"The Tanks felt Slow so we Sped Them Up"

Yeah, that's why I said not better in all areas. We need more of that.

But you said that TA had a "mix" of direct upgrades units and sidegrade units. So can you name a unit that's a direct upgrade of a T1 counterpart?, because unless you say the Vamp/Hawk or the Radar, there's likely a fundamental alteration in the transition between T1 to T2.

I bring this up because there's more of a difference between the Stumpy and the Bulldog than you've given them credit for; see my post here on the matter.

It's very likely that many people didn't notice the differences, but they WERE there and made the units behave very differently than a mere "upgrade". The same can be said about the vast majority of TA's units... exculding the Vamp/Hawk of course.

Are you saying that tiers are a requirement in general or that only Supreme Commander required them to be not boring? I disagree that you need tiers in general.

There are many ways to create a risk-reward median (medium?). In general you just need imperfect scouting and expensive ways to spend your resources which take a while to start doing anything useful. The current tier 2 fits this description because the factories are expensive and don't give you any return until your first T2 unit is produced. Economy can achieve this too; an expensive advanced metal extractor with significantly worse efficiency than the basic extractor could be available from the start but not built from the start. Large efficient powerplants are too expensive to be built at the start but making one in the midgame could lead to gains in efficiency. Similarly a player could spend some time building a large unit.

There is even risk-reward at 'small' levels of the game. How many raiders do you build? How rapidly/defensively do you expand? How much air should you make? How much do you scout to better inform yourself for these decisions? These are all somewhat blind decisions so you take a risk when choosing what to do.

Well now I can't put the Vamp / Hawk in there cause you already mentioned it Perhaps the Thud <-> Morty, perhaps the Shadow <-> Hurricane. One of the problems is I've played so many mods (Uberhack, XTA, UTASP, Absolution Annihilation, TAESC, etc) that fiddle with balance, that I can't be sure I'm remembering the way they worked in OTA, frankly it's been 15+ years since I've played unmodded TA. I will say from what I can remember though, you are correct, even the units that appeared to be direct upgrades either made some form of trade off or acted different enough in gameplay vs on paper.

Maybe a better way of putting it, rather than saying the relationship between a stumpy <-> bulldog was a direct upgrades, instead they filled the same (or close to the same) role. Of course even that isn't 100% accurate as the T1 tanks were fast enough that you could switch them to more of a raiding roll when you wanted to switch to T2 tanks for base assault.

The shadow was overall more maneuverable with a lower top speed, while the Hurricane beat it in a straight line. DPS per metal though? The Shadow wins easily. The hurricane gets a 20% boost in damage for a 40% increase in cost. It consolidates more health into a single unit, yes, and that helps it scale better when you have silly numbers of them, but not so much that the same cost in Shadows would be a "bad" investment. In fact against missile based threats the Shadow would win hands down through sheer number of targets, while the Hurricane fared better against Flak.

As for the Thud / Morty, Well the Morty cost almost three times the metal and energy as the thud did, and did less damage per shot (55 as opposed to 80) with a smaller AoE (36 as opposed to 48). It had range... that's about it. Everything else about it was worse, or at best, even.



As I said in my linked post, anyone who thinks TA had straight upgrades isn't looking at the whole picture. It had T2 units that were more powerful when put into specific roles and a T1 that focused more on general purpose and mutability in its roles; as you pointed out. The Stumpy could be a battle tank as it had very respectable health for its cost, or double as a pretty competent raider due to its speed, maneuverability and target acquisition speed. The Bulldog could not do those things (at least not as well) and focused a lot more heavily in being a main linebreaker tank with high health and decent (alpha focused) DPS. Due to its specialisation in the quote-unquote "better" tiers, rather than being a direct power upgrade, TA was able to, for the most part, maintain T1 as a completely viable tier throughout the game.

Having less damage but more range doesn't mean it doesn't have a similar role, both are arty type units, that are capable of hitting both static structure and mobile armies. Like you said, the morty trades damage for range, wasn't the morty slightly more accurate as well, I can't remember. Since they were around (if not the same) speed, both could be used for raiding, but the morty with the better range would fair better against static defenses.

In any case I think PA could stand to try to emulate this, I'm not saying that PA has to be exactly like TA but in the areas TA did well, PA might want to try something similar.

Those missile trucks certainly helped there

Let's be honest, anything with a cost increase isn't a direct upgrade if we're going to be pedantic.

If the only thing required to balance something is one mitigating factor (barring cost, taking into account economic efficiency), then things can definitely still be upgrades. If something has 100 attack, 100 defense, and 10 speed, up from 50 attack, 50 defense and 50 speed . . . it's still more of an upgrade.

Question is, is that kind of speed nerf an effective counter? Would it be acceptable as a "sidegrade"? I'm honestly interested in how far we can push the strengths of a unit while it still being considered a sidegrade.

I agree with you on both points.

