poll: Paper Units

I don't disagree with this in principle, but the problem, as I've stated before, is that the units we currently have are supposed to represent the 'core' or 'baseline' that the game needs to function but as they are now there isn't room to make 'weaker' units, just stronger ones and while yeah it will change things up it doesn't change how 'weak' the current units feel.

Sure a total revamp could easily change things but we have to talk about this situation we currently have in order to have any kind of consistency otherwise we will all just end up talking about our personal ideals.

Mike

You are assuming that the most-produced units will be 'average.' They aren't average- they are the cheapest ones, which will be the most common to be mass-produced. And because they are the cheapest, they will have limited HP and other capabilities.

Bigger, more expensive units will have their own "baseline" I suppose if you want to describe it that way. The median durability will be 'average' with variation on both sides. You can make a 1000 metal unit that is more or less durable than the average 1000 metal unit. But for cheap units, they can only have so much HP.

Hopefully there will be some diversity of cheap units. But I acknowledge that there is only so much you can do in the very low-cost weight class. Which means that while most of the unit types will cost more, most of the units produced will be regular army, and of the inexpensive, mass-produced variety.

Not necessarily. You can make some weak units with special abilities. Special abilities could act as force multipliers/make the game more interesting than scout or be scouted.

• Mobile radar
• Electronic Warfare
  • air variants make anti-air missiles 50% less accurate.
  • ground variants disrupt nearby units accuracy.
    
  • advanced air variants disrupt weapon systems
    
  • advanced ground variants disrupt nearby structure
• Unit Invisibility to Radar
  
  • (not real invisibility. No radar dot)
  • Advanced unit that makes nearby units invisible to radar
• Advanced anti-air vehicles
• Healing unit - repairs nearby units?
• Anti-structure units (bonus damage vs structures, no bonus damage vs units)

The thing is that we're talking about combat units here, Support units like you describe fall outside of that and as a result thier Health and ability to kill things doesn't really matter in the same vein.

I'm not talking about the amount of units produced thought. You're assuming that the cheapest available units will be well suited to combat. I guess I just feel that the 'middle class' of units are where you pull the kind of things that you build a Basic Army around(Like the Ant is currently) and you use things from the 'light' and 'heavy' classes to help specialize a force or creating specialized forces when they're used as the core.

Not that there should be the the same type/role of Tank/Bot/whatever in each 'class' of course.

Mike

They are combat units.
You have a missile bot, which shoots homing missiles at targets. Slightly lower dps than the dox, but ultimately just the same unit with a different effect added to the weapons.

You have a "disable tier 1 structures in range 120 vehicle". Suddenly the enemy has to specify his army to defend.

We're talking macro, not micro remember? That one unit changes the entire effectiveness of your forces.

A mobile radar unit mixed with the artillery advanced bots changes the effectiveness of that force.

I think the whole cost:hp needs a whole do over if we are to make units less paper like. Battles would last so much longer (Not necessarily a bad thing). However this will lead to a much more micro orientated game. Which is what über has mentioned they want to move away from.

Personally I hope this happens but it doesn't look likely.

I think that the HP definitely needs to be increased. I also think that there should definitely be friendly fire and decreased range of regular units to discourage deathballs.

I don't really like the poll because I don't think units need a big hp increase. I would even decrease hp of some buildings like the extractor.
But I want long lasting battles! In my opinion battles were intense in TA because of wreckage. Now they just disappear so quickly . Wreckage make units stronger without the need to add more HP.
It leads to quick skirmish ( 1vs1 doesn't look stupid and it's useful to make quick raid/traps ) but in case of a big battle, every units just suddenly have a virtual HP buff.
A second way to virtually increase unit hp is to make missile miss more often. Ants are really precise if you compare to TA tanks. Having slightly slower projectile would give untis more virtual HP.

These are not combat units. Just having an effect that you need combat units to address does not make them combat units.

Mike

Opinion:
I don't realy have a problem with how the game is now. However, it might be fun to have some longer battles.

Maybe though changes in HP, damage or accuracy. But it will take time; to make the changes and to test it. If you give basic bots and tanks more HP, defences will be weaker in comparicon. Welcom to balancing. Balanced, this game is not.

HP:
More HP is longer battles.

Damage:
Less Damage is longer battles.

Less accuracy:
Against a deathball less accuracy will not make that much of a difference. However if you put your units in a formations, there is space between then, they will be hit less. This will reduce the strength of deathballs and promote the use of formations.

