Some brainstorming ideas for possible future PA

that is of course if the migrationprocess goes over well
and since it has been mentioned that there is eventualy further work of PA at least planned though nothing realy announced https://forums.uberent.com/threads/the-future-of-pa-and-titans.72977/

if it´s in the scope of adding any further content i´d like to suggest the following (won´t suggest any ballanceideas here)


gameplay:

- multiunittransport for orbital, air and maybe hovercraft

- orbital and naval teleportgates

- hovercraftfactory with a hovercraftfabricator buildable on land and water + some additional hoverunits (grenadieresk and doxesk ammong with the existing hoverunits (locust, drifter, kaiju))

- maybe a couple extra orbital units and structures so gasplanets aren´t so boring aswell ...

- add a titantransport so atlas, ares and zeus can be send between planets as well ...

- Interplanetary artillery ? (no pseudo manual unitcannon+boombot artillery)

- add reclaimables to the remaining biomes ... maybe like dried, frozen or burned-to-coalclump trees as well as random scrap or broken ruinpieces ..

- manhattans should not detonate when reclaimed .. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!! rework unitpushes because commpush and manhattanpushes are beyond stupid!

- split the mend and stitch between medic/mechanic and combatenginerroles same with the barnacle
so one can be better used within armies while the other gets not selected as part of your army ..

- add fabricator production behavior:
for example set behavior to assist and the fabricator automatically assists factories or other fabricators with production unless issued a specific order which it finishes and then continues its set behavior
or set it to reclaim so it goes and reclaims on its own preferably only when the metalstorrage aint filled unless again gets order to assist on building or one unit in a que,or gets a speccific reclaimorder ..

- add static fabricator turret that assist s nearby construction and repairs units ..

- show healthvalue in actual points than percentage or offer a option for that ...

- change orbital view so people can be a bit sneakier with it again
like allow only orbital travelroutes to be visible as blibs by default and grounded orbital (like old deepspace radar) radar only shows blibs on the planet they are on also add a deepspaceradar for gasgiants and stationary orbital radar ... maybe also add a warning if a player actualy went orbital (first orbital unit build)

- add an option to toggle off/on orbital shell view and surfaceview

- allow defenses to be easier surounded by walls to give them extraprotection to last a bit longer .. building walls currently around defenses is a bit messy and often leaves small gaps were shots still can pass through than be properly blocked ..



Multiplayer:

- if it comes back up at all again
change how ranked multiplayer works so people are actualy motivated to play .. like implement a pointsystem like elo or similar and actualy give the player information on average playperformance like how good is he/she at production and/or how much does he/she waste resources or effective actions per minute .. stuff like that ... (partial implemantation with a with visible pointsystem for players in ranked games)



Moddability and Systemeditor

- if possible allow modabbilty for sounds .. (as of 21.12.18 has been added to PTE v. 112527, has been officialy been added 01.01.19 to live 112595, happy audiomodding)

- allow modding so units can be used with more than 4 weapons aswell as different stances and forms (say walker to flyer) as well as allowing muzzleflash animation and shots of single cannons or tubes
.. f.e. heavy laser tower launches one shot but shows 3 muzzleflashes iirc ...

- allow more planetsymmetry were one side is not just mirrored like it´s now but flipped, so having diagonal symmetry ..




i understand resources might be limited ... maybe very limited so again these are merely brainstormed ideas
but these are the things were i think IF these were to be implemented even with only the single unitpool PA has it should actualy be golden imho ...






PS: i may add more to the op

ideas marked green have been added to the livegame

These sound a bit to OP

There is already a point system in place called glicko. Extra statistics about matches isn't key to getting people to play ranked. what is more imported would be more detailed information. like a complete ranking list. Maybe show players actual rating.
Besides that an extended map pool would be good. Maybe even one managed by the community to keep a fresh map pool.

interplanetary artillery would require intel on the targetplanet the rest is how much splash and scattervalue/inacuracypercentage vs alphadamage you put to it could be a missileswarm that scatters before impact or a single strong round that however is launched less often ..
it is less difficould to build artillery if the opponent is on the same planet as you, but if he is on another that he more or less locked down so you can´t land troops on it and has enough nuke defense you may want atleast an option to soften him up

as for titantransport if it´s similarly fragile to the helios especialy with its need to land thus takin air and eventualy ground damage i can see it be fairly easy to defend against if a player would try to drop it directly on your head ..

what do you mean with orbital? orbital view? matter of awareness yes, it´s not easy but the current orbital is just too revealing that just makes any suprise attempts void when it comes to invading or infiltrating other planets and imo the game could greatly improve in that area ...

well whatever is/the community deems neccessary .. fact is the current ammount of info is just not enough .. .. like there is non realy ..

