Introducing a new Dev

To put it in perspective: In TA, most weapons, EMG(weapon on Peewee Kbots and Flash tanks) and lasers, could not reliably destroy wrecks and Dragons Teeth(walls). Wrecks were basically immune to their fire.
Only weapons with larger splash/AoE would be able to destroy wrecks but I'm not sure if they even did full damage to wrecks.
Wrecks usually had a little less health than the unit that were destroyed.

Because heavy assisting t2 units does still make a single t2 factory pump out a lot. T1 factories are pretty fair atm because you assist them and build more of them and steadily produce off of them. T2 factories it always seems like build just 1 and produce all you need from just it, sometimes you only build one advanced factory out of the three available. Why not have more fullscale armies made with abundant t2 require just one more factory than just one?

Honestly, I listed them in order of trial. If they work on metal, and you can't afford to heavily assist a t2 factory and produce a huge army and spread like the plague with infinite metal to spare, after they nerf metal spots and income and t2 mexes, then they probably don't need to worry too much about this.

Doing that is not as efficient as building more factories. Do it all you want, you will lose to someone building multiple factories instead.

Some mechanics that are still not in the game or could be experimented and supported in the engine:
1. Weapons leading their target.
Currently weapons aim straight for their target even if it moves. This was mostly true in TA as well even though units would be lead their target better and better as they gained experience.
Implementing this will definitely change balance as Dox and bots in general will be hit much more easily by commanders and Ants for example. Dodging micro will be harder to perform manually as the unit has to change speed or direction all the time.
Personally I prefer this behaviour to the current one as retreating, advancing and dodging becomes more tactical in nature.
If you want to chase down a target as fast as possible you can't dodge.
If you want to retreat as fast as possible you can't dodge.
If you want to keep dodging the enemy has the alternative to retreat at full speed or close in to a range where it is impossible for you to dodge.

2. Friendly fire blockage
In most games on the Spring engine, like Zero-k, units are unable to fire through eachother. I'd say it promotes tactical maneouvers but it also increases complexity in the simulation and for the player.
It is hard to read the simulation and access if you units can fire or are blocked by friendly units. It also makes the interaction between Line of Fire checks, collision volumes/hitboxes, weapon location and unit footprints much more important.
If an enemy can hide inside the collision volume of friendly unit, your units might be unable to fire at it for example. On the opposite side even when units can fire through friendly units you get situations where you can place walls or other buildings in front of your fighting units so that they shoot at the enemy without the enemy being able to hit your fighting units which is a mechanic I personally dislike and think is unintuitive and unrealistic.

I came across someone mentioning that when air units get a health increase, that ants/levellers being able to shoot up will become far less effective.

But, was the idea of this game to remove as much micro-management from the game as possible? because in my eyes, leaving it as it is will only force players to send single air units across an enemy tank force just before an engagement to make their turrets face the other way. Is that not micro-management?

Too many people seem to think that because this worked in TA, it will be fine in PA, yet all responses i see either go against the inherent design decisions of the game, and make absolutely no sense in other reasonings. I dont understand any need for tanks to be able to shoot up when we have dedicated anti-air ground vehicles eg. spinners.

1. needs to be implemented.

2. is debatable due to the fact of difference in scopes of the two games. planetary annihilation is meant to be played on a scale incomparable to zero-k, and whilst i would agree that this improves players tactical engagements, like i said above, the aim of the game is to remove as much micro as possible. zero-k is far more RTT than PA is, and in this case, it doesnt make sense to implement something like this.

The biggest issue I think needs to be addressed in the current build is nukes.

PA's late game strategy as it stands now is to get enough economy to build nuke before the enemy does, while building just enough units to defend your nuke from enemy units.

This is the optimal strategy right now. It shouldn't be. IMO, a nuke is awesome, and incredibly useful especially for breaking turtles. But it shouldn't be the strategy of choice, becoming more useful than units as a whole.

Instead, a nuke should be a strategic choice that supplements other strategies, rather than dominating them, Think "tactical missile" rather than "city-leveling explosive".

EXAMPLE:

The enemy has a heavily defended base. Many many laser turrets, in front of many many advanced laser turrets.

A nuke isn't the only option, and not necessarily the best. Off the top of my head, other good choices would be artillery, use of the unit cannon, and directly engaging it with some kind of high-health, low rate of fire, high damage units meant for such a scenario.

