poll: Paper Units

I think units in PA should have less HP than other games, bullet-sponges are boring.

That said, I think some units should have a lot more HP than others. Air units should go down in pretty much one hit, land units should be slightly stronger, and naval units should have HP comparable to buildings.

You are right, but don't forget that the farther forward you move the more exposed you make yourselves as well, and chances are if you just try to dive through eh enemy army they'll follow you as well and as you get closer to defenses they'll be attacking as well.

Don't for get things like turret turn rates and such as well which can play a role in how effective such a 'dive' could be.

So yeah you're getting 'farther' but you're also taking a lot more hits as well.

Mike

Yeah but that's all worth it if my dive is long enough that I can, say, destroy your anti-nuke silo, even if I lose all my units doing it.

I do think PA TTK is too low right now, though. In TA you were always forced to backup your defenses with mobile units that could run in to plug the holes and slow the enemy down enough for defense to do its job. In PA, 1 Pelter and a few missile turrets can stop an Ant rush all by themselves. We have to worry about over-penetration but right now I'd say the problem is static defenses kill too fast.

Something tells me if you have an army that's big enough to ignore the opponent's army and defenses to kill a structure they have behind it all there are much more effective ways you could have used it.

Mike

Actually, not necessarily. If sniping a specific target, such as an antinuke, allows you to then nuke that target area, then trading even a considerable force for the privilege actually makes a lot of sense.

Giving units a lot of HP gives them a lot of time during which they can move freely and ignore enemy firepower. Godde called this "penetration distance" which makes a lot of sense with respect to penetrating defenses. However the actual application of the concept is far broader. Very tough units have the special ability to be able to spend a certain amount of time doing whatever they want, with the amount of time determined by how much enemy firepower is attacking them. Very tough units can make limited engagements and either win or fall back to be repaired. They can ignore enemy zoning and positional play, they can ignore fields of fire, they can even straight up ignore entire groups of enemy units that are too small to be a threat. They just remove tactical and strategic considerations from play.

For certain roles, a limited amount of freedom to ignore the enemy is necessary. An assault unit is absolutely intended to march directly into enemy defenses, and needs to be able to close range. However, in order to avoid making assault units too universally useful they generally need to be saddled with very serious disadvantages as well.

Historically the huge freedom of movement of very tough units has been necessarily curtailed by drastically reducing the movement speed of tougher units. This approach sort-of works, and has become an RTS norm. But it really should not be this way, especially in a very large-scale RTS because of the way larger units ball up. A big blob of very tough units will smash almost anything and suffer relatively little damage.

This is even worse for extremely tough single targets like experimentals. And it gets even worse for air units, as demonstrated by the AC-1000 in SupCom 2, and to some extent the Krow in Zero-K. The mobility of a flying unit as well as the total impunity of a unit with a lot of HP is an extremely virulent combination.

By contrast, a group of weaker units dies a few at a time, smoothly decreasing the force's effectiveness against enemy firepower. A big, tough unit has no decrease in its effectiveness until, all of a sudden, its HP hits zero and its effectiveness immediately drops to nothing because it is dead. The other player has only one strategic option; deploy enough forces to kill it, or deploy nothing at all (anything less will be killed for free). When fungible groups of units fight, it may actually make sense to fight with smaller groups to stall for time and damage the enemy group. Against a huge unit you are just wasting resources if you do this.

It is much better to have a group of units which can be more easily killed. Consequently, a "tough" unit is one that absorbs a lot of damage for its cost, regardless of its actual HP. This means a group of them can take a lot of hits. Individual units with high HP should be available, of course, but you should be paying a lot for the freedom of motion that those units provide, and they should actually be fragile for cost compared to a large group of regular troops.

yes obviously... it does... -_-
how retarded would the game be if you had to do that manually?

and that's called "healing" by the way. and it's only on terran human units. there is a term called "repair" but that term is used for tanks and other mechanic land units and really it's a feature that has no time to get used at pro level play. Units cycle so fast and are always on the move.

there was a language missunderstanding there

Also the Hellbat. which is the Transformed mode of the Hellion. Yay arbitrary inclusions!

