New armor system?

x>y ; x>a
y>z ; y>b
z>x ; z>a
a>y ; a>b
b>x ; b>z

Rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock algebra

I agree with most of what you are saying in general, but I think one of the big reasons that fighters can shoot in every direction was the failure of SupCom when it came to air battles. Air was extremely dependent on good micro and I really hope the game doesn't go in that direction.

since this came up i like to suggest to replace the peregrin with a more defensive chopperversion ....

Fighters couldnt shoot in every direction in supcom though 0.o Its only in PA that they are able to do that.

Right, and SupCom fighters had to be precisely microed to deal with that.

Oh.

I guess thats perspective. The only thing i would change about FAF would be the keybinds, but i have yet to try any mods that deal with that. Other than that, FAF is far more of a competetive game than PA. At least it feels that way because PA just feels lacking in a lot of aspects. It hasnt got the difficulty or hard to master aspect.

Seems pretty difficult to me!

Fighters in SupCom had turrets but their turret traverse were limited to 110 degrees. My proposal is different as the Interceptors that I propose would have no or very small turret traverse so the micro that is seen in SupCom wouldn't apply.

Well I can give you some numbers but unit behaviors are also very important so the devil lures in the specific unit AI and unit targeting implementation as well.

If I should try to to further prove unit relationships with mathematical analysis it gets really hard and such an explanation would be quite lengthy.

Interceptor:
Cost: 400.
HP: 400
Damage: 20
Rate of fire: 20.
DPS: 400
Range: 100
Speed:100
Acceleration: 60
Braking rate: 80
Turn rate: 70
Turret traverse: Fixed guns. No turret traverse.

Fighter:
Cost: 100
HP: 25
Damage: 75
Rate of fire: 0.5
DPS: 37.5
Range: 100
Speed: 80
Range: 100
Acceleration: 80
Braking rate: 100
Turn rate:100
Turret traverse: 50 degrees. Guided missiles.

Bomber:
Cost: 400
HP: 400
Speed: 75
Acceleration: 45
Braking rate: 75
Turn rate: 45

Mobile ground AA, Stinger:
Cost: 90
Damage: 25
Rate of Fire: 0.5
DPS: 50
Range: 100

I deviated from that the Fighters should have had half the DPS for cost and half the HP for cost and reduced it even further as I made Fighters light and cheap(who says that advanced Fighters can't have a cheap metal cost? ).
An Interceptor is only likely to be able to destroy 1 Fighter on the approach while the Fighters outnumber the Interceptor 4 to 1 making them do 300 burst damage against the incoming Interceptor only needing 2 more shots to kill off the Interceptor.
I expect Fighters to fare a lot better than Interceptors in big clashes as they will be able to use their missiles much more reliably than the Interceptors forward facing guns while they are also able to out-turn the Interceptors.

Give us the ability to mod those values please

Scathis, with respect, with GREAT respect, you're wrong.

It all comes down to the numbers.

It comes down to all the numbers.

Health and damage have the same influence (or lesser) than range, AoE, refire rate and unit speed.

That's why the prior iteration of the Peregrine was really underpowered compared to Hummingbirds - its health, damage and range advantages didn't mean squat compared to the unit speed of itself and Hummingbirds, and the lack of an ability to kill multiple targets.

In 58772 and on paper, 75 seconds worth of Peregrines (3 Peregrines - 1200 dps, 750 health) attack 75 seconds worth of Hummingbirds (9 Hummingbirds (3 factories, 3 per factory) - 720dps, 450 health)

Hummingbirds win. They do 720dps to all three Peregrines, 3 hummingbirds die, 2 Peregrines die, and 1 Peregrine is left fighting 6 Hummingbirds

Notice the metal cost difference. That's 2430 metal of Peregrines to 1620 metal worth of Hummingbirds. @Godde - this is why I use time, not metal. Because you can't always produce x metal worth of X by the time your opponent has produced y metal worth of Y.

Look forward to it some more. Uni is being lame. I will reply though - there was an interesting misconception about manufacture and economy I wanted to clear up.

You're basically missing the point about the fruit weapons.

