I'm back. What's changed?

It's been about a year or two by now since I left PA. When I left, the game was a mess, and I felt cheated. I left a negative Metacritic review, which gained massive popularity soon after. The community was vile and throwing around insults for anyone who dared make a negative review. The fabled unit cannon was nowhere to be seen, nor was offline play or save games, and it was looking like the game was dead.

Well, I recently stumbled upon this game again. I was looking over my guides, and decided to see if my System Designer guide was still up to date. Something I heard about the game was that landscape painting was now possible, which made me question how accurate the guide still was. I came to these forums to look through some old threads, and I found a "landscaping" forum, which confirmed my suspicions. I also found mention of a unit cannon, which came as a nice surprise since it was more of a myth by the time I left. Save games were implemented, as well as offline play, and a lot of other things that the game promised to have. It looked like the community cleaned itself up, too.

The main reason I left the game was because the landscapes were always randomly generated, which made it tedious and time-consuming to make fun and balanced systems. Learning that they can now be manually painted gives me reason to come back to this game again.

I'm back, and I think I might stay. So, what's changed? Game mechanics, balance, mods, community, etc.

EDIT: Also, I love the stickied "misinformation" thread. It's actually a fantastic database of all the things the game has, and it's honest about the things the game doesn't have. Considering all the misinformation floating around about this game, a thread like that is incredibly useful.

A year or two is a long time and I wasn't around back then. But I'd say a lot has changed ( especially last year).

The system designer is a pretty powerful tool right now. I'm not sure how buggy the saving is at the moment (many people lost hours of work in the advanced system editor) so I'm right now using mikeyh mod fixing the amount of saving bugs (its called system editor fixes). You can't change the heightmap unfortunately. You do can place mountains and cracks and all. Its really nice.

Everything has pretty much changed. Balance has had some overhaul (t1 en especially naval). I can type it all out but honestly I think you should figure it out yourrself .

There are some handy dandy mappacks on pamm to get you started with balanced games. Most of them have a thread in the mapping section. Besides that visual mods are pretty popular on pamm too which alters the look of the game. Pastats mod has a nice chat system so I recommend installing that mod for sure and if you're looking for gameplay changing mod then there are a couple server sided mods like battleships, modx, orbital warfare overhaul and more. I'd recommend getting used to the vanilla game first though.

If you prefer singleplayer then go for galactic war. It has had some gameplay improvements recently and plays really nice. Especially with the chrono resume and replaying certain situations.

I think you came back at the right time. Last couple of months uber did a ton of bugfixing which was sorely needed. It plays pretty smooth right now.

What thread are you referring too? Do you got the linky for me?

Anyways have fun. The community still can get kinda salty from time to time with linking quotes from old interviews but I'd say its pretty rare these days?

If you're interested in pa activity then check exodusesport.com btw! There is a big tourney coming in the next 2 weeks I think? Gooooooood luck and have fun.

Yeah Unit Cannon, submarines, offline play, saving, custom csg placement, symetrical planets, replay resume or ingame windback (as in rewind and start playing from previous moments in replays or in the current game against AI) all have been implemented since launch. Prior to launch only the metal planet annihilaser and gas planet are the last big few I remember. Now Uber is working in overhauling the planet smashing with new and better effects and adding the promised asteroid fields into the game; which is basically one of the few promised big feature missing next to coop galactic war, official mod manager and official 40 player games and the performance improvements required for it.

You still cannot edit the terrain, alias the water, grass, sand, ice stuff is all still randomly generated by the sliders when generating the planet; but additions like mountains, cliffs, cracks and other custom CSG can be placed and resized by hand which gives you awesome maps like these few:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/i-bring-you-hot-platforms.66831/
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/trojanss-map-pack.69111/ -> Just look at that 2nd picture!!
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/ringworlds-confirmed-ufo-sighted.66077/page-4#post-1038378

and especially:

at the beginning all the planets are shown and at 24:00 till 26:00 pathfinding at that ring planet. This was all in a very early version of the CSG placement, I bet now things can get even more awesome!

Finally, custom hosted servers also work but require a few mods and help from PAStats; this has also resulted in some awesome games and gamemodes as rainbow racers with 42 players as can be seen here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rainbow-racers-rainbow-cup-50-after-kotp-11.67821/#post-1066619

fabled unit cannon is here lel

or should I say.... jabled

That's beautiful. I'll have to get to work in the system editor.

I don't really care about the biomes, but being able to change where the water is like in that map pack you showed is a pretty big deal. You can make a planet that's truly balanced for water warfare and ground warfare at the same time.

Hold on a minute. So INCREDIBLY INSANE planets are possible to make and play on, but every single standard planet is pretty much entirely flat.

Good going Uber.

well the camera controls are a bit awkward on those really insane planets, but yeah uber certainly could do a little more in the "use interesting maps for the standard game"-department.

I just came back from a long break, too and I could swear nukes used to be faster to build or something... anyway I'm glad to see content is still being added.

Oh, and I turned my old PC into a dedicated server and last night I had 2 humans and 9 AI doing a FFA on the PAX Prime system and I am surprised the sim stayed at 10FPS. I'm guessing some major performance improvements were made. Did we finally get multi-core sim..? I'll have to read through the threads and find out..

no multithreaded sim, but certainly a lot of perf improvements.

I can only assume that the camera control, and plane control in some cases is what is putting them off getting more interesting. Their standard line of 'if you want it, mod it' gets a bit old when maps are concerned. I don't care if the camera controls are a big off or if units are flying through mountains, worse things have happened. I think them putting together some crazy planets would do wonders for their marketing. They could even release a crazy planet as a trial run for a limited period to gather feedback.

Why didn't these crazy systems ever get posted to PAMM in a map pack, or the System Sharing mod? Or did they, and I missed it? Also, where is guest1 now? Seems like that trail blazing system editor god just fell off the planet so to speak, after creating this huge stir last year with custom system editing. I think we need more of his creations to generate some additional excitement, for new players especially, at this point.

I think his time to shine was before map packs arrived at PAMM and before mayor bugs were introduced by other bugfixes and additions. The last thing I heard is that the map maker still is kinda buggy in sometimes not saving stuff, but I never use it.

I haven't played in ages has much changed since January? I'm really itching to play rts game but there really is nothing else besides pa or going back to fa forever. Nothing on the horizon either it's sad day ti be an rts gamer. Iwas hoping to hear something on ta2@e3 but nothing
What are future plans for Pa?

What I posted above (3rd comment in this thread) minus unit cannon and matchmaking has been added and for the future; Uber only comments on what is being worked on instead of what is planned to avoid dissapointment due missing planned dates etc.

Now they are working on overhauling the planet smashing and adding asteroid fields to the game

PA is cool....c0ould be more , ocodul eb lesss.

Want mor as always , but happy that any work jappening at all.


@)))

I don't think adding asteroids and more planet smashing is going ti save this game

Since when does it need saving?

If you want to see a game that needs saving look no further than the RTS grey goo. I can tell you that in comparison pa does not need "saving" as you put it.

They are just constantly adding the most asked for features as long as it is duable cost wise and timewise. So if asteroids get called the main missing promised feature; Uber will be working on it

More units and improved terrain have been called for a thousand times more than asteroids.