The Importance Recovery

Back in the day, it was very easy to recover from having large portions of your base destroyed. These days... not as much. Make one small mistake or lose one or two buildings and you might as well die. In most matches, you can accurately determine who will win 5 to 8 minutes into the match – that's terrible.

Especially if the costs of Advanced are implemented... lose your advanced factory and there's no possible way to recover.

Not completely sure how the game should be changed to allow for this... but improving this will improve a lot of other areas. Get nuked? Who cares!

I'd almost thing that everything about advanced needs to be brought down. Make advanced economy buildings only produce a little more than their basic counterparts. Make the advanced factories cheaper. Make the advanced units a lot less powerful. Just bring everything all onto a much more equal level. That'll fix a lot of the other issues we're having and will even bring back massive armies.

Like I said though. I'm not completely sure how this should be implemented...

But being able to recover is very important.

/end rant

I think it's because power is so important in PA. T2 power generators are the first thing people build when they get T2 for a reason. If you power stall, your economy grinds to a halt. Knockout your opponent's power, and it makes it hard for them to recover from an attack. Also, metal is naturally spread around your base and territory, while power is usually located in a small area, which makes it vulnerable to nukes and surgical strikes.

I mostly agree, but I think at least some of the change comes from top players being able to play this game at a much higher level than ever before due to having more practice. When your opponent is playing perfectly, you can't afford to make any mistakes.

My motto. Just need to be careful with the commander. That's the only thing you really dont want to get nuked.

People who feel otherwise just need to stop making tiny bases.

Also cptconundrum, I think we are all very very far away from playing perfectly. I am quite sure I could i.e. increase my play level by a few hundred % if given 24/7 to practice.

I was exaggerating obviously, but the overall skill at the top has increased a lot and I think that is why we see less comebacks at the top levels of play.

I liked what someone posted a little while ago, if they made it so T2 mex produced the same as the T1 mex but was just able to be placed ontop not only would you then be able to scale down the cost of everything that is T2 so the game balances out well but it would also mean that someone who has tech 2 but owns 1/3 of the planet while you own 2/3 of the planet with just T1 will be completely = in metal income which would provide some interesting game play also it would mean if the whole eco is based around 7min and 14max metal per metal spot then I think it would be easier to ajust costs of everything to properly balance it all out

this also means that yes if you lost part of your base but had power gens spread out and still had metal spots you could replace what you had and rebuild instead of losing a part of your base and never being able to push out again because they have turrets around you and an air force that threatens you everywhere xD

TA had cloakable and underwater tech 2 power so you could just hide them away. This sort of option would be nice.

ah i dont like that. a nuke should destroy mutch and it should be a massive drawback. most likely nukes are too less powerful even now. and if you could rebuild everything simply in 2-3 mins where is the point then?

i would rather say make the nuke way less spamable (to make ground units a better option in comparison) and in exchange way more powerful (not killing the commander in 1 shot, but for example greater range).

It's certainly part of the reason Nukes are OP, a single nuke will break someone in most games. If it was easier to spread out/recovery Nuke would naturally be less OP. (they still need work no matter what you do but it would help).

I like and second the idea of bring things down so that T2 isn't an automatic trump to T1 it is now. This will help game play greatly. As the poster above mentioned I like the idea that T2 mex is no better then T1 Mex it's just ti builds on top of T1 Mex. I agree that I think it would give a more stable mex level to balance the game around.

I'd also like to see Orbital simplified but that's another discussion

I definitely hope this is coming after the game has been released as a patch or as an expansion.

I agree with Bryan's premise, that PA snowballs pretty hard. This is a normal design problem for basically all PvP games.

I was thinking about how DoW2, one of the most recoverable games, handles it. First off, that game has pretty rock-paper-scissory units. The early game consists of more all-around units, but as the game progresses it gets more and more rock-paper-scissory. Second, it has a two resource system: requisition (for building units) and a population cap. Losing units in battle means that you are essentially rewarded new pop cap, and you get to field a new unit of your choosing to counter what your opponent has on the field.

PA also has a two resource system: mass (for building things) and energy (which currently functions as a second resource for building things).

Thinking out loud, if every mobile unit in the game were given a power draw just for existing then it effectively turns power into a soft population cap. Players in the lead are forced to spend more resources on building more power to sustain a larger army (and with more buildings they also have a larger more vulnerable base). Players that just lost a battle do not need to build more power; they can dedicate all of those resources toward a new army that (in mid-late game) will counter the leading player's existing units.

A side effect of this is that defending your power generators becomes even more important, and the game can still snowball just as easily if you lose a chunk of power gens. There are a few ways this could be countered, such as making the commander generate drastically more power, increasing power gen hp, and spreading power generation around a bit more (making factories or engineers generate a small amount of power).

I don't know, it's just an idea. The premise to combating snowballing is to burden the leading player while rewarding the losing player. This accomplishes that and, while I feel like there should be a better way than above, this is a pretty straightforward use of existing systems.

You spelled my name wrong.

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Power draw for all units is a bad idea for two reasons. One, "unit cap" is a word associated with it. Second, that would just make recovery practically impossible if you got your power nuked.

The only fair way is to have the person who got nuked, get 5 free nukes to even the playing field. I think this solution is fair for all involved

1 nuke = 5 nukes = 25 nukes = 125 nukes = 625 nukes = 3125 nukes = 15625 nukes = 78125 nukes =390625 nukes, etc.

That would be insane. lol

Insane yes But you wouldn't have to worry about your recovery lol.

I really wish Uber would chime in on this topic.

Several players have brought it up multiple times on multiple threads and so far Uber hasn't responded to it.

It's my biggest concern about the experimental changes. :-/

Scathis said, as they have test played it, there has not been a game they played where snowballing occured.

That sounds pretty conclusive, even if hard to believe.

Probably because it will still be possible to smash armies together out of attrition and at least make a large kill in metal than a loss.

If they say they don't experience it, it leaves us to wait for update, play it, then if there is snowballing then lay the proof right onto a post and then discuss from there.

I don't mind the difference in power they are doing to t2. I just think the income from t2 shouldn't have been increased, just the cost of the stuff. Even then, it causes problems even getting t2 then, which theoretically causes snowballing. Really difficult to say what causes more snowballing, because "beating your enemy" causes snowballing yknow?

Interesting... They say that... but I've watched snowballing happen in their playtests. Meta snowballed bigtime in one of them. If his opponents were a minute or so behind him then they'd be way left behind.

They should use a special branch of PA stats. That'd provide some real hard and conclusive evidence about whether they're snowballing or not.

PA Stats most likely won't work in an unknown tests build.