poll: Paper Units

Poll for this thread :
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/paper-units.52551/

(OPs cannot be eddited to add polls or edit polls.)
make sure to also voice yourself and debate here. if you simply cast your vote and leave it doens't do much good. expose the reasons why you think it should be a certain way and also MOST IMPORTANTLY : I chose to only leave two poll options so as not to disperse opinions on this matter that requires a clear answer from the larger party : do explain just what in either poll option was closest to your opinion and why you voted for it, if it was different what was different from your exact opinion.

this way we can also see the disparities as well.

what did I say? don't cast your vote and leave. please comment on it.

We already have a thread where we're discussing the topic. The poll is also binary and doesn't properly represent the different opinions on what kind of change is required.

Mike

I know this, as explained in the OP this is an intentional choice so as to not leave with a full poll that leaves us with less answers than what we started with.

the comments are to voice where your exact opinion lies (as I know it is highly possible my poll serves a majority but not all people) the people this poll does not serve must say how their opinion lies 100% in between each option, or outside of them and why.

those who find their answer in the poll must comment on it also as their exact idea may be narrower/more precise/specific than my crazily broad poll options

So we should vote in a poll, but because it's flawed we need to discuss our opinions? Sounds like what we've already been doing that in the original thread doesn't it?

Mike

with the exption of thanks to this we'll be able to say : "the general consensus of the PA community is ... "

So basically we want to have poorly formulated polls so that we can misrepresent the majority opinion. I didn't realize Planetary Annihilation could be so... political.

And what if the community is indifferent?

What if they don't care?

Your poll cannot measure that.

uhm? wow sorry I didn't realise this would affect you this much.

would you mind pointing out how the poll disserves your personal interests?

I'm not here to be screamed at, take this elsewhere.

If you can make a better poll do it.

I object to the poll.

I want individually squishy units, and long engagements as a product of the number of units involved. This will also result in more shots exchanged because there are more shooters.

Just because one unit takes longer to kill doesn't make engagements longer. It makes killing just one unit take longer, and means you need more units to focus fire it in order to kill it quickly.

How much HP the group has will determine how long the engagement lasts. I want lots of small units that die quickly. Others have voiced a desire to have only a few units that take a lot of hits to destroy.

PA disproves you there. seeing as flowfield allows for massive numbers of units never to have to slow down at an engagement and to arrive in a decently spread out group and since units are a one-hit kill your 10000 vs 10000 engagement will last as long as your 1 v 1 in PA, unless you are purposefully sending them in single file, in wich case you are just providing aditional examples of 1 v 1s.

You have presupposed that a 10k vs 10k engagement is one hundred percent as efficient as a 1v1. That is not the case, will not be the case in any strategy game, and ideally PA should implement unit design and mechanics to make such large battles highly inefficient to a degree very unlike other RTS games, including Starcraft with its perfect movement, aim, and accuracy, with no inaccuracy or shot interference.

Unless those 10,000 units have extremely long range, there's just no sane way to arrange those units so that they all move into battle with a symmetric number of enemy units at exactly the same time.

Some of those units are going to engage sooner than others, and the outcome of that skirmish will affect what both players do with their other units. Repeat for the period of the entire engagement, which for 10,000 units will probably take a very long time. Easily long enough for reinforcements to arrive and prolong the battle still further.

It is my position that instead of counting HP on a unit, you should be counting bodies.

Yes, because clearly a single Poll is indicative of the entire community. Chances are Uber has been following the original thread, so they already have an idea of what some people think, with a lot of reasoned arguments and explanations which are far more useful to Uber than the outcome of a fundamentally 'broken' poll.

Mike

you're moving straight to my point though. even though the outcome should be extremely influenced by numbers, its so close to not the case at all : it's as if 1v1 are just as efficient ad 10k vs 10k.

this really needs to change.

You made the following claim;

Which is fairly obviously a crock of nonsense. 1v1 with any unit will be resolved sooner than 10k vs 10k of the same exact unit.