If you changed Planetary Annihilation to not being futuristic robot combat, you could make a game set in the universe of "The Beano", or a Lego game, or something like that, and change the weapon effects to suit.

In other words, it doesn't really matter what the weapon effects look like, because they just do damage. They can be changed to any sprite and special effect you like, and they would still make logical sense.

I.e. you could change Zero-K weapons to being universally energy weapons, or universally kinetic weapons, or yes, universally fruit (with a highly acidic juice) Doesn't really matter. The sprite used to represent the "weapon type" means nothing, it's really quite arbitrary.

Vyolin's Conventions - the convention actually seems to be an even split in the way of RTS games, and it's a given in RPG games.

E.g. shields - why is that shields don't work in SupCom? - they just add "health", the counter is artillery, the counter-counter is artillery protected by shields.

Why is it that shields work in other games? They still "just add health" - but there are weapons that are better against shields, that travel through shields, etc. It's kind of illogical that shields allow 1-way movement of objects and are just so universally good.




Godde - the comment about laser blasters is why I disagree with you.. It's the reason I'm questioning your knowledge of "arbitrary" and "logically consistent" so much.

The way a laser works as a weapon is very simple.

It transfers heat energy to the target. That does one of two things to damage the target.

1) it heats the target out of the solid state. That damages critical components.
2) It generates a temperature differential, which starts generating internal stresses. (Also caused by (1) occurring at the surface of the material, not necessarily anywhere useful)

Considering a Laser bolt

It's plasma. It's not a laser.

A plasma beam is stopped by planetary atmosphere very quickly, because the plasma collides with particles in the atmosphere and transfers its kinetic energy to them.

In order to get around that, plasma would have to be isolated from the atmosphere and fired towards the target - it's not light, it has mass, so it doesn't travel at c.

It does pretty much exactly the same thing that a laser beam does (transfers heat to the target) and it produces light. But it is not a laser.

In the original post you wrote, deviate was not present. It wasn't "citation semantics". I misunderstood your meaning because you didn't have words that indicated you were arguing otherwise, which I found confusing, given your previous stance on the issue.

Ah, I see your point now. I think I will just hope for the promoted modding support allowing to tweak unit stats to see if there are alternatives to the official balance and role design. Far easier than trying to convince people of differing design philosophies and their merits.

I were not referring to the version where Peregrines had a 810 metal cost. I were referring to this version were Peregrines cost 270 metal and before their rate of fire got buffed in this version.

I still don't agree with your usage of "time cost" as "time cost" varies depending on the amount of fabbers assisting the factory and the source of energy.

But PA nor Zero-K is in the universe of "The Beano" or is a Lego game.
PA and Zero-K is Sci-fi where combat is fought by robots and people have preconceptions about this type of Sci-fi and future robotic warfare. The setting does matter. No you couldn't change all the weapons in Zero-K to fruits because that would go against players expectations of how future weapons works. This isn't "Plants versus zombies".

Yes, I agree that shields as seen in SupCom are conceptually ill-defined and doesn't make much sense and that is one of the reasons that I don't want to see them in PA.

Personally I would like "Laser Blasters" to be abandoned because as I've come to learn that they aren't realistic. However they are frequently seen in Sci-Fi in movies like Star Wars and other Sci-Fi games so people have come to expect their inclusion in Sci-Fi games.

Again, we are speculating about future warfare. The future armor could have a cooling system that lets it absorb heat until a certain threshold where the unit explodes.
Also laser beams are basically instant as photons travel at the speed of light.

Plasma is also not a realistic candidate for future weapons but that still doesn't prevent science fiction writers from using them because they are "cool". I would also prefer if they were abandoned in favor of other weapon types.
People have preconceptions about lasers, missiles and ballistic projectiles. The game should use this to its' advantage so that players doesn't get confused or set-off by unrealistic behavior or arbitrary armor systems. In my opinion if there is an armor system it should be clear how different weapons interact with different types of armor and it should be clear by the design of the units to what type of armor the unit have. You have yet to present such a system for PA.

