Specialisations for the commander

I'm not sure if this is the right part of the forum to post this, but It's the closest I can get. I think the commander needs some kind of specialization, since as soon as you get up a decent amount of tanks, and workers he become useless, and just something players needs to baby sit. I believe with some kind of specialization upgrade it could be fixed.

My idea is that the commander can only have one specialization at any given time, so not the make him overpowered, and that the are a basic and advanced version of each specialization. Like "engineering" which would allow the commander to build a standard worker can, and we upgraded to "advanced engineering" the commander would be able to build anything an advanced worker could. Maybe outside the advanced factories.

Then have the standard offensive and defensive specializations, along side some other more interesting ones. So player could make their commander fit a certain role. That way the commander would never be useless.

I think also it could fit in the lore, since when you enter a battlefield you have no idea what you need, so you have just a basic commander, and then can give him a specialization to what suit the situation best, maybe even make the basic commander the most well rounded one. So even stay as that would be a viable option.

P.S. of course it would take mass, energy, and time to install/upgrade a specialization.

Do you remember Supreme Commander?
The game had an extremely tough commander that could give some fight to Tier 3 units and with certain upgrades it could be extremely tough (Aeon Commander) or oneshot everything in one swoop with Cybran laser.

And this was making the game sometimes last three, four, seven hours even with use of time lapse.
You just needed an awful lot of firepower to shoot the comander down, especially Aeon commander.
So i'm pretty fine with what comander is right now.
I miss Experimaental Tier units though, they were really cool.

Yes I played both supreme commander 1 and 2. But I don't mean to make the commander that powerful with any specialization, even if it's upgraded to advanced.

Oh well i got what you mean.
They said they will make it into the game that you will have a little customizationg for your commander like a little better cannon, or a little better anti-air, or a little better fabricator, or maybe +500 starting energy

Server mods are now in testing, and each commander is a separate unit which could (in theory) have separate stats.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/coming-up-soon-server-mods.59738/

A Commander commands his army. He doesn't run into the fight with the rest of his units. That's the easiest way for a game over.

What I mean isn't to mod each commander, what I mean is to install/upgrade any commander to fit an existing role. So when it's possible to add/remove status effects on the commander then I might look into it.

Yes I agree, I do not mean that these specialization's should make the commander to a super unit, just that he becomes better at a certain role, and worse on another. So it's not straight upgrades, it's sidegrades.

Unfortunately that violates the "What you see is what you get" principle uber is following for PA.

Differences between commanders, abilities and what not have been discussed before but never came to pass, which is a shame because with the sheer scale of commanders it will be a really hard thing with lots of "Debt" to do later on for Uber but we'll see.

Mike

What do you mean?

I don't think you understand, I don't want to make the commanders different, I just want to make it possible to install an optional sidegrade for the commanders during a match.

Uber has a design rule called "What you see is what you get", it rules out sidegrades and upgrades because if someone simply glanced at your army (or in this case your comm) they wouldn't be able to tell what upgrades/sidegrades it has, and wouldn't be able to react accordingly.

I see, well the are fixes for that. Such as adding a model to the commander. But it would fit every commander, and might be hard to stop... sad, I just hate how useless the commander is right now.

One of the options I like is making a Commander reminiscent of Total Annihilation's. For the uninitiated:

• Very low health. Most T2 Bots have more health than this guy.
• Agile, but relatively slow. Barely faster than T2 Heavy Tanks, but capable of climbing up the sides of mountains easily. Only outmaneuvered by Spiderbots, which could climb up vertical surfaces.
• Fastest builder in the game. Because PA uses a different energy/metal relationship than TA, their efficiency values cannot be fairly compared, but the Commander always built faster than both T1 and T2 Engineers by a significant margin.
• Poor basic weapon. The Commander had a Small Laser in his building arm, it was equivalent to a single T1 Tower. So it could take out scouts and with sustained fire a single tank or two, but against a task force it was useless.
• Short-range WMD. The most important part, otherwise known as the Disintegrator Gun, when wisely use the D-Gun could rightfully destroy an entire T2 Army. The weapon caused a series of small explosions in a line towards the target location, anything caught in this line would be instantly destroyed, no matter what it was; be it a T2 Factory, a group of T1 Tanks, or even another Commander. The only unit capable of surviving a hit was the CORE Krogoth, which had the equivalent cost of several hundred T2 units and was the equivalent of SupCom1's Megalith, except bigger. Even then, the Krogoth could only take two hits before going down, and the D-Gun had about a 1-second reload time. Probably the most valuable part of the D-Gun was that it pierced terrain; you could fire it through the sides of mountains.
• Cloaking. While PA doesn't have cloaking, it should be mentioned that for a high energy cost (consumed one T2 Fusion Generator's worth of energy), the Commander could become invisible to Line of Sight, but still visible on radar. In TA, this meant that the Commander could not be identified differently from any other unit, so if you hid him inside a base, the enemy wouldn't be able to find him.

TA's Commander was a unique unit, one which had no equivalent. PA's Commander looks more like a Slammer with good range, AA capabilities and a shiny sparkly Nanolathe.

Edit: To be a bit more on topic, I think Uber mentioned in a very old post that Commanders were originally going to have "Special Abilities" or "Unique Weapons" or something like that, with the rules being that a Commander would never modify his army's stats and only his own stats. But as Mike said, this seems to have been scrapped for the sake of WYSIWYG and production time/costs.

I know full well what you meant, it's different mechanics but it's all the same principle in the end.

Mike

Actually all commanders use the base commander for programming but it'll work if you copied the base comm programming and replaced each comms with it.

I haven't done any unit modding yet, but I believe that the base gives you defaults, and then the derived unit can override anything of interest.

The only exception is the Commanders and the naval buildings, naval buildings use the same .json as the land based one, they don't even have a .json in their files, only .papa model files, the commanders have .jsons but I don't think I could find any health or metal count etc..m in their .jsons I'm pretty sure they all just follow the base atm.

Edit: the only reason I know this is because I made a server mod that has triple health for every unit and building, still don't know how to implement it though. :/

You might have to add the properties yourself.

You would, I'd just copy the coding from the base commander, put it in each commander, change the name to the respective names, and edit the values how you like.

build comm shells like exoskeletons:


t2 bot shell: speed buff and better vision +t2 bot building arm( can build t2 bot factory and t2 buildings)

t2 tank shell: hp buff and better uber cannon +t2 tank building arm

t2 air shell: get 2-3 flak cannon and faster moving speed +t2 air building arm

t2 naval: slower mooving speed in land normal in water some t2 naval cannon( 1Leviathan shootgun+1flak)+t2 naval building arm

no upgrades only comm vehicles
and what you see.....