Role of the Commander

First off, PA is turning out to be a very exciting and innovative game in terms of how it's being developed and the scope/scale of the game itself. Kudos to Uber for trail blazing a radical development approach to a very ambitious game.

Background information on my thoughts of the Beta role of the commander:
After playing a bunch of games in Beta, I've observed that the current Commander implementation is feeling a bit more of liability than a Commander. My reference point here are previous RTS games with commander/hero units.

In many of these games, there's a stick/carrot mechanic, incentivizing getting your commander out in the front of the battle line. Killing guys -> experience building ->upgrades -> increased the power of the hero -> increased ability to kill guys... a positive feedback system. This tends to work as its own economy system. This really gets people to put there commander out in the action, which is exciting because the unit is also your single point failure. A fun balance between greed and death... how close will you venture to the edge of the cliff?

Today, I feel that the commander is strategicly useful in early harass, absorbing damage in battle, and building tech 1 economy quickly. However, the incentive of having your commander in a dangerous situation is pretty low considering the consequence of losing your commander. Usually when I see another player's commander, he's hiding deep in the safety of the base, not romping around stirring trouble.

Unlike the most popular RTS game, I enjoy the massive dynamic ranges of units; the strongest units are orders of magnitude stronger than the weakest, but weak units balance this with numbers, thus making them viable throughout the game. The commander cannot multiply to meet the dynamic range needs. In other games, upgrades scale the commander.

Finally, in Beta, the commander is a static character. Previously mentioned there will be no upgrade system. Upgrades are one way to enable dynamic characters, but there are certainly other ways as well.

Questions:
For Uber: What can you reveal about your vision of the Commander's role throughout the game. How will the commander be enabled to have a more dynamic/adaptable role?

EDIT: Gathering my thoughts here, the lore has painted a vivid and interesting picture of a bot with feelings, desires, goals and memories. But when I play the game, I don't get that. What's Uber's plan to make the in-game commander as interesting as the lore commander?

Mavor has been pretty against commander upgrades, he's meant to be useful early game but too vunerable midgame. There was some talk of a exosuit or something but I don't think it's going to happen. I'd really like it and love the greed/danger tradeoff of him having useful upgrades or similar, it makes for very exciting games. We'll probably have to use mods for it perhaps.

The point of the Commander is not that he is a powerful fighter(he is pretty powerful, but not in a 1 vs 1000 mentality) but that he is a very powerful Builder. He is the most efficient Fabber in the game and is the only one that builds and generates resources. Yeah he can't fight an army, but he doesn't have to, he builds his own army for that, instead you'll be using him to create new bases all game long on new planets, moons and asteroids.

The weapons he has are not for winning battles, but for protecting himself, his Lathe is his most power weapon.

Mike

Yep.
That was one of the things I really liked about SupCom over TA.
With a beefier, tankier, can-turn-the-tide-of-battle commander, you actually "feel" like you are the Commander.
With things like the Aeon Stun, tele-maser, UEF Billy and the resource allocation system, the Com isn't just what you started with, it is literally pivotal to your army.
So to me, a late-game viable commander is more fun.

I think an upgrade system meant you have options on the table, do I go T2 or go aggressive and get gun upgrade?
It keeps the enemy on their toes, and its very fun to play against.


So Mavor doesn't want it, while I disagree, I am confident he has a good vision for the game.
He's talked about it being your king and queen chess piece all rolled into one, but right now, he feels like more of a knight, than a queen.
And in late game, just merely a king.

I'm against strong combat commanders because you get into commpush situations. If it's strong enough the only way to stop the opponent from walking into your base early and blowing it up is to put your commander in the way. Then you get a single point on the battlefield with a lot of importance and associated turret wars and pushing.

The Reason SupCom needed Upgrades was because although an ACU had the power of 20 T1 Tanks, it only took 2-5 T3 Bots to completely outclass it.

Mike

To steer the discussion, the question is not necessarily about upgrades.

The commander today feels like a static character. Upgrades are one way of enabling the commander to adapt to an evolving battlefield. Upgrades certainly aren't the only way to make a dynamic character.

I'm wondering what Uber has planned to achieve making the commander a dynamic and critical component of the different facets (attack/economy/defense/sneak/etc...) throughout the game, if that is in fact their vision.

If not, what is their vision on the role of the commander and what mechanics will be used to achieve that vision?

