Please review PA on Steam, they need it

Planetary Annihilation's rating on Steam has moved below 70%, which means that it went from "Mostly Positive" to "Mixed" (actual colours).

So if you haven't reviewed the game yet, please do. I'm guessing that most people lurking the forums probably like the game, so it might help.

Please go to the Steam Store page for PA and write a review.

I wrote one.

I remember this thread appearing last time. So in essence, new players are giving it bad reviews. Excellent.

I only found out last night how to switch between open and team chat. Just one of those things that are impossible to infer while in game. In-fact, how to open chat is impossible to infer in-game.

Well, you could summon all the new, negative reviews in a single sentence:

The game completely lacks a structured, interactive tutorial and ingame popups are giving nowhere enough information.

Then there is also that 0.5% where the game just crashes due to various incompatibilities, but they are actually a minority.

Second largest group is "interplanetary gameplay sucks" respectively "interplanetary gameplay is poorly balanced". And you can't even disagree with them. It really does, especially in Galatic War where the tech can be missing.

But it's not much better in regular games, the game just turns into a stalemate unless there are any game enders in the map, and the game enders themselves are literally that. They are no tie breakers, but they are guaranteed to finish the game for you, and all of them follow the same mechanic of needing to be contested.

Nukes and the unit cannon are once again exceptions to that, but when the game has dragged for so long that a stalemate has been established, you are forced to spam these en mass, to get past the defenses.

I read through the recent reviews. The problem is that they all contradict each other...

1 review: "everything in this game is OP and there is no counter"
another review: "defences are so strong, all games wind up in an endless stalemate"
yet another reviewer: "AI has no low difficulty settings, I can't win a single game on normal, cheating AI so op"
Whilst someone else says: "AI is totally useless and doesn't work"

The tutorial things is obviously a sticking point. The player guide was a nice idea but I think players expect something a bit more interactive than that. I don't envy Uber's job picking through all this though.

Also I get frustrated at the negative reviews saying "game doesn't work, I have amazing computer but got crash, game sucks money scam..." as they usually haven't even bothered to ask for help.

Am I the only one who hates tutorials? They are so boring.
I have a lot more fun learning from my defeats.
When I start playing I didn't know even how the flowing eco worked. I actually had to use my head to deduce how things worked and to develop strategies to win vs the AI which was very satisfying. Then I faced players and came up with new noob strategies to win that won't work vs better players and so the self-learning continues...

I think that's a key point to like this game, enjoying self-learning.
A friend of mine bought a Rubik's cube and a book on how to solve it. He read it, learned the moves and he was able to solve it. But he didn't go a step further and tried improve anything, he just did what the book said. Is it any fun?

What are people looking for in games these days? A stupid program that tells you what to do and you have to obey it? I have a boss for that. I want a set of written rules (written in code, no need for a book)

I can't argue with those reviews.

Once the game gets to a certain point it loses all of its fun. How fun is a nuke war, seriously? How fun is it to build some unit cannons, find the commander, and launch units at him? How fun is it to build a big laser, or to build halleys on a moon? Not very much fun really is it, especially as you could spend 20 minutes on it (without any interesting battles along the way) only to press a button and win.

I watched a FFA last night, 6 or so players on one planet. Exactly the type of game I most want to play. Once guy got the jump on his economy and had T2 mexes all over his large base. If everyone else had ganged up on him he would have been killed because he had no defences. The problem is though, it doesn't benefit any individual player to attack the person winning. They open themselves up to to having their army killed and then being invaded by another player. In the end the person with the economy advantage just spammed units and won. the last 30 minutes of that game was everyone just sitting in their base spamming units.

At least in SupCom2 there were various strategic moves you could play to beat a large player. Spam bombers with shields, build gunship experimentals, fatboys, teleporting tanks etc. In this game there isn't really much you can do and your best move is to sit in your base and build up an army.

I think supcom has pretty much killed the rts market and we'll never see another supcom:FA,

Any game that isnt supcom just gets killed because 'its not supcom', well thats great and all but if supcom had got any of the hammering these new gen RTS get for not being supcom 3, and thats not just PA, then the RTS crowd wouldn't have got their beloved FA.

As for PA, it really needs the interactive tutorials.

That is a general issue of FFA in all RTS I know of?

And I agree with the others: The one big thing that would really help to keep some more players is a better tutorial.

