Confirmed Features List 2.0

There are a great many reasons for not including those 6 [WILL NOT BE PRESENT] features too. Jon has a few personal bugbears that he's just not willing to put into the game... and he's got pretty sound reasoning behind those decisions. If you check the first post again, and also search for Jon's posts on the forum (he goes by the alias Neutrino) you'll get an insight into why he's excluding them from the design.

but if you want the quick version:
Research Tree: Not present so as to not encourage "optimal" research orders. Balancing Research Trees is a headache and it's something Jon would rather avoid in the first place as they produce stale gameplay styles and "non-choice" build orders for optimum effect.
Shields: Makes the mid game stagnate as each player bounces off layered shields. Little to no gameplay changes other than promoting a turtle player to shield up and build Nukes... and nothing else.
Space combat: A completely different kind of gameplay is needed for combat in space. Try playing Homeworld some time, and compare it to Total Annihilation. They are very different beasts when it comes down to a technical level.
Multiple Unit Pools: Would you like 3 races with 50 units each? or one race with 150? Jon chose the latter. It cuts production costs and increases the variety on an individual unit-to-unit basis.
Commander Upgrades: See Research Tree and Multiple Unit Pools. Much the same explanations. We'd rather have 20 different commanders without "upgrades", than 3 or 4 with 5 upgrades each.
Unit Veterancy: Adds an incentive to micromanage individual units. Jon simply doesn't desire this to be the focus of gameplay and wants you to concentrate on several hundred units... rather than "ranking up". Ties in to the lack of "Super-Units" and lack of Tech-Disparity. All units are created and come off the factory conveyer already the best that they can be.

They're Robots. They don't "Get Better"... They are already the Best.

stephen10188, you should start reading through the Topic Index, it's a growing list of threads with in-depth discussions on pretty much all of the Topics you mentions, but I'll hit these up quickly;

Unit Vet just doesn't work that well when you have armies that number in the hundreds(maybe thousands) and the time you'd have to invest in it to take advantage of it is much better to use for expanding, and actual combat. Also How does a Mass Produced Robot get better in the field? [urlhttp://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=513076#p513076]Check out this thread for a good discussion on Unit Vet.[/url]

Multiple unit Pools just means that we all have the same Units, there is no Protoss, or Zerg, this is primarily a Money saving thing, art is expensive, but also has the benefit of being easier to balance and means you're never shoehorned into particular strategies, you can always transition into any strategy, and given the fact there are several types of Biomes each with different terrain implications it's fairly important to make sure everyone has the tools to take advantage of it.

Space Combat isn't needed. A game of PA is based around combat for control of a System(AKA Solar System), think of it as a singular Battle within the Greater Galactic War(Which BTW is just a Meta Game to tie together a series of Skirmishes) also there are a fair number of 'Lore' aspects which aren't conducive to deep space Combat. There will still be things up in Orbit like Satellites and Moons and you'll also have the option of moving asteroids into Orbit as well from the looks of things.

Shields are just a PAin to balance and work well into the Gameplay, it's not that they won't even make an appearance, but that they aren't planned to be a portion of the Core Game.

Research Tech Tree, I think your definition is different from what the rest of us are talking about, Research is more so in terms of the system used in SupCom2, which in short, was very poorly implemented and not well suited to RTS games of this particular Genre.

Mike

Thanks guys as I say I am new here and the number of posts I would have to read through in order to grasp the summary of reasons you've kindly provided was a little daunting. Though I will now obv make an effort to stay upto date :s

As I think I said, and you picked up on, the research tree and commander upgrades I was pitching vary quite a bit from the classic "tech tree/upgrades approach" but I can see your reasons for disapproving of the latter for sure. That said the multiple adapted commanders approach is very neat and definitely rendered that gripe of mine obsolete.
As I said I know shields are a pain to balance, I just happened to like them (and I believe many others did too) lol. Similarly I totally see the reasons behind the space combat issue it would be very touch to implement and therefore i get that the sharp change of pace/style might be unwelcome. I was more hinting that despite these valid obstacles I felt the concept was very much in keeping with galactic war.

