A thought...Just give me a moment...I'm not being alarmist I promise

So, I was reading an article in Euro Gamer about chess (titled 'Chess 2: The sequel') and its apparent problem that exists in grandmaster-level play; that 60% of games end in a draw and that many games are 'over' half way through the game as long as the player has memorized the proper steps to get to the win scenario. Anyway, the article is basically an outline of how, David Sirlin, a man who spends a lot of time balancing multi-player games (and pondering on how to do it better) would actually improve the game of chess in order to get rid of the high draw-rate inherent to the game. The article made me think of the many PA matches that I watch/have watched of I guess what you would call our current top-tier players...If not top tier then they are at least pioneering build and fight strategies.

This is the point of my post, were fighting each other with the same army, eventually were going to reach a point where the winner is decided by who clicks stuff or hits hotkeys faster. Now you may say, "But chess is millions of years old(probably) and it wasn't until recently that we hit that point, we have at least as long until we hit that same point in our games lifespan." Then we all realize that right now, in this moment in time, more play time has been logged in WoW than has ever been played in chess, ever...like ever (seriously, about 6 million years). Then we see that the problem of strategical stagnation at high-level play will come upon us like a bullet(comparatively) if this game gets even moderately popular competitively.

Granted, we don't know what the final game will look like and I could be drunk, but even TA had 2 distinct armies with unique (stat-wise and behavior-wise similar, but different enough to need specific strategies) units, Starcraft has/had 3, and pretty much every other multi-player game that has high-level competitive play has more than 1...except chess. Look, I know that even other rts games at the competitive level turn into 'My APM vs your APM' but I think this games' scale gives it the potential to turn competitive rts play on its ear strategy-wise.

Anyway, thanks for letting me say my piece(rant), I love the game as it is even in beta and I know it will only get better because the staff at uber actually give a damn and the community is full of enthusiastic and genuinely intelligent people that want to help the game succeed.

TL;DR - Chess is becoming stale in high level competitive play. PA shares important game play features with chess in the planetary portion of its warfare. Lets not be like chess because it may cause PA2 turn into a memorization based fast click-fest and that's not fun for anyone.

I'll go back to lurking now. (couldn't post link but if you Google the article it is a good read

That's a really interesting thought. I'm just thinking though, what difference does having more than 1 distinct army? It still could fall into the list-of-clicks trap. I also understand that because of the scale and options available in lare scale RTSs like PA there is a counter that will defeat each of those list-of-clicks strategies, so in theory at least, PA shouldn't fall into that trap. Anyway, great post!

Also, I think this is the link if anyone's interested: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...fightin-man-fixed-the-worlds-most-famous-game

The way the game is laid out(Spherical planets) and the semi-random nature of metal spawns and spawn points means that the game will never be able to become what SC2 or Chess has become, becauase there's too many random elements thrown in that can affect the entire game.

Even someone with the perfect build order that wins every game can get a bad spawn and be overrun before they can get units up.

PA will not become "Who can execute build orders the best" because the game isn't designed that way.

I'd agree if we weren't getting a butt load of units and more coming down the road as well. Current claims are to over 100 units at launch.

Also consider that in comparison to Chess where you always have the same army and fight on the same terrain, PA goes about things in pretty much the opposite way, One could say that PA strives to have it so that 2 players could both use unique sets of units(not due to any kind of limitation but simply from having different preferences) and each player could have entirely different terrain constraints/circumstances that promote varied gameplay.

Between stuff like that and hopefully more of a distinction between Vehicles and Bots will really push it towards letting players play the way they want to play without enforcing ridiculous punishments for it.

Just for clarity I want to specific that currently you are given a selection of Spawn locations to choose from and that between possible refinements on the Spawn placements and the Metal Spot Allocation Rework that Neutrino has said he wants to do along with the potential for maybe cheating it a little bit to ensure the variance between different spawns is smaller should help make it so that Spawn is not a primary Victory deciding factor.

Mike

I'm not saying it's a huge factor. I was using a bit of exaggeration to show that the semi-random nature of spawns in PA can have a pretty big effect on the battle at large, whereas in games like SC2 or chest everything is exactly the same every time. Build order and APM mean more in SC2 than almost anything else.

In PA what resources you get and how you use them is the main factor. Whether you tech up or unit spam or go around the side or whatever else. Your strategy and how you play will be the deciding factor in games.

I've been fighting for this in various ways all over the forums.

You should check out FAF.
you'd be astonished how it dwarfs chess stalemates. Contrary to Starcraft Brood War and Stracraft II there is no perfect strategy to FAF. People invent new wining strategies there daily. It truely is a game about strategy.


and that's what I want PA to be too.

