Factory Complex

Yes it was horrible because it made units redundant. And I think that you can prevent that.

That second statement of you is really shocking. You say that the community isn't entitled to how it wants this game to be, because the majority of them are clueless of gamedesign? I mean there's lots of good ideas in the megabot thread, and the "majority", which has no clue of anything in your opinion, suggests that it shouldn't be a no-brainer to build that thing. So in my opinion we're having a good course regarding the general opinion of people.

And the most important thing of all:
It's not the job of the community to design the game, it's the job of the devs. Ultimately it's their job to think about how to implement something. If the community really wants something, and it's a cool idea, and the devs even made a thread about it, wouldn't it be better to at least try implementing it? You don't even want to try, because you think your way of designing this game is the only right way of doing it. And I tend to disagree.

Not the way your thinking about it, your proposal leans much more towards the SupCom Approach than the TA Basic/Advanced Approach.

The Backers aren't entitled to ANYTHING in reality, Kickstarter is not an Investment platform, we are not investors in PA. Uber could have just shut up right after the KS was done and not said anything for 12 months and delivered a game and regardless of how that game turned out we don't have ground to stand on about whether it was the game we wanted or not.

We should be vary glad we are getting the level of communication we are and allowed the level of input we have been, but we were never entitled to it.

No. At the end of the day, Uber knew the game they wanted to make and that's what they proposed, and having experience from SupCom where they did not like how the experimentals turned out they aren't actively considering experimentals as we knew them from SupCom, even the Megabot thread included the phrase "We have no plans to at this time to take this any further" right up front.

Just because people want something doesn't mean it'll just neatly slot into Uber's intent, particularly as they've clearly been designing the game to not have them from pretty early on and when the majority of the discussion had little in the way of actual implementation and rather just as chorus of "yeah I like experimentals and they should be in the game!" in countless variations.

Again, there are roles and mechanics that work better on larger, singular units as compared to smaller units but those tend to not be direct combat roles.

Its not about Experimentals being "right" or "wrong" in general, it's about whether or not they're "right" for PA and based on all the Dev comments they don't feel it's a good fit for thier intent, which is something I agree with.

Mike

The idea of the megabot is very general so that the devs are flexible enough to make it work the way they want it to work. I don't like the philosophy of just blindly ignoring the feedback of the community. It would basically mean that all the time in the forums would be wasted. And I don't think that this was the intend of the devs, as they showed us on numerous occasions. You're right in that they're not forced to do anything. But don't act as if everything the community says is meaningless.

Here is the thing about Ideas, the idea itself is more often than not good or bad on it's own merits, but it's really all about context. An idea that works well in Games A, B and E might not work well in Games C, D or F. PA it seems has been designed with at the very least the intent of not having Experimentals as as know them from SupCom. While that doesn't physically prevent the implementation of Experimentals like was seen in SupCom but, it does mean that such a inclusion could/would require changes to many if not all other aspects of the game to accommodate it. Sometimes mechanics just don't fit in other games, Killstreaks from COD are cool and all, but as a mechanic it doesn't really fit well in Minecraft.

Mike

I know all that, and I still think that you can make it work in PA, without repeating the mistakes SupCom made. We'll just have to be patient and see what the devs have planned for us.

Yeeey, I have a stronger version of the previous units. Now I don't have to build the old once anymore.

For SupCom I think it was "nice". But if you only had 1 Tier and after that experimentals it would basicly be the same. The 3 tiers was basicly one long base building fase. Sure you would unlock some "fun" buildings along the way, but it wasn't that amazing.

Now that I think about it, it reminds me of Age of Empires. Doesn't that game have like 6 Ages? But if you would go age up you can't even build your previous stuff anymore. Atleast the ages would have different units not just a stronger version of what you had before.

I like the Basic and Advanced concept.
Basic
The backbone of you army. Normal units: good, cheap and spammable. Usefull in many different situations.

Advanced
Basic is nice but not in all situations. But some times you just need "the right unit" for a situation. Specialists, but they come at a price.

On an other note, I wonder how they are going to go about orbital usesing basic and advance.

Wow your ability to pick one sentence from what I've said and ignore the rest is really quite remarkable. You'd call that a straw man.

If you are not using Orbital after you reach the *what do I build next* point...your not doing it right

Orbital will easily give you the edge over your opponent, and at the moment, it just doesn't give much depth aside from moving to other planets. I'd wait till they add in some of the WIP units, like the unit cannon and gunship, as well as fixing the balance issues between orbital and planetside.

