I'm wondering aloud why the planets look kind of 'small' even though they certainly aren't. I think it's some of the subtle cues - size of the waves on the shore vs the size of the land masses, size of the trees and size of the features. A tank is probably 10% as high as a mountain. A crevasse is only as wide as a few tanks. I bought Wargame: Airland Battle on a steam sale the other day, and the scale there is a really interesting contrast. The scale is what I'd call 'realistic' with tanks impossible to see until you zoom right in, but a little badge above them showing what they are. Weapons range is probably 200 times the length of the vehicle itself, or more. PA wouldn't suit this approach of course, but it could if with similar land masses the tanks were smaller and the features a bit different. Relative to their scale though, they do seem slow for a robotic tank of the future. I liked the original tank speed but understand why they were slowed down. There was an earlier thread talking about shrinking units/factories by 25-30%, and I remember lots of people liking the idea. I don't think that would be a silver bullet, but it'd be interesting to have a 'crazy build' for a few days with this size change done. Assuming it could be changed without much effort. Now would be the time to give it a crack before things start moving into beta. A tank half the size moving at the current rate would appear to be making much more progress, while not affecting gameplay other than probably making pathing easier. Thoughts?
Like you said, PA is not to scale, not even close to. Especially the planets are not. (And the features on the planet are not in scale with the planet either. The scale is more logarithmic than linear as you would expect.) I would even say that tanks and alike are still to fast, not in comparison to their scale, but in comparison to the scale of the planet, and that's what determines the pace of the game. Decreasing the size of entities (especially units) isn't that simple though, from a technical view. Pathing wouldn't actually get better if units were smaller, it would just reveal the budget cuts in a more obvious way. The pathing is based on an really low resolution cost map, and even now it is rather obvious that many decals are not properly represented in that map, causing tanks to move straight through rocks and alike. If you did just decrease the unit scale, the low resolution of the cost map would just become more obvious. Increasing the resolution of the cost map isn't that easy either, as it costs a fair amount of resources, and contrary to simply rendering textures on the GPU, dealing with large maps on the CPU is quite costly.
Your point about the cost maps making pathing worse with smaller tanks is a good point, hadn't thought about it from that point of view. I still think communicating that the planets are indeed pretty big using visual cues is important, and a bit of refinement to those scales would go a long way.
I like the fact that factories (especially T2) are large, because it limits your production power based on the amount of land you control. If factories (and other buildings) were smaller, you could build more of them in the same size area and land control wouldn't play as big a role. That being said, it will be nice when building placement is less buggy so that you can pack them together more tightly/neatly.
That says quite a lot about scale, when you need land control just to have sufficient build space... You would expect a lack of resources as an argument against building large bases, but the lack of building space when you have an whole planet available?
There is nothing new in your post or the rest of this thread, why didn't you just post in the old one? Secondly, comparing scale from a game that plays on a small segment of the world (flat traditional RTS map in air land battle) to one playing on a sphere will always give you wrong results. Depending on the size of the sphere, certain scales are literally impossible to achieve in 3d. Also I love to say this but I'm thankfull that PA is no icon wars.
cola_colin pretty much proves you wrong already with his playstyle. It is, although a rather very fast one. There is just no time to admire the units when you have to flood the planet in an ridiculous speed, that is if you don't turtle for the nuke. You can either waste your time with micro base construction or just stay zoomed out, trying to keep control of the whole planet as one. Issue isn't so much the unit sizes though, they are just fine IMHO. Issue is just the pace of the unit movement which makes every single planet feeling tiny and the deathball mechanics which render anything short of the final strike a waste of resources.
T2 still seems to small. These huge buildings so much bigger than tier 1, sometimes makes just as small if not smaller units than tier 1. Seeing such a tiny unit in such a huge tier 2 building makes me sad :S The Commander should be bigger i think.
But WHY is a unit bigger? What is the Reason? You don't build a scout vehicle the same size as a heavy tank. The visuals play a very subconscious role in communicating the unit's role to the player, sure knowing the stats can be a big part of that, but you shouldn't HAVE to go about learning the stats to know what a unit is/does. Mike
I don't expect this game to be a perfect copy of Total Annihilation. But the factory size is in-line with how the advanced units work right now. They are better, so it makes sense for the factory to be bigger. As soon as they change the way advanced units work then I suspect some of the scaling will be changed as well.
I think you misunderstood what I said when I made that comment. I'm not declaring it as a fact, I'm giving the perspective of what small visual cues can make you subconsciously think. When you see a bigger tank you subconsciously presume it has thicker armor and bigger barrels even when that's not the case. The leveler and the ant really confirm this stereotype.
My understanding was that The Bigger Advanced Factories was purposeful in terms of readability in that you don't need to pay attention to small details to identify them, just the overall size is enough. Also that the maximum size a unit can be is dictated by the factory it is built by. Mike
That's another thing, the art design of the factories is to generic between basic and advanced. Not saying we should follow TA's art but the diversity in the look of the structures was amazing.
I didn't mean running out of space on a planet, I meant running out of space that you control and can defend safely. If somebody can turtle up in a small space and pack their factories together such that they match the production of an expansive player, that just seems wrong. If you want more production power, you should have to expand out to claim more land to build on, which is how it works right now because of the large factories. It should stay that way IMO.
I think it plays alright as is area wise, and metal wise it needs less over the same area, maybe t2 mex to not end world hunger as well. I like the curvature of the buildings on small planets. Bigger planets aren't terribly noticeable.
