poll: Paper Units

Remember a goal month for release doesn't equal a confirmed and unchangeable release date. The goal for December was estimated a very long time ago.

i too still believe it may yet still be moved.

I agree a ladder is what PA needs most to keep it alive through the rough winter.

In real life surface to surface combat. Very few tanks can survive more than one hit. I like the way it is with fragile units. It keeps the game, which can already get going at a slow pace due to long travel times from point A to point B, and makes it move faster once you get there.

I would support some specifically heavy units with limited fire range or damage or both, combined with very heavy armor. They could act as mobile barriers you could use to protect units like mobile artillery while they level someone's defenses. However, I definitely would not want to see HP increases across the board.

I would like to introduce you to the Real Life MBT <Insert any 1st world country Main Battle Tank>.

They can take many hits(Some Abrahms have been documented to take in excess of ten shots before becoming disabled, not even destroyed) and keep right on truckin'.

Soooooo yeah, no.

Say units one-shot each other and it takes half a second for a unit to turn its turret to acquire a target. If you successfully engage a group of enemy units while their turrets are turned the wrong way (or micro a small group to engage from one side and time a larger group to engage at the exact moment when the enemy have turned their turrets to engage the small group) you annihilate them all with no losses because none of them live long enough to fire. If units take 5 shots to kill each other this only means you get a 20% head-start on damage.

Another example: Units will tend to engage the first unit that comes into range, so a line or box formation crossing another line's T or engaging the corner of another box (the same happens with blobs, it's just slightly less pronounced) will tend to have all your units fire on the same target, massively overkilling it and costing you 90% of your DPS (if your front is 10 units wide and one-shots are the norm). If you micro and give individual fire orders to individual units you can prevent this loss of DPS from units firing at targets who are already doomed. If five-hits are the norm this only costs you 50% or less of your DPS.

Kiting, a micro technique, is also more powerful with lower unit health. If units take one second to die, a unit with superior range can get one free kill for every second it can kite. A micro'd unit can beat an un-micro'd force fifty times its size in under a minute. The limits of this are how long it can fall back before it runs into an obstacle or flanking force or until the chasing units catch up. Increasing unit hitpoints makes kiting take longer and so reduces its impact. The same happens with a unit which can out-turn enemy turrets. The lower unit health is, the easier this is to pull off and the more damage you can do before you hit an obstacle or make a mistake.

With slow-moving projectiles, you can gain a slightly earlier alpha-strike by predicting enemy movements and giving a ground fire order on the ground at your maximum range, when the unit AI would normally only fire once a unit has entered its maximum range. Getting a slightly earlier alpha strike is pretty minor if units are tough, but if units die quickly, manually ordering your units to fire individual shots can potentially annihilate an equivalent enemy force with no losses by killing them all before they have the chance to fire a shot.

So, how does increasing unit health increase micro opportunities? You've been pretty vague on the specifics.

well I saw a documentary called white house down that showed by A+B that bulletproof limousines are more resistant than tanks soooo..... /*Sarcasm

Allow me to apply some specifics.

What you are describing here is basically flanking mechanics. In order to perform this tactic you need to attack from several different angles which is something that the enemy might not allow you to do. There is already countergameplay before you enter combat as you manoeuvre to get into a flanking position and the enemy can respond to this if he can see your forces.
Flanking is typically something that applies well to largescale combat aswell as smallscale engagements.
I think that it is intended that turrets should actually pre-aim against enemies that are about to enter their range so in the final version of PA the only way to use this to your advantage is to get a flanking party in the right spot and then sacrifice them to distract the enemy units. Calling this microheavy is a bit of a stretch in my opinion. Positioning and manoeuvring should be important and could probably scale seamlessly from smallscale to largescale combat.

Overkill management actually get harder when units die faster. While you might be able turn your units to hold fire, select each individual unit and give them individual targets in highly lowered game speed or if the game were paused, doing something like this for more than a few units in real time becomes impossible unless it is automated or the UI is so powerful that it can be done easily.
Similarly even in Starcraft, players would want their units to advance on a line to maximize firepower but actually doing so requires so many clicks and keypresses that even pros cannot do it effectively. However with a UI tool like custom formations in Spring you can do it easily for hundreds of units.
The impact of target prioritization also decreases when units die quickly as units die off in quick succession when they come into range meaning that there isn't many targets to choose from.

Also after the first enemy unit dies the projectiles might continue and kill units that are coming in from behind. Also if the projectile speed is fast then the first enemy will be dead before all the units in the line have come in range and fired at that enemy.

On the contrary. You need to spend more time kiting if the units have more health.
While you can kill off many enemy Ants with Levelers now, you would be forced to micro even more and pay more attention to the Levelers if the Ants had more health. Now you can just kill them quickly and move on to other stuff after that.

