Unit Designs

same.

yes.

looked like "3D-welding"

I think it's pretty obvious that the physical properties of the units in the game doesn't really matter.

And PA already has molecular disassembly/reassembly. That's nanolathe.

So why do we need fancy looking units?

Because it would look cool.

They said earlier, its easier that you don't have to tell what it is, than it is for it to look different.

Ships could be borg cubes, but a new player would see one and not know if it's all-terrain, flying, naval, submarine, or otherwise.

That is why ships have bridges and decks, even though they sure as hell do not have personell.

Yeah! There's no fun to be had in learning how to play a game!

But it makes no sense, and I think the current units look cool enough.

"cool" is subjective. "boring" is subjective. You're going to need better arguments.

In an RTS, we have learned some lessons in development in the last ten years.

Remember Red Alert 2? Everything was very easy to read. They were enlarged "due to their resolution", had enough detail on them, and were very generic looking for what they were. They were very readable, if you never played the game before you knew what most everything was/did.

Red Alert 3 has cool mechs for the Rising Sun faction. Problem was, not being very experienced with the game, a unit swam across and suddenly few up into the sky, killing your units with impunity as you moved tanks to confront what you assumed were tanks.

Same with generals. They used as much detailed scenery and structures and units as they could. If you didn't highlight something, it looked like the clutter around it on the scenery.

In PA, a ship looks like a ship because then players know it is a ship. If a tank looked like a "Magrider", first off you would expect strafe to be a feature of it, second you would not know why it looks like that or if it means something or not. If it didn't go across the water, it would not make sense.

But, if they want to copy SupCom and Planetside2, thats the perfect way to make an expensive tank with standard ant power amphibious, make it a "Magrider". Just don't call it that, I hear Sony has lawyers.

Spot the difference.

I refer you to tatsujb, it's entirely possible to figure out what something is by looking at it. A ship is still going to look like a ship, I just don't want it to look like it belongs in this century.

Yeah. It started out as a pool, then the unit appeared from that with a grey goo shader, but it was much smaller than actual size. Then the pool disappeared, leaving the not-full size grey goo unit, which expanded as it was built until it was full size on completion. It was especially jarring for the Czar and Colossus, due to their size.

Shock twist: All the Aeon units were organic.

That explains EVERYTHING!

I think.

Don't Cheat. On first appearance, what does this unit look like?

A plane?

a fly.

The Yuuzhan Vong managed to build superluminal battle spaceships, so why not?

redblue tank, and snotuglygreen tank, a tank still ...

It is actually an anti infantry amphibious unit.

Yes it looks like a bomber but it's a mech. May I remind you that that issue is avoided because PA's factories a conveniently organized by type and there aren't any units that have dramatic transformation capabilities.

.

1. You need to turn your graphics up

2. One still uses tracks.

I already made the argument that we're approaching "as good as it gets" in terms of vehicle design. What evidence do you have that tanks in the future will somehow be radically different to tanks now?

Unreal Tournament stuck to "military sci-fi 101", worked out pretty well for them.