Zero Games

yes, thank you @DeathByDenim this is much more along the lines of what I had heard.

I'm currently running the PTE, and I am unable to see servers, but using palobby I can see them. Anyone got a quick fix?

Are you using https://palobby.com/?build=80155-pte

It is not about promoting. Its time that took them to make somewhat interesting game. For eg i got burned out with pa long before it got to somewhat playable multiplayer state. This is curse of kickstarter, everybody (well most) that cares about game gets it in alpha/beta state and abandons well before game is in usable state.

And after first months of awesome the charm wore off and now i see that pa is lacking copy of SupCom with worse graphics, and battles lacking that cool factor. Also still having unfinished areas.

Ps. this whole situation reminds me UT3 case, everybody blamed epic on lack of marketing but that game also missed that something. Nobody could put finger on exactly what it was.

Do you think you would come back in a year if development has continued even further?

I am still playing one or two games per week, so i never really quit PA. But last summer i got few hundred of hours in two months. Uber tried to bite off too big chunk, they almost succeed at it.

After this time i see PA as ambitious but not fully executed clone of supcom.

PA needs more everything. Colin is right that more polish has always been needed, but more features are too. There just isn't enough units to promote a successful mix of different meta-strategies. I also feel the units we do have are sorely lacking in interesting animations and effects; the game just looks dull after a while. PA has always been about learning the one dominant meta as fast as possible and then playing it endlessly until the next balance patch, when the cycle begins anew. For any given situation there is usually only 1 or 2 ways it can play out and it often comes down to a straight up production race. Decisive battles are too few and to far, usually it's one player has a better build, nips away at the weaker player, and then it all ends in one forgone conclusion of a battle. This is only fun for a little while, before it becomes painfully boring (to play and watch). I started to feel like literally every game I played was identical and winning and losing didn't matter, and the random content added in recent patches did nothing to change this feeling. Maybe more focus on modability - or letting us at least use the endless custom commander models for new units as long as we reskinned them or something - could have help the game grow more steadily. We're on a constant decline since the last major patch and I personally don't see anything on the horizon to bring me - our some of our favorite casters - back.

Playing a lot of Cities Skylines lately, and I think those Devs nailed it by focusing 100% on having a rock-solid core engine at release with full modability. A month later the Steam Workshop is full of literally thousands of awesome content packs, some of which are even being created by former Maxis employees. Yes, the engine itself is a little barebones, but in 5 months time the game will have more mods than any Sim game ever before it. I think the devs here simply bit off way more than they could chew. So in the end maybe I agree with Colin again; screw all the extra silly features, we would have been better off with a rock solid engine + UI and very deep modability. And less dev time spent on custom commanders, more dev time spent on giving us enough modular 'parts' that we could have at least added 10-20 good looking custom units through mods. Too many core engine parts were sacrificed or half-assed in the rush to meet every single KS promise.

why wouldn't it?

from a scientific standpoint the experiments have already been carried out and their results gathered. we even had a control group (non RTS-SP games).

therefore we should be allowed to predict that PA will come back in a big way, once it becomes everything the players want, once it has that magical addictive component.

I'm sorry but I have to strongly disagree. I always felt supcom was a poor relative of ta. PA is much better and the first game to capture that 'feeling' I got from ta.

Obviously all subjective but I think to write pa so flippant isn't at all fair.

so people are talking about PA missing a special something ... i think i can tell you what it is ... it is weight ... that feeling of "oompf" behind blasting through the hords of armies ..
i don't think PA is lacking too much in content anymore as people say "lackin in everything" that doesn't answer anything ... i think PA's biggest problem is that often you rather feel disconnected to it as in you are on the battlefield but you don't feel to be on the battlefield .. remember when nukes had a shakeeffect back then? or how terrified you where "feeling" a large explosion near by thinkin "was that a nuke now or a commander mowed down by a slammerhorde"? some people may consider that annoying to play with but i think this is what immerses you the most in playing the game ...
so it's a matter of stuff not just looking good but sounding good and feel impactful/powerfull through the damage done and the visual feedback ...

Yes you may be right, and cartoony style does not amplify that feeling at all.
As to supcom and TA, zerok, i like supcom flavor of that rts niche the most.

