Unit veterancy

Not subjective. In the majority of matches, unit clumps are not in the thousands. Unit blobs are normally at a hundred or less.

In a big match, players will maybe get 2 or 3 thousand units. All spread out across planets and stuff.

I have. I guess you haven't been reading my posts.

Unit veterancy encourages players to focus on micro. It rewards them for controlling individual units or groups of units and keeping them alive and whatnot. Does't take a lot of thinking to understand how veterancy encourages micro.

Not WYSIWYG? If I can't look at a strategic icon and know how much damage it does, then that's not WYSIWYG. Uber is going on the principle of a unit has X capabilities. Always. Having units deal different damage based on levels, upgrades, ranks, gravity, etc means I don't know what a unit is capable of. That is not WYSIWYG.

It's not in the engine yet, but it will be. It's a confirmed addition.

Jeez...looks like I started a flame war. The idea of adding another barrel was just an example of what could eliminate the problem. But seriously, if you lose an army because you sent them into a battery of 5 double laser towers, thinking they were single laser towers well too f*****g bad. That's happened to me countless times on other RTS games including this and FAF and it's just part of the game.

The thing is that vet improvements should be very small, like a 10% improvement on firerate for something like a pelter or holkins. It doesn't make it suddenly a game-ending unit, don't be ridiculous. If you send an army towards a pelters don't complain that you will lose units. The idea here is to increase survivability, not change the inevitable. The only time that vet will actually change the winner in a skirmish is on the small scale i.e you send 5 Bolos instead of 10...hardly something to get your knickers in a knot over. Veterancy is meant to make the inevitable harder to reach. For example, if you see 100 bolos coming to your unvetted base and you only manage to kill 30 bolos before you get overrun, how is killing 50 bolos due to veterancy upgrades going to be a big deal? Veterancy adds more depth to how players must tactically destroy defences, not just try to plow through them with units on *Rally Here* commands. As I said, HP shouldn't be part of this especially since we already cannot see the HP values of units.

Brian, your argument that you cannot see an extra barrel from strategic icons etc. is not enough to discount veterancy altogether. You can make it easier to spot vet units by giving them the ability to sport a secondary colour both in icons and in model (Great way to bring back Secondary colours yay!).

WYSIWYG is not against veterancy upgrades, only against HP increases. By your logic, the idea that laser towers can destroy units beyond their opponents LOS means that you don't know whether those units were destroyed by laser, double or triple laser towers, is something that is extremely problematic and game-breaking since you don't see what killed you! Oh no! ...
No, veterancy does not mean you have to micro more. You're simply letting your structures do the work, you don't have to choose upgrades for your vetted units, because they'll be based on predetermined upgrades ie. +5% fire rate, +5% range or whatever. I actually think a HP regen rate would be cool and it could also be small. For example, a holkins could get 1HP/second. Imagine your holkins is damaged down to 700/1500 HP (1500 is max HP for holkins according to PA Matches), and it is not taking damage for the next 10 minutes (quite a while), that means in that 10 minutes it will gain 600 HP to be 1300/1500 HP. This is not something that is game-breaking or unfair. In fact, maybe all units in the game should get some form of health regeneration if they gain veterancy, maybe even smaller than 1HP per second. If you don't use a group of damaged veteran Bolos for instance (50/250HP) for 10 minutes, maybe they should be able to heal to an extent that after 10 minutes they can take 1 more shot from a dox or whatever. However, currently this would be currently useless since almost all the units on the game die in like 2 shots from any units but if we get 2x or even 4x health values as mentioned on the 'top 7 thread' (which I support) then maybe we can revisit health regeneration for veteran combat units. I'm not going to talk about unit veterancy any more, just focus on structures since unit vet other than health regen is blatantly stupid when you have 100s and 1000s of units.

If you want to look at something like range increases, I agree that you wouldn't be able to determine where they can target, say with a holkins. Currently, you can get a fab to select Holkins build, then drag it over to the enemy holkins and compare the ranges. You can make an informed decision and say, hmm yes, my units will be safe from the enemy holkins if they guard this mex cluster back here. Sure, a problem would be that if that veteran holkins had 5% more range, and this could potentially change the result (your units guarding the mex cluster could be targetted). Although this can easily be handled. You can see the projected range for your standard holkins if you select it in build right? Why not add concentric circles which project the range for the veteran Holkins? (Btw I'm a fan of a 3 rank vet system in most games, but I'd be more than happy with just a 1 rank vet system just like TA, which would mean you only need 1 more circle in another colour meaning Veteran range or whatever).

