The Leveler

Is Jameson a straight upgrade from beer? Should it be moved into Basic Drinking while something like a Car Bomb is Advanced? Also, what's taking so long on the beer balance pass? Everyone knows Miller is inferior. Just remove it from the list! We've been waiting decades for this! And when can we expect the interception range on the toilet to be increased? It's way too small and protects far too little area as it is. Clearly a design flaw.

If the cost of Advanced Factories is reduced, it creates this problem.

Otherwise the Leveler and Ants complement each other and make both groups more effective. It's already a specialist.

It's not broke. Don't fix it.

The first sentence confused me because Jameson sounds like a unit name and then a sudden shiver of panic crept up on me when I realized I was drunk enough to completely forget a unit. So then I jumped over to pa matches wiki, laughed then finished reading the post, and was immediately reassured that I was just drunk enough.

Good night.

This has been an interesting read guys, thanks!

It's like if you wanted to stock a bar, what should you buy?

You would get a really large quantity of Basic Drinking beverages. There's your standard beers, your wines, and so on. But then you need a small quantity of Advanced Drinking beverages, there's your vodka and your other spirits, all the way up to your $1500 scotch. But your bar should stock a smaller quantity of each of these things because customers are unlikely to purchase them in the same quantity or frequency.

Never been to NZ.

Is everyone missing that more armor/metal spent /is/ a differentiating factor? If equal mass of anything else closes with a group of levelers, they levelers evaporate. Levelers are long-range specialists, very much like snipers.

The more interesting question is 'are Levelers too strong,' and considering how effective they are when grouped, the answer to that is 'probably.' Given their specialty, I'd think reduction in turret-tracking speed, reduction in their ability to turn (and therefore kite/avoid fights), or a reduction in speed would probably be the best choices.

The leveler is fine.

Just look at real life. Every advance in weaponry makes some other form of weaponry obsolete.

You don't bring a sword to a gun fight.
You don't take on a jet with a prop driven plane.
You don't fight a tank with a armored carriage.

In our actual tech tree for implements of war there are many "OP" advances that are now obsolete.

I think it is just fine to have T2 versions of every T1 unit. Those cheap T1 units serve as inexpensive meat shields for the T2 units that out gun them.

I think the point was made earlier that a single leveler surrounded by 10 ants is far more effective than it would be by itself.

Or even with a second leveller.

still waiting for proper mobile tacmissile launchervehicles, flakvehicles, proper Scout-Radar- and jammervehicles as well as hovercraftunits+hovercraftfac ...
no idea how orbital fac+ o- facspecificbuildings/units will be
concidering that there will be a orbital factory makes me think orbital launcher should be indeed moved to Basic and some of its units should be then moved to the orbital factory instead ... i think that sounds like a good solution to the idea of basic orbital (launcher) of scouting and expanding and advanced orbital (factory) of fortifying a colonised planet ...
because lets be honest we don´t necessarily want to get too many factorytypes, or do we?
adding a possible hovercraft factory, that would be like having 11 types ... ... ... this is a bit much imo ...

A few thoughts here:

First, Zaphod apparently considers the Leveler to be the solution to any and all PA related problems. And he's probably right. Here's a summary of his problem-solving flowchart:

TOO MANY NUKES? TANK SPAM IN YOUR BASE? NEED A QUICK FIX?
THIS WILL FIX EVERYTHING:


On a more serious note,

I'm only going to respond to the first part of your post here, I'm short on time.
Turtling is a valid strategy for someone who has been losing the expansion war. In fact, I usually set the foundation for a turtle *shell* once I get my production up - just in case. It is a noobish strategy in that it is relatively low skill for the amount of *power* it gives you against your opponent if done successfully. However, Uber has given us many different turtle-breaking strategies to beat them, the most obvious one being nukes and KEWs. In my experience, unless the turtler breaks orbit and heads offworld, and somehow builds the halleys necessary to kill a planet, they lose. Even laser swarms wouldn't help against an expansionist enemy.

Adv Mex also give an advantage (however slight) to someone who has T2 Eco, but bad map control, facing someone like Murcanic who spams Ants for 15 minutes

Can we please NOT have hovercraft? I want the distinction between water and land to remain the way it is

Why wouldn't it even with Amphibious units? Naval units are on a different level than you standard land units, and Amphibious units need to pay for thier amphibious ability, either in increased costs or reduced performance in other aspects. Amphibious units won't replace Naval, they aren't meant to, they're supposed to be for taking advantage of water as a type of terrain regular units can't.