I simply said though, stupid tiers are stupid but tiers don't have to be stupid. Tiers aren't necesary, but they aren't taboo. They can work. The game can work with and without them and the game can also be messed up with and without them.

Generally, I am ok with them, and at the same time I agree the game, right now, could have everything buildable from commander if the costs were balanced. Though I would have to imagine the basic bot factory taking 10 minutes a gil-e early game and take 30 assistants late game. Still, that would be neat, I hope release day someone immediately makes a mod removing tiers from vanilla game with price hikes in place, as well as later down the line making a more variant zero-k non-vanilla PA, but I am interested in how PA would play out.

Maybe if the devs are bored one day, they will release a PTE without tiers and just add the total cost of factory and unit with some formula to the cost of a unit and such, and allow everything to be built game start.

Because right now even, tiers can be rushed, and stall your economy, but so can anything in Zero-K. But, rushing t2 in PTE causes you to actually get t2 after an expanded opponent. Rushing orbital as very very first factory does same thing, an enemy can make a bot factory and an orbital factory and fabber before your get your orbital fabber. Seen orbital rush like that in a game before, everyone scouted and EVERYONE went orbital because of it but 2 players got orbital before the guy they scouted who went orbital-first-factory.

That's true and I think nanolathe did a good job pointing that out, I was being fairly loose with what I considered a direct upgrade, but when you looked more closely they weren't really direct upgrades.

It also doesn't always have to be T1 fast with light weaponry vs T2 slow with heavy weaponry. The core leveler was a T1 tank but was slower than T2 reaper (it was the same speed as the Goliath, Core's very heavy T2 tank) but had a short range high damage cannon that did even more damage (about 25% more) than the Reaper (almost as much as the Goliath), while costing less than half as much.

As for if a speed nerf can be an effective counter, I think it can be, you can run into situations where the slower, heavier unit excels at breaking a line of defenses, but total fails at a role of raiding, and can be overwhelmed with faster lighter units.

The leveler was a useless unit in TA.

There were lots of useless units in the final 3.1 patch, doesn't mean they couldn't be fixed via more tweaking. There was more than one community balance mod that fixed some / many of the more useless units. Uberhack springs to mind as one of ones I thought did a pretty good job.

You have to also consider the game situation. Of course the 'big unit' in your case will win in a 1v1 engagement. In a real game such a slow unit will barely be usable for anything but base defense - the weaker but faster units will be preferred for raiding and offensive moves.
Neither are weaker or stronger in a 'direct upgrade' manner - as long as you have another drawback to other increased values both will remain viable.

No because that "upgrade" unit will have a different role, it will be used for defence and heavy frontal assaults while the 50/50/50 unit will be used for raiding because of the speed.

If an advanced unit has one or more downsides, it's not an upgrade from the basic counterpart.

Cost to me, is a means to rarefy the unit. The thing that cost does is make the unit take longer to complete and do more "work" to be worth it. Unless the cost is prohibitive in some way that allows an opponent to actually exploit that cost, then it's not a way to balance a direct "upgrade". Even then... I'd classify such a unit as a complete waste of resources and potential that could be spent in making it specialised, memorable and interesting to use. Having a tank, a better tank and the best tank is not an interesting progression model to me, and I'm certain that I'm not alone in holding that opinion.

Essentially what you've posited there is a walking turret, something that TA was able to realise and be balanced without any problem. Read up on what a Can and a Sumo were in original TA. In short, they were specialists and both rank as one of my personal, most memorable units in the game. They weren't "overpowered", since that hit to movement speed was crippling to their use outside their intended role.

This.

There are at least DOZENS of ways that units can stand out from each other. Changing their core attributes (health/dps/cost) is bottom tier design. There are a limited number of interactions you can do before you either start making redundant units of similar stature or you delve into pants-on-head-retarded-number-skewing territory. Other unit features are critical for adding good stuff to the game, and they're going to take up most of your core attribute combinations by default.

Isn't everyone complaining about Vanguards right now, which are horribly slow but quite adapt at base assault. Just because a unit is slow doesn't mean it can only handle base defense.

This is because Vanguard HP has been buffed up to a point where it is simply stupid. How tough are they? 50 times tougher than a Dox?

62.5

5000 to 80. (unless those numbers have changed since I last opened up the files to check)

I wasn't saying it was good or bad, I was just pointing out you can have a very slow unit that is effective at more than just base defense. I will say that I don't think having 62.5 times the amount of health as a dox makes the vanguard a stupidly overpowered unit, just that we need a better counters, whether that's some sort of fast unit that can attack, do reasonable damage, then get away, or a base defense that shoots slowly but does massive damage (think Annihilator / Doomsday BloD from TA) or something else entirely, I don't know.

Cata, dox, ants? They all hit it hard in little time or kite it. It is just the counters for them are effective and alongside the vanguard.

The cata atm is the best isn't it?