Lategame units?

Keep in mind the units we have are all kinda copies of each other so it's hard to specialize an Advanced Tank when it has the same role as a Basic Tank, we need to wait and see what kind of units come in the future before we can properly pass judgment. Right now it could go either way.

Mike

I would say about 20 minutes at the earliest and in terms of Spamming I would say that anything is spam able late game. Mid game it could not be spammed so you should be ok. In TA the krogoth was almost unstoppable if you had 3 of them. They covered each other so well that they never took damage but a lone Krogoth could be taken down with enough units.

Lets not think of this unit as experimental but as an Advanced unit that takes a long time to make and could take out 500+ levelers. The tradeoff is it takes 500+ more time to build then a leveler. For resources I would say a drain of 500+ metal would be good.

I don't think TA is the perfect game. It is certainly a very memorable game, but not due to superunits being a good gameplay element.

I'm not convinced by the concept that you propose. If this unit is going to cost a lot, it needs to function in such a way that it justifies that cost, otherwise nobody will build it. So it would have to be pretty powerful against everything. Like you've said before, this works in TA because it is a different game. You have less space and resources to work with, and due to the unit cap games can turn into a stalemate.

The end result here is that the lategame becomes a boring race towards making that unit. Superunits sound incredibly awsome, but in reality they really are not. The strength of TA is that almost each unit serves a role from the beginning to the end of the game. Having a superunit in PA would only make it so that all the other units are invalidated.

You should never start a match and immediately think "I'm going to build Unit X". You should have to first analyze the situation, the planet you're on, where your enemies are in relation to you, and what your ultimate goal is (annihilation? assassination? forced surrender/dominance?) before you think "I'm going to build Unit Y".

Your thought process should be something like this:
>Spawn
>Mountain planet - Build Air Factory then Bot Factories for increased mobility
>Enemy 1 is entrenched in crater north of you
>Enemy 2 has spawned on a gigantic plateau
>You decide to secure air superiority and build artillery

And as the game progresses, you should continue to make decisions like this.

>Enemy 2 has rushed T2 Air, he has something silly like Flak Fighters
>You are forced to the ground
>Build Flak AA, drop a nuke on his doorstep and climb up the side of his plateau
>Blow him up with scouts as he has no ground-based defenses
>Enemy 2 has been ANNIHILATED

Superunits are the antipode of varied gameplay, as they tend to simply be better versions of smaller units. Literally the only reason a Super Unit should ever exist is to mount a gigantic weapon, and the only time gigantic weapons are ever used is for their range. But we already have artillery units, so the only super unit I can think of is something akin to the Annihilator from TA. Or maybe the Cybran Recycler from SupCom2.

Superunits would be redundant at this point anyways. Why? LEVELERS, HO!

What about thousands of units plus giant walkers and such, all at the same time? I'd love to see some bigger walkers join in with my bots and such.

There is no balance reason to include them, and once you get them there is usually never a reason to go back, and that looks stupid.

The commander should be the largest land unit available.

If we can put 'experimental' units aside for a minute, I would say that there's so much missing in the game-ending/doomsday weapon category right now that I don't think too much wild speculation is going to help. In fact, the 'endgame' of PA isn't even in the game yet.

That said, to make the late game interesting we will definitely need units/weapons that are able to crack fortified positions. With radar, catapults and T2 arty where they are just now, it's possible (though not always desirable!) to get dug in to the point where the free-flowing early game can stagnate a bit.

In the short term though, I would dearly like to see a few more interplanetary warfare options included in the next big patch. And the ability to launch nukes between planets, because, y'know, an ICBM is basically a rocket anyways so can we put some more fuel in it and send it gift-wrapped to the enemy com? Pretty please?

You mean that asteroid I crashed into a planet last night was only a dream? The end game is there, it's not complete and still rough but the fundamentals are there.

Mike

Well, yeah, that's in there. But it's like a bullet without a gun. The actual game that makes that an exciting event (rather than an impressive spectacle) just isn't there yet.

And where's my death star? I want to get MY metal planet cooking YOUR weedy little rock planets.

