Should Build Speed be Reduced?

what is there skewed about it? both the question and answers are clear weither you like it or not ..

i also don't understand why you are so hard on raising unitmetal prices in order to justify nukes ... nukes are as cost effective as you use them ... on the paper you may destroyed what may only half worth the nuke but in practice you may as well have won the game with it .. otherwise if metal is your concern then maybe make nukes cheaper ?

the higher hp may make units last longer and as such rise in number over time at the same time however you increase the gametime through passiv factors than aktiv and may make games last longer than they need to be .. i am not ok with artificialy increasing the gametime ..

- On nukes, am ambivalent, it wasn't exactly the point it was an example of one of the unintended cause of over-cheap to quickly made units while some thing (nukes are one) went the opposite way and the gap widened to a chasm.
- Unit metal prices and time do not have any significant effect on game lengths (this is a complete myth debunked by the average game lengths of almost every other game of 20min max) only the numbers of units at a certain interval are affected. Early and mid games would have less units, late game would be more or less the same even without health buffs.
- It USED to be this way before and noone had any problem with it, unit production speed was put in to overdrive mostly as a way to speed up the early phase because t2 rush was the thing at the time and people didn't like that there was little to do until levelers. This is no longer an issue and has not been for...well for a long time now.
- Nothing artificial about raising cost/time with health, its one of the most basic starting points of game balance that most people who have dabbled in modding would/should know if they weren't blinkered by a bias. It is also fundamental in restricting growth to sane levels. Increasing health without a check in place is like introducing a predatory or invasive species to a new habitat without thinking about the consequences. Example NZ: Possums and other disasters. Also supreme commander 2 -- I know most everyone has an aversion to that game here...gunships, my entire argument of cost/build-speed needing to match the health is summed up with that word, a slightly higher digit in regards to its cost would've made a world of difference and kept its role intact, instead it is the one unit you need to build.

so in other words we would have on average smaller and/or less engagements which would rather against what the creator of the game had in mind

Marginally smaller in one phase of play, out of several phases, potentially yes, but that number of units will live longer be able to accomplish more living long enough to see the next tranche of units leading to more or less the same numbers by around the mid-mid game phase, so i see little lost here except you get maybe a dozen less explosions in the first 5mins because that is frankly all the units (t1 anyway) are at present.

i call heresy

Really well written post sums up a lot of points better then myself. Is the average game length really 20 minutes? That's insanely short.. I have a hard time believing that. I have a harder time believing people actually LIKE a game length that short.

I honestly can't agree sorry. COH2 has slower build times, larger hp pools without players with faster apm really dominating. Maybe it's apples to oranges but the game definitely has a larger focus on unit roles, what you deploy, and a complex counter system. You can literally outsmart a faster opponent by using better tactics. I will agree though, the part of what holds back action per minutes is the economy that reaches a cap based on map control. Another great feature because it forces players to utilize all parts of the map, something PA could take a page from with meaningful objectives, but that's a different thread.

My point being that the addition of larger hp pools and slower build times in conjunction with some economy tweaks would bring the game back on track to employing more strategy and tactics and less of a focus on unit zerg and numbers. In my opinion this could just be the beginning, Uber could go on from there to make more interesting meaningful units that have more clear defined roles.

Huh? This game is all about positioning. If you want more of an interactive combat I would recommend wc3 cause that's not the game PA was made to be.

I don't want to be flaming here but if you can't come up with tactics using positioning then I don't think your a very good rts player.

I'm really confused now.
Do you argue that larger HP and slower build times are fun or do argue that larger HP and slower build times will result in less units and more computational resources for things like effects?

Just positioning is not a very deep system. The positioning the game does have, is not all that interesting. In practice, it would be better if there were other layers of strategy to employ. The game needs a bit more depth and larger hp pools are a step in the right direction for that. I don't have to go to wc3 to draw examples, there are actually many I can list from TA if you so desire. The very game that PA mimics and draws inspiration from.

