It's also equally caused (and in the opinion of some, more so) by an opponent's army reaching critical mass and becoming an untouchable deathball.
I think 'weak' is the wrong term here. They might be weaker in firepower but stronger in durability as a result.
Not really. If their hp stays the same, they don't turn more durable, they just get weaker in destroying each other. But that's just semantics.
'Weaker' is a loaded word, as is 'Stronger'. Durability and Damage are relative terms. Changing one alters the perceived strength or weakness of the other. HP and DPS are absolute numbers, but durability and weapon strength are not. Making a weapon do less damage increases the durability of units against that weapon as their HP is now effectively larger. It's not semantics, it's Ratios and Mathematics.
True, however since I prefer stronger (read: more firepower) units, I used the loaded term weak on purpose to say that I like the idea gameplay wise even if it makes the units be effectively less to my liking.
There's no reason you can't have some powerful units, ones that hit like a tonne of bricks and can blast away a building in a microsecond. But such units should be rare, not the norm. ... God, I love that movie.
There can still be diversity in firepower with units being more durable. It makes the units with more firepower stand out even more, as currently pretty much everything dies in an instant. Edit: Ah Nano beat me to it.
Hmm yes you guys are right. However I fear that those high firepower units will then only feel like direct upgrades to their cheaper/weaker counterparts. Oh well we'll just have to wait and see what uber has planned for us
That's why you balance them with significant drawbacks for their firepower. Make them large, have a low top speed, be fragile, turn very very slowly, require a 'Set-up' period, have no answer to Air units, have no answer to being swarmed by Basic Bots... Or any combination of the above.
The Sumo. The Leveler. The Bulldog. The Morty. The Shooter. The Dominator. The Penetrator. All very different units. All having very powerful weapons. All having major weaknesses that are exploitable to render them next to useless.
My personal favourites were the Annihilator and the Domesday Machine. Massive firepower, but quick enough units could despatch them before they got a chance to deploy.
If Uber can combine the Microwave Laser from Cybran Monkelords into the Doomsday Machine chassis from TA... Well I think I will have found my heaven. Think StarCraft Colossus as a Turret. Mmmmmm *drifts into dream-like torpor*
Yea they took almost a full five seconds to open up and be ready to fire. They also cost a crapton of energy to use at its full rate of fire. If you had an energy problem, you had no base defence whatsoever; just a big laser tower pointing impotently at your enemy's tanks.
There was however an exploit where you could order it to attack something outside it's range and it would stay deployed forever
Making them very vulnerable to air attacks from gunships and stealth fighters, since being fully deployed significantly reduced (halved) their effective health. It was an 'exploit'... that was exploitable! Seriously guys. Total Annihilation was a near-neverending series of one brilliant game design element after another. It. Was. Genius.
I see an alarming number of people not know how to properly nuke. They will waste one on an anti, or use it in wrong places because of the anti, or in the other seat they will put the anti in the wrong place and be vunerable to nuking. Btw, putting just two anti's on the ends covers a lot of chip. Which leads me to ask, which has more range btw, the nuke's blast radius, or the antimissile intercept range? I find ground AA to be rather immaculine compared to tanks trying to aa, tanks get lucky at best and even then it's not guaranteed to takedown. Levelers have the damage necessary and for some reason they have accuracy and/or range to shell one correctly and make it a takedown on a 1v1 level. That might be wrong to leave in the game honestly.
That does not logically follow. Overpowered, in gaming, is a weapon that is too good for its class. The fact that ants and levellers are better AA than actual AA makes the game very broken. It is not fun to play the exact same match, over and over and over. The only way I have found to prevent the "hurr I remember a specific build formation and rush early tanks" strategy (which would be fine if it wasn't every single game) is to force naval/air play by making a map with disconnected islands.