While it is true that the impact of such micro would be bigger when units die faster it is also gonna be impossible to manage on a large scale as the game goes on. You simply have better things to do with your time. This is also something that you would want to do even if the units died more slowly. It could also probably be the default targeting that unit fires at the enemy before it gets in range so that projectile hits just as the enemy moves in range.

Counter-raiding is also much easier when units die more quickly.
When units die in a few hits you can just intercept the enemy once and kill the enemy quickly.
If the units take a long time to die you might be forced to pay close attention to your anti-raiding forces so that they stay in range of the enemy long enough to kill the enemy raiders because otherwise they might just keep running through your defences.

Something that I currently think strain the players attention and forces twitch micro is the inability to effectively monitor a planet. Increasing unit health would give players more time to react and micro the combat as it unfolds but I'd rather have multiple screens and longer ranged radars to keep track of enemy manoeuvres.

Coming from the approach of "more time = more micro" fails when you take into account that the micro is just no longer as effective as a whole (some will always exist though). Ineffective micro is not a problem, since using it just puts you at a disadvantage.

If you dodge a shot with 1 click in a low HP environment, chances are you save a unit.
You'd need to dodge many more shots (many more clicks) in a high HP environment to achieve the same effect.

Yes, you'd have more time to do this. But that extra time isn't free, and would be far better spent elsewhere than for the small gain you get.

Add to this the advantages to gameplay that longer engagement (not pre-engagement) times bring, I don't really see any negatives to at least some buff to unit survivability.

I don't agree as listed in my above examples. Feel free to refute them.

Currently I'd say that dodging shots is pretty irrelevant in PA so I think so I think you would have to bring another example if you want to support your point.

The time you have to micro is bigger which really does increase amount micro you can perform. Whether the input is better used for smallscale micro or something else really depends on the current scope of the game and your ability to micro and multitask.

The thing about pre-engagements is that they can be wholly about positioning and manoeuvres which typically translates very well from small scale to large scale engagements. That is a very big reason why it might be preferred to longer engagements and combat micro. I'd say that lower health increases the importance of pre-engagement.

Anyway, if you want more combat micro then I want a more powerful UI and more automated unit behaviour so that micro doesn't scale limitlessly as the game escalates.

Micro takes time.

Time better spent managing other stuff.

So micro isn't a problem as long as there is other stuff to do that is more important.

I don't see the issue with micro here, unless you want to automate everything there will always be micro that you can do to help, and in a game of this scale the amount that helps is a hell of a lot less then in a RTS like AOE or CNC.

And the people who want everything automated are insane, because that is what TBS games do exceptionally well, removing the needless micro for total strategy.

I also support the heavy units idea. My convoy could be protected while fragile light long range units take the shots. (Thus creating the idea of formations.)
I like the almost piquing way the army crumbles in a storm of laser blasts in almost no time.. It's almost the trademark of RTS and it scratches the part of me that itches for simulation.

Is micro really a reason to justify unit HP levels, in any capacity? Why would someone cripple their design ethos just because they have some insane idea that player control doesn't belong in a game genre that can't exist without both tactical and strategic command? I just don't get it.

It would be cool if everything were automated as long as I could override it or turn it off. A general doesn't micromanage everything.
Even turn based games can be micro heavy and straining if you are forced to perform too many actions during a limited amount of time.

Anyway. This seems kind of off-topic.

Fair enough, it was just a rehash of what I have said once before.


Personally I see the unit HP issue like a comparison of 2 star craft marines fighting, and 2 star craft battleships dukeing it out.

If someone want to manage his forces to fight better, good for them, but managing an interplanetary economy with thousands on each planet, that is the true test.

Your so-called solution actually makes the effects of individual unit micro worse, not better. If turrets pre-aim against enemies about to enter their rage you don't even need to sacrifice your distraction unit if you give it a move order and follow up with a stop order. The problem with a lot of superficially 'intelligent' unit behaviours is that they too can often be micro'd to the same degree as the naive ones.

Very difficult very effective micro is the worst kind of micro, since it creates a massive gulf between those who know how to do it and those who don't. It doesn't matter if you're any good at the rest of the game if you can increase the effectiveness of your forces 10x by having a very high APM, because with that kind of advantage you can win games before the scale becomes large enough for it to become prohibitively difficult. You're concentrating on increasing the difficulty of micro, not reducing the benefit from it.

Wrecks in PA have hitboxes, you know, so this doesn't work.

You say "on the contrary" and then make a point that actually supports my position. More time means more chances for things to go wrong. And if Ants had more health, it wouldn't change a thing since you could quadruple Ant health and they'd still die in one shot from a Leveller, and nobody's proposing anything as drastic as quadrupling unit health.

