Vehicles and Bots

In my opinion, there are too many units being made. Vehicles and bots are essentially the same unit (land unit that ends up building the same structures). They should either be greatly diversified, or one should be removed.

Having lots of capabilities is a cool function in a game. Satellites, boats, rockets, all good things. However, incrementally better units don't do all that much to make things better, they just make it more of a grind to keep upgrading. Sure there are issues with balancing resources, but for now at least, in the later game I have unlimited resources (essentially), so it just feels like there are bunch of wasted units around. This goes for defense towers too.

Simplicity and the ability to easily identify units will make the game more fun than tons and tons of units

I am not sure what is more needed then the current classification of: Bots SPAMMMMMM!!!11111!!11!1!!1 Tanks less spamm.....

Although it is concerning that players feel like there is little reason to use tank fabbers and air fabbers when you can just as easily use boat or bot fabbers that are superior.

they will be diversified, but we are currently lacking the majority of the unit roster, so why bother talking about it? It will be easier to know which holes units should fill once we have the whole unit roster to play with.

Because discussing things before rather than after massive amounts of design work makes a ton more sense.

Each unit plays its role. Bots are good at metal harass. Tank are good invasion, base breaker units- yet they're annoyingly slow. Bots are faster, good at flanking. The list goes on...

That would be fine if they were more distinct in those abilities, but they work so similarly that the duplicate production line doesn't seem worth it. Having different structures to go with those abilities would be a real plus. I'd expect vehicles to be faster and bots slow (maybe vehicles carry bots?).

These things are best worked out early rather than waiting until everything is worked out and balanced around them.

Hang in there. More unit variety and specialization will be added.

Ants and Doxes are very very different units.

Ants deal a lot more damage and Doxes are a lot faster. That means they are meant for two different roles. Doxes are ideal for raiding and flanking, while Ants are more suited for unit clashes and smashing through defensive lines.

It would if it had not been discussed to mars and back before. Seriously, bot vs vehicle fab discussion goes all the way back to the start of alpha.

It's a topic that should still be discussed since there are still issues with it. Micromanaging the 20 units to attack a defense line seems pretty lame when I'm invading another planet.

I agree that the Dox and Ant are too similar. Other units will diversify the factories more, but the current units could also do with more diversity.

I think a good approach to diversifying bots and vehicles is to make bots much smaller and cheaper than vehicles. I don't think the current paradigm of having bots be fast, and vehicles have more guns and armor, is a good idea.

Instead, I think bots should be smaller and slower, and very cheap. They give significantly more firepower and HP for cost, but each individual has smaller weapons and less HP. An army of bots consumes a lot of space, but can't move quickly. The army has a large number of small-caliber weapons, and handle well in a variety of circumstances, including close quarters and in rough terrain. Your primary combat bot would be the cheapest combat unit in the factory, with a variety of more expensive and more specialized bots as support.

A tank army would be much smaller, with bigger cannons with more range and damage but lower rate of fire. High damage, low rate of fire main guns on a mobile, armored chassis. But each individual tank would be more expensive than a bot, so you can't have as many of them. The vehicles' army design is the opposite of the bots; the primary combat units are more expensive main battle tanks, with a variety of cheaper light vehicles acting as support.

Bots have map presence by having many units spread across space, stationed in different places. Vehicles have map presence because of their mobility and range. Both also need support in different ways, such as bots needing artillery or air support to extend its range, and vehicles needing it to cover more than one area.

Bot vs bot would be a completely different battle from bot vs tank, or tank vs tank. And eventually both sides would have both types, fielding armies of bots that fill out the map, and focused maneuvers using armored columns at specific points.

Yeah nothing has been done in earnest for balance yet, what there is currently is basically the bare minimum required to "play" the game.

Things like the balance between Basic and Advanced, differentiation between Bots and Tanks have been hot topics since PA was announced due to the examples put forth by TA and SupCom.

Mike

The last thing this game needs are more slow units.

I agree and disagree at the same time. The majority of all units are incredibly slow, making the game feel slow with a tired theme.
But that's not necessarily bad, It's a Real Time Strategy game (emphasis on Strategy). Having the game play out slow in some aspect is a benefit. If all the units moved at hyper speed, an average player could quickly get overwhelmed.

Ultimately, time is the only resource. Time is necessary to obtain resources, and any strategic decision can be undone or changed or developed given enough time. Ultimately, every in-game resource or asset boils down to time.

In order for player choices to have weight, it needs to take more time for strategic decisions to be effected or modified. When you deploy an army into the field, it should take a significant amount of time. If moves are quick, then you can simply send your units wherever they need to go. Slower means more commitment when you make a move, and greater significance to both sides' moves.

It should be possible to have your forces deployed wrong, such as too many in one area, and not enough in another area. An attack in a weak spot can only happen if a weak spot has some amount of temporal permanence. The only way this happens is if deploying takes time, and it would take time to undeploy them or redeploy them as well.

In addition, slow ground units creates space between regions of the map. On a large map with relatively slow units, transports become essential for strategic mobility between regions, even for units that are quite fast on a battlefield. Compared to the entire map, even speedy combat units should require transport in order to be moved between theatres in a practical amount of time.

In my opinion the issue with bots and ants is the massive visual range boost. If bots and ants could see each other before they got in range you could actually use bot speed to best advantage. As it is, you don't.

Seeing as air fabbers are among the most fragile units in the game, I think they should build quicker than they do. I.e. at same rate as bot fabber.

Ledarsi all of your essay is present already, so making bots slower than vehicles just switches bots amd vehicles. It doesn't make any significant change.

Giving tanks superior range but comparable optics would also be a good idea stormingkiwi. Without spotting, bots and tanks would spot each other at the same time, despite the tanks' superior range.

Tanks would need to piggyback off of each others' vision in order to use their range effectively, and would also benefit from forward scouts, possibly as fire support for bots, or using lighter vehicles to screen the tanks.

Didn't levellers do that in alpha?

They still do, and having a Skitter achieves the same result.

Ledarsi I was thinking of going in the other direction - Bot sight range is 105, tank sight range is 105. So bots can be microed so that they run away from incoming tanks before they take damage. Rather than 'is there a tank in this direction? Warmer... warmer... boiling!'

Isn't the same effect achieved by having a scout unit with your troops anyway?

Yes.

I guess maybe 100 each. So all the basic attack units have the same vision.

The problem with the skitter is that it requires both factories to be built and operating