Destiny is promoting PA!

I was referencing the whole money thing.

As I said, it was likely quid pro quo - so no money involved.

Sorry, but this is a real-time game, APM will always matter. You don't like APM you're going to need to go play turn-based. Getting rid of micro doesn't stop APM mattering, it simply changes what you're spending those APM on. Instead of activating unit abilities, you're working on expanding. Instead of fiddling with formations you're redirecting your reinforcements.

You don't get rid of APM with speed, you get rid of APM through automation.

APM matters, it has since the dawn of RTSs, so I have no idea what this period you're referring to that we've degraded from is. If anything we're a better served market now with the SUPCOM series than we ever were in the 90s when RTSs were in vogue.

The idea though that this sort of game reduces the need for APM is ridiculous. You only have to go look at top level play in SUPCOM or TA to know it's nonsense.

The opening isn't slow in that it's low click, it's slow in that there's no decision making going on.

I know it matters, but its should not be taking precedent just because you get board in the first 5 mins.

And you DEFIANTLY shouldn't be suggesting that the game as a whole should be changed from impatience.

Just up the game speed at the beginning.

As for my comment about degradation, the original CNC was not a APM determined RTS by any stretch.

Of course it was, in fact the inability to queue items made APM quite important. You had to be able to manage your troops, safe guard your harvester and at the same time ensure there was no downtime for your facilities.

Queuing is one of the automation things which reduces the importance of APM.

I do not agree.

Queueing really does reduce the importance of APM because units don't need to be babysat as much, and the lack of it increases the need for it because you need to click more stuff. You're simply objectively wrong on those points.

I think it's more fun to be constantly engaged. There is a rhythm to computer games where you will want to make decisions about once a second*, that's what makes them fun. In Starcraft 2 in the early game you are often twiddling your thumbs waiting for something to do because there are constant delays of multiple seconds where you can do nothing to improve your situation which are quite frustrating for me actually. Because while if the pace of the game is too high it can lead to stress, if it's too low it can lead to boredom.

* depending on the player and the type of decision, obviously this could be elaborated on a lot more

A think a lot of this is stuff that is going to be addressed(to some degree at least) just with missing features and streamlining the current game. some of the Big things we're missing;

Multiple viewports
A goodly portion of the unit roster
The 'Egg' for quicker starts
Overall Unit Balance(Orbital in particular is pretty ridiculous ATM IMO)

These will go a long way to improving 'Viewer-friendlyness' both directly and indirectly.

Also a lot of it will come down on the Commentators too, I don't know about others but for me what I really like about watching SC2 is not just watching someone play, but mostly its due to the commentator where a lot of me 'viewing enjoyment' actually stems from.

Mike

How did this topic become this, I was almost certain I was accidentally redirected to another similar topic elsewhere on these forums, just to realize in horror that this is actually the thread I meant to enter just SERVERELY off topic.

The game is a little slow in the beginning, by vanilla this is standard, I won't quit playing a game over the first 3 minutes of each game being boring. The talk of an egg feature should speed the game into 3 minutes worth of play within 10 seconds.

The old RTS game were generally rate-dependent, they managed APM by requiring a cycle of clicks every time you do something big while other things are set to timers on how often they occur while other things are just locked to large creation times. They conformed RTS to turn-based timings to keep speed from being a factor. It was ok. I liked the classics, then again I like RTS and Turn-Based alike. Runescape ftw.

However, this new game's pace is faster and more widespread, and this is because of both game mechanics and automation which has come a long way. This game already automates a lot, queueing alone means you can spend thirty seconds setting up building for minutes ahead of time, and other ideas are requested as features so one can automate any minute long task that is multi-click-based into a single quick action. This leaves the player the time to move attention across more map and build in more spots and build more units and have units actively in combat at more places, multiple planets even.

The list of ways this game cuts down on click-intensive actions include:
-Queueing lists of units or lists of buildings, and being able to adjust build order by holding a button to build high priority next in the queue list instead of after the rest of the queue
-Mexes building over top of destroyed mexes, and t2 mex building over t1 mexes. This reduces clicks and focus-time from clearing and replacing a mex, down to two clicks then it does it itself.
-travel orders
-patrol
-which preference of attack, at will, in defence, or resist firing at all
-Chronocam, which means instead of watching scouting, you can fast forward through it's path to see if it saw anything, taking theoretically half the time to observe instead of active watching at the time of the scout's scan.
-Others...