The one area we may have to agree to disagree is veterancy I would argue that no matter how perfect something is to begin with the inability to learn any lessons from what it sees in the field (which could be very different from pre-war ideas of strategy) would represent a weakness which even now we’re seeking to overcome with our developments into artificial intelligence (Chess computers). Indeed their knowing that another unit would approach something in the perfectly optimal way and expecting you to do the same would provide an opportunity to catch it unawares in a way which may more than make up for the sub-optimal initial approach (element of surprise etc). You’re never too clever to learn

Oh and thanks for the quick replies

The plan for commanders based on what we know so far is as such;

Multiple commanders, each with potentially 2 "abilities" pulled from a Global Pool. No Customization, just a large selection.

Mike

About veterancy:

Lore-wise, veterancy has arguments for and against. Gameplay-wise, while veterancy may make sense in a smaller-scale game like Dawn of War or Company of Heroes, it doesn't really work nearly as well when there are hundreds of units in play at any given time and micromanaging your 'veterans' just becomes a pain. Take SupCom (1 and FA) for example: the only units that people actually paid attention to the veterancy of were the Commanders and the Experimentals. That was because they couldn't be mass-produced, and therefore the health regen gained from veterancy became an important part of gameplay. with anything else (except maybe T3 bots), the speed at which stuff could die coupled with the sheer number of units which could be produced meant that most people, even at high levels of play, just didn't really use the veterancy mechanics at all.

Actually Vet in SupCom1/FA had more to do with the fact that it also increased health, not just total health, but also Current Health, making for a fairly broken system.

Mike

Much easier to see than original version, thanks for refinement.

Thank you for this, I was starting to wonder if we will ever see an update to that thread!
Anyway, good job, and much better layout. Also no colours! YAY! On the old one I kept having to scroll down to remind myself of the key

I'm going to throw back in Unit Naming with ctrl+N as a suggestion (as in SC1), for the same reasons as in the last thread.

I will continue to do so.

forever

Nice, though I would prefer some color code formatting, like the original.

I had a question regarding the Huge/Large Planet feature listed under maps.

Will this be just a very large planet to do battle on? or is this referencing a specific game mode where the entire game takes place on a single planet with multiple biomes?

Secondly, is there a consolidated suggestion thread, or do we just throw up posts if we have a particular idea?

There is no consolidated suggestion thread, nor subforum at this time.
It's pretty much a free-for-all in General Discussion and the Backers Lounge is no better

just glared over the list...
-
didn´t they say in the livestream with the deltacommander that
they may add upgrades such as rocketlaucnhers or rapidfireguns?
... i rather would put that as unconfirmed
was there an update were they discarded the idea?

It was mentioned in either the Delta Commander Livestream session and/or in teh backer's lounge, it's on my list of things to track down the confirmation of.

Mike

Commanders may have unique equipment, but they are decided at the start of the match. The Supcom system of purchasing Comm upgrades will not be present.

Quote?

Delta Commander Livestream.

Minutes? Seconds?







I see us get there.

IMO, keep commands manual and improve on these manual commands with hotkeys.

I don't like automation such as constructors automatically building extractors, or area selection of derelicts to reclaim; this kinda stuff separates skilled players from casuals, and albeit being a good thing to keep balance, when someone has the capacity to do something faster than someone else, it should be rewarding.

The suggestion regarding inserting commands in a queue that's already established is awesome. It doesn't take away the manual input and is an innovation I'm surprised took this long to surface.

I'm an advocate of hotkeys. After having played starcraft 2 (albeit badly), I'm a huge fan of mashing keys to speed up processes. I've always gone for hotkeys where I can, but starcraft 2 is a keyboard AND mouse game, unlike many other RTS games out there now, which could be played with a console controller. However, all this said, the hotkeys TA had were a little all over the place, lol; ideally, hotkeys would focus around qwerty and the wsad cluster that we're all so used to these days.

It would be nice if, when you update the list you could add an updated section and show all the new ones in that part, and also in the list in the right sections. Just a thought. I was looking back on it and I didn't know if any of them were new or not.

EDIT: or another idea, just put a date on when you added it to the list right next to it.