Current state of metagame.

This is a disease in online video game communities, especially among certain types of high level players. I've seen many examples of players that would switch to a new game confidently stating after playing only five games that "this race is OP, that strategy is broken" yet they are perfectly aware that after one hundred more games their judgement might as well be the complete opposite. It seems like an oddity to me: how can top players that supposedly enjoy improving at games be so incredibly sensitive to minor gameplay concerns that would go away by improving at the game. It's horrific to witness, you'd want these people to not have anything to do with your game because their judgement was always so harsh and they'd talk as if they didn't even like games, and the game itself was a nuisance that would get in the way of the pure competitive aspects that interest them most.

To quote the Cat from Red Dwarf:

"If it's any help, I've been studying his tactics and there's a pattern emerging:Every time you make a move, he makes one too..."

If the metagame changes to include more strategies then by definition there is more strategy in the current metagame than the previous metagame. Like the game can have a dominant strategy to which a counter is found which then again opens up the metagame to more strategies again.
Although we have to separate the 'metagame' as pre-game strategy which is to be considered what you or the community know about the game and 'strategic choices' ingame which depend on what your enemy does. I guess you refer to strategic choices as 'creative' strategy.

"Probably the way to go"? Harassing with T1 early game? T1 is 3 different factories. You can harass with Skitters, Doxes, Fireflies, Bombers and Hummingbirds(if the enemy made air fabbers). Do you say that there is nothing strategic about choosing what you should use to harass or how you should expand out on the map?

T1 harassment isn't only 1 thing you know.

Some options will simply be bad options. Mm... are you proposing that every decision or input should have strategic implications? Could be cool actually but I don't think there are any RTS like that. The problem is separating trivial decisions, strategic decisions and decisions that are just bad when there are so many possible inputs.

The metagame certainly gives some pointers as to what is effective strategies but you can deviate from that path and it really depends on the map/planet what is effective and what is not.

I'm not sure how you clearly define a strategy and how you would separate them. The transition to t2 have very strategical implications as you decide to which factory and which forces you should focus on first.

What is the dominant strategy? I don't know. Tell me. Also define the planet or system to which the strategy is dominant for. Is it a large water planet with dense metal, a small moon with scarce metal or a lava planet with 2 separated islands?

Incidentally Starcraft is usually frowned upon on this forum as mostly being about execution rather than strategy. I do have to agree that PA in the current version is very demanding in many ways. Lots of multitasking, keeping track on stuff on several planets or on the other side of the planet with no minimap and twitch micro with Gil-E micro, aircombat and Vanguard drops. I hope that it becomes more manegable in the future.

Well that is the difficult part. How do you balance a game to allow such a wide variety of play as possible? It is basically the same thing as balancing an asymmetrical RTS with different factions/races and you are doing it on randomly generated planets which can be anything from lava to water planets.

Yeah, this is very important to not revamp balance design but to focus on making ui and game more manageable

I was insanely tired last night when I wrote that.

It is perfectly possible to kill your opponent using only T1. It is just extraordinarily unlikely, to the point of being non competitive, takes much more time than upgrading to T2 and then attacking would have taken you, and requires a fair skill disparity.

It is possible. Just not plausible.

I kind of mucked up the order of my post - Addressed you, went to talk to the OP, back to you at the end.

The other response - bread and butter units.... for some reason, I thought Tech Trees grew downwards. So down should be up

I.e. b&b units are too high UP the tech tree.

I have no idea what the sentence saying 'that's the way it is in PA' means.

Do you think that if you had 500 apm you would almost never lose? PA potentially has a lot of things to manage, so it's possible for very high apm to be really strong, but opinions differ on this.

it depends on how intelligent you use those apm. But assuming a player has a good understanding of how to expand 500+ effective apm would probably be a potentially huge advantage. Depends on the map though. The bigger the better.

Yeah, that should be important. At the moment I don't really have the feeling that it is. You can choose different units to harass your opponent, but that's not strictly a strategic choice you're doing. They feel like empty choices to me, to be honest. It merely depends on which factory I decide for. And I'm asking myself whether that's all there is to it.

Strategies vary from planet to planet, that is true. But again, it only really decides which factory you go first, and how quickly you need units after that. That is fine and dandy, but I'm not really talking about that.

