i miss the feeling from supcom thinking of unit variety. i feel that the mid and late game in this game is not interesting at all. there is no room for tactical play because all the units look the same and have the same features. Mid and Late game is ONLY about spamming the most of 1 particular unit and building as many missile platforms are you can. the only games that currently win are the ones that make as many factories as possible and spam t1 tanks while making missile platforms to cover the entire planet. there is no fun in this. i also have no idea what uber were thinking when they said there will be galactic war and 40 player matches. game lags up with 4 ppls building some units.
I don't know how long you've been playing, but if you'd have been in from alpha you would have noticed the frankly gigantic leaps Uber has taken in terms of performance improvements. As the game development progresses, I expect this to continue to increase. (and consequently allow for more players in the same game). Unit variety, well partly this is still ongoing as development is still ongoing. And because of currently 'easy' choices you can make in the build, I grant that late game often consists of mass spam. (though in fairness I don't consider this to be as much of a bad thing as you do). Again as development progress I expect they will mix things up. But as stated, I'm actually kinda good with the game so far.
Actually spamming one kind of unit works really well until someone counters it. Then you need to add a counter for their counter to the mix. Then they add a counter... It quickly becomes a frantic arms race to include as many unit types as you possibly can in your production queues, and that's all with just two tiers of units! I think the difference from other games is that there are actually so many options now that you can't just throw a little of everything into the mix from the start. Also, SupCom units had pretty well-defined roles compared to PA, which lets you play around with different choices a little more. This unit balance is more like Total Annihilation than SupCom or Forged Alliance.
yes i have been here since alpha stage. and now that it is gamma and yet the game feels very unpolished i have started to react a little. this is just rock paper scissor. if you bring that unit i bring that unit. Yes for units that has a clear defined role. not something inbetween that makes the game feel like a cluster that it is like now.
LOL isn't rock paper scissor the whole balancing point in strategy? Its the idea you can counter certain types of units with other units. If you look at most strategy games PA has quit a lot of different units with also different roles. But id do think some units look a bit alike visually. for example the fighters T1 and T2 and tanks etc
Actually when compared to SupComm, the only units that really count are the tier 3, since there was no point to be using anything but T3 once you got to that point. PA on the other hand still has a use for tier one, even in the late game. So PA compares very favorably in that respect. (it still has only the one race though, but when you really get down to it, most units in SupCom had the same roles across races, so this didn't differentiate them that much)
The single race was actually one of the big selling points on this game for me. I think the game is much more interesting when all players have the same tools available.
If you think spamming t1 tanks and missile platforms is the best strategy then you haven't played a mildly competent player yet.
Of course. Maybe it's just me playing like a noob, but I find myself making just the standard t1 units in PA until I find a need for something else. In SupCom, you mostly knew from the start what your army composition needed to look like 20 minutes later.
It depends on what type of maps your playing on with how many players and so on. The performance is definitely improving so bigger matches are going to happen- although it will probably depend on system spec. I play on a rather dated laptop so I'm not expecting to be able to play smoothly with more than about 6 players which is fine, I will update my main rig in the not too distant future to something that will keep up better. Uber have also said that more units are incoming- at the moment we have a fairly rudimentary set of units, if you look at TA, Spring (BA, XTA or ZeroK mods) or FAF those games have a much wider unit set and currently many roles are left empty in PA. As these roles get filled in the strategic options should increase. Also I've found that although allot of people do just spam one type of unit, a well chosen mix is usually more effective. I've won games with less units and eco due to this. Personally my preferred build now is vanguards up front with a mix of Gil-E, combat fabbers and aa bots up at the back. That coupled with a couple of air labs producing scouts overhead is quite hard to defend against, although lots of t2 air is a good counter, as is a well placed nuke (although I tend to try and scout / bomb to prevent a player getting nukes if I can). Going orbital and the SXX lasers is also very effective *IF* you can secure the orbital layer, and of course asteroid smashing is nice if you can hold onto the planet long enough. The point is though that there are going to be more units added so I imagine the number of options will increase. I'd personally say that currently we have a complete T1 unit set and are probably about 50% the way there on T2 (land at least, I think t2 air is probably complete for now although I could be wrong).
Until people starting become smarter in the game you can't expect people to deviate from one unit. Sure there are still a myriad of balance issues, but the other half of the equation is players becoming smarter.
The game is not complete. Remember that disclaimer you accept every time you start the game? Yeah. The game is not complete. We don't have the full unit roster. We don't have the final balance. And we are FAR from the final performance improvements. The game is in beta. The game is not complete.
