Vehicles and Bots

This speaks to blobs more than the vision of combat units. Having a blob of units with one Skitter in the middle to extend the vision range of the entire blob is indicative of a different issue.

I think bots should be cheaper, more spread out, and inherently more defensive than tanks, using quantity to cover more area instead of higher movement speed. This would mean you can't 'run away' from tanks that want to fight. In fact, as long as tanks have superior range, it doesn't make sense to voluntarily disengage.

The tanks shouldn't want to get into close combat with a group of bots. If the bots can get within range they have the advantage due to higher DPS and HP per cost. In close quarters where everyone can shoot at everyone, raw efficiency matters more than finesse-type features like range and movement speed. Also, tank guns might have slower turret turn rates, and other features that make tanks less maneuverable in close quarters. A large army of bots should kill tanks at close quarters quickly.

Against bots, tanks want to stand off and use their superior range and mobility. However due to low fire rate of cannons and potentially some inaccuracy, it will take some time to chew through a group of bots. During which time, the other player might use missile bots, artillery, gunships, aircraft, or tanks of their own to kill the enemy tanks, or just advance with a wall of bots and force the enemy tanks back.

I like the current bot and tank balance. They both feel extremely valuable and different.

To the OP. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahaHAHAHAHAHhaahaha ha ha ho ha h

Yeah, but yeah. Clearly, you haven't played TA and there is nothing wrong with your remarks. I think if there were not a lot more unit choices coming then putting the bots and the tanks in the same structure wouldn't be a biggy, but...

Instead, we wait and sharpen our knifes while our teeth glitter in the night.

I think Doxs would be more effective raiders if the base health of resource production units weren't so high compared to Dox damage. They have to take out quite a few resource producers to justify their cost and to impact the enemy economy.

It's a sign that Skitters are a dumb unit. There should never be a cannon fodder unit that accomplishes its role by purchasing only one. It's a game about giant robot battles!

Screw the current scouting roles. Give the T1 scout a reclamation lathe. It is now a unit that you want and need on the front line, all over the place, putting more money in your bank. If that definition sounds like a perfect scout, that's because it is. Problem fixed.

It's very difficult to accomplish this in a realistic way with pure stats alone.

One potential solution is to increase the density of bots over tanks. Bots are tall units on two legs, while tanks are short fat units on treads. If you gave both sides equal stats, a hundred tanks will have a much larger footprint than the tightly packed bots. The bots will be able to engage more readily and with more force, and typically win as a result.

That same density also makes bots naturally weaker against AoE attacks. More bots get hit from a high explosive, taking more damage and dying more quickly. Add in explosive deaths, and huge battles tilt towards the favor of tanks once more.

^ just no........



bots and tanks are entirely different, something you learn hard as a bot style player. ants in fewer numbers can slug dox out of the park all day. Unless..... they are microed. bots are amazing fast assault units and make a great fire distraction, for your tank blob moving in behind them.
Or they can easily act out elimination missions at a moments notice, while your tanks are advancing in the opponents known radar nimble dox can scurry the outside of his radar and flank up the backside. with all your opponents forces moved to intercept the ant atttack, the dox, as ign put it, "run through torching everything like bloody mongolians!!!" they are far from different sir far from......

I like this idea quite a bit. Reclamation is a brilliant idea for a scout unit. It is simple and makes for a highly desirable scout to spread everywhere across the map at all stages in the game. Early in the game it can do some light harassment, later in the game there are lots of wrecks and it gathers metal as well as intel.

Different factories might have scout units that function differently, and the reclaim scout might be a special feature of one particular factory, such as the basic vehicle factory.

This is actually very simple to implement just with pure stats alone.

Just for the sake of argument, suppose a bot costs 1, and a tank costs 10. Any group of tanks can, metal for metal, be matched by ten times as many bots. Also suppose each bot has 1/5 as much HP and DPS, but also 1/3 the range and movement speed.

I'm absolutely just throwing out random numbers here, but the point is that the tanks want to stay out of range because the bots have considerably more HP and DPS for cost. A hundred bots would have twice as much combined HP and DPS as ten tanks despite their identical cost, meaning in a straight up fight where both sides can fire the bots win.

However the tanks have superior range and movement speed, as well as more HP and damage in each individual unit. This gives them greater ability to maneuver as well as better shock and assault capability. Tanks can kite a superior army of bots, and can use their superior movement speed to cover several areas where bots would have several independent groups. And a tank charge is much faster and hits harder than a bot charge, but is less cost-efficient and has less raw staying power.

Obviously if both sides have only these two units, most players are going to prefer to use tanks for their superior range. But when you factor in other units, such as air support, artillery, and other bots with better range, anti-heavy capability, alpha strike, or other specialists, the support units make the army play differently as a whole.

I like this idea, but it would work better if bots were simply smaller in footprint and can pack together more tightly to concentrate firepower more. Or, you can spread them out to cover more area, but due to their smaller size and shorter range their engagement efficiency would drop from doing this, although it makes them more resistant to splash damage which can easily be more important.

