Gameplay, Units & Balance

Ok, after trying them out, I'm really glad you put in area patrol commands for scouting.

I am the wisest master escapee and still F$%#k you up I can, even after my world is destroyed. These balances changes have scewed the odds in my favor. Well had a few beers; played a team game with 8 moons, 8 people, 4 teams, got my *** handed to me at the beginning of the game but then escaped---****----, hopped from moon to moon. My adversary did not have good recon and did not know where I was so they just decided to smash moons together starting with Moon 1, what did I do after they destroyed Moon 1, well not completely destroyed, built my base on Moon 1, after a glorious array of moon smashing and nukes and glorious horrah left a few moons left and me being completely driven off the planet built 3 Halleys on Moon 1. I scouted out which moon his commander was on and then well......
he or she was annihilated after all the work they done to take over most of the solar system. -------------
that game was F$@%King Epic

Well done! They deserved it, one doesn't go around smashing moons if he/she were a nice person in the first place.

Why not make space ships, built by an orbiting shipyard and are also able to fire from the orbital plane to the ground. Basicly having the role of naval units in space: Long range fire support and base killers.

Because the focus is on surfacebattles ... spaceships with firesupport would be the asteroids you could conquer and refit ... beeing able to build fleets of spaceships would make other unittypes redundant such as seanaval ... why build seanaval when i can bombard bases from space where most units are relativly save? Why build stational artillery, why towercreep, why even build an army at all if i can nuke planets from orbit? Spacenaval and/or spacefighters would change the gameplay significantly and also requiere a new ui for itself
Take a look on the faq thread ... spacenaval and fighters wont be a thing ... maybe something for a mod or a later expansion but not on release

Orbital needs more to it, which is why its still in heavy flux and being worked on. Big space ship battles are not happening if they aren't in the orbital layer. Nor will big orbital bombardments happen since it would nullify the ground game.

Why invade when you can blow everything up safe in orbit? At that point resources won't be a problem. Unless you could figure out a way that can easily shut down orbital bombardment without covering the planet in umbrellas, but then it would make any bombardment useless if it had such an easy counter. I wouldn't say no to giant space battles if someone could find a way around making everything else pointless. It does need something to give it more depth for when Gas Giants show up as a planet type.

Afaik gasgiants will be a sort of orbital and air kind of battlfield how airbattles shall happen on that ... i have no idea ......

I mean making them a very late game unit equivalent to half a nuke in cost as well as the factory. it should be something when battling over gass giants. But I get your point. It would make a ground base useless.

Something worth keeping in mind, Raw cost is a very poor balance mechanic.

Mike

Some ideas in maintaining this type of unit economywise: they would require a large amount of metal to build , use energy to fire and require metal to travel through space actively, since uranium is a metal. So a good economy would stay important to deploy these units.

But it's only an idea.

Those 'limitations' might work in a game like Starcraft, with unit caps and limited resources, but in a game like TA/SupCom/PA all they do is push back the point at which you can freely build them and not have to worry about it.

Mike

A small sidenote on using expensive-as-hell as a balance tool.

Eve Online decided to do that half a decade ago with Titans and Supercarriers. It didn't work. It resulted in something that's being called supercapital proliferation. It's where a group of players has a mass of giant, dangerous, nigh indestructible spaceships and can just forcefully do what they want to everyone else. The only counter to these blobs is a bigger blob. Originally, it was expected that only a dozen or so would ever exist.

Those who keep up with video game news would possibly have read about the most expensive fight in Eve's 10 year history. $330,000 USD of capital ships - pixels - were vaporised in a day-long fight. 75 Titans were destroyed - largely by titans firing point-blank into each other.

I did some research. A few years ago one of the developers released figures on how many Titans had been built. If we do the projection out to today, there should be about 1,200 Titans floating in space.

What I mean to say is that $330,000 USD represents less than 7% of the total value of ships that were intended to be only ever numbered in the handfuls.

Balance by expense is a dumb idea.

There are clear differences between PA and Eve, the first and most important being that eve is a persistent universe MMORPG, whereas PA is not. 'Expensive as hell' is completely different for these 2 games.

Not really. Persistence is irrelevant in this case - treat it like one long game of PA.

So I new to PA but not RTS in general. During this play I had got ROFL stomped pretty easily. But I did manage to move my commander to another planet, discovering it's the easiest way to keep him safe. Some more time had past and my frame rate dipped. No big deal it was still playable unlike some frame spikes so bad units freeze and skip great distances. Not until I had returned to the original planet that I discovered what made me frame rate nose dive. There must have been at least 100 bombers, it's hard to tell with them so packed together as they are here. What can one do when the entire sky is blotted out and seems to rain explosives? If you find this not to be relevant to this thread sorry 'bout that but I do believe they can fix the graphical problem as well as some balancing issues here.

Hey Shtin, i asked this to metabolical and he said that you shouldn't let it come that far. I think sometimes making a tactical decision shouldn't permanently lose you a planet so here are the only ingame solutions i found sofar: Time a planet smash with an incoming orbital unit so that you can first make a teleporter there after the whole planet is annihilated and make advanced fighters and bombers.... other way is shoot nukes spread out everywhere so you literally cover the entire planet and try to make sure they explode almost at the same time. Then quickly rush a teleporter, send trough a swarm of advanced fabricator bots combined with advanced combat fabricators and spam out flag guns around the teleporter and advanced fighters and bombers. If you play against a someone who don't micro bombers, send multiple groups of orbital workers and start different teleporters at places far away from each other then if you see him attack all but one of them with advanced bombers, send trough a swarm of advanced fabricator bots combined with advanced combat fabricators and spam out flag guns etc etc...

Orbital laser on their T2 air factory before they get up bombers might be an idea, but at that cost your enemy can make T2 air +deeporbital radar and an umbrella and you probably are toolate and he already got the bombers.