In this scenario, a nuke is another option. Of course, there has to be a reason to use it as a tactical supplement rather than a commander-instant-death weapon of mass destruction where, even if it misses, takes out half of the opponent's base. This could be because of the counter-nuke defenses in the core of the base, or the balanced impracticality of the nuke in that kind of scenario.

If you choose the nuke, you could use it against the defensive line before your main army storms the base. If you scout the enemy building something (say, a rocket ship to the moon, or their own nuke), you could use it against that, or perhaps use it against their economy.


I quite like the idea of having two different "nukes": low-damage, high radius nukes and high damage, low radius nukes. And both need to be easily counter-able by something that isn't "make your own nuke and nuke them before they do it to you.

Personally I'm not 100% convinced it needs to be implemented. In most cases the projectiles are so fast that they don't need to be aimed in front of a moving target in order to hit it.
Of course if units lead their target you can have higher variance in projectile velocities without some weapons with slow projectiles always missing a moving target.
Aircraft and gunships in TA were generally too fast to be hit by most land units.
Even in Zero-K where units lead their target the strafing of the gunships is enough to dodge slow projectiles.

It is a can of worms in terms of gameplay, simulation and exploits. It would be cool if Uber could solve it though. It is a nice way to nerf deathballs which in most cases would have to spread out on a line to maintain maximum firepower and a line can be flanked for example.

I see a few references to TA here that aren't correct. Tanks could not shoot air in TA. Well unless the unit was still. Slower shooting tanks were horrible against faster units (with or without veterancy) You needed to micro a force attack on the ground where you thought the unit would be when it reached.

Wrecks are in many people's opinion what makes TA a great game. Wreck battles are full of strategy. Wrecks could be horrible with the weak pathfinding (this has recently been massively improved as computers can now handle it), but this just brings more strategy in unit choices.

Projectiles were generally really slow compared to unit speeds in TA and unit ranges were pretty small but they could target and fire at air units. Because the projectiles were so slow they would rarely hit.
Having the same behavior in PA could work. Although slow projectiles would force people to manually dodge projectiles or use automated behavior in order to be effective in some situations at high level play. It might be against the goal of reducing micro.

I assume that is the same rationale behind the paper-thin armour these robots are sporting... or at least, part of the greater whole?

Well, it's only peripherally a balance issue, but again (Yeah, i said it before) why the automatic assumption that turtling=evil?

It's a strategic option.
Good sometimes, bad others.

Really bugs me when i see stuff like: "Yeah, but that leads to turtling." followed by "Yeah, that sux." and "Yeah, turtling=bad."

I happen to like grand defenses, and particularly dislike 20 armies of units going in different directions.
Which a lot of folks seem to consider to be 'the way to go.'

As it happens, i agree with most of shotogun's suggestions.

It looks to reduce the incidence of rush gaming, (which i don't like).
Mainly because i want to play a game of strategy and tactics, not 'can i get my build queue perfect in the first 30secs.'

That game is called Starcraft.
And i want a nice low Zaphod limit

While I agree about your statement about pseudo nuclear arms races, I think/hope much of the balance of nukes will be changed once multiple planets are implemented.

The most frustrating thing about nukes (IMO) is that currently they are mostly used to target factory groups. While it is a valid, and currently highly effective strategy, it can cripple a team with one shot.

Once multi-planet basing is added, and bases are able to expand to the point where a single nuke would be inefficient against buildings, I think they'll be much more useful at attacking massive unit armies.

Nukes should serve as an highly effective anti-unit weapon with perhaps a small bonus towards destroying defences rather than a one-shot-base-crippling cannon.

Honestly it hurts to watch a super warmachine of the distant future to constantly miss just because the target is moving. I know this argument can be used to justify many things that completely crippel gameplay (i.e. tanks that work as perfect aa, something I absolutely don't want), but it just hurts to see PA units fail at stuff that even the tanks of the actual past already could do reasonably well.

Actually so far I don't have the feeling that all games, at least 1v1 on middle size planets, are pure nuke races. I've been doing fine for the most part without going for nukes at all.
Actually I have the feeling that nukes are already not very effective in terms of base destruction because bases are so extremely huge. The one weak spot that most players have is energy production which quite often is mostly in one place and therefore a very good target.

Increasing typical unit longevity would improve the feel of the game substantially.