Go is a prime example of a highly competitive game as old a chess where both players have the exact same army consisting of just one unit type that only can perform one specific action (being placed on the board) that doesn't suffer from strategic stagnation at all.
That's because even though the basic rules of Go are way simpler than those of Chess the game is way more complex cos it offers you way more possible moves per turn. Onc Uber added all the units to PA it has the potential to be more like Go than like Chess, if the balancing is done properly. You don't need different armies to avoid strategic stagnation, you "just" need multiple equally accessible ways to achieve your goals.

Ya, I see now that a large unit variety basically turns PA into an "effective" 'multiple distinct army' type of game where people will favor certain units/techniques and given a sufficiently large selection of units the players end up creating the unique armies themselves. That saves the developer from having to write code/develop units for just 1 or 2 predefined armies and, by consequence, limiting the players strategic creativity. The only issue I see that rises after this is that now you have to balance for a ton of army compositions which, I bet due to my lack of coding expertise, may be easier than it sounds and/or can likely be done as the game matures after release (like an MMO).

That the randomly generated planets/systems is akin to changing the chess board every time you play a match also helps with preventing strategic stagnation. With the addition of procedurally generated terrain to the planets we also get more of a "think on your toes" strategy vs. "click fast, die hard" type game play. Now that I think of it, the streaming economy was already a step towards forcing strategic diversity. It is in effect a mini game in parallel with the 'war' part of the game.

I guess it is inevitable that until you scout your enemy there are probably going to be cookie cutter builds to get the best economy as fast as possible, then the truly dynamic strategy game play would kick in once the enemies found each other. So if you wanted a highly dynamic, action packed game you would want fight in systems whose planets fall inside a 'green zone' of size and the metal distribution.

Like I said, I'm not declaring that the sky is falling, I just wanted to throw some thoughts out here and see what others think.

There's a simple difference between those other games and this one. Planetary Annihilation is randomly generated.

No two games are alike, so each and every game must be handled uniquely. You can't memorize which buttons to push in which order, because you had to do something different every time.

In regards to bad spawns - that's true for a 1v1. But vs 4 AIs or more, you only have one spawn it seems.

I was thinking about this for a while. Even if every map is procedurally generated and pseudorandom. But everybody has access to the same perfectly balanced unit pool. There lies the issue. Now we're also seeing optimum strategies being formed.

How are people supposed to create optimum strategies on maps/planets they haven't ever played before?

1 faction makes it easier for the developers to allow more choices to balanced. Strategies can have inherent local imbalances. A local imbalance can be chronal, windows of opportunity. A local imbalance can be terrain dependant, vehicles excels at flat terrain, bots in hilly terrain for example.
By giving players many viable options they are likely to chose different paths which might give them strengths in some areas at some times and weaknesses at different places and different times.
Going for navy early might give you dominance on the sea but it might hurt your economy as you expand more slowly.

I'm actually glad there's only one mechanical faction(even if in-universe there's a few) because it's easier for Uber to balance.

That video was great. The point about never letting a player's deck etc ever be best at everything was a good point. In airland battle (which I am terrible at), they have the idea of a deck, where you select cards, each of which lets you build x units of a certain type. Having a lot of units of a single type (eg tanks) starts costing proportionately more points, which encourages a diverse deck.

Limiting quantities would be silly in PA, but the idea of allowing certain units to be disabled/enabled could be taken a step further. You could nominate a 'deck' of unit types you can build, up to an agreed point limit. That would add an element of metastrategy. Perhaps a mod.

I don't like the idea of deck in an RTS. Actually that is currently what is holding me from getting Airland battle right now. Limiting your options from the start without knowing your opponent is not something I'd like to do.
But people can go ahead and try it out. Actually just for the heck of it could be interesting to be able to disable different units for different players as a sort of handicap.

This is true. If there are hundreds of units then you just have to balance those units. If there are 50 units for two factions, then you have to make it so that each faction feels unique, and has rough counters to the other faction, without being completely outclassed in situations.

Because the strategy actually doesn't vary that much for each map. If the map randomly generated different types of terrain on a large scale, and certain terrain types inflicted different bonuses or penalties on units, it might be a different story.

And that's where the "It's still in beta" bit comes in. The 'balance' is still really rough in a lot of areas and at the least I feel it's safe to say that the potential areas have been identified and ideas suggested and now it's up to Uber to fix things considering the far better 'context' that they have.

Mike

What areas? What are we expecting to change?

Well everyone has different opinions, there are things that tend to be more agreed upon in some forms but there are few(if any) issues that have a single universally agreed upon solution.

Myself and concerned about the overall obsolescence that is rife in the current state of PA and the huge costs attached to things like the entirety of Orbital and also things like nucks.

Mike