The reason why PA bores me (feedback)

Just thought its about time to analize why i simply cant play PA for a longer duration, so far i have never thought about it, i just played for a few days and left again for quite a while.

Dont get me wrong, PA has some pretty nice Elements. Sadly, Planet Smashing is not everything.

So what bores me?
The first and also one of the biggest thing is the "map design". Sure, Planets are fun, adding a third layer of combat is also nice...but the potential is unused.
The Planets are simply flat with some rocks and lakes. It doesnt need a good base placement, it doesnt need a good strategy like for example shooting a base from a hill with artillery who get increased range based on height, or trapping the enemy in a canyon while shooting down from above.
You cant move through a forest with bots while tanks are slowed down, are forced to go around or other things like that.
Its more or less just "build a bunch of units and swarm the base", snipe the commander or simply get your annihilation weapons as fast as possible.
The combat feels similar to Supreme Commander 2...and i think we all agree that this game was bad.

Another thing that i dont like is the fact, that there are only Combat Units.
No Utility.
Sure, PA has no Shields, but there can be others. Buffing Units for example.
Units that can buff the damage, redirect damage from one unit to another, mobile radar, or things like the following.

Another thing i totally hate in PA is the Intelligence Mechanic.
I loved the Intel and Radar manipulation in Supreme Commander.
Stealth, Cloak, Jammers...it created a strategical element that made sense. That gave you a tactical advantage.
Having dozens of Jammer Units to get through the enemies artillery defense, creating a trap so that he thinks that there is a big army incoming, while another stealthed troop is coming from another direction, creating ambush traps with cloaked snipers, or building a hidden outpost.
Not to mention hiding a few Nuclear Subs...they can cause a lot of terror.
In PA the radar is more or less over the top. Planetwide covering with radar and vision through satelites, radar that can see every single orbital unit and movement...thats boring.
If the Deep Space radar would work like the "Eye of Rhianne" so that it can only cover a certain planet with Deep Space vision, or see movement only in a certain radius around its location, or atleast time based vision...but currently its boring. It doesnt cost much, so you can see very early when the enemy moves his commander to another planet. And even after that you know when something is incoming and have enough time to adapt to it.

Another thing i noticed in Multiplayer games is, that most games are very predictable.
If there is a smashable moon or annihilaser, you allready know where a major battle starts, where you need to rush to, especially if you start on different planets.

Then there is the Orbital layer...interesting idea in theory...
But im not sure if weaponizing the orbital layer was such a good idea.
For example, look at the Anchor. Anti-Orbital, Anti-Air, Anti-Ground...and most units are down with a few hits while they cant even shoot back (except for the long range missile units)
Its pretty much overkill to trap the enemy commander with them. He cant flee, cant build up a new base, cant shoot them down...

I think these are the reasons why PA bores me currently...
PA is a good game, it simply has a lot of unused potential.

My thoughts exactly. Thank you.

I loved the early alpha when it looked like turrets would be able to be placed on plateau's.

Id say lack of tactically useful terrain is the main issue I have with the game.

@lazeruski, @borkyborkbork have you two tried any of the custom hand made maps yet?

I'd recommend installing the 'community map pack' from PAMM. There are some great examples on there. The hand CSG placement tools allow many interesting things like bridges (where units can go over *and* under), tunnels, plateaus and so on. Also you *can* place turrets on plateaus and so on....

I agree in part on the orbital play- although if your getting attacked with anchors it's quite easy to stop them using an umbrella (which has much longer range and costs less) so I don't view them as that OP. Orbital combat isn't much fun though, I personally think orbital fighters could be gotten rid of (or perhaps prevent them travelling between planets- I think there is a use for them on Gas giants but that's about it)....

Out of interest, bots do have an advantage in forests over tanks that they don't on open terrain (seriously, a mix of dox + grenadiers or even booms in trees are really hard to fight with tanks as the trees prevent the slow firing tanks being able to shoot them).

I'm personally finding the latest balance quite nice, multi planet can be fun, it just becomes tedious late on once planets get locked down as with enough porc you can't even get down on the surface.

i tried, also i tried the Orbital Overhaul.
Sadly, i cant play them. Simply because the upload to the server takes ages, even if i want to play against AI.