Addressed above.

The run-by is a valid strategic decision where you sacrifice units to destroy enemy infrastructure. With popcorn units it's impossible to trade units for structures because of the massive gap between unit health and structure health. If you haven't won in a direct confrontation you'll never harm their infrastructure. A strategically interesting game has options other than "annihilate the enemy's military force", but the gulf between the time it takes a unit to kill other units and the time it takes for a unit to kill structures largely removes options that don't involve first destroying all nearby combat units.

Micro is inevitable. It is not something you can design out of an RTS without removing an R, a T, or even the S. If you can not design a razor tight RTS, then you have no chance or reason to play around with the tiny tweaks of micro that only matter for a razor tight game.

Okey. So you stop on the edge of the range of the turret near one of my tanks. Now the rest of my tanks will aim at your incoming units because they are closer to them than the one standing still. You get very little if anything trying to abuse the targeting AI and if I'm watching I can undo all of your micro with even less micro by driving in and killing your first unit or retreating.

If micro is too hard to perform then it might not be worth doing because it simply takes too much of your APM and attention. Like advancing on a line in Starcraft. Not even pro players do it. Certain micro tactics in PA like dodging becomes useless as the battle escalates. You are simply wasting your time. Dodging with 1 unit when there are hundreds others to attend is simply a waste of your time. PA players already chose to not perform this "prohibitively difficult" micro.

Well I can go on. Units don't always leave wrecks in PA. If they die quickly they don't leave a wreck. Ants have relatively low reload speed so they are likely to reload before they get in range of the next unit if they even came in range of the enemy before it died. You are not even trying.

Yeah I forgot the power difference between Leveller and Ant. Anyway. The point still stands. When unit takes more time to die there is more room for combat micro. Anyway. I think that cheap spam units should be squishy while beefy units should be more durable but not necessarily do that much more damage so that they last longer.

This is avoiding my point about anti-raiding. How fast buildings should be destroyed is not the same question as how much micro killing raiders should require. Those questions can be treated separately.

The quantity and reliance on micro to affect the outcome of the game is not inevitable, and can be designed around.

I was talking in generalities; when individual actions mean less but take the same amount of micro, then micro as a whole is less effective. Therefore, more HP = less micro, regardless of whether you have more chance to micro (you don't actually get more time, since time is finite).

But again, more micro doesn't mean more effective. Unless more micro is more effective, people wont use more micro.

It does, but it also basically makes the actual engagement simply something that resolves, and not something you have any say in, since it's only the pre-engagement that matters. That's not annihilation, or epic, or even combat. To me, that's just plain boring. It wasn't what TA was about, and it drastically limits what you can do. Make the combat matter too.

I'm not advocating more combat micro. I'm advocating less micro all-round. By increasing the duration of combat, you can actually perform strategic moves such as retreat, manoeuvring, reinforcement etc. during combat. These are not possible at present. If you try to retreat you lose by an even greater margin, and there's not time to move or reinforce.

I think it is quite possible to design an RTS without micro. Of course it depends on your definition of micromanagement but if I say that manipulating individual units directly is the definition of micro then surely you must be able to see that controlling unit behaviour, setting priority targets and controlling the ratio of workers and warriors can constitute an RTS without direct control of the units.
The need for APM is an entire different spectrum. Designing an RTS where player APM requirement isn't an important factor at high levels is in my opinion possible.

I don't agree. Lets take anti-raiding for example. Lets say the you are trying to kill an enemy vehicle Skitter with a Dox. Currently you only need to intercept it and score a few hits to kill it. If the skitter took, say 10 seconds, to destroy with your Dox it wouldn't be enough to just intercept it. You would actually need to stay in range atleast 10 seconds to kill it. The Skitter will be able to run past your Dox. If you don't pay attention and micro your Dox to continually intercept and cut-off the Skitter it can drive around in your base with the Dox trailing behind out of range of the enemy microed Skitter. See how much more important micromanagement is in this situation? There are a lot more actions required to get the enemy Skitter.

The engagements in SupCom are usually also predetermined. Microing groups of units is prohibited by the inbuilt latency delay and by the fact that land units get their orders in succession messing up their pathing badly.
Anyway. There is not such a long delay in PA and the pathing is much better so microing groups of units in PA is much more fun and rewarding.

Well I want more combat management. By increasing the duration of combat, the importance of targeting priorities, maximizing firepower, flanking, AoE and unit spread becomes much more important but increasing the duration of combat does not need to come from an overall health increase on all combat units but can be applied to tough units designed to take a beating while their damage potential is similar to that of the standard mainline squishy units.

Edit:I want more combat management rather than combat micromanagement. Small difference but significant.