I noticed a *dox speed* thread before making this post, but I've been pondering this for quite a while now. Skipping it over a semi-related thread doesn't do the subject justice. 'BUT WAIT!' You say. 'What subject? I came in here because I like the ironic use of Ants in the title!' Ground units are too slow in general. Anyone else clock how long it takes an army of vehicles to cross the map? It's so long that you HAVE to put the factories near the enemy base. It's forced. It's either that or air transports - which take a lot of skill to use correctly (not that I mind that). It's not fun trying to use tanks as anything but a brute force weapon. You either steamroll someone with a critical mass of tanks, or they die to sniper bots and gunship strafing. Rinse, Repeat. Redirecting them is difficult or unnecessary because of the necessary flexibility of their counters. Or, in the case of a tank on tank fight, a binary case of attrition. Now, my position is rather well known - I liked the old tank duels of old, with frack tons of units late game that were completely necessary. Going pure turtle with air, bots, or nukes just didn't work. Mind, Orbital was a little (ok, a LOT) more like a T3 - which boosted your eco out the wazoo. That doesn't mean a new meta would be bad. It needs to be flexible, varied, and NOT BASED ON A TECH RACE. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------^^^WARNING! KEY POINT^^^ To that end, let's increase the speed of tanks by 3 and all bots by 2. Just leave acceleration and turning speed low, like it's supposed to be. They should be the precise sledgehammer that comes from nowhere, not the lumbering Godzilla creeping towards your base. Brian and I aptly demonstrated how lethal tank armies are in the BotB showcase match - and how the best solution is a nuke to the face. Give me more options, please. I think that's what I'm getting at here: MORE VIABLE gameplay options. I don't want to see the same thing from people at the top all time. Mind, I DO see differences - but most are in playstyle, not in strategy. A variety of workable strats will make this game beyond amazing at the competitive level. Also, shout out to @bgolus for being awesome about giving us so much optimization, it's like a birthday all over again.
Lol awesome. Also, about your idea, giving both a +2 speed increase, and giving air a -2 speed increase, would be nice. Would that put air just a peg faster than bots? Because right now they are what, close to 2x faster than bots? Generally, I think tanks could use a little faster, bots shouldn't lose speed by comparison because that is their use, and air is unreactable to because if they strike either you already had AA or they killed their target.
Very good points. I agree. Anything that gets us closer to the massive armies of early beta. I especially agree with the following:
Go for it! So I just watched this for the first time ever... Is it just me, or is Meta talking out of his .......? The comments about Scathis's check your principals, and then the "oh it's alright,us devs were just going easy on you?" On topic, I utterly agree - Completely in need of a new meta.
That was meta being showy. Brian and I showed him up. I understood from the start that: 1) We couldn't beat Godde or Colin in an invasion war. So battling for the moon was out of the question. 2) Orbital had helped me win big FFAs before, so it was a big priority 3) Nukes would keep us in the game, Satellites would win it for us. All this talk about meta when I can get up a T2 air fac in 5 minutes. Meh.
Ehh I dunno you guys. I mean, with engineers, and if we can get proper supcom like transport controls like the ferry command, I kinda like the need to consider logistics over such vast battlefields. I mean, moving tanks over such distances were never much of a problem in supcom were they? Even in TA it was ok. So if anything id rather not have the speed boost, but would love to have buggies and armoured cars/APC's/IFV's/Mechanised infantry like units to cover ground quickly before the better equipped and armoured bots and tanks can get there. As well as having land based transports for bots, like big trucks with magnetic clamps to suck up friendly's to it for ease of use.
I agree that aircraft haven't really paid for their speed, but is increasing the speed of tanks and bots really the right way to go about it? Id much rather have AA units be stronger, heavier and deadlier as to prevent aircraft from.....hovering over your precious armys. Make AA units less throw away, but more like vanguards with rapid-fire multi-targeting missiles.
No. Absolutely not. I've played enough games to know that trying to balance an OP unit with another OP unit is not going to work. Bring air DOWN. We already have solid gameplay with doxen and tanks - let's balance around adding to that gameplay instead of invalidating it completely. Besides, t1 AA is already quite powerful against air, especially when massed.
Well exactly, current T1 AA is already good enough. So I don't see the need, not that AA can invalidate air, because aircraft can pick and choose it's battles. If you can't win a attack, then don't.
Bots are already IFVs. I.e. they are already Mechanised Infantry. I really wish we had more variety from that factory. (Like more IFVs) A problem with air is that until your air is actually shot down, you aren't really committing it. What I mean is commitment of forces for land occurs as SOON as they travel anywhere On the other hand, you can very quickly turn your mex harass Kestrel squadron into an antitank squadron.
I think we might have our definitions of mechanised infantry mixed up. Things like IFV's are units that are equipped to infantry, rather then the infantry them selves. If I read wiki right:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanized_infantry But you could say that the current tanks already do this.
Remember Ledarsi, that beautiful mind? He was talking about how bots should be actual infantry. They should be slower than vehicles. And that got me thinking - if bots are infantry, why aren't they slower than vehicles? You know how in Civilization V, all of the infantry eventually upgrade to Mechanized Infantry? That's my idea of what the bots in PA are representing - they are representing the idea that the infantry unit and the APC have been combined into one unit. I really do want more APCs equipped with more varieties of weapons also.
Or what we could do is increase speed of T1 in general but keep T2 speed, that way we wont have any of those problems of a leveler soloing 40 ants because of......*micro* (moving backwards). That way people cant use T2 as the supreme ultimate solution to countering T1, instead, they can supplement your T1 forces. Like in early stages of Alpha where ants and levelers would be the only useful way to go, you would use levelers in the back of your huge ant army to make your army more dangerous, but not going just levelers (because the ants where to numerous, they didnt shoot fast enough, and some supporting levelers of the ants would WRECK the leveler only army because those levelers had a nice meatsheild of ants. Now T2 can laughably go through any T1 being ~Super Cost Effective~, once T2 comes in to play T1 is useless, instead of just being support of T1
No. If T1 and t2 are to be used side by side in battle, each enhancing the other, they need to be the same speed. OP t2, like we have now, needs that speed detriment to keep the balance. Not so with T2 that supplements t1.
Side by Side in battle...uber can just get the formations working where all units move at the same speed of the slowest unit, best example, Age of Empires 2.
They already do move at the same speed as the slowest unit. Try selecting a bot and a Vanguard and giving the a move order. The bot will move as fast as the Vanguard.
Bots in TA were slower than vehicles (depending on the bot and vehicle of course) Bots were focused on being a bit slower but much more meanuverable; could dodge shots very well if microed correctly. Though, I don't know if people would like that now..
