Supreme commander Killer or simple jack Tropical thunder here

to all of you who dissed SupCom in this thread :

1 : you dissed all the devs currently working on PA, congrats.

2 :

I'm actually very surprised you guys don't like SupCom.
Yes, it's metagame was very focused on upgrading, that also meant you had to play the "tech investment vs army now".
Maybe that wasn't your style.

But the innovations and polish SupCom brought to the RTS genre are amazing.

And the variety 3 tiers of units brought to the game was also a lot of fun.
And experimentals were just a crazy wow factor.

p.s.

The UI it supported was also great out-of-box, but post mods? Amazeballs!

Quit being such a Drama Llama, by your logic the Devs are insulting themselves because they aren't just copying SupCom1/FA.

Get over it, SupCom had plenty of issues to go along with it's achievements.

Mike

Let's take supcom out of the equation.

The ideas they pitched for kickstarter elaborated on a macro playstyle, requiring planet coverage and fast spreading. It specifically said less shields and experimental, more tiers of tech types instead of tiers of tech level.

This is PA. They should add more unit roles, things people can fall in love with, combat healers and melee bots and mobile walls and stuff.

AAactually that's extrapolation, your own words, and cannot be extracted from mine and without context means you think they did a poor job.

I highly doubt they despised their own game, actually, I know for a fact that isn't true.

it would ok without T3 and experimental if there would be much T1 and T2 and powerful ones

SupCom was a great game, After playing it I found myself unable to enjoy any RTS where unit factories could not be just be left on to produce infinite armies. (I'm actually still waiting for that feature in PA, I hate having to shift click 20 times each time I build a factory to que up 100 units, and then do it again if the game drags on long enough.)

I am waiting for PA to get to SupCom's level of polish. That said, tiers and age advancement are a relic of historical RTS such as Age Of Empires, and don't add much to gameplay other than making the developers make units that never see use and punishing people who don't tech up fast enough.

There already is a tier 3, it's called orbital. T2 engineers have to build the orbital factory which then builds new units. How is that not T3?

Not to mention the exponential jump in overall power and cost.

Mike

I came here because of TA, which only had T1 and T2.

Experimentals are the result of spectacle creep, not necessarily good design decisions. Once the developers have created a mechanically sound, dynamically diverse, and most importantly, fun and engaging game, they can start to think about experimentals. Until then, it's easiest to keep tech levels out of the game entirely.

I don't think that experimentals or super weapons have to be either overpowered or useless.
You can just balance them like any other unit.

I personally dont care if they go down the supcom or TA route with units. Im sure either will be fine. But for the guys saying that TA is superior because every unit is usable at all points in the game, why is it bad that a unit becomes invalid after a certain point? You dont build T3 units at the start of a game, so it would be silly to build T1 units at the end. Theres nothing wrong with units having a purpose.

Obviously they didn't despise it, but they recognize that it had flaws. Otherwise, why would they be making this game?

uhm no.

you don't need 'flaws' so to speak to spark the need for progress. the need for progress is already there and always will be.

It's inherent to our need for change which is human nature and cannot be altered.

By the way, most of the concerns about T3/XP/tech race has been fixed (or are being fixed) in FAF.

T1 will never ever be useable the whole game, because they are not balanced against T2 arty and base defenses.
A strong base defense will never be overwhelmed by T1 tanks (if t2 arty and t2 bomber with splash damege are in the game). So what are the options we have we now ? Nuke/Orbital and T2 Bomber snipe. I would rather see T2/3/4 tanks/bots tanks which can overwhelm base defenses.

-> there is need for tanks/bots which survive splash damage with a lot of hp and speed to break turtles.

this is black/white argumentation. T1 units can help overwhelming any defense. They distract fire and bigger units can get into range easier. And by now only 3 defense units seem OP for me: Pelter, Catapult and Holtkins. The reason is: They are incredibly accurate and have high range.

Why not? Radar jammers, mobile artillery, horribly inaccurate static artillery. There are so many options to balance this out....

And there's no mobile unit that can counter battery their fire. Except the Stingray.

@frobb - 1 T2 leveller and 6 t1 Ants have more survivability than 2 t2 levellers.