Units variety

How many different units per factory (air, land, bot, other?) can we expect? How interesting the variety of units will be? Laser, flames, multi bullets, electric, spy, stun, radar, jam, etc...

We've been told about 100 units for release, but no idea what the actual number will be. Unit Variety is a big convern for many people.

Mike

Indeed, it is all about unit variety! Your strategy is based on it, how you attack, you defend, etc... That is what makes people still playing TA and/or TA mods like Escalation... And in my opinion, the lack of unit variety in Supcom killed the game/made the game boring!

I see you're new to the forums, welcome!

You should do a search before posting in accordance to the forum rules.

As @KNight mentioned, we're looking at over 100 units for release. We don't know how many or what they all will be.

We have a list of some units that might be added to the game, but it isn't confirmed whether they'll be added or not. Check it out: http://pamatches.com/wiki/not-in-the-game/

I just submitted a request for a page edit - the single laser defence tower is, in fact, in the game.

Thanks. I swapped that out. I have updated that structure a few times since it was added to the game, but forgot to move it into the defensive structure category. Thanks for that.

No probs

If you look at pa-db.com it looks like we have 92 defined units so far, but 14 aren't in the game:

True, it can depend on how they count/define it exactly, and if they put more variance into the units like Ant/Leveler and Hummingbird/Peregrine it could turn out to be pretty good and they do want to support PA long term with new content so it should grow over time. I'm not too worried about the long term thought.

Mike

Emboldened units are for debug purposes only.

Wouldn't units count as things that move and not buildings, defenses,etc...think this is how it was labeled in supcom?

In TA everything you created was a unit +commander -fortifications -nuke missiles from memory (its a long time since i played.
so building = 1 unit
fixed defenses = 1 unit
1"unit" = 1 unit

Technically yes.

But practically, no.

Personally I think it's kind of lame. There's no difference between structures and units.

Looking at stats makes that particular stat kinda pointless.

Another player could consistently have more units than you in the stats. But you don't actually know if those are real units or just wall templates

Wow, I really really hope structures aren't included in the 100~ unit tree. I was expecting tons more units before release and a real opening up of unit based strategic options. If we are already on 92...

Neutrino also just said: Theres one guy working on new units and they wont see the light of day for a while. If we aren't seeing these units soon, how are we going to play test them for release?

Argh. Why do I care so much about this game?!

Me too.

I know right?

I asked the same question cm dandy! If new units are far off I guess that means release is still far off. Could an Uber Dev clear things up, please?

My view on units on such is that there should effectively be a variety like this (with regards to military ones):

T1: dedicated units only.
T2: Advanced dedicated units, and some multi-purpose ones (i.e. units with more then one weapons system on them or more then one mode of combat, though they may not have quite the punch of a dedicated one).
T3, If they decide to put in a "proper" T3 (air/vehicle/bot/sea): Advanced multi-purpose ones. And expensive slow-to-build large-scale units.

They may not want T3 factories so much though if they are following the TA formula. Too many levels of gear, maybe. In which case, they can move multipurpose units into T1 too. Though I certainly wouldn't mind there being a super-unit factory as an endgame piece of equipment.


Orbit T1 (pseudo-T3 launchpad): basic satelites, space fighter, space constructor, etc.
Orbit "T2" (orbital shipyard): Can do the same units as the launch pad and some larger ones. Culminating in a space-faring warship and some larger interplanetary unit transports, naturally.


With regards to units, it might be interesting if factories could be individually upgraded to enhance the units they build in some way. For instance, an air factory could have its assembly line upgraded to build one combat aircraft with energy shields equal to about 25% of its health that slowly recharge. A vehicle factory that upgraded its production line for that tier's tank may now build that tank with a minor boost to range and damage. Or maybe the tank will now have a second short range turret on it. In any case, upgrading the production for that factory will let it build the improved variant (said variant is more costly, naturally).


But yeah, I'm a fan of having some units with multiple weapons systems or more then one turret and stuff like that. At the same time, I am NOT a fan of having to sit in some design room screen customizing my units for an RTS. So if factories simply had some simple, effectively automatic upgrade options available for what it builds, that would be a small enough amount of unit customization to not get in the way of gameplay.

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I think people have inflated expectations of how many units there will be in this game. I'm only expecting another 5 to 10 units to bring it up to a similar number that TA had at release (basically the ones that are already defined in the list above, but not enabled, plus transports) . Supcom had more, but most of those were just higher tier duplicates or experimentals (which we know we arent getting lots of in this game, maybe just the Megabot).

Neutrino mentioned that he would like to have 6 units in each tree during the live chat today. That's 3 more basic bots, 3 more advanced bots, 2 more basic vehicles and 3 more advanced vehicles assuming an average of 6 per factory.

It's not that much, but leaves a lot of space for the community to play. Neutrino even mentioned the possibility that Uber might want to add community units to the game.

Six combat units per factory is perfectly reasonable if they are solid, interesting units that behave differently in battle.

If you think back to TA, that was about as many units as the base game had. Core contingency added a few more units, there were a few units added later as well. But the huge amount of units only came much, much later when the community started making units. And then began merging large rosters of units together into "mega packs" which literally maxed out the number of unit types the engine would support. Which, if I recall correctly, was five hundred and eleven unit types.

And there wasn't just one of these mega packs- there were dozens of them, with different content created by lots of different people. These mega packs also often incorporated very different balance mods and design/gameplay systems.

As great a job as Uber is doing, they will simply not be able to produce more content than the vastly more numerous third-party creators. That is not a realistic expectation from the devs. Once the game platform gets opened up to modders I expect there will be a lot of units created, and in a few months or perhaps a year or two, we will start to see third-party game designers who cobble a huge amount of that content together into cohesive, expanded PA-like games.