Your feeling for TA vs Supcom may be exactly what i feel about Supcom vs Pa. Back then my pc could not handle TA, and i had XCom, Master of Orion, Civilization, Call to Power and plenty more. Then there were dark ages of MMOS in my life. When i got back to more than single game at once, TA was ancient and Supcom was new shiny rts. While i played some TA when it was new i could not go past those tiny tutorial maps. So for me SupCom was that first RTS in this subgenre, and that is why i value it most.

although a strong defendant of SupCom, I must agree.

All you have to do is look at how successful PA's Kickstarter was.

at the heart of the kickstarter vid and many statements thereafter was the idea that they wanted to really recreate that TA feel.

obviously if everybody backed so hard it must, at least in part, be because they agreed with this idea.

I personally was hoping it would "recreate that supcom feel" as well, what with all the SupCom copies flaunted in the KS video, I must admit I was let down.

"SupCom copies flaunted in the KS video"? The video hinged on the "Spiritual successor to TA" all the way thought? What SupCom things did you notice as I missed them (not saying there weren't any, I guess you pick up on the things that interest you most)?

I mean PA is neither TA or SupCom but something else that in my opinion straddles the two game-play wise. Irrespective I think PA *is a successful game* in it's own right. It isn't that close to either of it's predecessors so I guess both camps probably have something they wish was in that isn't (the TA commander with all his abilities for example). That said I think if you take a step back and look at it as a whole, what Uber have done makes a lot of sense. They've kept much of the core game as simple as possible (virtually no special abilities for example) give the fact you have an extra layer to work with + multiple battlefields. There is more than enough to keep the game challenging.

What's 'missing' is a a tutorial + campaign mode to help guide players into it- GW is a great idea however there needs to be as a minimum a scripted tutorial campaign- I tried to get my fiancee to play it and she found the learning curve far too steep, and she played a fair few other RTS titles in the past (although not TA or SupCom admittedly).

As for the core game, well there are areas they could improve upon for sure (however I'd argue that's the case for most games), but personally I think it's fun, especially in shared teams where you can dynamically move units between battlefields and work with people. The game enders are also gloriously over the top- I know many bemoan not having 'experimentals' however that imo is what hallers and the annihilazor are for.

I think a lot of this 'zero games' has to do with time zone. I play in the UK and there are quite a few UK and EU based players so there's almost always a good set of games going on whenever I'm on. The 1 v 1 ladder is a bit quiet currently, although I think there are things Uber could do to reinvigorate that (e.g. expand on the leader-boards system a bit so you can view everyone and then reset and relaunch the ladder would probably get people playing again- as it stands it's very difficult to move on the ladder once you've hit a certain position).

They showed boxed copies of SupCom for a second near the end of the video! Everything is totally meant to be about SupCom and they totally lied to us!

errmmm

you're ignorant.

the majority of the UBER team, especially at the time of that video was basically GPG.

So showing the boxes is just a little reminder out there for those who may have forgotten where they come from (and apparently for those who even with that still don't get it )

but also you're lashing out at me for no good reason, I didn't say any of the things you just said nor anything neighbouring.

What I said is actually damn specific so I won't bother reformulating, I talked about my own personal hopes :

Yeah, but the copies weren't exactly flaunted. Nor is a short pan over a few copies of SupCom any kind of prediction or promise that the game would turn out anything like SupCom.

I'm not lashing out at you for no good reason at all. Your logic is completely unsound, that's why I'm criticising it. Accept that, or don't.

In fairness Tatsu they were trying to appeal to all TA derived communities (including SupCom and Zero K). That was a necessity for them to have a hope of getting funded.

That said there are quite a few die hard fans of all of the above who would only ever be satisfied with a *direct sequel down to unit names and functions*. Sadly this was never on the cards for either community, so the end result it's lots of disappointed people.

To be honest I didn't expect that, this *was never meant to be TA2, or SupCom 3* but a game in the same genre (which you can't argue it is) working on planets.

I would LOVE someone to make a true TA 2 with the ARM, CORE, commander abilities and the units I already know and bring it up to date with a modern engine, some new units and a nice shiny new campaign. That could still happen, and PA was never going to offer me that (although there is an argument to be made that a true TA, or SupCom for that matter, sequel could be built on the PA engine down the road)....