Mike

The Hellbat is the actual Hellbat unit(Which is a Biological unit), so I would consider it either a balance inclusion of just an oversight.

Noooooooooooo. The Hellion TRANSFORMS into the Hellbat. It's a buggy, that transforms into a mech and the Medivac can heal it while in Mech form. Actually seeing as it's a Mechanical/Biological Type so it can be healed by Medivacs and repaired by SCVs.

http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Hellbat

Mike

Then perhaps a balance change.

The Hellion transforms into the classical Hellbat. They changed it's graphic but it still operates almost exactly like the Hellbat from Wings of Liberty.

I didn't actually know that it counts as Mechanical as well.

more metal than flesh I'd say

The health/damage output of the units is fine where it is at.

Tanks shouldn't be surviving taking a shell from another rank in the first place. (unless it is a vastly inferior shell)

People seem to want a more traditional approach where your basic infantry man can get shot 100 times before dying. That simply doesn't work in a large scale game. Increasing health significantly would damage the game and make micro a necessity.

The focus of Total Annihilation and this game, has always been grand strategy and macro. Micro managing troops more often then not will hurt you rather than help, as it should. As in real life, you should be in control of the tactics employed but leave the basic task to your troops. If you have to tell them how to move, who to shoot, then every battle will be micro managed to the extreme.

Each unit's pros and cons will be found in its movement speed. Bots will never stand to tanks, but they have more mobility and are better suited to raids.

There is no way to justify that a tank would not have a shell big enough to take out a tank of similar size in one shot with a direct hit. If nothing else badly maim it. Health should stay the same or possibly even be lowered.

And TA had very robust troops that lasted a long time in a battle so that kinda works against you really. This is a case where Realism comes second to Gameplay.

Mike

I would just like to reiterate that the existing basic units are all quite inexpensive. Increasing their HP is not a good idea. If you really think they are too squishy, you should be asking to decrease their cost even more.

A Dox is 180 metal. At 7 metal per tick that's only 26 mex ticks. That's Peewee territory.

More expensive units can be tougher. But there's only so much you can do with such spam-happy inexpensive units. Making such inexpensive units as tough as you guys seem to think some units should be would be ridiculous.

Tough units are coming. But they will cost significantly more metal than the current main combat units.

To be completely fair the Abrams US Frontline Tank can take quite a few shots from itself before anything becomes disabled unless you get extremely lucky and manage to hit the turret traverse ring or hit it from behind and ping the radiator.

Even using HEAT shells it would take more than few to get through the Abrams armor, even using the main gun of another Abrams.

These tanks have taken multiple shots and have even taken IEDs made up of several large-caliber Artillery Shells and been completely flipped on their side and have driven away with only minor superficial damage.

The argument that a tank 'can't take more than a shot' is, frankly, wrong.

This.

real life tanks can get shot up to three times by their clone.
but really fuc k realism. This isn't an argument here. we're trying to get a fun game nut a dull drag of a show.
what's fun in never getting to intervine in your battles? in that case you just mass up units and send them in when the ball is big enough (summary of winning pro-level PA right now).

so if we want battles that are strategic : E.G. decided by terrain, a tad of micro and whatnot, then you need a bit more time on your hands.

I have a bunch of troop management skills from FA that I can't put to use here, it's very frustrating.

On the subject of tanks one-hitting each other:
Why do they have armor, then? Who designed these tanks? If your armor does not protect you from the weakest weapon on the battlefield (and in PA, a world of orbital death lasers, the lowly tank fits this bill) then why bother carrying it around? You would be better off leaving it home and taking the maneuverability bonus.

On the subject of adding HP to allow for players to influence battles:
Where is the dividing line between tactics and unnecessary micromanagement?
Right now, I don't even see why we have mobile artillery, as an example. It doesn't have a range advantage over the main battle tank. Even if it did, my main battle tanks are too fragile to protect my artillery. Sure, it can lob over things. But there aren't many things to lob over.

