New armor system?

Anything in the blueprints is already "exposed" to modders (how do you think we found out the specifics of it? ). I don't disagree with you in general, but I should point out that both TA and Sup Com had armour systems in some form. Sup Coms was very much like what was just implemented in PA, whereas TA's was done by modifying the damage of individual weapons vs individual units.

Correct indeed, poor phrasing on my part. I frankly assumed the armor system not being extendable for other units.
You are right with the Supreme Commander reference, too. Although the inconsistency of the overcharge damage was jarring at best. I sincerely hoped for PA that those kinds of inconsistencies were a thing of the past which makes the recent, uhm, changes a cause for concern for me.

I agree, though in Sup Com's case it was added for the exact same reason - the commander used to do full damage to everything early on, but that was patched because of all the commander rushing in team games that occurred. It's a difficult problem to solve without armour.

Yeah being rushed by 4 AI commanders at the same time is ni unbeatable, as they can even shoot uber-cannons over-walls at turrets.

Personally I feel like their power cost (And damage) could be linked by drawing a % of your total stored energy, making it early game kinda weaksause, but late game a true monster.

But if we are keeping the anti-uber cannon armour, could we not have the buildings and commander adsorb the AOE from it so targeting them in a base removes the AOE when it's not hitting units directly.

It is indeed difficult to balance so perhaps a wholly different approach should be in order. How about making the Uber cannon mass powered instead of energy powered? The commander has a capacity for a few shots. To reload it has to convert (reclaim?) a friendly (!) unit into ammunition. The defending commander would be thus clearly favored while the attacking one would eventually run out of units to power its shots. Thoughts?

I dont realy see the problem here. fighters shouldnt be able to kill ground units or buildings for obvious reasons, so why not use an armor system to do it. Its a relatively easy fix, so all the better.
Sure it would be nicer to have fighters only shoot anything in the air, but apparently that is a lot of work and more importantly unecessary work since, well it works. So much for ground units, landing pads and carrier units, they simply dont take damage from air and all is well, wow that was easy.
What i dont get is how the Astreus is supposed to be an example for an edge case, because, the thing obviously works how its supposed to work and gets killed by whats supposed to be able to kill it.

It seems you miss the point: A landed aircraft is not in the air and as such not an air unit. Thus it should be exempt from weapons targeting air units. That is the problem here. Not factories being wasted by absurdly high anti-air damage.

I suggest a coffee machine(decaf) be installed into the forum.

Perhaps if uber could give us a defined list of what they will and won't do, that would help. Then we would know what we can work with? anybody know how to kidnap an uber employee and interrogate them?

Amazing idea! But who would take the caffeine out of his coffee? It is literally the only thing that it may be mixed with without going against all the laws of gods and men!

By god your right, it may be costly but I think I have a solution.
Two coffee machines, one decaf one not decaf. Maybe this is what started the infinite war in the first place. An argument over the natural state of coffee. Still, what type of people would start a war over coffee? It fathoms the mind.

Me, any day, twice on sunday. In the morning at least. In all honesty, though, I would love for Uber to hand out a sort of design roadmap detailing their goals with the unit roster and its units' roles. Makes assessment of how well units fill their roles pretty pointless otherwise.

Well they said for right now this is the only way they intend on using it, and they also said they do not intend on using it widespread IE all units across unit types.

No interrogation needed. They told you that. That is yours to keep. Have fun.

Secondly, what do you mean with all those other scenarios? If there is ever anything that shoots what it shouldn't, that would be a bug no? Would you like for fighters to KEEP killing factories? No, you do not want that to stay you say? Then what's the problem? Again, had nobody told you how the fix worked, nobody would be in this thread today.

So basically, let's forget about all this nonsense. You are all worried they are going to use the armor system on all units, yet for modders one needed added in anyway, and while they were at it they used it to fix a bug ingame. So far, they haven't used it on all units, so you have no reason to be here complaining. Actually, if they didn't add armor system, this thread would be titled "So F****** Tired of Fighters Killing Factories!!@!". So basically, you would nag at them either way, at least this way they actually did take care of the bug. Because someone always complains each patch when a bug they hate isn't fixed. Want me to cite the source of the last threads made last two updates before this where someone ranted about "air needs a f****** nerf"?