Hopefully splash damage is a major consideration in PA. Tanks would fare much better against splash damage both due to their larger size, making them less dense, as well as their superior armor. Bots would deal with splash damage by spreading a large quantity of units across space. That artillery shell will definitely kill a couple bots, but out of a large army so a few losses aren't important. Tanks just shrug off the damage, and can also be repaired, but losing one is more consequential than losing one bot.

If there is any thing positive that I got from this thread, its that I now want reclamation scouts.

However I don't understand why people argue the militieristic characteristics of tanks and bots have to be attack stat this speed that or vision there. A military unit serves a purpose and usually one at most. Understanding what a unit is designed to do will lead to stats that can be rightly justified.

I find the current bots quite fun to move around and perform flank scouting maneuvers with tanks as the front line defender. Adjusting unit density and or vision range is ignoring the point of the role that it serves. Should tanks be durable??? Bots strong attack??? I find these arguements circular with no real answer that will satisfy anyone.

If any discussion is fruitful here, I think functionality should be defined before theory crafting how smaller bots are needed to engage since they can have a higher percent of units fireing.

Yes, you can accomplish anything by using broken units and failing to follow proper RTS conventions. What you accomplish is a completely broken game. The hard part is getting it done without making a broken mess.

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The point of my previous post is that units with equal damage/dps/cost can still behave very differently by changing other attributes. A heavier attack favors the first unit to strike, but loses efficiency to overkill. A smaller unit increases the "hardness" of the attack, letting it punch through defensive lines, but becomes more vulnerable to splash. Explosive death changes things even more. There are countless possibilities, and the more you can utilize the better it can be. Not everything requires a novice-tier change to core attributes (health/damage/cost). If you can't even get those right, then what hope is there of doing anything more?

For example, take a tank with 100hp and a 3.5 second (175HP) attack, vs a bot with 100hp and a 1 second (50HP) attack. In a 5v5 battle, the tanks autowin by killing everything. But now lets add wreckage. Both unit types have wreckage health equal to their living health.

The 5v5 battle still goes to the tanks, but what happens in a bigger battle? Tanks need 2 shots to kill the bot and cut through wreckage, which takes alpha strike+4 seconds. Bots do it in alpha strike+3 seconds. The bots take less time cutting through the wreckage to get the juicy tanks, giving them the advantage, despite them having the same core stats.

Alternatively, the bots' extra altitude allows them to shoot the tanks behind their own wreckage, ignoring it entirely. In that situation, they get to deal 100% damage while tanks have to kill both bot and wreckage, plus wasting overkill. The end result is tanks dealing less than 30% damage despite having the same DPS!

It's not really negative? At least, I wasn't looking at it in that way.

It encourages you to have diversity in your units. A small number of sunfish improve the effectiveness of your navy. A small number of narwhals improves the survivability as well.

So do the radar units.

It's back to that concept I posted about in October/November - there are situations where an equal investment in doxen/ants is a stronger choice than an additional leveller/slammer.

Theoretically, Skitters aren't a cannon fodder unit. They are a large investment, one worth protecting, because they act as an area buff on the combat units in the vicinity - in this case, they increase the range that the combat units can fire.

They aren't a "large investment" at all, each one is only about 60% of an Ant yes provides a benefit to almost all units within a certain radius. To me, that sounds a lot like a bubble shield(as far as implications go) except for the fact that it doesn't stack. I will agree that they aren't quite cannon fodder, but at the same time they aren't really any of the other things you said they were.

Mike

They are a large investment in that the cost of losing them is significant.

Easiest way to explain this is with Naval.

Without radar or scouting, the Stingray is sh!t.

Your fleet of stingrays therefore isn't worth as much as the scout plane hovering overhead. On their own, the Stingrays are worthless. You shouldn't protect them because they'll get eaten by anything that looks at them twice, and they won't do enough damage to justify their cost. Your scout plane has both the metal cost of itself, and of all the stingrays it is assisting, invested into it.

Likewise, your fleet of Leviathans is worth nothing if you have no anti-air support, and I have bombers hovering overhead. If you have a fighter, and my bombers kills one Leviathan before being shot down, that Leviathan didn't cost much. If you lose your fighter, you lose all your Leviathans. The cost of losing 1 fighter is much more than the cost of losing 1 Leviathan.

And of course, the commander. Every bit of metal you've invested in the game is lost when he dies. Even though your commander is free, he is a worth more than anything else you own. That would be true even in the case that he could do nothing but walk.

Correct. It is an example of a good support unit.

Really, I know that Supcom completely destroyed the idea of support units, but supcom did not do everything perfectly, and certainly didn't do support units well.

Scouts are NOT a large investment. The loss of one is significant only in that you failed to build more than one. They are no more special than cannon fodder, except you don't want to fight with them.

Scouting is definitely a support role, but it is easily the dumbest one there is. Everything in the game has vision. If you require visual confirmation, deploy one of anything to spot it.

Clearly if people are going to be so anal about terminology, my use of investment was incorrect.


The utility of a scout is more valuable than the utility of an additional Leveller.