I've played 6 matches this weekend and lost all of them, I used to be able to hold my own but there seems to be two new methods to winning, speed spam or turtle then nuke... YAWN, screw any actually strategy or epic battles. It's just becoming a 'who can click fastest' game. I know it's alpha but I'd hate to see this as the preferred play style moving forward. Also random start points need to go, or at least have an option to be switched off. I've played too many matches now where one player (usually me!) is surround by 2 or 3 other players. The piggy in the middle usually doesn't stand a chance. Oh and why can tanks attack air units??!
I can agree on the 2nd and the 3rd point. Your first point basically boils down to "I want to win by doing X and Y, so let me win doing it because I think X and Y are best". Games don't work like that. Spamming tanks all over the planet is at the heart of "epic" battles. I agree though that the low variety of "useable" (seriously navy and orbital units are too far away from being finished) units is a bit low resulting in fewer choices (less "strategy") to the player.
Most maps aren't like that because planets are not flat and you'll always be between other planets. I agree that sometimes spawns very near to each other, but probably this problem will gone when game will have interplanetary and will be optimized better, so we'll able to play on larger planets. Because it's silly when pack of 50 tanks can be killed by one bomber and they even can't try to shot it. Why they shouldn't able to do so? They actually not efficient as AA.
Actually, right now, tanks are far too accurate against air. But I digress THIS IS ALPHA. Purpose of it is to get things into the game AND FUNCTIONAL. Balance will be addressed at some point in Beta. For now, expect rabidly unbalanced games, bad spawns, crappy metal, many many crashes, lack of depth, lack of strategy, ect. There is no point complaining about it at this stage, as there is basically nothing the devs can really do about it right now, they need to focus on feature implementation. And there is still quite a bit left to go.
its your fault if you send 50 tanks at the enemy without AA and they all get taken out by a single bomber. stop trying to build only one unit.
I'm don't have such problem, it's not change fact that strict limitation's are usually looks silly, but I agree that in current build non-AA units quite too efficient against air.
But the game currently encourages you to build a single unit only... Mass producing tanks/bots is just a lot cheaper than dealing with the paper-scissor-rocks mechanics. Mobile AA is wasted resources when you carry out the rush and 50 tanks already DO take out bombers without losses. It's not about the lack of dedicated counter measures, it's about the fact that they are pretty much pointless since you don't really need them unless you go for an cost efficient turtle. The actual movement and combat is also really fast paced in comparison to the planets size and unit production times, so you are not rewarded for playing smart or reactive in strategic terms. The production is very rigid while the units are far to agile, thus eliminating any chance of reacting to a threat by producing the correct counter in time. So you are essentially forced to turtle in order to defend properly against all threats, since you can't do so in the open field. It would be worth to try, what would happen if ALL unit's speeds and damage outputs were cut in half (except for long range weapons), thereby inverting the time cost of unit production vs deployment. In theory, this should finally allow for proper on field battles since you can now actually produce counter measures while the enemy is already on the way, and it also discourages homogeneous deathballs, since your enemy now has actually the TIME to produce the counter. It could also help the issue that the current planets just feel tiny, despite their actual size. In this case, TA can not serve as an example since the maps were rather tiny, but SupCom does. Remember how long it took for a simple tank to cross a 20km map without the use of transports? I say, that time was perfectly reasonable. Another side effect: This should also help the issue that the planets currently don't really FEEL that big despite their actual size. You only notice their size during scouting, but once scouted, even slow tanks get to the front line in no time. Don't even mention bombers, which could as well be used for scouting due to their ridiculous speed if it wasn't for the lack of vision...
Halving the current speeds would make it too close to a 'turn based game in rts form' a bit like SOASE. If tanks arrive on an edge of your base, buildings have already been destroyed by the time tanks get from the middle of it to the edge. I kinda liked the original speed of the tanks actually. Though I understand the rationale for reducing it.
True, but when you look at SupCom, that actually worked quite well that way on the larger maps. It added much to the game since you suddenly had discrete front lines instead of just one big mess. And as for the tanks which are now incapable of fighting surprise attacks without loss of buildings, that's not a bad thing either. Because that means that there is suddenly an alternative to complete steamrolling when you can attack your enemies base and he WILL suffer losses, even though you won't be able to annihilate him yet. Just chew your way through his base bit by bit. Besides, you would now have sufficient time to intercept the enemy tanks in the field with the use of faster, dedicated counter weapons Sure, we all love fast cars. But to be honest: I find an extended offroad-rally way more interesting than a simple F1 race, later one is just over way to soon and even though there are some intense crashes sometimes, most races just end eventless.
I guess it comes down to scale again. You'd expect it to take a while to get to an enemy's base - but if you literally have tanks in your base you'd hope they'd be able to respond before half your base is wiped out...
I played a game with 5 teams of 2 earlier where I started out like this. Both players next to me began to attack me but I managed to escape with my commander in the middle of the chaos. As I was running away I ran into a third team's base nearby. My only escape was to trudge through the ocean to a nearby landmass that wasn't claimed yet. I began to rebuild and teched up to T2 fast as I knew that was the only way I could catch up. Miraculously, (and because one guy accidentally nuked himself) I managed to pull through and win the game despite losing my initial base and my teammate being completely new to the game. The moral of the story is, no matter how bad it looks, NEVER GIVE UP! You never know when your enemy might nuke themselves...