Oh, and units? Really, it is a "who knows" kind of a situation. They ARE adding cloak, so who knows how many units they will come up with or how few? If they gave you a roadmap, promised you a list of units, then decided one screwed the whole system up, balance and engine... again, there would be a thread complaining about it. You know they stream their internal builds now which basically release what they are working on in the immediate future to the public? That is about as accurate information they can portray, anything longer-term and they would "accidentally lie" to you, anyone's parents ever use that term "accidentally lie" when they had something come up and couldn't keep plans to go to the park when they promised to that day or whatever?

Perhaps we should create a petition to ask uber to do such a thing? How would one do this? would we make a poll and put it in general discussion or keep it in backers lounge? Other than using GIANT CAPITAL LETTERS WITH FLASHING COLOURS AND FIREWORKS, how do we get their attention? oh wait we can steal their coffee machine from Uber headquarters and ransom it Then they must listen to us. alright we have a plan, just need people to sign off on it then put it into action.

They didn't fix a bug - the simulation behaved just as advertised. The behaviour just wasn't to their liking and instead of fundamentally correcting the underlying issue - static layer categorization - which would have prevented this problem and all others akin to it, they band-aided one single edge case.
And that is what irks me - how they approached the problem not the armor system and the other specifics of the fix. 'Check your premises', indeed.

Yes, check your premise indeed. They stated, it was in fact a bug for overkill fighter missiles to be able to destroy a factory. Technically, they said it was a bug for the fighters to be able to shoot unfinished grounded air vehicles still inside the factory at all. Technically, they did only fix half the bug, but it was the part affecting gameplay. They improvised with what they had.

Ever heard the saying "don't knock it if it works"? I get the feeling from all the "simulated as it advertized" that you liked killing factories with fighters, despite it not being intended to keep in the game. Well, I am fairly sure most other people wanted that gone, and apparently the devs wanted that gone, and generally now that it's gone I see many people not looking back. When something good happens, I personally never look back. When they first made orbital for instance, they changed it, and I never looked back since then. When it's good, that's it.

Honestly, you can call it a band-aid solution, and it is, they will have to apply this solution to every instance of this ever happening, but it did work and quickly, freeing them up time to work on the "loading planets during lobby" and "main menu friends bar and chat" and other things better than "adding to engine an invisible layer guard preventing one layer from accidentally attacking another when they shouldn't". And honestly, they could still add that invisible safeguard, and it will work as a better fix, but they can now do that later, and we can enjoy the fix now.

Even if they were planning on a real fix down the line, would you rather the game continue allowing fighters to kill factories until a better fix is made? Scratch that, who else here wanted fighters to keep killing factories to stay as long as possible?

Thanks for jumping to conclusions on my part here, much appreciated. Since the game is not live yet and the factory killing is an exploit rather than a bug they could just left it in until more pressing issues had been resolved. The beta phase is for testing and not for providing smooth gameplay, after all. I just meant to point out that a more thorough approach of resolving the problem would not have gone amiss.
Go on defending fixing symptoms instead of causes after your heart's content, though, I will rest my case here.

I contend that comrushing isn't a "problem" that needs to be solved in the first place.

In 1v1, it's not, since you can't lose your com. When there's more than 2 players though, it becomes very powerful, since you can take out quite a bit of infrastructure with a spare com or two (note that I see the death nuke as more of an issue than the Uber cannon, which isn't actually affected by the armour system so I may have gone off topic a bit).

And as I've said many times before on this topic, if someone wants to lose a head, which is far more valuable than any resources, then they can go ahead and cripple their team by suiciding all they want IMHO. The current "co-op" mode does make that a bit more of an issue since you don't actually lose control until all coms are gone.

Landed aircraft are not classified as airborne.



Fighters shoot at the aircraft being fabricated when, and only when, it takes off to roll-off the factory. I have a video of this.




Note that this is not the bug where you get 20 fighters to attack another friendly fighter. Fighters killing stuff that got in the way of their missiles was a logical result of the fully modelled weapons or whatever the devs description is. The underlying issue could have been fixed by making it impossible to attack a friendly unit, or enabling friendly fire damage. You can still form fighter tornadoes to take out units.

Correct. And the reason why the bombers have more health is because the anti-air defences have become thicker. The reason why the fighters have more DPS is because the health of bombers has increased. The reason why the health of fighters has increased is for the same reason as bombers.