I'm pretty sure I just explained it, the Commander is a builder first and foremost, and thus you'll be using him to build, a lot and in particular starting new bases on other planets and such.

Mike

Well you explained what's there today in the Beta, and I agree with you.

But, could we imagine more than a commander that builds tech 1 buildings efficiently? With a role so narrow, is it plausible your army really gets annihilated when he dies?

Was Napoleon a great tech 1 builder? Was Genghis Kahn an efficient tech 1 builder. There's no greatness (or interest frankly) in ancillary parts of the army. The character of the commander is interesting (vision, cunning and even the brutality of the commanders).

The commander is the heart and sole of the army, not just an ancillary efficient builder that cowards in the face of danger. The lore I think is backing this up.

I imagine a lot of creative things could be done with the commander within the scope of possibility. Upgrades are the obvious option (for commander only). But of course there could be lots of elements to color and scale the commander: achievements, victory points, exo-skeletons, power-ranger like combining commanders together to super units, all sorts of wild things within the reality of the lore.

Lots of stuff, but where is Uber taking it and where does the community think it should go?

Honestly I don't think there is any need for the Commander to do more, the Commander already does a lot and I think you unfairly simplify it when you say all he does is Build T1 Structure, which it is technically correct the implications have a lot more depth than you give them credit for.

Things like upgrades, exo suits and all the other things you mention are really just gimmicks, some of them even move the commander far from it's original purpose and only really add complexity, not so much depth.

You say a Commander should be the same as Genghis Kahn and other but to me he already is. Sure they didn't do the exact same things but they did function in the same scope. Genghis Kahn never wore magical armor that let him bench press 10 elephants not did he ever fuse with other great leaders. You say you want PA Commanders to do things that the Great Leaders you use as a comparison never did either.

PA Commanders are actually great analogues of great leaders in history, in of themselves they are powerful, but fall to an army easily and through careful planning and thought they can command armies to great achievements, but alone, they accomplish little more than any other single man could.

Mike

I would rather the commander stay as is rather than risk empowering him to the point where the game devolves into commander rushes like in sup com 2.

That said, with the right balance I think he probably should buff as the game goes, perhaps unlocking higher tech construction options, more health, faster movement, more fire power, etc. but it should come at a cost to really suppress his ability to rush early. Perhaps when upgrading he cannot move or build.

As long as I don't have to fight com rushes every game I'll be happy either way.

He's certainly the heart and soul... and most importantly the brain and mind of the army. But the body of the army is made out of all those loyal, obient drones that he commands. They are stupid, clueless what they should do and would just die uselessly without their commander.

Commanders in PA aren't made to blow up armies, they are made to create them with their nanolathe and then cause planetary annihilation across the galaxy as they throw their armies against the other factions!

I think of the commander as the only intelligent AI on the field, everything is robots, even the buildings, all automated, When your commander dies the whole system crashes.....remember if you are an AI robot (or maybe the commander is living) you don't exactly want to create other AI robots, or maybe you did make that mistake and that is why you are at war with a few of them....

So once you lose connection in the system, all systems fail....fits lore perfectly fine to me.

If the commander is the brains then why does he not equip himself with the same powerful lasers that his drone army has?

And why does he have no idea how to build advanced buildings when his drones do?

The whole point of the Commander is that all of it's tech is way beyond what can be made with a Nanolathe.

The Commander already has a low grade weapon, adding a second one won't help much against and army with 100 or more of the same or better weapons. So you give the Commander just enough along to defend itself with an ace in hole(Uber-Cannon) and let it build that army of equal or greater weapons to fight for it.

Mike

I agree with this again, you are spot on. The real problem is avoiding adding gimmicks that add a superficial layer of complexity with no extra fun. I think that's the spirit of avoiding a poorly implemented upgrade system in the first place.

Uber has gone through the effort to create lore because they want a deep and interesting game beyond just a cool RTS. I get it, and that's awesome! The lore has painted a vivid and interesting picture of a bot with feelings, desires, goals and memories. But when I play the game, I don't get that. The lore personalizes the commander, the game's commander is static, dull, and has little personality.

My guess is the commander was made first for kickstarter and the lore came second. It's the Beta after all! As the lore develops, I hope it gets back-annotated into the game. I think part of that is giving the commander a little personality and dynamic roles in the game.

