Hi, I've been playing Planetary Annihilation for a few days now, and I thought I would give my feedback on how the game felt and what I think could be changed to improve the game. First, my thoughts. I LOVE the game, the theme, the style. It is a overall fun experience. My two biggest complaints are: 1. The game feels to much like a glass cannon 2. The unit control is awkward and depends too much on micromanagement I will now expand on what I mean by this, and what I think could be changed to improve this. With the reference to a glass cannon, what I mean is the battles feel quite one sided. Pretty much any unit can blast any other unit or any building into oblivion. It feels really awkward when I spend 2 minutes building a teleporter only to have a single bomber fly in blow it up in a 10th of a second. Also when it comes to units, they die by the thousands in seconds. I would like to see the battles played out a little more, so I can learn what works and what doesn't. When the battle lasts for 10 seconds if no commander is there, it hard to see what ACTUALLY happens and all you know is the winning side and the losing side. Maybe units & buildings need more health/armor or the total DPS of units need to be reduced. Or maybe the number of units that allowed to exist are WAY too high. One way or another this needs to be addressed. Another part of the glass cannon are nukes. I love the nukes BTW and I don't want to see them changed, but there needs to be better defenses against nukes. The anti-nuke units don't seem to always work (nukes seem to sometimes slip though them, or maybe I am just getting nuke spammed). I think moving anti-nuke buildings to a lower tier will help. As of now, they are the same tier as nukes, meaning lots of games become a race to who can reach the top tier and build a nuke first. If anti-nukes were lower tier you could start preparing defenses before nukes could possibly exist. Meaning even if someone is the first person to build a nuke, their chance of it being a successful game ending move would be lower. Now onto the second part, with unit controls and micromanagement. Over all, I think units need to be smarter. I've assigned units to "assist" my commander, the healing units are happy repairing the commander, but often times the combat is out of range of the units right behind the commander. Meaning they are happy to sit there and do nothing while the commander takes a beating. If you assign units to assist another unit, if the unit they are assisting is being attacked or attacking something, they should take action. Maybe a "guard" order is better. And while on the topic of assisting, units when told to move in a group, stay neat and orderly, they all pile on top of each other when multiple units are assisting a single unit Next, while I am aware saved selection groups exist though key controls, there should be more to them. You should have some type of UI elements dealing with it. To some extent, groups should be more like a meta-unit. Where you can issue commands to a group instead of a list of individuals. I should be able to tell one group of units to assist/guard another group. And make it feel like you are controlling a group of units acting together instead of a list of individuals. Another nice feature might be to have saved meta-unit types (like 2 of type A, 5 of type B). And allow factories to automatically create these groups. But that might be a bit hard to pull off. And while we are on the topic of groups, units and UI controls. There should be sometype of list of units that you have. Nothing is more annoying then losing track of where your units are and having to spend valuable time searching for them. I know that you might have LOTS of units in a single game, which could make lists so long they are no longer practical. This is where more "official" groups might come in handy. Cause you could only list them. And even the most massive armies can be controlled via 10 or 15 groups. Next, I know there is a "roam" movement type, but when I select it, it doesn't seem to do anything. I am guessing it either changes the pathfinding algorithm or it is broken. But there are two "orders" I think should exist. Scout and Search & Destroy. Scout would be a unit randomly moving around, and try to escape if it ends up in a conflict. While search & destroy should be randomly moving with them engaging in any conflict it finds. Finally, my last suggestion, this one I am not certain on if I actually want it or not. But orbital units just hover above the ground. While I know that geosynchronous orbits exist, most orbits are not geosynchronous. So a option where things actually orbit would be useful, especially for radar satellites. Though if a "scout" order existed, it wouldn't really be needed. Anyways, if you made it to the end of my post, thanks for reading. Feel free to post other suggestions or your comments on my recommendations.
All of these are common topics on the forum. Some people think that the unit health should be increased – but I don't. We have armies that have hundreds of units. When the units survive longer, that gives bonuses to micro gameplay. It encourages players to spend time detailing the minute movements of units rather than the big picture. A lot of people aren't happy with how nukes operate. I'm neutral at this point – we'll see what Uber does. I don't think units should automatically do things for me (fabricators automatically go do stuff). There's a difference between micro, macro, and the game playing itself. Currently if you set combat units to follow another unit, they will act accordingly when the enemy comes in. Your suggestion for factories to build certain groups of units is already in the game. Set infinite build to on and then select the appropriate ratios of units you want. Lists of units have no place in the game because we're going to literally have thousands of units. Lists aren't viable. You can already create groups of units to keybinds. Maybe you should try using that more. I don't think the roam function works. Use the "Patrol" order. Units will move around in that area and if they see something, they'll attempt to destroy it. As for orbital units, again, use the "Patrol" command.