At best one that even explains how to open the chat, cause for some people it seems that is not as intuitive as for most... (srsly "press enter to chat" is like "move your mouse to move the mouse cursor" xD)

I'm not sure it is. SupCom2 went a bit the other way whereby the first person to build an experimental basically just went from base to base killing commanders. It was a fine art, there was usually only a few seconds in it for you to get that experimental out before you got killed but once you did you owned.

Because PA is more focused on land control, which is better, this means you expand up to a certain point, hold it, build up an army, and then take each player out individually with a massive army. You reach a point where you can't be stopped, but you still have to play for another half an hour to seal the deal despite nobody having any possibility or incentive to attack and kill you. The only way the winning player can die at this point is by being too aggressive, which forces them to turtle.

In SupCom2 you could win a battle against a more powerful opponent with good unit control. A well placed mobile arty hit could destroy a whole army. This meant that you were rewarded for controlling your units well in battle, which meant that your time in the game was more focused on the actual battles because your units would die without your control. In PA you just get a blob of units together and walk them into the enemy base, you can do a bit of kiting with arty but nowhere near what you could do in SupCom2.

True big experimental units can shake it up a bit, but it still means that attacking before you have that is suicide. The experimental takes the role of the game ender in that case.

Sadly now the game enders take 30 minutes of no-action play to build, you have a choice of a couple but none of them are fun or involve skill to use. Even marching an army through someone's base isn't really all that fun. This game is more strategic than tactical, I think it could benefit from introducing some more tactical options which you could use to give you an edge mid-game.

Well, most units still *are* paper like. That creates the feeling of every single unit being overpowered. Or if you mean the other review: He pointed out that there is a giant power gap between game enders and regular units. When talking about interplanetary gameplay, you have Astreus and teleporters, and the next step are already Unitcannon, nukes, Halleys and the Deathstar. Whereby all of the latter ones are almost guaranteed kills when aimed at the commander.

And that statement was made on interplanetary gameplay. Let's face it, multi planet maps DO end up in stalemates quite easily.

Lack of tutorial?

Don't rip that quote out of context. He was playing galactic war, and his ally couldn't cope with the tech selection he had. And we still do have scenarios where the AI just gets stuck because it's not expanding.

I dunno, most of the negative criticism feels like it stems from the fact modern pc gamers have 0 interest or ability with the tech and expect to be spoon fed everything.

I started out with a 286, having to go through quite a complex configuration of the system for each game. Obviously that isn't reasonable, however having to figure some stuff out for yourself, or having to do a bit of 'technical' stuff to make a game work doesn't strike me as out of the ordinary. PCs aren't consoles at the end of the day.

I'm not saying there aren't legitimate negative reviews, I'm just frustrated by the number of them that boil down to 'negative: game required effort of some description how dare the devs'

You're right, modern gamers do expect to be spoon-fed how to play the game, but it's the new standard that has been set with modern games.

I tried Dota 2 a few weeks ago, and although I'm experienced with RTS-style controls, I was immediately taught how to buy things from the store, what the basic keyboard shortcuts were, and how the courier works, among other things. I ended up not liking the game, but my frustration had nothing to do with not knowing how it worked on a basic level.

I could see Planetary Annihilation driving people insane when they've never seen a streaming economy before. There definitely needs to be some interactive help or a structured interactive tutorial. Many of these players are going to be young kids who have only lived in a time of intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces.

These expectations of having your hand held through the game are just a symptom of progress. The days of figuring it out on your own are over, and we're generally better off for it. If Planetary Annihilation doesn't get in line, other games are going to take the market share.

I wouldn't say we're better off for it- the UK is currently one of the world leaders in programming (after the USA) as a result of the boom in rather basic computers in the 80's (things like the Sinclair ZX81 and Spectrum and so on). These machines required a lot of low level interaction to get the most out of them, which got many people interested and started.

The issue over here now is that programming isn't on any of the curriculum even at A Level IT (they teach 'MS office skills' in IT classes because that's what they think employers want). That coupled with the total lack of technical know how / interest from home has meant the number of programmers has been plummeting. People going into 'IT' learn about managing databases and messing around with networking rather than how to actually write software, or even code a website properly (word press, another terrible development imo). That is why the Raspberry PI was created and took off.

I mean it's a double edged sword- as technology advances things become faster and more efficient, people can get more done which is a big plus. The downside though is that the number of people with the *base skills to develop and maintain* all this technology dwindle (similar problems exist in engineering). If we're not careful the end result will be a technological collapse because the foundations are no longer there...