AOE damage
Area of Effect damage or Splash damage. This is almost the same as 'less accuracy', however even if you miss you might still do a little damage. This is Highly effective against deathballs! And might result in shorter battles. Therefor AOE damage might be more suited for specialized units. (Like a unit that spams missiles or one that has a spiderbot laser.)

Slower projectiles:
Slower bullet let your units live just a bit longer. I'm not a fan of this option! This might promote Micro, horrible idea. It's annoying enough that you commander can't kill a single bot because it's to fast to hit.

For now flowfield pathing,its really poor but i think that will change in future.

This was a big step to future games on Sup2

They need moore space between them.
On Sup2 that was 1 great Thing they work .

I also want an hp buff all round but I can't understand this common notion that longer battles means more micro.

how do you work this out when starcraft and supcom together have been providing proof to the contrary for a decade?

Both those games you mentioned deal with flat symmetric maps with less units. I have only watched Starcraft but their battles seem super micro oriented. Moving back damaged units, transporting, repairing, and attacking specific units.

Right now you just crash units into eachother in pa with little regard for their lives. This saves apm which is needed in the orienting of map and then building side of the game.

There are several factors in how quickly a battle happens:

• The damage / second / health (High value for longer battles)

• The damage / second / m² (Low value for longer battles)

• The path finding is the key here. If the units are very clumped like in Starcraft2 or currently in PA, the damage output in the selected area will be very high. This is probably going to be fixed in PA when they will introduce formations, i can't wait for that.

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• The range of the units (Low value for longer battles)

• The bigger the range is, more units will be able to shoot at once

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• The size of the units (high value for longer battles)

• If a unit is 1 meter wide, you can place more on them on a 100 meters wide line than a 3 meters wide unit. It becomes even more important when you take their range into consideration.

Longer battles don't force micro but they heavily encourage it because it is a moment when you can gain an edge over your ennemy.
People in Starcraft2 complained a lot about the quick battles because they didn't have time to micro and it is a game oriented towards micro. I don't know how it is now.​

Isn't the idea that single long battles are good, but having to try and manage 15 different long battles on 5 different planets at the same time is headache inducing (especially when factoring in everything you should be doing simultaneously), hence the swing towards short, and (theoretically) easy to manage battles?

I don't think you will have to keep track of 15 battles at the same time, i barely get to 3 battles in a free for all on multiple planets. The key will be to create the easiest navigation between planets possible to let players keep track of what is going on on every planet, we are getting there.

here lies the problem supcom is not macro it's MACRO Pa pales in comparison

that, they were. Starcraft is micro

obviously noob play, you never, ever see pros repair, eitherway starcraft doesn't need that to be micro, it's the microest the most micro micro micro game that ever was.

closer to sup com but the engagements feels stale.

Right now PA is really REALLY micro the easy reason to this problem is lack of tools (which me and Culverin have been tackling) but honestly engagements that make a bigger use of simulated projectiles and implement anticipation targeting for each individual unit would also help as you'd have to babysit your units a tad less.

I have only eve watched the best in the world play Starcraft and really doubt doing all that is noobish. Does the medevac or whatever it is called repair automatically? Either way doesn't mean repair won't/isn't a viable option in pa. This kind of micro is what seperates the better players.

Anyhows the argument I mentioned about longer battles requiring more micro is so obvious I didn't think it needed any support.

To restate my earlier point, my concern is "penetration".

My unit moves 5 meters/second and has 1000 hit points.
Your unit deals 100 DPS.
My time-to-kill is 10 seconds, so I can penetrate 50 meters into that defense before being killed.

If we simply increase my hit points to 2000, my time-to-kill is 20 seconds, which is the OP's goal, but now I can penetrate 100 meters, which I don't think he considered.

Increasing time-to-kill without decreasing speed will increase penetration distance (that's what she said).

Decreasing speed will make it take longer to reach the fight, though. So there's a tricky balance here.

I like that you bring this up. I have been thinking about a good term for this. Seeing this "Penetration rate" was the first thing that came to mind but then one letter wrong it becomes something completely different.

So... a term for how far 2 units can go when passing each other.
If 2 units can run and shoot at each other, hi-fiving each other when they meet and continue to move out of range of each other without dying then that would be rated as they have high penetration rate.
If 2 raiders could pass each other without one dying then that means counter-raiding becomes much harder as you have to micro your mobile defences to stay in range of the enemy raider to prevent it from running through.