A group of 10,000 units is obviously of comparable strength to another group of 10,000 identical units. Just like how one unit is of comparable strength to another identical unit. So obviously we aren't talking about outcome determination here.

What we are talking about is how much time the engagement will take. Ten thousand separate shooters with ten thousand separate pools of HP behaves very differently from one unit. They occupy separate points in space, they have separate range fields, they have different target selection based on their position. They die separately, reducing the effective strength of the group continuously, rather than a very discrete drop from full strength to zero when the unit dies. And for quite a lot of the time of that 10k vs 10k engagement, the majority of them are either not firing, or are already dead. The huge engagement is less efficient because the group uses more space, has limited range and movement, interferes with each other's shooting, has to path and shoot around wrecks and other enemies, deals overkill, and many other reasons making the huge engagement very inefficient compared to a duel of two units.

Using a group of 10,000 units creates vastly more decisions than a 1v1 engagement. How you choose to split your forces, how you choose to react to enemy movements, and how you use your forces to control space. How you choose to change your deployments based on your own losses and enemy losses. When you kill some units, or when you lose some units, or when an enemy advances or falls back or bunches up on one side, all these things are of consequence and are impossible with just one unit. And because of these complexities, it is ridiculous to just assume that every unit will instantly acquire a unique target and that multiplying the number of units results in a cancelling multiplication of DPS and HP. They don't cancel out. Huge battles take much more time.

An enemy bomber comes in and kills a few dozen of your troops instantly. The battle isn't over. But that was an event which you react to, possibly by repositioning units and anti-air. Possibly by falling back, possibly by spreading your forces, possibly by requisitioning anti-air reinforcements or redeploying anti-air from somewhere else on the planet. You have so many other units that it will take far more time to kill them all, no matter how you slice it, and that means more decisions for how to kill them most effectively, and how to counteract those tactics. Each move has an effect, but the degree of effect will vary.

Your claim that ten thousand units will all simultaneously acquire exactly one enemy target and that consequently the entire 10k vs 10k battle takes the same amount of time as a 1v1 is just wrong.

The idea of cancelling stats applies to individual units. If you multiply a unit's HP and damage by two (or any constant value), you have effectively done nothing for a 1v1 using that unit type, or for any quantity of that unit. You have just redefined your unit of measurement. However, multiplying the quantity of units does not cancel.


This is why I say experimentals are boring. You take all the resources that could have been used to make 10,000 troops, and you get just one unit. Sure, it has tremendous stats. But if the enemy is also using such large units with big numbers, they cancel out. You just end up with fewer units on both sides, and fewer decisions despite the massive economy of both sides.

the answer is not so black and white, tatsujb just likes drama honestly. The units need to be microable but require sufficient apm to handle properly imho, that way we can make this a competitive game. making them more tanky or how they are is not the debate. How can we lure 550 apm players that viewers drool over into this epic intergalactic game is the question at hand imho. I want to see a god of war, a destroyer of planets, a ruler of galaxies take home a quarter million on his domination of a single tourney in PA. This game has so much more potential than being a nitch RTS. Although I do fear that is where it is headed.

With line formations, entire armies will start 1-2 hitting each other. Or at least almost doing that. I think sooner or later the HP of units has to be changed.

Ledarsi, we know you oppose that. You have said that a gazillion times. But as can be seen by this poll, the majority wants more health on units. Maybe it's time you accept that?

I think this should definitively be tested. I guess the game would profit if all mobile unit's health was doubled. In the same time building health should be multiplied only by 1.5-1.7.

right now its really too fast. you cant even react. If you send your tanks in a place where you dont have vision or radar, and you accidentically find an enemy army or some turrets, you dont have even time to respond. By the time you scroll around the planet, your army is gone (or at least a huge part of it).

I'm working on a video to proove ledarsi wrong.
the fact of the matter is the curve of time an engagement lasts to number of units is not continuous, it's not even exponential, it's logarythmic.

that's a sad, sad way for the game to be in.