I might be waaaay off about thinking upgrades will help it, I'm not fixated on that. But I don't think I'm way off thinking that the commander is missing a certain je ne c'est pas quoi.

I think that one thing we could do is have different commanders have different abilities, this would add two things. The first would be that it would help differentiate the Commanders from eachother instead of having a copy+paste vibe, the second thing it would do would be that it would give commanders "roles" like you want, for example an anti-air missle, artillery, etc. It wouldn't be too over powered since each of these abilites would dictate what strategy you want. Are you going to turtle or push hard on eco for example.

The lore will always serve the Gameplay. Let me tell you more about the lore for SupCom, it's similar to what I know about TA's lore, but I don't know nearly as much about TA as I do SupCom.

SupCom's universe has Galactic Gates, these allow for effectively instant travel between 2 gates at a high cost. you an also Send something on a one way trip without a Gate at the end, but it's not only more expensive but it's also far less accurate(and I think more limited in terms of range) which leads to the point that trying to transport an army is way too expensive, so they create these incredibly expensive, powerful and compact(relatively) ACUs that can build an army using local resources within hours to send through the Galactic Gates which turns out to be overall much cheaper than sending an entire army through.

It's a very similar idea in PA, the distances involved between start systems is MASSIVE, to the point that as either Bobucles or Bulletmagnet likes to say "Even if you Gate/teleport 99.9% of the distance you still have a long way to go before you get in-system". Try to create all the support structure to ship an army to a new solar system is much more expensive than just sending a Commander that can just build the army on-site(and do it quicker than the prep work that the Long trip would take for an army).

Just saying what you think without explaining why you feel that way doesn't leave anything to talk about. Pin down why you feel that is the case and we can talk about it, but in terms of discussion it's about as useful as me saying "Well I think it's fine as is." What's fine? What is it now? it's too ambiguous.

Neutrino has definitely talked about a plan for just such a thing, you can see my big summary about it HERE or my short summary of it HERE. Keep in mind that Neutrino hasn't commented on this in any kind of depth since the debacle that happened in the Delta thread, so it's not guaranteed to happen at this stage, although I hope it still does.

Mike

First off, I didn't know that about the supcom lore... I was in grad school when it was out, so I missed that bandwagon. That's awesome, thanks for sharing!

Good point, this is why I started a thread after all. I think the commander doesn't play much differently from the other bots. When I played other similar games, I feel like the hero is expressive and changes the way you fight and the composition/tactics of the army.

What I would like to see is something that keeps me interested in what the commander is doing. Things that have been nixed in general for the armies could do that if applied to the commander only.

A concrete example: The commander has a damage, health, build, economy gen, traverse rates. What if "experience points" allowed you to re-allocate points in these categories to other ones? A zero-sum stats property. So if you're in the situation where you need a glass cannon, you can do that. If you need a tank, a caster etc... available, all at a cost to the other categories. This would suddenly open the door to a more interesting commander, but not create crazy super weapons, etc... Maybe you get to extra stat allocation points every time you kill a commander? or every time you've killed units valued of X amount?

This was just a toy example off the top of my head, not really fitting with today's lore, but something could be easily be done, is not overly complicated, will give the player a reason to care about the commander, and lets the commander 'fit' the play style or personality of the player or adapt in the game. A balls-to-the-wall kind of person can tailor a ballsy commander, a turtler can make a turtler like commander.

I'm sure Uber and the community can come up with something much better though, just to get the juices flowing.

The Problem is that you view the Commander in the same light as you do Heroes, like in Warcraft3, it's like shopping for a Car when what you need is a Truck.

You view the commander as more of something that adapts when it's quite the opposite, the Commander stays the same and builds an army to suit what his combat needs are for any given battle.

Imagine you're in a gravel pit and you have to smash a rock, you don't try to evolve your bones so they're denser, you just get a sledgehammer, to dig a hole you don't evolve your nails to be sturdier, you get a shovel. In the same way we use tools, Commanders will use different units that best fit whatever is needed at any particular moment.

The thing is what your suggesting was more or less done in SupCom2, and the Upgrade/research system is widely regarded as being one of the leading reasons SupCom2 sucked at Being a SupCom/TA type game(along with many others of course).

The commander was never intended to be an active combatant, never. You need to Keep your commander safe, and using him to expand to other planets is a great of not only protecting him, but putting him to work and giving him a purpose.

Mike