Risk vs Reward

I would hope you would wan it to be more ta than sc tho right?

Yes. And then they made the Vanguard

The Vanguard sucks. It's easy to kite with every other unit. If you ever let it get close you are doing it wrong.

It was really annoying, but the TES forums had a 200 post limit in a thread. After 200 posts the mods would swoop in and close it

You made me go on YouTube and listen to Dune 2000 soundtrack again. I hope you're happy.

If you're playing 1v1 on a size ~400 planet or of you spawn close together in a FFA, no, they don't suck. You can only kite them of the transit time is very long, and transports negate that as well.
They and artillery tanks both need nerfs IMO.

To be honest, after 200 posts, I think the conversation diverges from the main point due to newcomers not reading the thread and people going off on tangents (like this one).

Regardless, I've said my 2 cents on what balance should be, its just a matter of, what will uber do.

You still need to apply some sort of incentive for the enemy to focus your vanguards, they can't just have no damage whatsoever, otherwise someone who's microing can safely ignore them and pick off the rest of your units, the current idea behind the vanguard is that you can't ignore them, because they're coming to give you a death hug, and thus they more adequately fill their tanking role, because the enemy has a reason to hit them first.

I play all of my games on 1v1s small planets.

Vanguards are fine at killing stuff in close proximity. And then they tend to get torn apart.

I get more kills from escorts. They are very powerful. But I don't believe they are OP. Kite them to deal with them. Rely on depth in defence, not one thin line.

I feel like there's a very important distinction between the two positions Trophy.

I'm actually curious why a development studio with limited resources would ever opt for tiers representing an increase in strength and utility of the army material available. This seems to me like you would have to create more models, more animations, more of everything together with an increase of complexity in balancing the game; the latter leading to more time needed for beta tests and so on. Surely it's more economical to merely create one set of basic and specialized units and then divide them over tiers.

Yeah but...

I know this game is supposed to start from a fresh start. TA started from a fresh start. Supcom was more heavily influenced by what came before, made mistakes, and supcom 2 advanced upon that and made even more mistakes. TA also made mistakes and I am in no way stating you want a TA clone with the metal converters, the maplong artillery, the one faction with the wierd experimental.

I am just saying, some of us have unique ideas for the game, some of us have requested inclusions from TA, some of us want things from SC, some of us want things from Zero-K. I am in no way implying Nano wants a TA port or Madsci wants a Zero-K port. I don't want a Red Alert 2 port. Quitch, doesn't he like Starcraft or something, he definitely doesn't strike me as someone asking for a lot of Starcraft-esque things.

Enough with this **** -> Back to the topic. We don't want it to deteriorate into people arguing about, teake it to the PM's.

How would people justify extremely powerful Advanced tech if it was more risky, but even better than it is now? What would you do differently? What risks and rewards would you impose on advanced tech ?

I have already stated what I want here.

In addition to that I think that if we make Advanced tech too powerful it will significantly raise the learning curve for new players, because everyone going advanced will outright win because their enemy won't know how to counter them or will lose outright because they will kill themselves with it. It's not as big of an issue for regular and advanced players because we have already learned the basic mechanics of the game.

If it has higher reward, it needs really really higher risk. Anything in Street Fighter for instance... the idea for balance there is that if it does more damage, it is harder to setup and hit a small area and is easily blocked or avoided and then the user is stuck in animation to be punished after a miss... whereas if it has a high cost to do and does low damage, it should hit safely and easily in most ranges and situations with little accurate aiming.

I almost don't care if this game had a Meta tier. As long as they take their server side statistics of games lasting longer than 15 minutes, all players and all planet systems, and balance it until t1 wins with at least a 51% margain, and t1 units would obviously be used with meta eco so that should be considered a meta win, and the meta endgame units should win maybe 10% of the time, it should literally be used when 2 teams both get meta eco and t1 mass armies so highly produced that no 1 team can get an army to another team, so they NEED a game ender.