It might be pointed out that before advanced air got a buff (metal cost decrease), Peregrines were actually less effective than Hummingbirds for cost. Now they’ve received an anti-buff, Peregrines still beat the same cost in Hummingbirds. (Costs measured in terms of time, not metal)

Health points do not take into account mobility kills, catastrophic kills or disabling the weapon systems. It treats all kills as the same. I.e. you have to burn through the exterior armour to damage one of a few systems (mobility, weapons, and ammunition/interior) or just cause structural failure. Once you've done so, you achieve catastrophic kill.


I.e. current PA combat mechanics is basically just a turn based game, where health represents the progress towards a valid kill (catastrophic kill or mobility kill), once one of those is achieved the unit self-destructs, and the actual animations present on screen are completely meaningless. A separate issue entirely.


Health points are a leftover of turn based games, where the critical chance takes into account the ability to hit an already damaged piece of the vehicle. Which is part of directional armour. But I'm not arguing for directional armour. I'm talking about the way that different types of weapons interact with different units

But it is consistent. I am arguing for a consistent rule-set. You argue now that the anti-air missiles and the anti-ship torpedoes have inconsistent damage modifiers because it is only clear they can’t shoot into the wrong domain when you get a unit of the wrong domain to approach them.


You’re arguing that the relationship between Taffi’s, Spinners and Infernos is inconsistent. You can’t get a feel for the Taffi’s performance against Inferno’s after seeing it perform against Doxen.

No, you are wrong.


An area of effect unit does not kill bots in loose formation. Neither do tanks. So such a unit is not more effective than a tank at killing loose bots. Did you not see how flawed the assumption bots would be clumped is? They have the most mobility of any land unit. They are the least suitable unit to use splash damage against, because they are the unit which are least suited to being tightly blobbed, as they are the most vulnerable to splash damage, are most maneuverable with exception of air, and the quickest killed by tanks. Bots should be spread out so that the tank has to rotate its turret. It's only when they come up against other bots that they need to blob up.

Range *could* have been a limiting factor. Except Vehicles attacking a base will always have to keep moving forward (they are limited in how far they can retreat by their range vs position of stationary buildings, and if more units move into firing range behind, they can maximise damage against targets. Plus, they should keep steam rolling through the base) With 80 damage per shot the ABT kills tanks in 2 shots, with area of effect it hurts nearby tanks as well, and its reload time has to be capable of killing 2 bots in 6 seconds or faster, which would actually make it perform better than Taffis against Taffis everywhere but in a position where the Taffis can retreat indefinitely. Which is neither on offense nor defense.

And for the damage they do against Bots, everything has to be measured against tanks and opportunity cost. If it costs more, you have to get the same bang for your buck for cost, otherwise you're just better off building the non-specialised unit. They have to have such a rate of fire that they kill spread out Bots faster than the same costs in tanks. I.e. if they cost more, they have to be better than more normal tanks.


Lazy design is lazy design. The methods used are neither here nor there, a lazy designer will always design lazily.

The problem with that system of balancing is that everything has to be balanced to the lowest common factor and it isn’t flexible to change.


It restricts the simulation in one major way. Weapon types don’t mean anything. They are just aesthetic, and they do damage. I would much rather play a game where lasers vs ballistics was not just flashy effects, but actually meant something.


Also, difficulty to repair can’t be modelled independently from health (you can’t have two units, equally resistant to damage, one is a cheap unit hard to repair and the other an expensive unit cheap to repair)


You can’t have everything being able to shoot at everything.


Zero-K has managed to design Pokémon, where the only type available is Normal type, and every stat is available, bar special attack/special defence, and adding range because the game is in real time.


Explain how armour isn’t WYSIWYG. Enough RTS games have it.


Take Pokemon's elemental type system. The game says fire beats grass. When you use it in a battle, fire does indeed beat grass. There isn’t some strange pure grass Pokémon where fire doesn’t beat grass. Sure, there are water Pokémon where fire doesn’t beat water. But it isn’t some weird exception to the rule, the rule is that fire doesn’t beat water, it beats grass.

Fine, you don't like armour systems, and you have weird ideas about inconsistency. I’m not suggesting it should be inconsistent. I’m suggesting it should be consistent according to a ruleset. There are many games that have done it well, the Earth 21xx games did it very well but I'll agree to disagree with you and your Zero-K bias.