About the upcoming PTE balance changes

Scouting late game should be hard. It's what makes the late game last so long. Most folks dont realize they have the resources to kill an enemy commander within two minutes of spotting him. So they don't scout for it, they just keep attacking the enemy's infrastructure.

Good point. Just hoping the don't waste the t2 fighter model cause liked it

I have a question:
"Yup, infernos find bomb bots delicious"
did you guys try to flank, i mean since infernos are soo slow and turn rate is slow and bomb bots soo fast they shoulde totally be abel to flank no prob and kill em?

infernos have a practically instantaneous turret speed. But in principle, you could go around the infernos. With the small vision radius, this advantage is completely negated. It makes them quite balanced, imho.

Tactical missiles sound interesting.

I played a few games of the latest PTE build, and as an "average joe" sort of player, I'd say I love it. Way more fun than the current main build, and lots of good, creative ideas for units.

I actually feel that I have several valid choices regarding tactics, and I love how T2 vehicles are becoming more specialised, such as the incredibly slow turret turn rate of the Leveler.

Good ideas all around, I'm actually getting psyched again for playing PA.

Edit: If it was up to me, I'd keep the T2 fighter model and use it instead of the T1 model. It looks cooler, and it'd be a shame to let it go to waste.

Or to make it more of a specialization you could add it back, make it a bit more expensive than t1 fighter, make it invisible to radar, but same stats otherwise.

I am really really hoping they use the advanced fighter model for a suborbital fighter that can fight air and orbital but is beaten for cost by t1 air.

I hope Uber experiments with increasing the health of all units by roughly 2x.

It works extremely well on the realm balance mod and is tons of fun.

It also doesn't increase the length of the entire match. The only factors I've seen that determine a match's length is the player's strategy and the size of the planet/system.

Point being. 2x the health is a ton of fun. Increases the strategy involved by a ton.

Where can I get this mod?

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-the-realm-community-balance-mod.58942/

Naval and Orbital hasn't been balanced. But ground works pretty well and air is mostly well.

Check out this thread to learn about the mod: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/playing-the-realms-balance-mod.60502/

There are some pretty drastic changes.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/mods-server-side-mods-update.57013/
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/guide-on-how-to-play-on-pte.60594/

Why the sad face? I been playing pte for ages, however I tend to avoid mods for the most part due to the issues between builds.....

Anyways thanks for the link to you're thread, very informative, I'll give it a go in the next few days when I have time

the thing is PTE only started supporting mods one build ago and as soon as it happened I changed my mod's thread title to include "server mods" and updated it with info where i put Realm mod in pole position.

I added the PTE explanation thread today as an extension to my mods thread.

i'm sad because of how my threads seem not to get noticed despite my efforts. oh well...

*sends giant hug*​

​

So about the possibility of units having more health...

I feel what we want is not do with health. Its to do with not having your units vanish instantly in combat, and having the time and capability to retreat, send in reinforcements, flank, etc. in combat.

Part of the way PA differs from other RTS games is its principle of "more". An army isn't made up of a few units with many hit points, it made up of MANY UNITS with a few hit points. That's really cool.

So, I would like more emphasis in the game on the interesting tactics mentioned above. The Realms balance mod does this by giving units much more health (well, t1) and a bit more speed. Is this the only way? Probably not.

One of the main reasons this sort of thing doesn't happen in the current live build (and so far the PTE, because no Stingers), is because the MAIN unit in the game (the ANT) is pretty slow, can't be retreated (turning around in combat is suicide), and doesn't have massive amounts of health when facing other Ants.

Its also pretty good to control individual units still, to give you an advantage in small battles, and because attacking from all angles is good. This helps exentuate the " low HP" of armies, because the army is only 1 unit, so they feel more like paper. Encouraging small groups of units to be used, a bit like how its good to have 3 or 4 stingers in a group right now, could help with this.

I agree.

We want engagements to last longer and for overall strategy and unit composition to matter more.

We want to be able to attack and fallback, and actually fallback without just losing everything.

1. For engagements to last longer, you increase the army hp to damage ratio and so i think the realm did make the best choice given their objective. I personally don't find engagements are too short. Though hey if people find the realm balance mod more fun, i'd be the last to take that away from them.
   
2. For overall strategy and tactical movement, I would argue that the problem people are having is not with hp or the game lacking the tools and balance numbers for tactically moving units. It's that people don't know how to micro, don't want to micro, and then find that they lose against armies which are positioned better and in better concaves of fire. Also, i think most people are slow to disengage. There is a window before it starts snowballing exponentially harder, and most people are only really dealing with l2p (myself included sometimes), not balance.
   
   You absolutely need to micro with the current state of uber pathing because the surface area you get from it is just so bad especially when it comes to trees. I would not judge this aspect and say something in the balance numbers needs to change untill pathing is improved. With two people who don't micro, it all comes down to a coin toss of who the pathing god's favoured at the time.
   
   Alot of people try to doom attack in bad engagements with tanks in long columns, without infernos infront, without infernos at all, with less than 3 tanks in a group, without knowing where their opponent has positioned his tanks, and then wonder why they snowball to a loss later on.
   
   Tanks move the same speed as other tanks, so faster tanks do not necessarily result in anything really different. Increasing turn speed from currently i think is bad because you head towards not needing to think about what you're doing. Retreating should not be super forgiving of mistakes, and i should need to think far ahead when trying to dodge things like uber cannons. There are always two sides of the coin, why should you not reward the winning player for the strategy/tactics he employed to get the edge?
   
   I would argue that the game of strategy and army movement starts even before the engagement both with build orders, macro, and positioning. Radar is cheap.
   
3. Unit composition.
   Burnt custard is right that once you engage in certain situations, it's very hard to justify retreat. That is, unless you have infernos in your composition to meat shield your ***. I'll not really ever understand why people don't build 1 inferno for atleast every 3 tanks in the start, and then 1 for every 6 against pure ant (or atleast 1 more than your opponent if he also uses infernos). It's just so much more metal efficient for snowballing ant fights.
   
   The main problem with unit composition right now is that grenadier and bots in general are crap, not any kind systematic balance flaw like too low hp.