S

In my opinion, the main reason to have very large units would be for things like mobile factories and trojan horse type units. A unit that carried a large number of smaller units through an area that is covered by enemy's AoE artillery most definitely has a use-able role (think Star Wars trade federation MTT) that cannot really be filled by something else. Also, a mobile stealth factory that can create small groups of units to attack from different angles right under the radar of the enemy? Seems do-able (all while keeping any one particular unit from always having radar stealth and making it an extreme hassle to deal with).

So long as the units don't REPLACE any other units, there is nothing wrong with experimental scale units. Plus, think of what a super large unit would look like walking around the horizon from a zoomed-out view; that scale would just look amazing.

I think there's an element of ambiguity of what a late game unit entails. It could be late-game because it's existence on the battlefield will likely decide the fate of the game, or it could be late-game because it's simply prohibitive or pointless to build until the battlefield can support it.

I'm fully in support of late-game meaning they are rely on a late-game state to become feasible. I think it would be strange if we didn't see at least a few units conforming to this concept given the ~100 units Uber are planning as well, there's only so much you can do before when avoiding redundancy until you get real niche and weird.

Hm... a fast and big walker that has some puny laser but when it gets destroyed it explodes and releases a dozen Drox bots.

How about a dragon's teeth launcher which can shoot tall metal walls across a broad area. The purpose would be not about damage, but laying down a field of cover for your mobile units to approach an enemy fortification. It would need decent path finding which I'm confident we'll end up with, and allow units with low range to get within firing distance of defences. The launcher would need to lack precision so it couldn't be micro'ed and abused, but just peppering a battlefield with these dragons teeth. An alternative strategy for this unit would be simply to fire a bunch of them at enemy artillery creating obstacles in a similar vein but less for defending your own attack, but more for simply disrupting artillery bombardment and buying you some time to mount an offensive.

Actually, on a second read through this thread, I'd say that what we need in the game at present isn't necessarily a special-tactics kind of weapon (though a weapon that temporarily disables/inconveniences enemy PD would be super handy).

What we need is a more extended system of counters in the planetary part of the game. What made Supcom's experimentals a great part of the game wasn't that they made point defence structures obsolete, but they did need fairly specific counters. You could hold off experimentals using point defence, but you needed lots and it was more of a last resort than it was an actual counter.

Right now we can't cost-effectively counter the walls of holkins/catapults/laser towers/antinukes without either going orbital or going crazy with our own point defence structures. That will definitely change, but I'd like the option at least of breaking open someone's fortifications using on-planet tools.

Yes, more siege weapons so that we can also have a more powerful defensive set in the early game.

I don't know, I just think that lategame units should most definitely be large scale (or else what would make them late game?). The point isn't to not have big units, it is to not have big units that make smaller units obsolete; so long as you have big units either require the use of smaller units or complement their roles, you don't get the "experimental" problem that was present in Supcom. With the maps being planets and solar systems, large scale units would look even more epic than they did in Supcom, and giving them interesting roles (not just big shooty guns) would make them fun to use.

Another one that would be cool would be smaller but mobile unit cannons (Like a Warhammer 40k Biovore, but mechanical)
Or how about a unit with a really wide riot-shield type thing that blocks fire for units behind it.
These are things that require large scale (and lots of resources), have roles, but don't replace other units.

How does what I said imply that? 'Breaking open fortifications' =/= 'more emplaced artillery/siege weapons'.

In fact, who were you actually responding to? That was such a gnomic comment I genuinely have no idea.

Well you could go the other way and make fortifications useless so you don't need to siege, but that would be boring.

Yeah it's the middle ground that's key. Fortifications have to do something, but you've got to have something to beat them that isn't more fortifications.

Experimentals were pretty good like that in supcom, but the game sorta revolved around them, in the same way PA revolves around asteroid smashing. I guess you could also change things by spicing up the intel/recon game, which isn't so far along in PA atm. You can make fortifications useless pretty quickly by cutting their effective range down to vision range. Right now I'd prefer smart, simple solutions to the current lategame slowdown that didn't involve adding in an extra tier of units. An extra tier of big, awesome-looking units.

Ah, who am I kidding? Saddle up my monkeylord, we're gonna show those pelters who's boss.

I would prefer avoiding extra tiers, but instead adding to the current ones.