You can learn from other games without turning the game into a copy.

Virtually every seminal real time strategy is directly based on a predecessor, but then distinguishes itself by one innovation, one original twist. To take Blizzard games as an example: Warcraft II is a slightly streamlined version of the original Warcraft; Starcraft is Warcraft II with asymmetrical races; Warcraft III takes the Starcraft hero units from the campaign and turns them into full-fledged hero units. (Adding the hero units made the game quite different, units had to have a lot more health for instance, but those are direct consequences of the original decision to add hero units). Starcraft 2 is simply the original Starcraft with a new interface and a few unit changes.

And of course Total Annihilation at its core is a command and conquer-type game, but implemented on a larger scale.

So even if the games aren't identical, it would be foolish to not try to evaluate various proposals by comparing them to existing implementations in the wealth of past rts games. For instance, the decision not to have different factions in PA could easily have been influenced by having perceived the implementation of this in Starcraft as a failure. I mean, it's not necessarily true and perhaps there is a more fundamental reason for why there is only one faction, but nevertheless, by virtue of working in the real-time strategy genre a lot of decisions that you have to make are very similar to ones made by other developers in the past.

There is nothing wrong in copying stuffs, Picasso was used to say.

For me the biggest problem with current Basic and Advanced units is that this is only 2 steps and you get all you need.
In SupCom, Starcraft and few other RTS games you have more tiers or upgrades. This mean that if your strategy is about Air, you need to pay for it, and this need to take some time. Making many stages if this investment make it passible to use it in the middle of the process. In supcom when going to T3/T4 air you have T2 that can help you defend and attack. In Starcraft you bought upgrades, and you need few of them and few building before you will be able to build what you want. And you can do something else or use your upgrades in beetween.

In PA? You are on T1, one building and yeah, now you can build all best units of that kind! Make t2 fab cost alot - this will be risky to build. Make it cheap - everyone will do it. Make t2 similar to t1 but only more specialized - there is no depth in game, you just spam of few units and you can fast change what you are doing.

Also right now on planets there are too many mass points for me, and not in strategic posittions.

I fail to see the logic. You're assuming that all units in all tiers become inexpensive and spamable. Who ever stated that such would be the case in a flat-balanced system?

And that's what could become the cool distinction, a flat tier for balance, and another (or more) tier for the crazy stuff, support stuff and specialised stuff.

All in retrospect to the balanced tier of course.

I use T1 with T2 units all the time. It can be very effective.

We understand the cost means you should only invest in the unit you need and that you need an economy to support building it and you need the correct cheap units to support getting the economy to access the correct units you need of an expensive nature...

However, I always liked the design concept Ozo mentioned. It doesn't even need to be more than 2 factories, but I want both t2 units to be balanced against t1 except for a utility role they excel at, and for any factory any tier any terrain to have an entry cost which demands dedication to that choice.

For instance, if someone goes first factory air, the game already promotes that to be the first adv. factory as well, because you need other factories to get the other adv. ones. The game unfolds right past that req. when you have multiplayer teams, but thats actually ends up being pretty fun on it's scale. However, the t2 is fairly cheap and fast to rush into, you get one up in 4 minutes and afterwards can get 2 of every adv fact. if you want.

I know I must say this a lot, but if t2 multiplier over t1 economy was no more than double, and if metal was more scarce, one would have to choose more wisely which factory they go via which units they want to use, because the investment means those are the units they have access to at that moment.

Then again, that even requires unit balance, because if you could only go for one factory, wouldn' you ALWAYS go for air? Because if you spam peregrines the best, theoretically, you can at least kill the enemy's fighters, avoid land AA where available, and use a few kestrels to pick not-or-lightly defended economy points, and just proceed from there with a huge unit and eco advantage.

If vehicles became pretty resilient to air, at least it would be a rock paper scissors mechanic. If the tools were just staggered differently for each factory though, it would be more about the when to attack and the when to build counters as well as what factory has access to what first.