I just wanna better late game sim and bigger planets.
But I can't argue against the multi unit transport.

that´s hardwaredependand and how multithreading is implemented .. and since this game was not done with vulcan as the game was out before vulcan i don´t see there be any further improvement to multithreading ..
so it´s a matter of having a killerserver .. or a supercomputer ...

- new setting for game hosting: maximal number of units
- in a team game: if one commander dies, the player can continue playing until all team commanders are lost. or make a setting for this. So if one team is army-sharing, the non-sharing team does have no disadvantage.
- teleportation should be allowed cross-player within a team.
- It should be possible to donate units or ressources to another player.
- show ressource bars for every teamplayer at a sidebar.
- add a ship titan with antinuke.
- add a armored t2 air transporter
- add a non-armored t2 air transporter which can transport up to 6 units or so.
- make t1 laser faster for better fighting dox.
- new biom: glass/crystal
- new biom: water-metal.
- make biom style a bit more like kickstarter trailer. a bit more "contrast". and a bit more better fitting fadings between ground and CSG.
- intruduce real textures for units
- much more CSGs, such as circles or squares with a ramp on the inner or outer/inner side.
- include direct edit for map maker.
- show element id of a CSG within map editor
- strong t2 wall
- weak t2 wall which is passable by ally units.
- energy generator shall consume metal to produce energy
- ground solar energy generator which doesnt consume metal
- anti radar radar jammer
- shield
- metal spots with double and half amount of metal. (+two more metal spot models/textures)
- radar and sonar separation, as done in Stuart's mod Planetary Obliteration.
- preview pictures per map in map selector
- multi window user interface or multiple tabs, to browse games, waiting in a game, and creating maps at the map designer
- automaticly hosted games with automatic map selection, balancing, kicking idle people and starting. or with votes to control the autohost.
- add 10 seconds forced wait with countdown to 1v1 ranked, so that people are forced to stay at least 10 seconds in order to know wheter they can play right now or not.
- short range EMP weapon (tactical)
- long range EMP weapon (strategical)
- underground factory for better protection?
- invisible units?
- expensive time machine to speed up all units and buildings within a range?
- expensive time machine to jump backwards in time, which causes all players to revert to an older state of the game?

Some very interesting suggestions, emarkus.

I've always wanted an anti-snipe mode: "in a team game: if one commander dies, the player can continue playing until all team commanders are lost. or make a setting for this. So if one team is army-sharing, the non-sharing team does have no disadvantage.". There are some downsides to it but I think it would be fun.

These are also great:

This can be re-engineered to use Vulcan and better multi threat sim. Huge work but that is what I think its better to the game. It is really frustrating when after hours of gameplay your game speed is down to "I wanna kill myself" level.

Isn't this available when you play FFA with Alliances Enabled?

FFA with Alliances Enabled has a checkbox in player list to share resources. But it is sharing, not donation. Donation means, that I can donate a single unit or a specific amount of resources to a specific player at the current time when the action is performed.

In SpringRTS, we call it ally-bars. Metal and energy resource bars for each allys. And when you click/drag metal or energy button for an ally, another bar opens vertically and you can release to mouse button for example at 50% of metal, and then you donate 50% of metal to the player.

Moreover, a ally-bar is drawn red, if the ally will be metal stalling soon.

- The vehicle titan should not be able to drive through deep water. This is unrealistic. And a separate ship titan would be much more fun.
- The build menu of factories shall be divided in two separate areas or tabbed ares. Purpose: Two separate queues for continious production and non-continious production. Both areas look exactly the same. So the player can have continious production, while sometimes injecting a special unit into the queue. If non-continious production is done, the factory continues with the continious production.
- redefine continous production command: pause the continous production.
- if no factory is selected, all continious production is paused. If then a non-continous production is queued, then the current building is aborted and the non-continious unit is built.
- introduce nested build menus.
- add a nested build menue for Pelter and Holkins, in order to add different variants of these units in terms of precision, strength and range. No separate models needed for this.
- t1 stationary repair/assistant tower: medium range and speed.
- t2 stationary repair/assistant tower: long range and much energy consuming
- add small and big EMP mine
- mines shall be not collidable with units, so pathing is better.
- Hovercraft units shall not trigger mines
- add a further mine which is stronger
- add an atomic mine which is not scoutable. allow manual fire.

- add an decoy commander
- add another advanced energy plant with ability to make it invisible
- add energy frequency. if too much energy is consumed by energy storage in a short time, the frequence declines and the energy stalls for a short time.
- add big t2 energy storage
- add small t2 energy storage with capacitors, which stabilices frequency.
- add t2 torpedo hovercraft vehicles
- add low trajority pelter version with faster reaction
- add high energy beam t2 bot with long range and slow movement and slow reloading and high energy consumption.
- add rocket throwing units without making the rockets following the target units.
- hardened t2 air scout
- hardened t2 repair/assistant
- add some fighting units to be able to built by repair/assistant units.
- add expensive and strong t2 transport hovercraft vehicles with up to 8 units loaded
- add a big t2 portal which can transport mobile nukes and maybe even Titans.
- add a "matrix-biom" with green lines and abstract figures on planet surface.
- add ability to make custom planets within map designer with custom height map and custom texture/material texture.