There are even more things they can add to cut down on click intensive actions:
-Auto reclaim on any build
-better unit assigning from factory rally point, such as a rally point from a factory being set to the factory itself meaning fabbers come out and assist the factory that made it, while it being set to the commander making all built units leave to meet/follow/assist the commander wherever he is.
-Units remembering assisted queues. This way, if the main unit selected to build a series of sturctures dies, all his assistants can continue building the same structures he was assigned instead of stopping in place. This can be done by copying one unit's build orders to the others so they all do the same thing independently just at the same time. Any unit assigned off of that task, the rest remembers their orders, and further orders assigned will be assigned to all of them at the same time. So, all the units will share the same memory as far as orders.
-Multiple game windows, so you don't need to scroll your camera to what you are working on, you can work 2 different places or planets at once without adjusting your view, because you have two separate views to perform actions from.
-Plausible as a mod, assign "ai control" to your own things, making it as if the AI was playing it's own game under your team with just the units it has. If you assign one mex and one factory to him, he will constantly produce units from that factory and regularly send them in raids. If you assign him some fabbers and a mex he will do structure spreading.

I felt like I was in a destiny is promoting PA thread until I walked into page 4. I feel like all these posts need to be copied onto the thread that is in the beta forum regarding game interaction speed.

Good to see a SC2 player adjust to a massive strategy game decided by hundreds of units compared to 10s of units

I don't think he'll stream Planetary Annihilation today:

https://twitter.com/OWNEDBYDDOSQUAD

Some people are really pathetic.

That was Desrow.
http://www.twitch.tv/desrowfighting
I talked to him for a few seconds in post stream chat, and from what I could gather, I think the art style really turns him off. Not that we can change the art style at this point, but maybe that wasn't the fatal flaw that Desrow saw. I doubt he is going to give the game another chance. He said something about not being 8 anymore and playing with Legos.

I don't think what we saw was because Destiny thought too high of himself for being good at SC2.
I think he walked into this game completely blind, and that session was centered around learning the game without reading up on it.
You have to understand that he needs to make his stream entertaining, and going full fledged, serious learning mode, is not very fun to watch. So his aloof, lighthearted attitude was okay in my opinion.

YES.

It was really good of him to recognize that this is only beta. It doesn't matter what the true definition of beta is. Because this beta is going to be compared to other betas, and frankly, what we are playing now, seems like alpha material compared to other games.

I think that the lack of functionality in the UI is more of a barrier to play than in-game bugs or balance at the moment.

He was given 15 keys, 2 were used for DESBRO and Steven, so 13 left for probably T3 subs.
He's probably going to play with them, or at least I wish he would. Except organizing something like that can take a lot of coordination. 13 keys, 13 people, 13 downloads, 13 things that can go wrong, plus there is 9 player max atm.

True, this game would look a lot more fun, appealing and engaging in that state.

I guess he is controversial, although I would stand behind ~90% of the stuff he does and says on stream, but I guess that's just my white cis male privilege talking. LUL

YES.
Yeah, Destiny walked into this knowing pretty much nothing. It was awesome watching him learn that T1 fabbers can build more than the commander, that was the first time I remembered how I learned that while playing TA, when I was like 8 years old.


One thing that Destiny said that made me really happy: "Apparently the game is a lot less mechanically intensive, you can play for about a day and be pretty good at the mechanics, so that leaves a lot more space for strategy, and I think that's really cool"
I'm really glad he didn't think that automation would oversimplify the game.
One of the reasons that I quit SC2 was because of the high mechanics barrier. When I pick up an RTS game, I don't want to have to develop a skill that has very little to do with strategy to be good at the game. Because of the high mechanical cost, strategy is only open to the top level players that have spent hundreds of hours mastering the mechanics.

That being said, if Destiny becomes a LoL/SC2/PA guy I will most definitely subscribe.

If the goal was to get more people interested in PA it was a great success. Judging by my stream in twitch alone, when he had finished streaming 3000 people came over the next few hours to see my stream. That's 3 times more that no had before.

It was clearly what was to be expected from 2 guys playing the game for the first time. Anytime something happened that shouldn't have or something that wasn't implemented he said the game was in beta.

