Next tiers?

Again I must stress that balance is not a quality that is unique to any game. That supcom was more balanced than TA. And the most important point is that TA T2 was more powerful than T1. Not to a degree that made T1 useless which was supcoms biggest problem, but more powerful. Bigger, more expensive, more armor, more damage. More powerful. Not necessarily more useful, but more powerful.-

PA uses the two step escalation from TA, not the 4 point escalation from supcom. And there was an escalation in TA. What you want isn't something that was ever in TA.

The units that are in PA bear more resemblance to TA as well. Bots are pretty obviously analogues for kbots. And the one that I cited before, probably poorly, is the single unit transport which was iconic to TA because of its ability to steal enemy units. It's quite clear that the pelican is a nod to that unit which had no analogue in supcom. They want to focus on large armies and not super units, another thing that was distinguishing between TA and supcom.

They have the (starwars-style!) laser defense towers which was also a thing from TA that did not exist in supcom. And just like in TA there is a heavy and weak version of the tower according to the two step escalation.

I think PA actually has more escalation than TA or SupCom. The structure *technically* lumps everything together however we have allot of options and in my experience the game roughly follows 5 phases:

1: Land war / Naval depending on planet conditions
2: Air war
3: Orbital War
4: Multi-Planet land war (via gates)
5: WMD war (nukes and KEWs)

Now it's possible sometimes to skip a stage, or to re-order things a bit however that is the basic way a game of PA plays out *provided* you are in a multi planet system. I think a large proportion of the problem is down to people playing PA single planet, which demotes orbital and removes the final stages of the game completely. The reason for this is mainly due to the difficulty of planetary invasion which is something that is under heavy development and will improve.

Orbital does add another level to PA, but that isn't related to the discussion. As that is a thing that was never in either TA or supcom.

I agree bmb, the point I was trying to make though is that some of the finer features of both previous games have been left out in favour of the new mechanics.

Uber is calling planetary annihilation a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation for a reason. It's pretty obvious what they're going for here. Also I think you mean bmb is too infatuated with sup com to do anything else.

.................

I won't disagree, I think supcom is tantalizingly close to perfection while TA is old and busted. But even so it doesn't mean that they can't learn from supcom even if they want something that is closer to TA.

Because nukes (or any other game enders really) wouldn't have these same problems eith... oh wait!

Dude, have you played this game yet? I honestly seriously doubt you've tried FFA with more than 2 people. Try nukes!

shields:

commander upgrades:

Also this PSA: Commanders and what we know so far.
multiunit transports:

adjacency:

super units

tech levels

Every design decision has its reasons.

Also quite frankly they use ideas from TA and SupCom when they're developing PA. Hopefully improve upon those ideas. Everybody remember the game is not finished yet. So let's not jump the gun yet.

I'm not so sure that you have played one either. You don't have to build one thing (nukes) to automatically win. Use gunships, Boom drops, T2 bombers, a planet or just a stupid amount of units. In fact, the past few FFAs I played, there was not one nuke launched. And I didn't play with total n00bs.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with anything. We're not discussing if it's a good idea, only if PA is closer to TA or not. I contend that it's too close to TA for its own good, unwilling to learn or advance beyond it.

The least I would like to see is semi-megabots or semi-commanders/semi-superunits in the Game.
It would be pretty cool.

Supcom and TA had different strong points. Supcom had better eye candy and ui features. TA had better resources, maps and tech levels. Supcom was designed around superior stat lines and and brute force superiority, while TA emphasized unit behavior and ability.

A lot of good things were lost and forgotten about TA. Likewise, Supcom added a bunch of new and cool things to the genre. Not every feature from both games are mutually exclusive. We can sometimes take the best of both worlds.

Which is off topic. The thread is about tiers, super bots, etc.

i wonder how many people mix tiers with tech lvels or viceverca
just because we have only basic and advanced doest mean we can`t have differently tiered units ...
is a nukelauncher the same "tier" as a sniperbot or a dox the same tier like a lasersatelite?
and this is what bugged me quite for a while now ... especialy with the recent patch that moved airtransports to the advanced air factory ...
this may not matter much for gameplay because gameplay goes first and all, but to me this makes understanding the unitroster blurred ...
why is an air transport now "advanced" when we clearly can basicly (see what i did thar?) build a houston Nasa center like almost from the start?
to me the current roster definition kinda feels all over the place and somewhat implausible ... the terms basic and advance or t1 t2 dont realy fit with it in places imo ... it is a bit hard to explain what i mean ...
i wonder if uber shouldn´t just remove or move units to factories and class them standart assault or specialised ... ... i dont know ... i`m just currently not happy with how the the roster is tiered and defined it is/feels just weird

Not if you actually follow the conversation that lead here.

I don't really follow, I don't see the need for a second layer of uinformation about units that is really a duplicate of something else, Metal Cost(or just overall Cost).

We can just look at Costs to figure out where things line up against each other roughtly, we can look at the Skitter and Ant and know that they are different "tiers" because on is half the cost of the other.

Obviously you don't want to extrapolate too far on such limited information, but thats true no matter what you call it and what information you use.

Mike

That still adds a "tier" above our current Advanced units which invalidates other units making the game about having the most of these new types of units.

Not necessarily. They could be support units that can't win without a supporting army. Or ones that actually make T1 units you have in your army more useful. Big guns are good, but sometimes making your armies more powerful is better. Maybe without stacking effects... Thus, still making the game about armies of units but with more options to use them. The possibilities are infinite!