I would propose that tactics in PA should revolve around positioning, both with respect to what the enemy is doing and with respect to the terrain features. Setting up artillery behind a crevasse and using slower but more durable tanks to hold the enemy away from them should be a logical thing to do. Then the enemy should bring in air support...and then you must bring in fighters...and so on. This is deeper and more dynamic than "make blob of 100 tanks. Send blob to middle of enemy base". Unfortunately all of our unit options are much too fragile to do anything other than drive full steam into the enemy.

This is different from micromanagement which encompasses things like retreating wounded units, targeting individual specific enemies, giving specific move orders to kite and/or dodge.

The battles should last long enough for the former to matter. The terrain needs to be more varied to give a benefit to attack plans that aren't "go forward, always".
The units individual AI needs to be talented enough to make the latter a poor investment. Once they lead properly a lot of the zig-zagging should go away.

x'D this has been killing me for awhile but I hadn't said anything so far. I'm sure this at least is a balance issue.

This is a very good point, but I think it deserves a bit more explanation.

A real-life tank is primarily meant to survive small weapons, including infantry rifles up to large-caliber machine guns. Against serious anti-tank weaponry, that tank's armor is really not going to do anything. A single hit from an anti-armor missile is going to seriously ruin that tank's day.

However, larger weapons are more expensive, and inconvenient to transport. And that armor is extremely effective against the vast majority of the enemy army equipped with pistols, rifles, and so on. So the armor is still a very useful asset to have even though the tank still dies in one hit.

In PA, the "smallest" weapons are indeed fairly comparable to the HP of the "smallest" tank. But at the moment its 'tank' designation is pretty much just lore and visual appearance. For only 225 metal on the Ant to the Dox's 180, you are not going to get a real "tank" amount of durability against small arms. Ideally we would get some diversity between bots and tanks in weight class, with tanks generally being tougher and more expensive by a reasonable factor (say, four times).

The idea here is that players have to exercise caution when using units that are fragile. Charging directly into battle to fistbump the enemy is possible if you have a long time-to-kill. You literally just ignore enemy weapons until your HP runs out. But if your HP is split between many distinct units which are individually fragile, then you have to weigh the casualty cost of any kind of aggressive or defensive action. Being similarly suicidal with a group of units will mean you lose quite a lot of them, even in cases where doing so is an excellent idea, strategically speaking.

Agreed. Tanks and artillery are currently relatively similar. Ideally we get a lot more diversity in units in the near future, including making artillery longer range and more artillery-like.

This is another very good point, but also deserves more explanation.

The fact that we have only a few unit types means there are relatively limited ways to interact with an enemy army. You have a blob, they have a blob. There isn't much to do to interact other than just attack, and if one side is in range then so is the other.

Bringing up some missile gunships to take out an armored column, or using bombers to snipe enemy artillery, and so on and so forth all depends on having both those types of assets available to use, and also having those types of targets available to destroy.

Adding asset types like specialized mobile artillery, air support, defensive assets, and so on, will mean you can do more types of things than just attack. This also means that these units will have squishier regular army units to interact with, such as dropping bombs on a group of Doxes, killing them, or having guided missiles to defend against an assault by tanks instead of always using tanks of your own.

A large part of the blobbiness of PA right now is simply from a lack of other unit types that would enable a force to advantageously (or even for free) deal damage to a large group of squishy units. Because both sides only have squishy units, even though it is inefficient to fight using a larger group, it does make you win the fight, and you don't have to worry about any other type of unit being available to defeat you handily, so it is still the best option.

For example, a really large army of Ants would ordinarily be scared of things like missile gunships, ATGM carriers, and so on. A well-balanced mixed army with some ability to engage a large armored assault without support would actually engage a large, 100% Ant attacker very well. Bring up the gunships, problem solved, essentially. But since you only have to worry about Ants and Doxes, it makes perfect sense to just always make sure you have more Ants in one place.

An M1 Abrams can survive one or two hits from another M1 Abrams, and an Ant can survive one or two hits from another Ant.

I don't see the problem.