TITANS Impressions

On the one side, PA has much more different ways how you can win the game. But it is nearly impossible to tech your weaponry in close combat on small planet - in this phase it is very similar with TA but TA + much much more ≠ TA2. I miss graphic and audio setting of TA in "Forged Alliance", but it is indeed a better TA. Imho.

As someone who *actually played TA, competitively for pretty much full duration as a competitive online RTS* and *still plays it from time to time*, I find it hard to beleieve that you look at PA and *don't* see TA running through its core?!

I mean yeah there are loads of little things that TA had that PA doesn't, but then again, there's loadsa stuff in PA that was never in TA.

Do I think that PA could benefit from some of these details? Yes I think it could- although what you and @ace63 are very quick to deem trivial may well actually entail a vast amount of work when you take into account what PA does as a whole. If you want an example, lets look at *gravity* as a configurable options shall we?

So, yeah TA had differentiated gravity on a few maps (wasn't that many that actually changed it, Comet Catcher springs to mind as the only notably one I remember but anyway, it was a thing). Now with TA, as it works on single maps, that's easy. It's a global setting, which allowed projectiles to fly *a bit* further.

So, why not allow that in PA? Well firstly, it would have to become a per planet variable to make any sense. Yes you could apply it as a global variable but then you wouldn't get the effect you guys are after.

So, now we have a per planet variable that adjust gravity. Sounds easy enough, but wait- this effects the weapon arcs does it not. Also for it to make sense it really has to scale *with planet radius*. Now here's where it gets really nasty from a coding perspective. You see, lower gravity (i.e. smaller radius planet) = longer range (i.e. wider arc) on your projectiles. Problem is, with a spherical planet, you have a hard limit on how wide your projectile arc can be *before it causes projectiles to orbit the planet*. Given that the projectile arc gets up as the planet gets smaller, this could become a *real problem* for smaller celestial bodies like small moons and asteroids.

You've also got the problem of conveying the difference in unit ranges to the player. People already complain that PA's controls aren't obvious despite being very straight forward in my experience. A unit having considerably longer range on one planet than another is going to make this worse *unless* a method is devised to clearly indicate this change to the player in a way that makes logical sense.

Now please don't get me wrong- I think this is something that could really add to PA, as I think TA's greatest strength was it's 'depth through subtle interactions' (and PA is a lot less subtle as it stands). Still I just wanted to try and highlight that when you take something that's simple and try and apply it to a whole solar system of spherical maps it becomes a lot less simple. PA has a really really clever engine imo- Uber have obviously had to overcome a lot of new problems to make it all work as well as it does, which is why I defend them. I mean the other big argument I'd make for keeping things simpler in PA is the amount each user has to control. Whilst 'TA on planets' sounds really cool and all that- I think full on TA (with all it's quirks and micro) on the scale of PA would be pretty much unplayable, so adding more complexity needs to be done carefully.

I still think PA could well mature into the best RTS ever made, it's certainly up there for me, however simply throwing in more and more complexity is likely to make it totally overwhelming to play imo. As with all things there is a balance after all.

Ok. so gravity is the most important aspect of TA and therefore you succeeded in proving that PA can't be its spiritual successor, due to the fact that's missing it.

Is it this that you wanted to say?

I'd say he was trying to say the exact opposite.

PA is a spiritual successor to TA. That does not mean however that it requires all of the features of the previous game, and in some cases adding the features that are "missing" may not actually improve the game.

since when does spiritual successor mean 100% carbon copy?

Ah, sorry. My bad, I misunderstood.

Of course I don't expect PA to be a carbon copy of anything. I frankly prefer PA to TA. But I also prefer SC to PA. Matter of personal taste. Mainly because the map (planets) in PA are still quite dull. Beautiful graphically nonetheless. But that's not enough I'm afraid.

I'm confident that we'll have larger planets in future, and doing so possibly a better experience. Especially when more than 2 players are involved.

The ability to support larger and larger planets will increase as long as the standard specs of your average computer keep increasing, depending on how beefy of a server you can build/support you can already have games with quite a lot of players/very large systems/planets.

Heck, I think I've seen that custom server we've got running up to 40 players sometimes.

I've seen SupCom players complain about PA map sizes a few times and I don't even. I assume you mean when performance is better, not actually having the planet size limit increased...