Introducing a new Dev

I'm not talking about shooting into groups, I'm talking about a single target. Shooting at a target's side could expose more area for the shot to hit compared to say shooting at the front of the same target for example.

Mike

For single target, there is only one scenario where a jitter in the time component couldn't prevent an accidental hit, and that is when your target is approaching you head on (in the same plane the projectile is moving) and you are using a direct fire weapon.

In every other scenario, you are guaranteed a certain hit chance, but you can't exceed it by far.

The actual hit chance is somewhere along the line of:
hit chance = min(size / ((jitter * speed) + spread), 100%)

With the only exception being projectile and target movement vector being (close to) parallel. So don't approach head on. Just don't.

sorry I misunderstood what you meant with "lead", that's all I have nothing against smarter units that target at the future position of a moving object, that still enables you to dodge shots with changing movement directions. I just argued against homing or instant hitting projectiles

Hi sirvladamir, are you familiar with Zero-K? It is a free to play RTS developed on the Spring engine. The balance, strategy, tactics and units are highly refined and inspired by Total Annihilation.
http://zero-k.info/

One important facet of maintaining balance and engaging gameplay in Zero-K is the use of unit classes.
http://zero-k.info/Wiki/UnitClasses

The classes are not contrived but rather organic classifications i.e. high speed, high damage units are considered "Raiders". The natural counter to raiders would be "Riot Control", or units with high damage and high health but low speed and small range. There's much more nuance described in the link above and of course 'high' and 'low' is often relative to cost. One thing to note however is that balance is much more straight forward when units fall into unit classes. Especially when learning what units are useful for what.Zero-K's use of unit classes also allow for a great variety of unit and weapon types without severely undermining the ability to balance the game.
http://zero-k.info/Static/UnitGuide
http://zero-k.info/Wiki/WeaponClasses

Sorry, while Zero-k is a good game its use of unit classes is just boring. It makes most units only differ greatly in type of locomotion and a lot of them just fulfill the same role while moving a bit different.

Personally I don't like it.

idk you can make that argument about any TA-like game. there's a lot more variety in weapon types (emp, slow, bullet, laser, etc.) as well as locomotion (hover, ocean-crawling, all-terrain, etc) in ZK.

Well... the current unit roster in PA is pretty bad. You could even call it horrible. But then the game isn't finished at all.

I don't disagree that Zero-K has a certain elegance in that you can go with most factory types and be sucessfull. But imo (I may be wrong here of course) it leads to playing very similar independent of what factory you choose.

(Hope I don't sound to negative here. Zero-K IS good. I just want PA to go a bit of a different way.)

agreed, at the very least spring RTS are a great source of cautionary tales and inspiration

I think the unit classes page drastically simplifies the use of each unit. It is a decent first approximation for new players but units within the same class often have significant differences between their weapons (as well as movement) such that they often require different usage and drift a bit into some other class. There are a lot of ways to make many unique units within a lose class structure.

I dislike copies of weapons sitting on different chassis and try to avoid it. With 4 factories in PA the units should be really different if that is the kind of game PA is supposed to be. If it is supposed to be a large scale macro spam game then it doesn't suffer much from a lack of interesting units. In this case it wouldn't need more than one ground factory.

I both disagree and agree.
At first when you start playing Zero-K and understand the basic unit classes you can play the different factories pretty similar and do well.
However once you start understanding the individual units you will see a very complex factory-matchup dynamic.
In 1v1 I'd say it can be likened to having different factions as you can't easily switch to another factory for the first 5-10 minutes.

Just the fact that factories have different mobility traits and can use different terrain to their advantage is a great source of asymmetry. Just assimilating that in PA would get you far. Players will push out on the map in different ways and use different routes. Some maps in Zero-K are generally bot maps while other are considered vehicle maps but then you also have water which can promote amphibious units or hovers and you have steep hills that can promote spiders/all-terrain units and jumpbots that can jump up steep cliffs.

I would be interesting to hear how PA could have even a more diverse unit set.

Considering that factories are much more spammable in PA I guess you could have many diverse factories where each unit in the factory have a unique role. Want a fast light raider? Make a vehicle factory.
Want a riot unit? Make a hover factory. Want general spammable infantry? Make a bot factory and so on.

In regards to the OP: Great now I know who to direct the angry "XYZ is op" PM's to when I fail miserably in the game. XD

I didn't play alpha, but I watched lots of videos, mostly by Zaphodx. I like the new balance changes and I believe they were a step in the right direction.

You get to live, for now.

¨

So dragging up this post again. How is the balancing coming along? If you dont mind sharing what your plan/process is?

i barely seen this thread i thought i was new?!!!

Yeah I decided to bring it back up because of growing, it's not the time to talk dismissals of any balance related posts.

Just buff the Range of a T-2 Fighter
120 to 100 is low for that speed...

Haha and then we good to go?

in the Fighter balance yep...

Ok...

Balance wise:

Artillery is too powerful against singular units.

Fighters should fire missiles which can miss.

Missiles shouldn't reacquire lock onto another target once their intended target is destroyed.

I feel that doxen should have a visual range of 100. They don't fulfill their role of flanking raiders very well.

Disagree, just buff the T-2 Fighter range like I say 120 to 100 is too low for that speed

Thats more the issue that 5 missiles always hits 5 targets, because the missiles don't overkill