- add improved start spot specification for maps:
- for each game mode (2 teams, 3 teams, 4 teams, 5 teams, 1ffa 2ffa, 3ffa, 4ffa, 5ffa, 6ffa) the map designer shall be able to definite different spawns. For a team mode, every spawn is assigned to a team number. For a team mode, there is a checkbox whether or not a team member is given *all* spawns to chose from.
- maybe add host ability to manually specify start spots.

- if a host creates a game, he shall not automatically load the map. Wait until game starts or until he choses another map. The automatic loading is annoying sometimes.

The Ares is a hover unit so it is realistic.
If you mean the Atlas then maybe, but still it so large it still stick out above the surface, still believable.
The issue with a pure naval titan is that it would have limited use, and currently all other movable titans can be used against naval so you have multiple naval titans.

Ideally you would need to have naval titan than can leave the water, so either hover to extendable legs to be able to walk on land.

I know its hovercraft. but i mean, its unrealistic that such a heavy unit can hover.

it's totally realistic that hover tech can be scaled up.







Do you have a idea for a naval titan?

yea huge work .. that assumes uber has the workforce and resources to do it which i´m very positive they don´t .. so this is not happening ..

To give the simulations speed a big enough boost i think it would need re-coding the simulation to use CUDA or similar like OpenCL. HUGE WORK.

bunch of things i disagree with/find questionable (what´s not in there i am ok with)

real textures :
what do mean by that? textures that are like supcom or generals?
this game has a cartoonishstyle for visibility reasons
i don´t see them invest work into this but this rather being a mod
there also was a mod iirc that recolored planets like it was more in the Kickstartertrailer

powergens consuming metal:
just no, we don´t need to have economy be more complicated ...
thus i also don´t see a need for extra nonmetalcosting powergens ..
this is stuff that is extrawork for no real gain ..

metalspotvalues:
why? planets are generaly well covered with metalspots and having spots with different values would be rather confusing for players who are learning the game .. this might be easier to implement but i don´t see this being a worthwhile change .. to me this is a relic of TA that doesn´t need to be in this game .. even in supcom metalgeneration is consistent ..

EMP:
i just don´t find it intresting considering how much this is a numbersgame .. could also be too powerfull .. like how are you meant to defend against that? ..

invisible units:
again a problem with the scale of this game the best bet would be stealthed units like the kraken
but entirely cloaked and with how difficould it can be to be aware of stuff across planets? .. rather not ..

expensive time machine to speed up all units and buildings within a range?:
nah i am rather against "buff" units/contructions too much potential of snowballing

radar/sonar seperation:
again a rather not worthwhile implementation for no real gain to gameplay imo
as it just complicates things ...


force players to wait:
absolutely not .. especialy if you clicked ranked by accident .. i wait when i want to wait ..

colonels are kinda decoycomanders

what do you even mean by that? i don´t understand


beam weapons have been long a problem with this game cause of a planets corvature ... at best beam weapons can only be shortrange or they either hit the ground or clip through terrain ..

rocketthrowing units: don´t see the need when there already are things like grenadiers or other artillery or directfireunits .. this is at best for visual difference .. nothing realy intresting ..
at best a ranged scattershot but that can be problematic with the engine with many units

t2 airscout: .. you have already various ways to scout with orbital ..

titanportal: problematic depending on the size of a planetoid (like an asteroid) such a structure could be simply too big .. would otherwise require a totaly different teleportstructure that is more like a plattform than a gate in that case i would just change the defaultportal to a plattform ..

matrixbiom: yes i totaly wanted to rip my eyes out ..

gameplay >>>>> realism

overlooked these

shiptitan can still be there even with the ares i don´t see the problem with that

bad idea !!! this way people can accidently pause all unitproduction when they don´t want to
so factories should ALWAYS be selected .. the game provides a "select all factories" command anyway

what are nested buildmenus?

seperated models for turrets are needed to distinguish them the game has a "what you see is what you get " moto as in what unit you see after understanding from seeing it first you always will know it´s capabilities that wont ever change ... your "no different turretmodel" suggestion goes against that .. and i disagree with this suggestion ..

empmines sound ineffective .. like what would they do? just stun units for a bit .. better just destroy them with regular mines
nukemines should definitively be scoutabale by scoutunits and minedetectors ..

hovercraft should trigger mines as those are proximitymines
units do not collide with mines already
also current minefields are strong enough (as in a fairly sized field can stop an ares with its 80000 points of health) so current minefields are nothing to scoff at .. so no need for stronger ones outside a nukemine which seems rather more for fun than anything else ..