Haven't read the full thread yet but just wanted to say welcome to the team!!

will post something more constructive when I've had a chance to play more beta with my son, we're both big TA and SC fans, but can't afford a second account to play against each other just yet

We prefer a long base building game, so i'm not coming from a competitive online point of view and I'm not referring to PA here just games in general, the main balance issues for me seem to be:

* base defences should be more useful, otherwise why not just build loads of units?
* unit promotions/upgrades/naming are good, makes you care more about/identify with them
* have terrains where only certain units can go, make it worth loading bots into a flying transport and landing in a spot where only flying units can attack you, not long range artillery
* maybe if units had a small nuclear shield so the nukes/artillery mainly damaged buildings and didn't one-shot all your troops it would be more fun for long game play
* there shouldn't be too many long-range firing units too early on in the game
* more amphibious/infiltration type units please

If you're aiming for more global domination instead of one hour 'quickie' games then this would be great!

keep up the good work, hopefully will get my son an account for beta and we'll get some games in!

Mark/Bluejam

I have to disagree on this. I've seen nukes becoming a kind of crutch for poor players, which allows them to outclass decent players. The only way for mid-rank players to defeat this tactic is to build their own nukes before they try to do so, which, well, works, but it's not as fun as maneuvering tanks down the enemy's front line, or doing cool, original tactics like sending in 20 air fabricators to build artillery in the middle of the enemy's energy field (that was a fun game...).

Anti nukes work, but isn't it more fun to build your own counter-nuke instead? Anti-nukes seem to take around the same economic burden to build as nukes. However, there's a clear incentive to build nukes instead. Consider this, an anti-nuke simply stops the enemy's nuke at best, re-routes it to a different part of your base at worst. A nuke, on the other hand, can destroy the enemy's nuke launcher, as well as the surrounding factories, econ buildings, defenses, nearby armies, and sometimes commander.

Consider also, the nuke is more efficient than using normal units. To get to the enemy's base, you need to fight through their armies, point defenses, artillery, etc before reaching their buildings, which even then take some amount of time to destroy -- while the enemy can send reinforcements. Such a mechanic for battle is what makes RTS's fun -- the defender has a small advantage in that case, which can prevent a slippery slope.

A nuke isn't just a slippery slope though. It's a goddamn cliff made of Teflon. The person to get nukes first almost invariably wins the game in a landslide following the detonation. Sure, a better player will win, since their econ will be stronger and they'll get nukes faster. But the game at this point has devolved into an arms race, rather than a strategic military game. Right now, the base-destruction-per-resource-cost of nukes is off the charts, especially because they ignore every other defense in the entire game besides their specialized counter, which no one uses because they're lame.

Bad players 'rush' nukes. I dont have much of a problem with them, and i can only justify using them when i have over 1k income.

Perhaps their cost needs increasing, but that kind of discussion is not for this thread as was posted in the OP.

If your having problems against nuke 'rushing', try splitting your energy power lines up, or actually building an army and attacking. after all, each nuke does cost 35k metal.

Turtling is evil. Defending is good/nice/superb/fantastic. Look at the videos that Zaphodx posts every day, there you see defenses instead of turtling. Obviously in those videos you see master rts player playing at breakneck speeds, but they still use defenses, they build turrets and artillery and they use them to protect themselves from raids or to whittle down a larger force before engaging it with their own smaller force.

I prefer that to sitting behind a comfy impenetrable wall sipping tea while planning carefully how to deal with my enemy who has been trying fruitlessly to get through my wall of doom (that was frankly far too easy to make). Thankfully the next patch lowers metal point numbers so we will hopefully see less walls of doom.

Good players use nukes too, they just use them more conservatively because they can either use tanks well enough to crush any noob, or because diverting economy to nukes while fighting a strong player is risky during early-mid game . A nuke has more destructive power than the equivalent in tanks, and it completely ignores cumulative defenses. Even if I do have all my energy and production scattered, that doesn't mean that even a single nuke strike isn't devastating!

Also, isn't the original post about discussing balance changes?

'Bad players 'rush' nukes. I dont have much of a problem with them, and i can only justify using them when i have over 1k income.'

Tell me what part about 1k income is early or mid game?

Besides, nukes ARE devestating, but do they usually kill 35k worth of buildings? probably not. In any case, this is higher level balance designs rather than changing nuke cost or explosive power.