You are aware minute-by-minute? I just played a game where I (thought) I had a decent defense. Then someone sent in, like 50 bombers and pin-pointed my commander and blow him up in under a second, well before I had ANY time at all to respond. The game is completely about surprise attacks and overwhelming your opponent. Nothing about strategy, planning, or actually interacting with your units in combat. Fact of the matter is: Combat happens too quickly. Every time I've been in combat, it has been resolved in seconds, when (IMO) it should had taken minutes. As for micromanagement, I personally think this is a bad thing. RTS shouldn't be about micromanagement... but rather the bigger picture, planning, and coordinating attacks. Not a dog pile **** fest that lasts 5 seconds. It should be feasible to do things like, retreat from battle, flanking, direction of attack should matter. If you want to micromanage everything, go play turn based games. I addressed the existence of groups though key controls. But I think there should be more to them. And having units follow other units absolutely doesn't work. My army of tanks didn't attack anything my commander would attack, just follow him around and look pretty.
I was actually thinking, one possibility to the glass cannon issue, is a diminishing return on attacks. Each type of attack has a cooldown before it can be used again. Maybe a unit takes full damage, but then only 1/2 damage from that type of attack for the duration of that cooldown. That way, it makes it harder for a large force to overwhelm and causes the battles to be more drawn out. Also it would encourage players to create forces with more variety.
Hold Ground: Units remain in place. Maneuver: If an enemy unit gets into range, the unit will pursue a short distance. Roam: If an enemy unit gets into range, the unit will follow it to the ends of the earth until it dies.
50 bombers is a lot of bombers, but air can easily be taken out it you remember to build AA turrets / units. Even a couple of fighters set to patrol over your base will absolutely wreck any bombers that come in without support. Plus, you should be mass producing as many units as possible, making them last a bit longer isn't going good to really improve gameplay, but give an advantage to players with better micromanagement skills.
Glass cannon is apt. It feels like things die entirely too fast - yes, there's a lot of units on the screen, but they're swept aside like dust. If there's large battles, I want to SEE these large battles happen. Not have entire armies being destroyed in seconds, unless it was by some super powerful unit like an Experimental a la SupComm. Otherwise, equal tier armies should take longer to kill each other off...
In fairness though, this is part of the strategy. You will probably have seen a scout shortly before this, which would give you a clue something was up. Also, if your opponent had time to build 50 bombers, you should have a)scouted their base at all and seen this at least partially coming, b) had some T2 AA flak turrets up which muller bombers, c) had some T2 fighters patrolling your base (which doesn't have to be micro'd, you can easily set factories to send out patrolling units). I kind of like the fact that if you aren't careful your comm can get sniped in short speed, like if you don't see an SXX laser coming and get death-from-above'd without realising I'm pretty confident the UI concerns are being worked on extensively, as Uber realise a game of this scope requires ease of interaction to succeed. We shall see. P.S. welcome to the forums
I don't think this is necessarily the case. If my units had more HP, I wouldn't have to baby sit them as much. I could toss them around a bit without worrying that a bomber will fly overhead and kill half of them or that they might wander into a turret. As it is now, if you take your eye off your army(s) for more than a few seconds, they could easily all get killed before you would even notice. This goes doubly so for air units. T2 flak, peregrines, and even the T2 missile ship (Stringray?) will SHRED even the largest of groups of air units if you're not watching them like a hawk. IMO, this promotes the worst kind of micro. You're not even giving them any strategic commands, just trying to keep them from killing themselves like lemmings. Lets examine the case of 2 dox fighting each other: Low HP: Lets assume they can 1 shot each other. Player 1 micros his dox to avoid shots from the other dox while player 2 is busy doing something else. Player 1 wins because he dodged and his dox 1 shot the other dox. High HP: For the sake of argument, lets assume it takes something absurd like 20 shots to kill each other. Player 1 micros as before and player 2 doesn't. Player 1 still wins, but lets say his micro wasn't perfect and he got hit about half the time. Now his dox is at 50% hp, so he will most likely lose the next engagement even if he micros. He also wasted a lot more time microing this one unit to win when he could have been doing something more useful because the engagement takes longer with higher HP values. Also, because the fight lasts longer, player 2 has more time to respond and make a strategic choice. Does he retreat his dox for repairs, try to kite the other dox into a turret, move in reinforcements, or charge the enemy? Or does he simply do nothing knowing that his dox will wear down the opponent regardless? None of these choices are available with low hp because the engagement is already over.
Production off this kind game has come too far,we not talk about a top game like Starcraft 2 or other top rts like FaForever . At this moment i thing many things showld already have change but...... Iff where a game like ex: GTA5 with hight levals off production i could get,but this game its so easy to play and got so few things,wy take so long a production off a game like this? Thats wy many rts players are confused with PA.....
Many? Just you. Uber is building a new ending and creating features and mechanics that have never been in any other RTS ever. GTA5 and Starcraft and SupCom also had a great many more developers than Uber. I believe they only have 32 employees - not all are working on PA.
