Internal Playtest – Transports! Improved Visuals – 2/7

• A “number of balance changes”
• Air Transport! Costs 90 metal. Looks like it’ll only transport one unit at a time, which is expected. Apparently using them causes a crash, but hey, it’s a step forward, right?
• The continued adding and tweaking of lights look really cool. Looks awesome on vehicles.
• The newly tweaked Uber cannon is very powerful at slaughtering units. Sending units at the Commander is nigh on pointless at this iteration. Man. It can take out large groups of units. Now it seems that only long range advanced units can viably take out a Commander that is aware of what’s going on. That or air units. Which is a little concerning… But we’ll see how it plays and tweak it from there.
• Bug with the Uber Cannon where the Uber Cannon shot curves.
• Performance seems to have been improved, though that is far from scientific.
• The AI seems to have improved. Again, far from scientific. But, the AI was the first player to get off planet. That counts for something. However, the AI still doesn’t know what to do with water. When the AI can build gates then it will be a force to be reckoned with.
• Lots of units, very fast. I really like how everything is being balanced to have lots of units.
• The Inferno is turning out to be a very nasty unit – especially when paired with combat fabricators.
• Gunships are fast and powerful, but they seem to be better suited for buildings while bombes are better for units due to their area of effect.
• Uber has a lot of people working on performance. Both server side performance and client side performance. We should be seeing some big strides on this “sooner rather than later.”
• Formations seem to be coming along very nicely. Gonna be such an awesome addition to Planetary Annihilation.
• The upcoming changes to Orbital look amazing. Really makes Orbital an integral component of gameplay, even for single planet gameplay, like it should be.
• Pings seem to be working just fine and change based on the color of the player. That’s pretty cool.
• Wow laser defense satellites have a lot of health.
• Jets on the aircraft look awesome and they’ll look even cooler “shortly” when GPU rendering is integrated.
• The Unit Cannon has a low priority right now. Which is a good thing. There’s more important things to be finished.
• Astroid smashing is less bugged.
• Uber playtests seem to end with planet smashes. And I’m fine with that.

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It seems like Uber might want to add a lot of emphasis on winning games with mega weapons, hence the uber powerful uber cannon.
I could be wrong though, we'll see what happens once it actually uses up energy (assuming it doesn't already, I didn't get in the stream before Garat died)

It doesn't currently use energy. But it will use energy. But it can be fired even if you don't have any energy. Which is a problem in my opinion.

I particularly liked how much of the tiny planet the AI was on got demolished! Really gave some weight to the KEW menace, I'm looking forward to some scaled up craters in the future to really mess up bigger planets if say a moon instead of an asteroid hits one.

I would honestly prefer if the Uber cannon didn't rely on energy, and just had a set cool down time. IMO, if your back's up against the wall because you have no power and a cluster of units is looking to snipe your comm, at the very least it should be able to go out guns blazing. I imagine all commanders having a small flux capacitor for this specific purpose alone. But I definitely think it should definitely fire less frequently than it is currently capable of (every 5 seconds? dunno).

is this uploaded to youtube yet?

Another important change, brad built tanks, not bots!
The video is linked in the first post of https://forums.uberent.com/threads/whats-that.56326/

Here's da vid:

I am fine with strong uber cannon and dumping energy into it, as long as its balanced. Really, it is the only scalable commander ability that is alright via energy storage.

anyway, one can kill commanders with large armies. It just takes the whole army. Easier if commander uber cannon takes energy and they didn't see it coming (didn't store energy for cannon usage)

Can anyone confirm that there is indeed an embedded video here? I see blank space, but that might happen due to the Great Firewall of China (where I live).
I can enable a VPN to see it if so, as these are always a treat to watch.

There is in fact an embedded youtube video there.

Thanks!

Yes, it is there.

Transport one unit at the time? Ehe, well, it's a good start.

The real problem right now is the Air is too powerful. Playing online I've realized how many people simply rush in T2 Air, and moves from there. Making the Missile turrets only AA, will cause some trouble in my opinion. Because people will have less of those early game, and that will expose them later to Air attacks. We will see, hopefully I'm wrong.

I also hope that there will be some improvements on the performance side. Right now the game starts to lag with less than 1.000 units total on map. Sometimes I have to fight and react blindly to the opponent 'cos I literally have no more than 10 frames per minutes. Funny stuffs... I still kick ***

And about the Uber Cannon... good stuffs, nice and powerful. And who knows what exactly shots and how does it really work? I'm fine with loops. They look pretty.

Awesome game. Awesome game. Where can I buy it? ...oh, wait... I've it already.

Watching the past stream now on YouTube. The Uber Cannon has something strange. Over powered, and time to time it clearly shots at the wrong spot on the map. Anyway, it recharges very fast. Perhaps too fast?

Basic and Adv construction aircrafts move much faster. They may be useful to set up far away bases.

This looks really like an area build. So there will be already the possibility to chose inline or area build, in-game?



Edit - That ended up being the AI, so not a human design. Forget it.

Or we need bridges/platforms/transport... or the AI needs to get smarter.

AI needs to get smarter. It has no clue how to handle water.

I think the strength of air has nothing to do with missile towers. Particularly advanced air.

It's simply needs to be re-balanced.

There's also the fact that Air will always be powerful. If you don't defend against it, then you're going to have a bad time. Kinda like if you don't build orbital, or naval, or ground.

Yes. Air is inbalanced. But that's not tied into the commonality of missile towers. Advanced air simply needs to be reduced.

The dps per metal of advanced air is way high.

Meh on the one unit transport...does not sounds uber at all, just about the only thing I'm not impressed by in pa...

People keep on saying they don't like one unit transports.

But rarely say why.

Why don't you like one unit transports?

There are many many benefits to having one unit transports. Which is why Uber, who is much better at making RTS games than us, is opting for them.

First off, when it gets shot down, you only lose one. Especially when compared to the current air balance, and overall game balance. Air is really fragile. A single fighter can do a lot of damage. So these new transports will likely be pretty paper thin – but that also means they'll be really fast. Which is also a really really good thing.

They can be cheaper. Which is great for building only one to relocate a single fabber to the other side of a planet. Which means no wasted metal because you built a 10 unit transport to move one unit.

You know what... I'm gonna make a dedicated thread on this topic...