For the Umbrella: A friend tried exactly that. Anchor won that battle.
My Orbital fabbers were faster in building more Anchors, than his fabbers in building Umbrellas. Since Anchor annihilated his base, he could not produce more fabbers (they shot down his Air Fabbers and locked him from producing new ones, since he was on the water, he had absolutely no chance to survive) - His only chance would have been a Submerged Factory or Submerged Missile Launchers...but there is no such thing
As soon as his commander tried to build a factory - my Orbital fabbers build another Anchor on top of it. All i needed to do was to destroy his existing Umbrellas...and since they are made of paper, that wasnt even a hard task. A few Grenadiers and Bombers and it was done.

btw, can the commander even build the Umbrella? He turns useless so fast, that i dont even know what he can build besides Factories, PGens and Extractors...

So for Orbital stuff i liked - again - the Supreme Commander solution. Destroy the command center and the UEF satelite crashes down to earth again.

This kind of "dependency" would usefull, so that a destroyed ground based launcher would impact the orbital layer.
Also Anchor needs to split into 3, one for each layer, not like the "out-of-reach tower that can shoot anything except submerged units" that it currently is...

Its unfortunate that your upload speed is too slow, otherwise you would have been able to play with separate anchors for each purpose. Whats is your speedtest.net upload speed?

Regarding the anchor vs umbrella... you can get into that situation- but *only* where the orbital player has a significant eco advantage. Remember orbital is essentially tech 2. If you can afford to spam anchors over him, then you could have air sniped him, or crushed him with ground forces as well in all likelihood.

The funny thing is, that people keep complaining about, that the only way to kill a commander is to spam tanks. And once someone is able to kill an opponent with something that isn't a tank, well guess what?

Booms are weird, they're either totally OP or totally suck, situation dependent.

I must admit they are rather a cheap way to kill a com out in the open, but any rapid fire units (turrets, dox, flame tanks) near the com and they're useless...

I think coms are a bit too easy to kill in general- their health isn't the problem either. There needs to be a way to keep them out of harms way- the number of games I've seen where a player has a huge base, loads of defense, and looses against a much weaker opponent down to a snipe tactic. Whilst snipes should definitely be a thing, really late game you want it to be about large armies rather than the current game of sit in base, build up cheesy snipe tactic of choice then win.

A commander cloak would be a good solution, requiring you to cripple your opponents energy before being able to uncover the commander. You can't snipe something you cant find

just around 930kbit/s...
The tool i used said, that it would take 15m just to upload 100Mb...

Lets not transform this topic into "this is op or that is op", all i can say is, that it does not feel like a strategy game to me. Building more and faster than your enemy so you can crush him with more and bigger units is not strategy at all...thats why i said that i miss some utility and several features for intel

If i have the chance, i do the same that i did in SupCom 2 - park the commander in a puddle. Its basically another layer - submerged, and exactly as the orbital layer, it has the same issue...not enough units that can shoot it. I guess the only unit that can counter it, is the T2 bot, since he is amphibious and has torps, right? (im talking about a small lake, not an ocean)

I have to agree with pretty much everything the op said, minus the fact that I find it boring. This is a very fun game but lacks so many things. A few of the things mentioned in the op (i imagine) wouldn't be too difficult to implement. Such as tanks slowing down in forests whereas bots could traverse them just fine and the other being utility units.

Seeing even a couple of these things make their way into PA would be great and I certainly believe it would make the game a hell of a lot better.

@tvinita have you taken a look at some of this stuff?

I totally agree with OP. Pa lacks the intelligence war that sup com had. It also lacks any interesting units which arty it apart like sup comdid. Also let's face it pa terrain is garbage there is no impact on the gameplay and it's way worse than sup com and even 90s Ta game yet this is a 2015 game how sad...if they could just improve these two things above it would make pa way better. I'm considering going back to sup com until another rts is actually better than it....it bothers me that no game has effectively been able to implement an rts with terrain that affects the gameplay...it's 2015 wth!?

I think orbital should have the same base building mechanics (such as scouting, not the ground but scouting the actual orbital layer with something) as on the ground. If orbital played like the ground on gas giants with near identical mechanics i would be very happy.

The sad thing is, that even EA with C&C had a better Intel system than PA currently...