Modern tanks can shoot airplanes. It's a fact. For instance CV90 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_Vehicle_90) has an onboard computer that is able to track plane movement and shoot them down with it's main cannon. Having tanks shoot airplanes in a sci fi game is therefore not op or silly. Land A.A is still more adept at destroying air, like it should be. Their only downside is they don't do close to any damage to other land which makes them completely useless if enemy doesn't build mass air. That is something that should be returned to it's former glory (I remember them being quite good at killing land targets, must have been nerfed at some point of time). Halve speed?!? Cut damage?!? The one thing I love about PA over other rts is the fact that tanks actually behave more like actual tanks! They are semi fast, can't take a lot of damage and deal a lot of damage! You know, just like real world TANKS!!! I hated how in supcom the tanks and most t1 units in general felt like they did absolutely nothing. You needed 20 of them to take one generator out efficiently. Cutting their speed and damage will just make them perform even worse against land defenses, especially artillery that currently devours them at range. That would make turtling the one and only possible strategy. Imo making the walking bots be the fastest land units in the game is a bit odd since irl walkers can't be as fast as treads and wheels, that's just physics. The way I picture bots would be a really cheap a bit slower than tanks cannon fodder troops that you use to shield your tank army from artillery and land defenses.
I have to disagree. It may not be silly, but at present it is certainly very overpowered. It renders AA-specific units completely redundant. As ace63 said yesterday on Monday: In TA - stumpies, bulldogs and their core counterparts would perhaps have shot down one plane in a hundred. This was because of their turrets' slow vertical movement speed and the slow speed of their projectiles. Even if they managed to get their turret aimed at about the right place before the plane was out of range, the shot rarely ever hit a thing as the plane manoeuvred our of the way. In any case, I'm sure Uber are well aware of the over-effectiveness of non-AA units against air, and this is something they'll address in beta
The deal is, that their simply isn't much use in having a unit that is weaker than a tank and also slower than it. In that situation, it'd almost alway be easier to spam tanks than to deal with the more complicated usage required to make use of such a slow and weak unit despite its cheap production cost. There's also an upper limit to how fast bots can move before it just looks silly, so at some point the only way to have a meaningful difference in speed between them is to make tanks slower. Hence the current unit stats and the commonness of slow tanks in other games. Don't get too attached to realism, it's usually(and should always be) the first thing to be sacrificed in exchange for a more fun experience, or for greater gameplay balance.
Just sandboxing, i discovered levelers are very accurate aa. Maybe give them spread vs air. That way they naturally miss a bit. I figured before alpha, unit targeting would need lots of patching. I was wrong, units calculate perfect minus player imput change such as bot strifing
In pa unit cost is directly transferred to build time. You can build a much larger cheap unit force in the same time period as you would build a smaller more costly army. Hence them being cannon fodder. Sure you want tanks to do damage but you want fodder to keep them alive. Also I think the A.A should be upgraded to be on par with tank instead of tank being nerfed to be on par with a.a. I don't like realism for the sake of realism, that's what I bought european escalation for. However I like to feel like my units are actually powerful. I don't want to watch one tank with exploding shots shooting at a volatile power plant for two minutes before managing to take it down.
'Feeling powerful' is firstly a completely subjective term. Your feeling of power is also secondary to decent gameplay, which Planetary Annihilation lacks due to the speed of engagement being set at eleven. You can't make meaningful choices during almost any engagement because everything is too busy being already dead ten seconds ago. Your feeling of 'power' at destroying an Energy plant in a fraction of a second leads the other player to feel 'powerless'. There's no reasonable delay between a unit being attacked and it already being dead. There are no heroic last stands, there is no back-and-forth flow to a front line, there is no interesting counterplay against an attacking force, other than to have already been there before it attacked you... and Planetary Annihilation is a weaker game because of it. I put emphasis on the word 'game' because in a game all players should feel like they have options at nearly all stages of play. If a clear winner is established at minute ten, then why bother playing the other fifty minutes? If the losing player is reduced (as is the case in Planetary Annihilation) to only one option - 'The Snipe' - then that's not really an option, now is it?
Well, a snipe is not a singular entity. The player would still have to decide if he uses bombers, a nuke, or maybe some last ditch secret asteroid expansion effort.... And there's certainly right and wrong choices among them, depending on the state of your game...
There are multiple types of snipe, yes, but the snipe is your only option... and as you said, there are 'right' and 'wrong' options even when considering that. Yet more examples of calculations masquerading as choices. It's starting to feel like the game many people are happy playing could be played by a computer many times more efficiently than a human could.
Yes I quess that making that big game defining fight take longer could create a back and forth moving frontline that forces you to put your concentration into creating defence lines and expanding your production to keep the reinforcements coming faster than the enemy. I would actually like to see pa play like this, even if it means weaker units. However the problem that you mentioned, that comm snipe is the only tactic for the weaker player, is more caused by defenses being close to impossible to destroy without nukes at the current moment. You can't really make a daring raid for the enemy commander with just a bunch of units when even a huge army can't even get near his walls (however I hope the unit cannon will fix this problem). Right now the only tactic against a turtle is to win the nuke race.