This is where the issues arise:
- Rate of Fire of 20: That completely blows out the bandwidth and the performance of the game. We really can't go higher than like 5 right now. When you get a into a big battle and the game turns into a slide show, projectiles in air is one of the big reasons.
- Fixed guns rarely work because flight dynamics will make them either completely super-effective or completely non-effective and looks like a bug. Having interceptors that sometimes don't fire when they go into dog-fight mode but not shoot is rage inducing to some players. And that's because flight dynamics, weapon detection, and rate of fire is incredibly difficult, if not impossible to get right.

I'm ok with your opinion. Nuthin' but <3

Um.. ok. You can argue semantics.

Yes, all the numbers, including the ones that aren't seen, like practical minimum and maximum values and ones that hurt performance or result in unexpected behaviors.

So balance is limited by technology at some point -understandable but you could have made that point clear way earlier and saved us lots of text.
On a more serious note, though: When can we expect unit stat modding to be a thing? Just to poke the engine a bit and settle this religious debate with some serious empirical data.

Well we can just raise the damage to 100 and let if fire 4 times per second. This also means that at least 75% of the DPS will be wasted due to overkill against the fighters which could be seen as a good thing if we want cheap fighters to counter Interceptors.

Well the easy solution is to make them fire more often than not. Even if their aim isn´t perfect the interceptors could fire anyway.
Dogfighting on the Spring engine works well with fixed guns and is in my eyes beautiful to witness as the fighters swirl in scissors trying to get on the opponents tail. Allow me to show a short clip of dogfighting in Action in the game NOTA which in my opinion have the best air combat among the TA-derivatives.
NOTA video(embedding doesn't seem allow starting at a certain time)
Anyway. I'm not gonna pretend its' easy to implement a system where dogfighting works well but one can dream.

Thanks a lot for spoiling me on those dog fights, much appreciated.

It's not semantics - the whole point of using the other numbers to balance is that you're not relying on differences in health and damage to balance. The range and refire rate and stuff are equally important, and I've never actually seen you acknowledge that. It's always "change the health/damage values, and get back to me."

Pardon?

That comment was directed at Scathis, not at you, and his opinion that only health and damage matters and should be used for balance. I am still to reply to your earlier comments. I was referring to that version, because it was in that version that hummingbirds outperformed a greater expensive investment in peregrines.

Are you familiar with Ceteris Paribus? It means "all other things are equal". So you assume that all other things are equal. I.e. you assume that time is the independent variable, you assume there is 100% build rate.

What I do is very simple.

I assume both economies have X income, and they are spending the same percentage of their economy on the things I'm comparing. Remember that metal is a function of time - Metal = (Metal/time) (Time)

Times should cancel, right? But Metal/time is a rate of change, so you can't cancel time with Time, and mathematically it won't work. You have to multiply the M/t value by T before you can cancel the second per second.

Take a t2 air factory. It's being assisted by 8 fabbers. So the total metal / second is 107.

The other person has 3 air factories, and 8 fabbers. The 8 fabbers are not building air or anti-air.

T2 air factory Assisted
M = (AM/t) * T.
You assume M is constant. A is the coefficient of Assisting (i.e. if you're spending 107 metal per second on t2 air, the value would be 3.96). M/t for a t2 air factory is constant. Therefore as A increases, T decreases.

Spend 1500 metal

T = 1500/107 = 14 seconds.

T1 Air factory
M = (AM/t)*T
A = 1, M/t = 27,

M = (1*27) * T.

At T = 14 seconds, your metal cost in t1 air is: 378. At M = 1500, T = ~55 seconds. At any given point in time, you aren't actually comparing an equal amount of metal cost. At any given metal cost, you're not comparing the same moment in time.

So you have to assume that A is constant for both players you're looking at values for. If you want to compare the same metal value, you also have to assume that M/t is constant, or you run into the same problem.

The relationship becomes M = E * T, where E represents the amount of economy used. I prefer to change T and make comparisons. You prefer to keep T constant, and just compare M costs at an instantaneous value of T. Both approaches are fair. Because T2 build time is more or less equal to t1 build time, both approaches are about the same accuracy in current build. In previous builds however they weren't, and when comparing Shellers, the time approach is preferable.

In summary, if you assume that time cost varies because of assistance/economy percentages, then you assume that the economies are not equal. If you assume that the economies are not equal, you're not actually comparing the metal cost at the same point in time.