KNight has it right though: Any sort of complex or add-on for buildings after T2 needs to be specialized and not just a straight upgrade. If I had 5-10 choices of what to do with my facs, things would be interesting. EMP, eMP bombs/weapons, a factory that only creates one type of unit, but makes them faster than another regular factory.

Just throwing ideas out here, they might be slightly crazy.

Waiting seems the best policy right now. I cannot wait till I see what Uber does with this game, no matter the direction.

But that's exactly how Supcom tiers worked. A great deal of units had identical roles, with the only difference being the strength of that unit. Are you going to build the assault bot, the 1/10th assault bot, the 10x assault bot, or the 100x experimental assault bot? The differences only served to highlight how few real roles there were, and how much time was wasted on building the same exact unit with a new paint job.

Yes, and I called that a straw man, because it oversimplified what I really said. I said that I liked the SupCom tier system, but that I didn't like units to be obsolescent, and that I think that there are various ways to prevent that from happening.
And then your answer is: But it makes units obsolescent.
Gives me the impression that somebody didn't listen.

Look, there are other ways in making every unit count instead of the "advanced" suggestion mentioned before, which would remove every "big" unit in the game, and all those to come.

Where's the problem in making the Holkins/Pelter specialized so that none of them become redundant, without changing the cost of each. Can't people just see how amazing it is to be able to have an artillery piece that can put a big hole in your enemy's army in one single shot?

Where is the problem of making the main tradeoff to be that of cost and time? I think most people don't know what competitive gameplay is like. Where you make one wrong investment and you're out of the game. Saying that the Holkins is stronger than the Pelter doesn't make it indefinitely more obvious to build it. What if there was a high energy upkeep for big artillery pieces? Would you still only build Holkins? What if the Holkins was very inaccurate and only ment to be effective against big blops of units? Would you still only build the Holkins in favor of the Pelter? What if the Pelter got more specialized too, making it better against single targets than the Holkins, would you sti...

You're getting my point.

Right back at ya.

Back to topic:

How about instead of combining multiple factories together, that you could upgrade your factories later in the game? There could be different upgrades available, kinda like how they work in Starcraft 2 with the barracks upgrades (reactor or tech lab). One could provide you faster unit production, the other one cheaper unit production, and yet another one would unlock a complete new unit that you didn't have access to before.
And maybe make it only available for T1 factories to compensate for lategame redundancy.

Obviously I don't want this to be like Starcraft 2, I just made the comparison for better understanding.

If you want to build faster, Build more of the same factory. If you want to build different units, build the Advanced Factory.

Mike

Thanks, Captain Obvious.

Just imagine why it worked in Starcraft 2. In case you didn't play Starcraft 2:
The tech lab gave you the Marauder (and additional research possibilities, but that isn't important here), a unit that wasn't available in any other higher tier factory.
The reactor gave you the possibility to create two marines instead of one. Why did you build it instead of more barracks? Because it would basically double your unit production, and the upgrade would cost less than another factory (also gas instead of minerals but again, not important).
Why didn't that just force you to always build the upgrade immediately?
Because first of all you decided not to build marauders, which were only available with the tech lab.
Second of all, because it took very long to build them, while all that time your rax wasn't producing anything.
It created a huge weakness, and you had a huge surplus in ressources which you had to spend somehow.

Btw there were many players who neglected building any upgrades at first and just built more rax to pump out marines. Most of the time they did that so they could pressure their opponent while concentrating on spending the rest of their ressources on economy. So that was a possibility, too. All in all it really created diversity in gameplay.

Obviously it wouldn't work exactly like this in PA, because the metagame is so drastically different and much slower-paced. So you'd probably have to move the upgrade for those T1 factories to T2 or even higher up.

So then stop using Starcraft 2 as an example and describe how it would work in PA.

Mike

Sorry now you're just trolling. I mentioned how it could work in the paragraph you quoted...

Sorry, but a single sentence is not an in-depth explanation.

Mike

Dude, I already explained it in depth by the example of how it worked in Starcraft 2, take that with a bit of adjusting to make it work in PA, but take it higher up the tier system because the metagame is much slower-paced. And the adjustments wouldn't be worth mentioning. It's just that there is no "research" like in Starcraft 2, and no ressource resembling "gas" but like I already mentioned it's not important.

I described all that above already. Why are you making me repeat myself?

So you want a system where you are forced to build auxiliary structures beside factories in order to unlock further potential, but never a factory's full potential? A system that forces players to follow certainer paths instead of allowing them to make decisions on the fly about what kind of unit composition they want?

I don't get why people put limits on things and claim "strategy" when confronted.

Mike