Again, I wish that there was more decisionmaking when it's about units. Atm I don't really care whether I build Shellers, or Gil-E, or Levelers. If I build 3 advanced vehicle factories, one will produce Levelers, one Shellers and the other one Vanguards. I don't feel as if it would make much of a difference if for example all three of those produced Levelers instead. Ofc there is a difference. But it is not big enough, imo.

I think that atm, when you choose a factory, you get a set of units you can work with.
What I'd like instead, is that you build a factory, because you're interested in one unit especially.

That can be the case already. Some people say "I want Shellers" and build an adv. vehicle factory because of that. But Shellers are op anyway. I want there to be more emphasis on making strategic decisions based on which unit I want. I want each unit to have different strategic implications, and to be attached to a different playstyle. I want there to be a reason to mix different kind of factories, like bot and vehicle factories to get a better result. I want to be creative when creating my own unit combos.

And I don't feel like that is the case atm. This might be fixable by balance, and all I want to do is to call attention to this problem.

Ofc it's hard to balance this game correctly. I never said that it's easy. And I don't really have a solution, either.
I think that there are too many units that just shoot, you know? What are you there for? "I can shoot at stuff".
They shoot differently, and that alone can bring much variety. But all in all it's a bit simple imo.

I'd probably just accelerate the pace of the game, make it more stringent, every decision more severe in it's consequences. It just feels a bit lax to me.

And I'd make T2 more specialized.

Greetings


Edit: I said that I want there two be better results when mixing different factories. But players who want to win a game by for example only using vehicle factories, should also be able to do so. I don't want to be forced to build air every single game, for example...

I feel bad for scathis who will probably attempt to read this whole topic.

This build still feels shallow to me though, and it's a combination of lots of elements working in tandem. Rather than suggesting a way to fix the problem (that's up to the developers), I think it's better to say what our concerns are, and trust that the developers will answer them in the form of a more balanced game.

There's a similar anecdote from the development of Borderlands 1. A lot of people complained that the walking speed was too slow. They told the devs "you should make the character faster". But instead of listening to their suggestion, they listened to their concern. They added lots of small rubble on the ground to make it seem like the character was moving through more stuff. They never got the complaint that the character wasn't fast enough again.

Thus, rather than list things I think should change, I will list my concerns. These aren't necessarily true for high level players, or even other medium level players, but these are what I feel is un-fun in this build.

• As a medium-level player, t1 feels useless, because t1 attacks can easily be countered by a few engineers building a turret after seeing the attack coming on radar.

• As a medium-level player, I cannot win a game unless I rush t2. If I don't rush t2, the opponent does, and I lose.
• I cannot respond to t2 attacks without building t2 myself. For instance, if the enemy rushes sniper bots, I have no idea how to counter them without rushing sniper bots or gunships myself.
• Vanguard drops are easy to defend against and hard to pull off. You need t2 air AND t2 vehicles, and they're counterable by a single flak turret (or actually building anti-orbital defenses, as many players neglect to do in single-planet systems). The only issue is with interplanetary vanguard snipes, because the astreus can instantly drop the vanguard on a commander without taking fire to anti-orbital defenses prior to doing so.

I played 5 games against the AI today.

The first one - T1 only. Lasted 40 minutes. I had 5 6ths of the planet. The next one, lasted 35, same story.

All other games that involved t2 - lasted 10 minutes.

500 apm is meaningless number. The key is intelligence and knowledge of game. First if you have it, then you follow it up with fast fingers. 500 apm definitely helps a lot in PA, I believe this game has very high apm demand, we are not there yet though. If I got 100 more effective apm than I do have now, it would benefit me incredibly. In future if we are supposed to manage thousands of units, interface must be more friendly.

In current form of gameplay and interface, the apm needed to play perfectly might be equally as big as in starcraft. We don't know yet, but I can see million things that can be done faster or better.

Imagine harrassing with 5-6 groups of units that are all hotkeyed and you constantly manage them to do it perfectly.
Imagine constant scouting with air to make sure what you are going to face
Imagine having whole map covered with camera locations and using them perfectly
And a lot of other things

If you put it this way, "Using commander is a dominant strategy, therefore PA sucks because you HAVE TO USE COMMANDER EVERY ******* GAME."