And obviously, 1122 worth of t1 air that hasn't been built yet doesn't really count for much against 1500 worth of t2 air.





2430 metal of Peregrines in 58772 took the same time as 1620 metal worth of humminbirds. So yes, you can assume that 2430 metal of peregrines are fighting 2430 metal of hummingbirds. But 2430 metal worth of hummingbirds will never fight 2430 metal of peregrines, because of the time difference.

Godde, you still read around my point.

Because weapon types do damage independent of weapon type, any properties you have given to those weapon types (which is your earlier argument - read up the thread) are entirely arbitrary.

You can change all of the Zero-K weapons to whatever sprite you choose. They just do "damage". The mechanism of that damage is immaterial, and is just a special effect.


You can quite easily change all the weapons to fruit, because at the end of the day the weapons are just an art style, and you can change the art style at any time you like.

So you'd rather that the feature was never implemented, rather than it be changed to be well defined (like other games) and implemented?

This is basically the reason why I would rather not define my armor system. Because no matter how well defined it is, at the end of the day if people are just opposed to the principal, they won't see it as well defined, but will say "nah, that's dumb".

Err.... they aren't realistic. They don't exist. Anything that travels slower than light is not a laser.

How is plasma not realistic?

Technology depends on 7 factors to be possible

• cost (financial)
• energy
• knowledge
• tools (fabrication)
• materials
• people
• time.

The reasons plasma weapons don't already exist are because of knowledge, fabrication and energy. Possibly materials. Lightning is a form of plasma, don't forget.

I think you misunderstand how physical properties are related.

In the most extreme case, heat damage instantaneously raises the temperature of the solid, such that it sublimes into gas or goes straight from solid to plasma.

A HEAT warhead does not operate under that principal. It sends a stream of metal particles through the material. The armor doesn't turn into gas or plasma.

The"future armor" which can resist an instantaneous temperature change of 50,000K would have to be cooled to very low temperatures.

The lower the temperature of the armor, the more brittle it is, (this is due to the Ductile-Brittle Transition Temperature for metals, and the glass-transition temperature for glasses and polymers). Have you ever poured boiling water on a frozen windscreen? You know what happens, right?

Cooling material is a really bad idea. Composites are the only decent idea for armor, and the colder your composite, the less resistant it is to shock waves, which means it is less able to deal with HEAT warheads and purely kinetic weaponry. It is also less able to deal with the shock waves that are generated by lasers, because after they vaporise the surface of the armor, a shockwave is generated and propagates through the material. The rest of the material is supercooled. The differential between T2 and T1 is higher. The stresses are also higher. The material is unable to deal with those stresses because it is more brittle.

Err... Yes.

Because as I wrote in my post, laser is light, so it travels at c.

Realistically, I'm not going to present a system, because the forum will shoot it down for no other reason than I suggested it, and I'm sorry but I'm not going to waste my time and energy doing the typing. Regardless of how "good" the idea is, the forum will shoot it down on first principals.

When Uber releases the relevant modding tools, I'll set up such a system for my own benefit.

"It all comes down to the numbers."
is basically the same as
"It all comes down to all the numbers."

Thus the semantics. I meant all the numbers. The conversation was directed at health and damage. But I was curious if you guys could produce numbers that would work. It's easy to ruminate on the idea of balance, it's something else to actually produce the results.

Which you guys did sort-of did. So, I applaud that.

"Soon".

Ahh. Sorry. I did originally write my comment to throw your words right back at you.

Wait. I actually looked up the definition of semantics. It means the study of meaning.

What the hell? Yes, of course I'm going to argue about what people meant. If there words meant nothing, there wouldn't be anything to talk about.


Excellent

I'm over this soon in-joke now.
I can't think of features that were talked about as coming "soon" that actually came. But maybe my brain deactivated.

When you say soon, do you mean

a) this coming patch
b) when my mother used to say "maybe", which meant "probably never"
c) Sometime before Easter
d) Sometime after that before June/Winter
e) Sometime after that before Springtime
f) Sometime after that before Christmas/Summer
g) Sometime after that before 2020
h) Sometime after that before 2100.