Give us tier 3, FPS problem solved.

Hi,

Me and my mate usually play on 4 planets, with 2 impacts, 2x 5 teams. Usually we end up with one other team after one hour playing and then the problem comes: Both sides trying to kill eachother by sending hundreds of units. Also, we see a lot of people locking down their planets by letting hundreds of fighters / bots patrolling the place.

This generates mass FPS lag and sucks bigtime.

My solutions:
Solution 1: Unit cap, something we don't want.
Solution 2: Tier 3 units, example: one very big orbital unit that replaces 100 anchors or avengers. Ofcourse, this unit will cost a **** load of resources.
Solution 3: More smashing options, that are supercool, to discourage people to send out 1000s of units. Example: Controlling comets with a building, that takes tons of resources. Players will only have the ability to build this building in late game (when they have loads of resources, it will be extremely expensive). The player has the ability to link the building up with a comet, take it out of its orbit and smash it into someones planet.

Just my 2 cents.

Or, you can simply define the metal abundance on each of the planets so there's limited metal to work with.

why a 3rd Teir? why not just make this build an expensive thing for T2 fabbers to build? also we are supposed to get asteroid belts at some point and metal planets still have yet to get their main function in the game plus gas giants haven't even been added

Why not a unit cap? that would be fun!

Uber doesnt want to make T3, what i would like though for T3 is just BIG units (aKa Experimental)
Uber did state they are adding big units, so that could be our T3, the problem right now is that T1 is sorta useless against T2, (getting better though), just imagine T3 against T1, and the fact that those T1 factories dont upgrade, so waste of space (cant reclaim, to much power to do so). Instead of standard T3 units, go for the MASSIVE units =)

there are no tiers in PA, there are basic, and advance (units and build)

the term "tiers" describe them.

Well yes, there is no unit tiers, its Basic, Advanced then Uber did state they are adding Super units (right now i think Halleys do count as a super unit ). Super units just havent ben added yet =( so we have no idea how they could affect balance (personally i like SupCom Experimentals, you could easily kill a super unit by itself, but is devastating when they have an army supporting that super unit)

I personally don't believe that PA will stay double-tiered. If you have two tiers, a third one becomes imperative most of the time. I just hope they won't do it like in Supreme-Commander (although everything seems to point towards that at the moment).

The fix to the FPS is to wait for Uber to finish the game. There's lots of performance optimizations yet to come. For example, the server is so far from optimized that Uber cannot even give a rough guestimate to the end server requirements.

A third tier would be VERY bad for the game. Then it would be even more of the tech race than it currently is.

A third tier would be very bad for the game because of many reasons for that matter. Reasons that have been discussed in dozens of threads.

Yeah, with arguments that apply to Supreme-Commander tiers, and not really much else.
This is where our opinions still differ, Brian.

You can have multiple tiers, with higher cost for a "risk vs reward" effect, without creating unit obsolescence.
Most people don't get that. And I'm not sure whether Uber understands it or not, but I think they do.

Technically speaking, a 3rd Tier wouldn't Solve any FPS problems, just postpone the point at which it would affect the game.

Mike

The whole idea of PA is to throw gigantic armies at each other. Let's hope Uber continues to improve performance instead of adding additional tiers that indeed just delay the issues. Unit caps are no fun.

Or we could wait until the game is optimized since this is Gamma after all. I'd rather have Uber devote more resources to optimizing the game and balancing and what not than putting in a boring 3 tier system like in SupCom.

Tier 3 will not help anything.

Hmmm i might said the wrong word, Tier 3....

All i was thinking was that in late game, MASS amounts of units should be replaced by orbital superstuff, like controlling comets, etc. etc.
Controlling comets could be done with a Comet/Astroid control facility (costs loads of stuff) and managing the structure/device could be done using the cosmic screen.

Why not just rename Planetary Annihilation Supreme Commander 3 while we're at it?

The FPS will improve with optimisation. PA should not be a tech race.

Never ever ever ever EVER

NO UNIT CAP!

its a disease that infected many many rts games, please not PA

Varrak confirmed a while ago that although currently the client side rendering engine is single threaded, they are actively looking at making it multi threaded. Given all of us have multi-core cpu's this should provide a big improvement into the amount of units the game will tolerate whilst maintaining good fps (having tried both the single and multi-threaded version of the Spring RTS engine I can tell you the MT version is a huge improvement in large games- the FPS just refuse to drop).

Obviously the SIM performance has to match the client side which is why we probably haven't seen anything yet- although I've got to say the improvement those guys have done with just 1 thread to play with is massive so we should be good on that front imo.

Not a tech race, okay with that, but what about the current FPS issues?

People should stop think that Uberent can wipe out the FPS problems with patches, no matter how much they like the idea. Everything has its limits, including the servers that have to keep track of all the units, their paths, their state and so forth.

I think most harcore players will acknowledge that we do have a serious FPS challenge, which cannot be taken care of with some simple 'optimizations'. Some structural things should change to get grip on this serious issue.

Metal scarcity to control unit numbers might be one option?

Have you read the rest of the replies?

Do you understand how games are made?
PA has currently had very little work done on it to improve performance (relative to a released game). Basically, yes the FPS can be taken care of with some not-so-simple 'optimisations'.