The Leveler

I know, I was being dramatic

I see what you mean but I feel it would be somewhat backwards to build a mex, then 'upgrade' it, then after the upgrade, it suddenly has less health (as per one of my examples)
Also, I'm particularly partial to the 'area extractor' mex, which wouldn't be possible if we were using an upgrade system.

Honestly, even though the results are concerning I'm not the least bit surprised.
I long ago lost faith in humanity.

People always assume when we saw something like "We want X cheaper" that we would make such a change in a vacuum. I never understand that reasoning, Of course it would require other changes, heck, if I got the chance to make all the changes to PA that I want to you'd prolly be blown away by how far reaching my changes would be.

Mike

*shrug* I think it's fine.

I think the upgrade system just works better, and its not backwards if the mex loses health, because thats a trade off for something else eg. higher metal income.

I dont particularly enjoy the thought of area commands like that, it would feel like the game is moving towards features that are there to patch problems with design. kind of like an auto-scout feature for large planets, there are far better ways to do this than removing elements from players grasp. I dont mind removing micro from the game, but i do mind removing micro by giving it to the computer to do, there are just better ways of doing that keep the player in control.

I agree with the point that the Leveler is really just a better Ant and if you could build both from a T1 vehicle factory, I'm not sure why you'd waste any time building Ants.

Maybe the problem isn't the Leveler so much as the Ant. What's "general" about the Ant? Maybe what we should really do is remove the Ant and make the missile truck work against land as well as air. Kinda like the old missile bots from TA; it won't be that strong but it will be "general" in that it can attack anything. The Leveler is then a specialist "tough, close range ground attack vehicle".

Your tradeoff for more metal is just that the mex has less HP? That's it?

Hell, I would have a mex with 1 HP if it would increase that mex's output by 0.1. Increased economic power is worth almost any functional tradeoff. The only tradeoff of consequence is cost, and even then you are paying an upfront lump sum for increased yield over time. Again, a higher yield will almost always be valuable enough to acquire because of the increased total yield.

Spending metal to get more metal is obviously a winning proposition. If doing so saves you from exposing assets to the enemy, and allows you to more efficiently defend a smaller space, so much the better.

The advanced mex was just not a good mechanic in TA. Adding a second advanced mex in SupCom made it much worse.

Uber should really just make one mex, and figure out maps, unit design, and gameplay based on how the one mex works. Adding more types of mexes is pointless complexity on a very fundamental system, and adding bigger mexes just makes players more passive and less territorial.

We're here to have a war for crying out loud- and claiming metal is the entire reason to fight. Anything that makes claiming territory optional or even only marginally less important is detrimental to gameplay.

I honestly couldnt care less what the gains and losses are. I just advocate for the upgrading of mexes in this manner, and i would be perfectly happy if it was just a straight upgrade. And you are wrong. Completely. Adding advanced mexes does not deter expansionism, far from it. have you been watching anyone play recently? because i delay T2 until the 14-15min mark when i have 300-400 income minimum (i only play up to small scale 3, ~radius 700 of which that kind of income is half the planet). And also, wether you enjoy it or not, turtling is a valid strategy and is already at a huge disadvantage is comparison to others.

Hyperbolic hand wringing much? Sheesh people. It's an interesting topic, and we read it. With all the "With every build, we lose a little more faith" type posts, it makes it harder and harder to take some people seriously. How many times do I have to say that even though we don't make changes on certain fronts for extended periods, it has nothing to do with if we're actually going to change them. Game development takes time. And while I'm sure I could spend a weekend redoing a number of units to remove some of the "pure upgrade" perception, frankly, I have other things I, and the rest of the team, are focused on right now. And making those changes now, before we have other things in place, is frankly a waste of time.

Please have discussions like this. They're incredibly useful for when we do get to the point where we can start focusing more on individual unit functions. But enough with the histrionics. It's tiresome, and more than a little childish.

Sorry to pick on your post in particular Nano.. just the last one in the thread that fit the bill. There are examples of this in most threads every day that seriously dilute the signal to noise ratio.

You have contradicted yourself in the space of a couple sentences. You claim advanced mexes do not deter expansionism, but then say "please don't take my advanced mexes because I want to turtle." As they now stand the advanced mex is a strict upgrade from the basic mex. It is equally cost-efficient (bad design; but placeholder) and has four times the yield. It is a strict upgrade, and it serves only to increase the resource scale on the same map scale. Presumably so you can afford an army of scaled-up advanced units that are just superior, more expensive basic fighters. This whole dynamic needs to be replaced. I am sure it will be- this kind of thing is just changing numbers in data files, but it will probably take a few tries to get right.

