Unlimited Assisting, Game-Ending Weapons and Factory Redundancy

Doing really drastic things with energy cost could make for some cool situations. If factories consumed only a token amount of energy, then assisting them would be an emergency only operation.

That would actually have the opposite effect. People would be more likely to put all fabbers to use so as not to have the energy cost of them being wasted.

Huh?

You shouldn't have idle builders anyway, so I don't get your point.

I would very much like to see more of the maze in the game than we have now. In order to accomplish that we need to get rid of strictly upgrade T2 units and replace them with advanced support units, like radar jammers, stealth, mobile radar, etc. We would need to roll back orbital to tactical and intelligence gathering and keep the battle on the ground for the most part. "Is that going to happen?" At this point I tend to doubt it, but if it does happen I would be happy as a honey bee in a flower shop.

If a fabber is a drain whether you are using it or not you are compelled to use it. I agree that fabbers should not be idle but the important point is that they can be idle and costing no energy when they are not being used.

I'm not sure if it's in that game, but I remember seeing one where a player had 100+ engineers assisting an air factory to get one ASF per second. That was fun when it went up in smoke.

That was the standard tactic for Setons to be honest. Both sides did it, so it usually ended up in smoke for somebody. If you didn't get ASFs up you were toast.

I read with interest this topic. I hope that UBER also does.

I think that the possibility of assisting has a direct impact on the flexibility of the game.
If you have a good economy and many fabs, you can in a few minutes drastically change your strategy.
You can quickly go from spam army or something to spam anything else (nuks, air, orbital, etc.).
I believe that currently flexibility is too high in late.

I also believe that excessive restriction of flexibility is also bad.
The mistakes made at the beginning of the game will be impossible to fix.
Imagine that you have neglected air. When you know it, it is too late for spam air factories.

The optimum is somewhere in the middle.

Finally, I am a fan of the drastic increase the energy efficiency of factories.
This will cause the spam factories will simply become very effective.
Assisting will be possible but would require a lot of energy.

If it will be well-balanced, we get an effective spam factories, without losing the possibility of flexible game.

I'm with you on this. I'd like to see T2 be options to T1 format, not replacements. I very much would like to see the game play more like what we saw in the Kickstarter trailer, Particularly with orbital. It's pretty clear this games focus is suppose to be on the ground and not in orbit. However if we keep going down this road a big focus is going to be the orbital. T1 should be the best generalist in all ways, with T2 being specialists but with flaws so they don't over take T1.

The only way you can put upgrade units into a game like this is if their is a liability/limitation biuld in for having them. For example... Super Bomber, requires it's own biulding for each super bomber. The super bomber after making it's bombing run has to return to the biuld and recharge it's bomb load. If the biulding is destroyed the bomber crashes after using it's bombs.

In order for someone to spam something like this would require TONS of base room, bigger base means more vulnerable to attack. More structures means more drain on the Eco to upkeep and not only to biuld them.

I realize the game is planetary annihilation but they need to make up their minds real quick. Is this a game that's land based and supported by orbital. Or is it a orbital game supported by land, and then they need to stick with it. I'd love to see the simplistic quick, and easy to use orbital we saw in the trailer. It was simply build a rocket and click on a destination and poof off you went. In the case of Asteroids I'd even like it to be a special unit (like what it looked like in the trailer) that you sent and they all by themselves would convert the asteroid into a weapon.

I don't have much experience with RTS so if this idea is just bad you guys can ignore me:
I was thinking about mass assistance and nuke spam and I got an idea; you guys would like to keep assistance ingame but don't want nuke spam by assist a nuke with a hundred fabbers but make a factory assistable and another one not is ust silly. So why we don't try to make so that is more advantage to assist another thing instead of the nuke?

I was thinking why we don't increase the cost of the nuke missile together with the usage of metal and energy per second it uses to build up? Like it uses something like 200+ metal and 100000 energy(just spiting numbers here) per second but still takes something like 5-10 minutes to go without any assistance, so your enemy have a time window of 5-10 minutes where your capacity of build up units is really hampered and he can just assist his factories to spit units asap and use it to take the advantage winning territory, trying to comm snipe, break a stalemate of some sort, etc. I really wouldn't see any problem with nuke spam if the guy doing it have some sort of considerable drawback while doing it.

I would love a stacking penalty for assisting as well, 1 -3 engineers assisting will still help a bunch, but for every engineer after that it should dramatically drop in effectiveness, eg. from engineer 6 or so and forwards, the extra speed would totally be not worth it anymore.

Or if fabbers didn't cost more.

Thats what I suggested too. If the nuke costed twice as much, and the silo produced more, the silo would have the same build time as before, but the fabber assisting it would put a small dent in it, and the cost would stack up before 10 or more fabbers could contribute.

Which brings me to my other suggestion as well, why not lower t2 metal rate so nukes cost too much to assist. The other plus side is that they would literally make you choose between high volume production and nukes, you couldn't just throw fabbers at absolutely everything, you could stretch some things but not with heavy assistance but at normal rate, or you could build 2-3 nukes and cut a lot of other production down.

This could work too. Makes metal more precious and territory a necessity. Raids and expand would just become a huge necessity

wow so much was said that I utterly disagree with, to such a point that I don't have the courage to make a full point by point answer.

First of how is assisting unlimited? (The whole idea around limiting assisting is random, unexplained and terrible.)

Since the very first PA build Assisting was range limited, meaning you could only clump up a set number of engies around each structure.

second SupCom 2 was one thing, Fa and FaF in particular, a whole other.

No research point gimmick meant a whole other way of functioning, and FaF balance meant you were better off building multiple factories than massively assisting a few.

When it comes to the way you describe how SupCom 2 came to be what it is especially in the case of experimentals, or how one thing lead to another, you're utterly mislead again.

No. Experimentals where in Supcom the first and were mostly a wacky gimmicky feature, in no way were they quintessential to solving turtleing or finishing the game, one of the hosting limits was actually turning off experimentals and it was even more balanced.

And finally, and a point that drives me INSANE every time I hear it, NO, unfinished PA's wining turtle strategy is not to be compared with or blamed on a resemblance to SupCom.No need to even go into explaining it :

the simple fact of the matter that so many of you ignore is that turtle was always the absolute poorest strategy in supcom, if you wanted to be the worst player of all time, then by all means!

So repeat after me : by having a more turtle-happy PA we are not gaining proximity with SupCom but surprisingly losing it!

As for your eventual defense that you may have been referring to SupCom the second : / ... "the obvious failures of SupCom" ... "2" that's how easy it would have been,

But your will to associate the two seems quite fervent to me despite their night and day differences.

Go on saying assisting is terrible, that turtle is the end, I won't bat an eye, but drag SupCom into the fray and attempt to throw it in the mud and shun it and I will show up, as anticipated.