Do you see what I did there? It's the same as saying T2 is the only viable dominant style in Pa. It's not only wrong, because as I've said T1 is dominant for first part of the game but it's also extremely broad term. Under T2 you can put so many different things like harrass with bots, attacks with different veh composition, nukes, drops, airharrass etc. What, was mass t1 more strategically deep? I'm saying that we might need to improve some t1 and certain t2 units to make them more useful but the general feeling of the game is very good.

"Every viable strategy should have chance to win." Every born man is alive. If strategy brings your chances closer to win it's viable, if it's not then it's not viable. It is how it should be and it's obvious. If you come up with something and it doesn't work it's not viable and shouldn't win.

I don't understand why people think that there is no strategy in build orders or the way you move your units out on the map or the way you do your attacks, the way you use unit combinations, the way you micro units etc. RTS always consist of such elements and the longer game is in the same patch, the longer these things will matter more.
Building stuff is deep strategic thinking, in which you have to figure out what's the best to build, in which order and how many of it do you need. It's just the element of the game as microing levellers vs vanguards and this is the subject of some people's hate too.
"I don't want to micro units"
"I don't want to build buildings"
What do you guys want in this game?

Matiz, I'd totally agree with you.

But read my previous post.

You don't understand the arguments you are trying to counter argue. It's not that t1 is useless. In the short term, t1 is useful.

You'll notice a common theme if you read your own posts however. I think it's most telling from the OP...

The t1 factories are your first factories. Those units should be the bread and butter. Not for every player, not in all cases. (Teching should still be a strategy). But there is very little benefit in the current patch from neglecting teching in favour of increasing production and military spending. While you can afford 9 t1 factories per t2 factory, you can only afford to run 3 t1 factories per t2 factory, and Levellers at 1:3 do not win against Ants.

T1 is just used as a stepping stone to T2. You can use T1 in addition to T2 in the short term. In the long term, you should be moving towards using T2 as your bread and butter.

And well, that just seems wrong.

Your comments about defences are complete bollocks. Prevention is always better than the cure, but to counter by prevention is not a counter.

You don't understand what clopse is saying.

It's not the way you move units on the map, or the way you do attacks, unit combinations, etc.

Because those things aren't relevant.

You make an amazing push on my base with your t1 army. You're attacking an undefended side of my base. I simply pop up a bunch of turrets and it absorbs your attack.

Best builders win. It's the same scenario with nukes and anti-nukes. First person to beat the other person to the nuke/antinuke wins.

Unit diversity has started to matter more than it previously did, but it's still very much a work in progress.

I don't care wether the game is micro or macro. The problem is that heavy macro is the only option. There is no window for clever t1 attacks. It's build until you reach t2 and rush them. If you are 30 secs behind the t2 game you are in trouble.

If course we could all learn to build heavy. But this will just lead to longer stalemates. I often hear you in games saying ah sure I don't have to go air cause I know he doesn't go air. Also stale gameplay.

For you to say there are many differnet options is strange as you pretty much do the same build every single time you play pa. Your a great player but you have a lot less experience with different builds in PA than most. Maybe you are still just in the honeymoon stage like we have been. I hope so as the game you envision sounds pretty dull.

Remember I'm not saying the build doesn't play well. Yes it still is a lot of fun.... If you just forget about the t1 units. Maybe it's the massive hp t1 structures have in comparison to dps from t1 units. By the time your raiding units do damage you have probably replaced what they killed and built a turret to defend them

In my opinion, individual builds aren't strategy. Individual builds are optimization problems.
However, the choice of build is strategy when you consider your opponent or other builds IMO. It can either be part of the metagame where you try to outsmart your opponent before the game starts and when you try to use a counter to the current metagame build(s) or it can be Real Strategy™ when you scout the enemy build and adapt or try to counter his build by changing your own build.

Yeah but the problem lies when there is no counter to the optimal strategy other than do it better. Turrets and commander dgun has shut all t1 attacking windows. So we are pretty much left with a straight race to t2 before you start getting favorable confrontations without heavily relying on luck.

Yes, but is racing to t2 only a single dominant strategy? I'd say that there are many strategies to reach t2 and there are several different t1 harassment strategies and and expansion strategies that you can use before and even after you have reached t2.
Now buffing Ants and nerfing turrets would probably be an easy way to increase the amount of viable strategies.