re: orbital intel:

I think the SXX should still be visible when travelling between planets to avoid frustrating snipes you had no way to see coming. Especially now that SXX don't give warnings when spotted. And nukes, but I assume nukes are still fully visible? Haven't tried.

The UI doesn't really support managing the power state of different sections of wall, and I really don't want another facet of power to manage.

Energy draw really only makes sense when:

- The unit has variable draw that can be naturally idled (factories and fabricators)
- Will often be in harms way (fabricators and radar satellites)
- You want to punish a player for mismanaging energy, or reward a player for attacking energy production. (everything, esp. ground radar, maybe walls)

Otherwise, just increase the unit cost by the cost of the power plants, and save me the mental load of managing it please.

Dat glow and building animation tho

The one on the right is almost perfect. The hitbox is larger than the energy part of the shield, so if the shields are placed in such manner that their bases "touch", then they will also catch any shots which would visually pass through.

You can even place these shields sidewards, and they still behave as they were hit from the front.

We've passed the info on to nvidia and currently are waiting on them to come back.

You'll want to talk to @tvinita on that. He'll be keeping an eye on things and deciding.

I personally really like these changes, it means the starting build is more strategic, and hopefully your a bit more metal constrained requiring expansion to support more factories. It should allow more interesting use of the commander amongst other things. I'd also go as far as reducing the metal income from t1 mex a bit, maybe 5 instead of 7... and with it bring back unit wreckage maybe that's taking it to far though I'm not sure

Hey Jables there are a ton of bugs in the planet editor, some are even in the current stable version, I made a thread about it in the support section

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/system-editor-broken-pte-78194.67998/#post-1069967

Not if you have combat fabbers to actually use that reclaim function for something

Yeah as I said: The one on the right was made by hand and rotating by hand. Took me more than a minute and I could still not make it perfect. But placing it like that in a real game is out of the question to how long it takes.

There are so many solutions to that that are soooo much better than the horrible fact that wreckages are missing. Wreckages are
a) a MASSIVE plus for immersion. I can remember how I first got SupCom and played vs AI. It send it tons and tons of units vs my turrets and aftter a while huge piles of smoking wreckage was piled up. It looked so damn AWESOME. In PA all we have are black marks on the ground that go away after some time. Bland.
b) a MASSIVE plus for gameplay. Attacking suddenly is something you need to careful consider. Will your attack just provide your opponent with extra metal? Or will the damage outweight the cost?

The missing wreckage for certain is one the biggest qualms I have with PA as it is now.

Solutions to wreckage include:
- make it have no collision box. Worked fine in SupCom
or, the nicer looking solution:
- make it break down after a little overkill to little rubble that is flat and has no collision box.

No collision box units can walk straight over it. To place buildings you would still need to clear the area.

Also I think even with the current pathblocking from wreckage it isn't actually bad. Blocked paths due to tons of wrecks make sense. Tweak the look a bit maybe but I don't think it is frustrating. What is frustrating is when fabbers or your commander get stuck in a factory. Fix pathfinding to work better for those cases.

Basically "look at what you did in TA and do that"

/agree

Yeah there are a lot of well proven solutions to some of the issues PA has in TA and FA.

I still deeply dislike the commander income and production changes, we do not need a worse energy situation... Storage is practically meaningless, that's not compensation, I can play and win a whole game with 0 mass and energy storage.

I don't think the commander economy should decide if we have enough energy or not. Make pgens cheaper to compensate, reduce the metal income from mex a little, maybe to 6 from 7, and add wreckage so reclaim is more important.

Alternatively, make walls auto-connect to one another à la Earth 2150:


I suspect this would be quite time-intensive and complicated to implement, though.

First I hate the term WYSIWYG, it makes me remember ms word. A horrible program. Plain text editors are so much more fun to use.

Also on the hitbox of the wall:

The hitbox is not a square anymore. That turret really is much easier to hit from the side.
It also shows the hitbox actually is even taller than the visible shield. Imho either the shield should be visibly taller as well (they look awesome so why not) or the hitbox should be smaller, but I guess then it will not protect turrets as well.

I guess there's no way to make shots passing through the invisible part of the shield to do half damage? It would simulate the turret top being more armored than the base, but still have the turret be easy to take out from the side

And of course walls will still protect all regular small units hiding behind them