But currently advanced mexes just allow players to passively inflate their economy. True, you can't do this right away. Advanced mexes have a higher upfront cost, which means you need a stronger economy before you can start building them. You cannot turtle to them quickly. You will die to someone who expands because they get more mexes, and then get advanced mexes sooner, and then get more advanced mexes. But once the advanced mexes hit the field, you can spend metal to get more metal on fewer mex spots.

This is directly contrary to being required to obtain more mex spots, and to fight to control them. Moho mexes in PA allow you to get four times the income on the same amount of land. This means you can quadruple your investment and quadruple your income without interacting with your opponent in any way! No scary combat, just hide in your safety blanket of turrets and so forth.


The core dynamic of the game is fighting over territory for metal spots. Both expanding aggressively and denying enemy mexes. Protected advanced mexes consolidate player income in secure locations instead of putting the majority of their economy in distant areas of the map. Raiding the fringes should hurt their economy more because there is more land area in the fringes than in the center of their territory. You can centralize energy, so there is plenty of reason to want to attack a player's core already.

Another dynamic of expanding is that the further ahead you are economically the harder it is to defend your advantage because you have so much more land area to protect. Advanced mexes break this dynamic too. The player who is economically ahead can now turtle into you, making it completely impossible for you to ever catch up. Even aggression against the player with the economic lead would be ineffectual at this point because even their defenses are more efficient than yours due to territory consolidation and their superior economy. In which case, why not incentivize the player to end the game instead of giving them an unlimited license to passive eco upgrades and porc?

And in return for all this crap? In the end all you get is more metal per mex for everyone. Why bother with such pointless economic inflation? Why have an advanced mex when you could just reduce the cost of all the expensive stuff which you need the advanced mexes to afford?

This is like leveling up in an RPG only to have all the monsters get scaled to exactly match your increased power to keep the difficulty the same. It is pointless inflation that would be better addressed by removing the economy inflation and cutting costs.

Advanced mexes negate territory control. They run away so the player who is already ahead gets even further ahead. They create the option to spend time and resources to passively upgrade instead of fighting to take land from each other. And the ultimate result is that both players now have increased income. So they can use their resources to build units and fight to take land from each other. Why not just remove the income inflation upgrade and instead proceed directly to actually playing the game?

The only definition of a good strategy is a system for making decisions that results in victory. There is no such thing as a "valid" or "invalid" strategy- only strategies that win, and strategies that don't. Strategies that win are per se good. Strategies that always lose are per se bad. And the simple fact is that turtling on a few mexes is dreadful. It is an awful strategy, and worse yet it is obviously awful.

Turtling on just a few mexes is terrible. There is no other way to put it. In TA, SupCom, any Spring variant of TA, Zero-K, in every single one you cannot sit in the corner with a couple mexes and win. Scrubs do this over and over again, and they always lose. In every match, in every game. You cannot do this. You will lose to even the dumbest opponent who actually knows how to expand.

A lot of players enjoy turtling against the AI. Fine, go nuts. But the game should not be designed for players to just mess around- you can screw around with a well-tuned system just as easily as you can with a game that only allows for that.

Garat, I am losing hope, not strictly because things aren't coming in patches but because we don't know what Uber's plan is to begin with. We've been talking as a community about this kind of thing for a long time already.

If you can't show us what your plan is in Updates, then you gotta tell us, blind faith only goes so far you know?

Mike

How uncharacteristically defensive. I was commenting on the general lack of faith in the community to be able to identify a problem, let alone come to a consensus on a solution.

However I can't say that I'm entirely guiltless in extending that lack of faith occasionally.

You say the signal to noise ratio from the community on the forums is sometimes a little diluted by such posts, but as Mike says, the almost total lack of 'signal' from the developers has gotten a few of us diehards a little on edge.

You say ' If ' you are going to change them, indicating that you do not 100% acknowledge that there is a problem to begin with. That is where some of us take issue.

Try having a conversation with us some time, rather than just the airy-fairy PR talk.

To say that the discussion is pointless until the full roster is released is counter to the whole point of pitching in to be an early backer. The discussions should be had now so that the developer can gauge the communities feedback to the things it implements.

What is pointless is the hyper defensiveness on both sides of the discussions. Uber doesn't need anyone to protect them from the opinions of the forum goers so the almost knee jerk reaction to threads like this that amount to, "Stop talking about this until we know more and if you do bring up a topic like this you'll be made to feel unreasonable" is what needs to be reigned in a bit. Likewise, the alarm bell does not need to be sounded at level 11 nor does the equally alarmist themed thread need to be created every time a unit isn't improved on every patch does not need to be created.

