and since they are T2, a good player already has anti-air defense, in the form of stingers, flak cannons, and peregrines. All of your pelicans are now dead.
Sorry, just slightly confused. Do you want to play me, or do you want to give it a try with a game (doesn't matter which) and get back to me?
Sure, though I might lose just out of being worse than him, never played him before, don't know how good he is.
I'm only 10th on PA Stats. Seems like it might be a mute point, all the balance if changing soon anyway. Edit: but i'm always up for a game.
Sure, I can play you tomorrow sometime. I'm in timezone UTC-8:00, you can add me on steam as well, if you want.
I tested this with a friend today, and he was not able to beat me with a vanguard rush, even under ideal conditions (neither player attacks the other until the dropship rush), I was able to get defenses up easily before he attacked with 20 dropships. I killed all of them. We then tested it with a lot of dropships, escorted by pergerines (60 dropships with 72 pergerines) none of either managed to get to the dropzone, which was right on the edge of my base. Mainly because of stingers, who do 25 damage, while pelicans have 20 HP.
I actually feel they're expensive and should be put back into T1. This is a macro game - transporting armies across continents shouldn't be hard. Taking account of the weight of their cargo by slowing could balance Vanguard drops and Commander-rushing. I think the UBER-Cannon could also be more effective against Vanguards. In TA it practically one-shotted most things. Not saying it should in PA, but 2-3 shots should do it for a group, or a direct hit on a single Vanguard, else we're left mashing hotkeys.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it did one-shot everything. Leading to some games where a player literally draws a d-gun line in the sand, promising mutually assured destruction for any idiot who crosses it.
I was Comm-rushed once when it was a thing. I built a Missile Defence Tower and the guy died straight away. Really it's just suicidal. I think they should be slow as a comatose tortoise with such heavy units. Even the K-BOT?!
Once you get the luxury of a advanced factory, you get the addition of a movement enhancer unit for your land armys, at which point the transport it's self is really easy to build. I don't see the problem of having it at the advanced tier considering that there is a god damn Stargate at the basic tier.
Why not just put it in the basic tier? I still think that the stargate should at least be T 1.5 but preferably T2
What, the air transport? Well part of the balance is to create a kind of escalating war, where you go from smaller squads of roving units, to massive scale conflicts on a planetary and even interplanetary scale. So a part of that is restricting the players ability's to get right into each others faces within the first few minutes, now this can be done with map size, making the actual travel distance between places take long enough even by air as to make the escalation take time enough for players to actually build up. But on a smaller map, the difference between driving on the ground and taking a transport can make it very easy to immediately strike your opponent with the force required to do even more then stunt the growth of your enemy, but to outright defeat them before the game can even begin. So that creates a problem, when players get very good at fighting each other within the first few critical minutes of a game, the game begins to revolve around that interaction, rushing, turtling, booming become less important to conducting a game wining all in strategy, that kinda goes against not only the theme of the game, but ultimately stagnates the game into forcing this interaction to play out every time in order to determine a games out come before it has even really started. It ends up that units and buildings that are designed for later on in the game are almost impossible to use, and that players who maximise their use of few resources and time, the micromanage of few forces trumps the use of more broad strategy and macro style gameplay by a huge margin. And that's not really the kind of game I wanna play, and besides the long drive to a enemy's base is never that worrying to me, as usually this is done with a huge factory production line that is constantly pumped out, reducing my need to rely on outward pylons of radar and defences.
Well as I posted earlier, I tested this, and it's very difficult to properly land any kind of force with transports, they are immediately shot down by defenses. 20 transports are taken out by 10 stingers or spinners in 1 second... and that's not an exaggeration, if you look at the stats.
Ahh, but I never mentioned that you would be dropping within a opponents base, in fact I didn't mention any specifics or even PA and it's current builds of temporary balance at all. My point here, is that air transports are a logistical tool for moving units across a map with hazards terrain faster, thus making the effective distance in timer shorter, and making the map smaller. Now during the late game, this is awesome as you take your continent spanning bases and interlink them in order to make your whole job easier, however this addition to your logistics also make getting to your opponent easier, and as stated they make the map smaller by making you faster. So the problem with having transports faster, is that it makes the maps smaller more early in the game, which means you go from fighting huge sprawling planets, to the more classic sandbox maps of old. Now don't get me wrong here, playing on SupCom's 5KMx5KM maps is extremely fun, the plays and strategy that players do to contest over space is all magical and engaging, however playing on larger maps is extremely different and focuses the player down completely different avenues of strategy and gameplay to their accompanying smaller maps. However I also would prefer having the air transports being in the second tier of units to help promote similar kinds of units also being in such factory's, as this stems from a mix of the developers comments and wishes for the gameplay of PA that seem to stem from many, many years of industry experience in RTS game design, the risk reward teching system, unlocking additional units to augment your force, at a cost and potential risk of disaster, and a mix of the community's own drive to have the additional tiers of units be ways of augmenting your basic tier of forces without inherently replacing their original function (And as I might add, replacing their function in EVERY way, as replacing older tiers of units in some ways is expected and even encouraged, but no single unit should completely replace any single other, or multiple others. Only partially), thus creating a set of units that assist, and change the way the original set of units play. One such unit is the air transport, allowing all terrain navigation and a speed increase to units assisted, at the cost of the transports literal cost, and at a risk of HP and new weapon types vulnerability for a temporary period of time. This, is why I feel the transport should remain T2, as it's a augment to a ground army, but it shouldn't be a standard addition.