Orbital and Underwater have a looong way to go until they feel right.
As @killerkiwijuice just said, a system like the other layers would be pretty fun. Some kind of Orbital Mode for the commander would also be fun. Imagine pure orbital wars with a variety of units.
For example fast but low damaging ships (the bots),
slow longrange ships (the tanks),
orbital to ground ships (airforce)

Not to mention that there might be the same issue that SupCom2 had with submerged units, but no units that could attack there (if i remember correctly, UEF had the only submarine there...and the last time i checked there was just one unit that could kill a submerged commander on a turtled planet in PA - T2 Bots via Unit Cannon...you cant get down Naval, you cant snipe him with satelites...so sending in amphibious bots with torps is the only solution i see...or a moon of course)

You can kill a submerged com with orbital or air. As well as with nukes, a smash, annihilasor as well as slammers. the issue of not being able to hit him with other stuff was changed ages ago...

Thats good then. But just a few weeks ago, neither my Anchor nor my SSX could attack a submerged commander, SSX just followed him but could not shoot (and i have not seen a patch since then)
I can be wrong there, but thats what happened to me. I ended it with a Moon then.

Nukes, Smash and Laz0r are all Annihilation/Gameender Weapons...so they are a bit off there.
This leaves two units that you can send in, Slammer and if it works now the SSX, since Bombers cant travel that easily between planets.

Maybe the SXX issue is related to water depth? I know bombers have been made able to attack underwater units, and I've sniped a 'submerged' com before with SXX (though many maps the water is shallow so maybe he wasn't actually submerged?).

That one probably needs more testing and if it doesn't work then something we should bring up with @tvinita as I'm fairly sure the ability (or otherwise) to target something underwater is just an option in the unit json.

Regarding anchors:

I have to admit that I don't like the way that anchors can decimate the rest of the orbital layer, and do less but still substantial damage to the ground layer. All of this I don't like, despite umbrellas being very strong.

Often I find that there's no way to clear anchors once they're built without creeping umbrellas, or building way too many orbital fighters which get heavily damaged while clearing the anchors.

They're not impossible to remove, but I think that they're too versatile regardless of cost.

I don't agree with all of @lazeruski's points, but I believe some have merit. It's hard to read, so I summarized what he was saying:

Summary of @lazeruski's post: (the OP)

Map Design: Unused potential
- Altitude doesn't play much of a factor in combat and base-building
- Forest doesn't alter unit movement in an enough of an interesting way

Lack of utility units
- Units to buff or redirect damage
- Mobile radar
- Mobile radar jammers

Intelligence could be more interesting
- Lack of stealth, cloak, radar jamming
- Orbital radar is too powerful, makes intelligence in the orbital radar less interesting
- Orbital radar could have reduced scope so you can't see everything
- Fixing this would enable: Preventing artillery with jammers, faking large armies, stealth ambushes, cloaked snipers, building a hidden base, hiding nuclear subs

Predictability in Multiplayer
- Presence of smashable moons or annihilaser makes it clear where the fight is going to go

Orbital weapons too powerful
- Anchor can decimate the ground without being able to shoot back once under attack

Regarding radar jamming:

I'm not sure how radar jammers would change the game, but I think it's worth exploring. I don't have a lot of input about how they affected past games, except for that they always seemed to get easily killed in TA, and were negated with better scouting by air units.

I think units like these introduce a lot of unpredictability to the balance of the game, and such decisions must be made with caution.

If introduced, it would be helpful to get an alert that said: "Several radar-jammed units detected", so there was an automated way to negate their advantage with diligent scouting.

To limit their power, it might help if mobile jammers could only jam mobile units, and more expensive and larger jammer buildings could only jam buildings. Or, just leave out the ability to jam buildings entirely, and make it only used for armies. Introducing mobile jammers first would be a way to explore the idea without everyone just erasing radar from the equation by jamming their whole base, which seems like it would be boring.

this doesn't make sense though.

bombers shouldn't be able to bomb underwater units. (wait can they bomb subs? cuz if they can't then the whole thing REALLY makes no sense)

there should be torpedo bombers for that.

same with the SXX and anchor. the water should shield the com from the shots.

the water is badly used as is.

The bots going underwater still drive me up the wall.

what do they do there except exploit the terrain 100% to their advantage? if fighting them back with tanks all of the sudden the tanks no longer have an edge. they can't shoot back. and they can come out wherever they please it's broken and OP.

should be hover units instead of waterproof units.

I absolutely and 100% agree with this post.