Edit: Sorry for off topic, I've gone into 'old man rant mode' a bit today :S

Eh. It really does assume a lot of personal knowledge. I figured it out fairly quickly. I guessed "enter" instantly, first try. I tryed shift and stuff, before guessing that shift-enter was probably the chat toggle.

It does need better documentation, don't get me wrong, but how does someone buy a cool RTS like this, and rate it bad right off the starting line, despite giving it a decent play-up? Finish a game, or come to the conclusion that a "specific reason the game itself is responsible for" is at fault for the game being unrealistically playable.

Now, that last part is important, because a lot of Steam reviews are not very clear as to what problem they have with it. I mean "This game is awful don't get it" is pretty ******* detailed, convinces me for sure. Or Naw. Honestly, I would buy the game despite a rating like that, even if I had no clue what it was.

"Think Critically"

You're completely missing the point.

There shouldn't be any artificial barriers to learning. Programming is easy to learn these days because there are so many excellent teaching resources out there, and computers and programming languages aren't s|-|it like they used to be. That gets more people to learn how to program more rapidly. In that arena, we're much better off than we used to be, with programmers working at higher levels of abstraction and getting more work done.

When it comes to learning a real-time strategy game, it should be as easy as possible. It's not interesting to discover completely on your own, with no help, how some arbitrary system designed by someone else works. It's much better to be given some help learning the basics (how the economy works, how the interface works, how to build units, which units to build) than it is to poke around in the dark. Reading a manual to learn how to use a piece of software is a thing of the past.

A tutorial would make the game easier to learn, which makes it more fun, which would give us more, better players who tell their friends about the game, which will bring Uber more money and strengthen the community. There is no downside to consider other than cost and developer time.

I used to say this a lot last time the game got Steam sale:

Watch a youtube video. There are like 10+, and all of them I watched had the complete simple and advanced rundown of things:

1) Economy = always build to spend metal, storage = a bunch of units standing around to use later, there is no way to store besides buying an army to stand there as "stored metal".
2) Get all the metal points. Especially the distant ones. As far away as you can get and keep from your enemy. Then, destroy his metal points as often as you can, while denying him the ones at his border so he can't have them. Good players will try to do this to you too, so get all the metal points as far as you can, and defend them against attacking armies at all cost so you can outproduce him.
3) Commander, early game defense tower and builder, late game "king" (piece to protect) and factory assistant. Don't walk far from spawn, have fast engineers do the walking, don't spend 2 minutes letting your commander walk, build a factory and some mex with him and leave him there while faster engineers travel. I cannot stress that enough.
4) Bots are fast and cheap, tanks are slow but heavily armored and do high slow single shot damage.
5) To win a game, mass up in your first minute 10 of anything, like dox for instance, and rush to find enemy base and kill a few mexes or enemy engineers with it. Then, build like 20-40 units and mass the enemy base.
6) To kill a commander, have boom bots or bombers at the ready. Alternatively, if you just strip his economy by destroying eco structures, you can win by attrition later.
7) Hold shift to do lists of commands, like do one thing after another.
8) Grenadiers and walls are strong, early air bomber mass is strong, there are many strong strategy combos in youtube videos.
9) Build many basic factories. Build them until they build enough to make your metal not-full. The huge army those many factories build is how you win.
10) Sacrifice units a bit, they are squishy toilet paper, but if you wreck 8 mexes with 50 units, you can build 50 more units and they will have a hard time affording 8 more mexes.
11) Don't go advanced too early, at least have 15 metal extractors and abundant energy, and an army large enough already to turn off a few basic factories for a while.

You made the very same mistake every advanced player would make when trying to explain the game. You skipped the PA specific basics.

• Realign camera with pole.
  
• Using area commands.
• Chaining commands.
• Looped production in factories.
• Tech tree.
• Reading eco statistics.
  
• Explaining eco stall.
• Reading unit information in factory and on selection.
  
• "There are 4 different layers"
• Keys for chat, ping and other communication.

And only after the basic controls and concepts are known, start with base construction, explaining stall free meta builds.

Followed by simple expansion and securing the expansion by deploying towers/troops.

Followed by unit interaction. Which role works best in which situation, and how to perform staged attacks.

Uber could learn a lot through the negative reviews.

There's a very obvious pattern of 3 or 4 themes in their complaints.