Was as fun for me to watch as he would find me playing sc for the first time. Nice job man.

Hi i just bought the game (not only cause of Destiny, but it is a part of the reason^^) and had no time to play it yet.
But i can't really agree on your statement here if it is really THAT easy to execute stuff.
I think a big part of every rts should be to manage the time aspect. Time should be a ressource and you should have to consider which task is worth the time in any part of the game.
I really have no idea how this (imo big part of rts games) is done in PA or the older games (TA and supcomm), but if this isn't really part of these games i would be sad to say the least.

Well Destiny is streaming PA again, they will start with a 1vs1 (destiny vs desrow).

Why isn't your stream info in the streaming thread? At least put it in your profile!

Let me expound on what I meant by execution.
If you are playing Terran, and plan on doing some sort of marine push vs a Zerg, you best know how to stutter step and do it well, or you will lose. This is what I meant. Why should such a small mechanic decide how good of a strategist I am?
How long does it take to build a worker as a Terran or Protoss? 17 or 20 seconds, disregard chronoboost.
Workers are super important in SC2. Queuing up workers is not a good habit or alternative. Forgetting to build a worker every 17 seconds should not decide how good I am as a planner, or how well I can predict things.
In pa, I can just queue as many workers as I need out of as many factories as I need.

If you need anymore clarification or examples just respond to this post.

To be clear, I enjoy SC2. I put in a bit of effort to get to platinum, and I was there for a few seasons. Then I examined how much effort it took, and tried to project how much more it would take to get to diamond or masters, and decided that the investment into mechanics is just not worth it.
TA was my first RTS at like 7 years old and I'm so glad that PA got funded.


On another note, IT'S HABBENIN'

I understood what you mean by execution, i am just not sure how the "time as ressource aspect" is done in this game. I mean i get what you are saying, but rts games are fun (for me) cause you can win games purely on better execution, just like in sports i guess.
But that isn't really what i meant with "time as ressource".
Let me explain it a bit more: I think it is a good thing if the game "forces" you to not being able to do everything you wanna do at once. The interesting aspect about this "design" is that you have to make decisions where you want to spend your apm/attention to. That creates a lot of depth if the game allows you to win with more than one playstyle (macro) and has units which can be more effective if you babysit them.
I already got that PA isn't really about micro (i think right?), but maybe there are other ways to kinda fall into this "time as ressource" aspect.

One big problem i have right now is that the game seems to be extremely unclear cause everything looks kinda the same (at least i get this vibe from watching the stream right now), but maybe that is just something that will get better if i play/watch it more.

Destiny isn't playing from the perspective you would actually play from. Normally you'll be viewing half the planet at one time and looking at icons.

Time is very much a resource, especially as there's no minimap, which means you're constantly balancing between expanding, keeping the stream of units going, checking your scouts and ensuring your raids aren't running into trouble. Where as in

The play on the stream is far more passive than you'd witness against people with some more experience. It doesn't help he's playing 1v1 on pretty large maps. He should generate a scale 2 map. Also if he had a more land focused map you'd see action earlier.

pamatches.com is a good resource for seeing how the game plays.

Time is still a resource, if you listen to TLO, IIRC he quit starcraft and joined the much, MUCH smaller community of Forged Alliance. FA is super similar to PA, except some differences because the publisher fucked with their creative freedom.
Anyway, he said that he could have 5000 AMP and still not be able to do everything he wants to do. So you still have to make that decision of what you want to focus on. I can't really explain it to you because one, I don't think about it that way, and two, you don't have enough experience in this game for me to effectively convey the idea to you.

I guess that's how it looks to a new player, I think it will get better at that. I can't say for sure because I don't do a lot of observing, but when I play, I have no problem working things out.
Personally, the worst part about this product is the lack of UI functionality. If you want to get a good idea of proper play and a UI that is good, but will be worse than the UI for this game, check out high level play of FA players on youtube.

Lastly, we as a community have lots of differences, but one thing that 100% of us, and I doubt I'm overstating this, agree on, is that the player should not have to fight the UI to execute his plans. As a consequence, we like automation, like factory loops and units that kite by themselves. I know, that sounds like horror to a pure SC player. LUL

oh and as a side note, I don't know why DESBRO is acting so childish about PA, maybe it's on purpose and some marketing plan. He is completely unwilling to be flexible with what he needs to do in this game.