The devs have shown a good track record on interacting with and replying to issues, concerns, and cool ideas raised by the community. The issue I have that I think KNight hit on as well is that 'iterative design' is great but the inclusion of non-patch updates by a community liaison would be cool. Maybe it would quell the urge to make threads that are panicky if we just had a notion of the stuff that's going on progress wise. Like if we get patches on a 6 week (average) interval maybe just a community notice on whats being worked on/getting hung up on/pissing devs off on a bi-weekly basis.(a completely 'for example' time-line, I know)

The lack of information is fine for a game in development, I understand that the 'iterative development' means it is a wandering path that the devs take to get **** done. That's cool, but a progress report that just says, "Hey guys, this is whats going on in 'x' section of the dev team...yadda yadda yadda" would be greatly appreciated.

That's my opinion. People will agree, more will probably disagree but that's life on the mean streets of the internet.

Here is where you went wrong. It doesn't make turtle viable, because a player that will build 10 advanced mexes will always have less ressource income than a player that builds more than 10 advanced mexes. So the urge to expand is in no way decreased. What it does is allow you to build a second "wave" of mexes over your previous mexes. That's bascially it.

And I would argue that having that kind of mechanic is not a bad one to have.
It gives you the possibility to upgrade your economy, and doing it (in the case of the T2 mex) is very rewarding and can give you a huge advantage over an opponent that neglects to do it in time. It requires you to build a T2 Factory and Fab first, before you can do it though. It's a high investment at that point in time, because until then you're only supplied by T1 economy. And the idea behind big investments in RTS games like this, is that it forces you to commit more to the choice you made. Because obviously you decided not to build whatever else you could've build, like more ants instead of the T2 Factory. Someone else called it a "paywall".

I think that it forces player interaction, instead of reducing it. It makes it much more important to scout your opponent, because now there is this weakness you can exploit if you see someone building a T2 factory. Your enemy will invest many ressources and time into not building units, that means that you probably have more units than him. That means that you have a clear window of opportunity to attack him.
Also you don't want to get surprised by someone who has built a lot of T2 mexes while you still sit on your T1.
Without this, it wouldn't matter nearly as much if you scouted your opponent or not, because your enemy wouldn't be able to get this huge advantage anymore. So no matter what he did, it wouldn't worry you as much, because there was no possibility for him to get that far ahead from you anymore.
Thus it would decrease the player interaction necessary to play the game well. Thus making the game require less skill.

And that's bad imo.

' Changes are coming ' we are told... But we are not told what those changes are or even the vaguest hint of the direction they will be taking.

' Don't worry ' we are told and yet not a scrap of information is provided; we are to take everything on faith.

This has continued throughout development. We are now halfway through the scheduled Beta... and the lack of meaningful interaction between developer and community is getting tiresome.

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Why does this thread exist?

Because the community has been kept in the dark since the Leveler's release over the exact direction Uber wishes to take regarding Basic and Advanced units. The factual information given to us by the developers on this topic has always been hand-wavey non-committal twoddle that allays the fears of no one with even a passing concern over the games direction.

Again, not sure what game you are playing, but this game does not advocate turtling. Always expanding is the aim of the game wether you have T2 mexes or not, which is why turtling is such a bad idea.

I am not sure I follow your logic. At some point you're going to run out of room to expand and not be at an end game scenario. This forces you to make the most of what you have control of, which is what T2 mex does. It increases the value of the metal spots that you control, in effect it expands the play by giving incentive to fight the enemy to take their spots and throw a T2 mex on it. Expansion continues because at T2 the metal is worth more to you at that point so you can build more fighting units.

I definitely think its fine to develop strategies based on beta, but to invalidate a play style because you don't 'get it' or enjoy it is a little rash. The way I understand so far is that the T2 mex reinforces the dynamic(as described in the last paragraph), in that if you are truly deadlocked in a turtle on turtle fight to the slow death then its time to jump planets and attack from a different angle. If that's not an option due to a one planet system then you are both missing something a la nuke building/scouting/unit building/etc. and some one should have won by that point in the match.

I'm probably going to post a response in the backers forum continuing this thread. My response is reaching book length already, and frankly, I need to let it simmer a while so my head doesn't explode.

Back later, after I've had some dinner, and probably a drink or five.

The best posting is done after at least 5 drinks, I find.

Many great authors had the habit of taking a drink before writing. ^^