Also Hover is only one of 3 primary Amphibious types, you also have units that move along Seafloor and others that move in/across the water much like boats.

Mike

Really, he is right. I am not saying I want them to stay the way they are, I am saying they actually could do with not very much changing and still be "specialist"...

...Because right now if you build nothing but levelers, an enemy with radar would just avoid them with ants and attack the enemy base where the levelers aren't, because the enemy will probably never have enough levelers to easily move on the map wherever they need at their speed. If they attack your base with levelers, you hit them from behind with your ants while your turrets chew up their front and bombers overhead. They don't move very fast to avoid all this happening to them at once. If they circle their own base, just keep strifing around, and if you literally can't wiggle your way in the circle then just use bombers and ants (get the ants in to destroy the AA only and then bombers for levelers) and generally you will have traded metal for metal in better value.

I always favored them making levelers have high damage to kill a unit instantly, but slow movement and slow rate of fire so they are sitting ducks outside of salvo, thus either an ant army is needed or they are used as a door kicker to turtle base or hit and run in longer fights.

So costly burst damage, with the downside of speed and dps. Burst damage is in and of itself very useful for following up with frontal land army snipes (not artillery) and for cracking into enemy bases. Designed this way they would in no way be independent, building them alone would just literally spend money into dirt.

I agree with the concept you present. Presently, however, Ants and Levelers both have the same max speed.

The reason i say this is because of another game, LASW, that I played a ton on my ipod Touch. In that RTS, having tanks and water units really didn't matter, because hovercraft could be produced by the same factories (land and sea) as those units could, and the T3 hovercraft (there were only T2 and T3 hovers) was better than even the flamethrowers, which happen to be the highest DPS unit available. To make things worse, most naval bases were unable to build defenses against hovercraft, since torpedoes obviously go underneath them, and tank defense turrets also could only be built on land. So, for a full-on naval map, if the other team started sending hovers at you, you had two choices:

Build a VERY EXPENSIVE flame turret (short range, massive DPS)
Spam your own hovers (none of the air units were worth anything until T3)


That is a situation i'd rather avoid. I want to be able to use the terrain to my advantage, and that means it would have to punish the enemy for not taking that into account (as it does now).

Now, weaker/more expensive hovers could be a good answer. But I guess we won't know until they are implemented. If, I should say.

So if I get what your saying, PA shouldn't have Amphibious units, because a completely different game, made by completely different company, for a completely different platform, did it wrong and thus so will Uber?

Mike

aw screw this!

your dogma of basic/advanced falls apart with orbital. You can't choose not to "specialize" in orbital combat if the enemy com goes off-map.

There will always be stronger/weaker units, if I chose to, I could try to invade you with land scouts. I'm dubious about it's success rate, though...


I don't understand what you're so scared of anyways. Really the game so far fits your ideal of basic/advanced, as it stands noone switches to full levelers when they have t2 (yes that's on purpose) they keep spamming the ants, and there's still always more t1 by a factor of two or three in the mix.

how would you have it? no levelers at all? I can go with that as is already, I'm not entirely sure my mass isn't better spent on ants anyways. your poll doesn't have a "make levelers stronger" option. If people want non-biased polls from me they're going to have to give me the same.

Suppose we do away with the Leveler as it currently is; a main combat unit that is very expensive, but is flatly superior to the Ant.

Instead, the Leveler has only a bit more HP, but a tank gun with a lot more stopping power and a small range advantage for a bit more cost. Or maybe we make it a big, beefy tank with a similar main gun to the Ant. Or maybe make it a highly mobile cavalry tank which is comparable in combat capabilities to the Ant, but has high move speed and maneuverability. There are endless number of possible units that are more specialized fighters than a basic, all-round generalist main combat unit.

But changing the Leveler isn't necessarily the only approach. We could even make the Ant more generalist if that would create a role for the current Leveler. Perhaps we give the Ant a second weapon; like a general-purpose machine gun for short range combat that can attack air units and tracks quickly for fighting small targets at close range, a weapon which the Leveler could lack, making it a superior battle tank but less flexible against air units and swarms of bots.

The point is to make the units interestingly different; not functionally identical but with different numbers. Different numbers can make units interestingly different also, but not just by multiplying everything by a constant value.