I love how whenever anyone asks for improvements or some innovation there is always someone who claims "That is now how the game was intended." Are you the PA God? Do you work for Uber? How do you know this? Obviously this isn't true because there have been several iterations on the current build times and hp pools. Clearly Uber is still tweaking things to find the right balanced as stated by DalekDan.

Both actually? I thought that was pretty clear, sorry for confusion.

I think positioning is a very, very deep system that between two highly skilled players has a lot of depth. Maybe less so at lower levels but positioning is largely psychological combat. There are a three main factors that go into combat. The amount of units, the composition of the units and the situation in which the units engage. The situation in which the units engage is a pretty big deal. What I mean by 'situations in which the units engage' is basically positioning. Just saying. Just saying.

You are advocating for more micro to be added to the game when the game has been stated and loved for being a macro based rts game. And I am sorry but how does increasing the health on units and changing the speed of a build arm add more depth to the game? Tweaking the values will only make the game feel better. It will do nothing to change the complexity of the game. What you want to be advocating for is to add more mechanics and counter mechanics into the game. Reskinning units and changing their values will only add more variety. Increasing the variety will do nothing for adding to the depth of the game. You have to add more mechanics to the game. Add mechanics and refine those mechanics. That will make for a great game.

I just feel you don't fully understand the game as it currently is and I don't think your suggestions are a good solution to the problems that do exist in the game. I mean feel free to slag me off if you think I'm an idiot cause you know that's like what forums were invented for right?

I fully agree with slocke here. You are trying to make PA a different game. If you want COH2-style stuff play COH2. If you want to suggest improvements to PA compare with TA and FA. If those games had something PA has not then you will probably find many people here who blindly agree the moment you say "but TA/FA had that as well..."

You can draw influences from a multitude of games without becoming that game. Nothing wrong with borrowing certain features from other rts that work. I think there are many things TA did better, it has much more interesting combat, part of which, stems from tankier units with larger hp pools. I am not sure why anyone would advocate for 20 minute matches, that's completely beyond me. Sounds like a zergfest to me.

I think you guys need to take your blinders off, and realize PA is very niche for a reason, it lacks a lot of depth from other RTS. This would be a great step in restoring some of that.

of course pa is niche and that is what i want of it being a specific kind of rts on its own and not some mash up of others ...

20 minute matches is a skewed number, I assume that's talking about 1v1's on a tiny planet.

NNNNNEEEEEEOOOOOOOOO!!!

what's the big deal with playing with 4 to 5 different players or matches in an hour .. god forbid people enjoy short brawls lets throw away the idea of scaleability and entirely destroy that comboxingmyth because there can only be superlarge slow matches now ..

You don't really understand the economy of PA. PA doesn't have a set build rate for every fabricator, build time is directly connected to metal used per second. A unit that costs ten metal being build by a factory at 1 metal/s would take ten seconds to build. And when you're negative that 1 m/s will lower to say.. half a metal a second (while energy cost for some reason doesn't scale down in the same way)

If you want unit build speed to be reduced all unit costs must be doubled, which I assume means you'd want all economic buildings to give double resources while fabricators and/or factories work at half the metal a second. Which most likely would make assisting a bigger part of the game as there is extra metal and energy you normally wouldn't have. The entire economy would have to change to get the results you want.

Personally I believe units should have double the health, and be possibly a smidge more expensive. Also unit scale should be reduced by at least half their original size to make maps larger. Unit acceleration needs to be slower, and unit speeds altogether a bit slower. Bots having quicker acceleration while vehicles have less, let's say.. 1 second to top speed for bots on average and 3-5 seconds to top speed for vehicles on average. While ships will have the slowest with a possible 8-10 seconds to top speed on average (yet their top speed would be around 20 - 30 m/s) and aircraft would have the fastest with 1/2 to 2 seconds to top speed on average with movement speeds above 60.

When did I say that? I have no idea what you're talking about. All I said is the average 1v1 match length is skewed because it's on a very very small map. =S

There are games with almost no depth to them that aren´t "niche".
Having or not having depth doesn´t decide wether it is niche.