If you're too lazy to read my full response, I talk about:

1. The small difference veterancy should make. It's about survivability, not changing the result of who wins a skirmish.

2. Why WYSIWYG is not a problem for what veterancy upgrades SHOULD BE. ie. not max HP bonuses or anything you can't intuitively know about a particular defence structure.

3. Why micro is not an issue.

4. Very Slow Health regeneration for veteran units if we had x2 or x4 more HP than we currently have.

5. Other bonuses like range and it's relationship to WYSIWYG.

Yeah, a 10% increase is actually quite a lot.

Needs to exist in mod hooks.

Doesn't need to complicate the vanilla game with hidden bonuses not easily seen.

at the very least the hooks.

At the very least, nothing less would be acceptable, for sure.

Also, that becomes the "doorway to moba mods" considering it wouldn't be a moba without a system of leveling.

true.

I bet a moba on a planet where you can spread out in all directions and each nexus is on an opposed pole wold be really fun.

hey.. perhaps the next multi-billion dollar hit?

It would be a fun mod, let's not get too far ahead of ourself.

it's an inside joke.

Moba-style was born in these exact circumstances : a mod on an rts and now lol is the highest grossing game of all time (5,284,319,973.58€ in a single year) . who am I kidding, you know this already.

Yeah, but it was technically a warcraft mod no? Or was it a starcraft arcade mod? Either way, yeah I knew.

Mobas are rage inducing. I hate them. I didn't mind a shooter like a moba but even it was pretty bad. I hear C&C was being made, and EA wanted it to be a Moba, before shutting 'er down. That is what Mobas do, they do what "grundig style" and "call me maybe" and "military shooters" do to the market. They get a huge popularity sure, but I can't help but question what people are literally trying to do with them, like it is a 5 million person mistake. Like the whole "world is flat" thing.

warcraft 3 was an rts. i'm not a fan of moba either, contrary to you i don't get much rage from it, I'm rather passive and loose alot, I don't quite have the mindset for learning their universal encyclopedia's worth of lore so that I know what build is good. I also can't reign in my urges to attack, when evidently it's all about striking last. I also hate the redundancy of it all, it feels like a chore. and if you're not winning you're not getting any fun out of it because it punishes you too hard.

I also hate that (in the case of LOL) for a professional game they have not fixed tenfolds of power vs. power vs. power case resolution issues. As a result you get heaps of in-game glitches and some of the powers resolve one way one time and another way another ; when the base rule is that they are supposed to be static case senerio = outcome for all of them. they just never have the time at the rate they are introducing the new characters, to fix the bugs you get when facing them of with the most ancient ones. Problem that I ran into alot since my main was Miss Fortune, one of the oldest characters there is. and boy... is she freaking bugged.

Last thing I wish to highlight ...lol's community is utter shite. by grouping up the world's masses, you get an indistinguishable homogeneous mix of the dumbest person in the list. I litteraly have not played ONE lol game (and i max leveled an American and a European account) where everyone didn't report each other at the end of the game or at least threaten to or call for it during the game.

when you come from a community like gpgnet's/faf's this can only leave you feeling disappointed

so yea, moba, definitely not my cup of tea. and I'd say I am the curious type and I do try and give a genuine shot to everything but I don't think I'd try it again.

I would however understand that there be a moba mod since I respect that (a huge majority of people) seem to love it.

In that regard I like street fighter. Things work 100% of the time, if they don't then they were improperly timed or something, because it is 100% invincible from this time to this time. I had close failures and close wins out of edge cases, but you know what everything does. If it travels fullscreen in 2 seconds and invincible for 1 second, and someone is nearly fullscreen away, you can at least attempt to clear the distance in a punish, and it's real close but you know it was "the same as always".

No exp. This isn't final fantasy, this is Planetary Annihilation. Tons of units dying non-stop.

Kill counts are fine, but they can't effect anything

Besides everything else already said, I don't like veterancy because it doesn't make sense for the context of the game. We are fighting with robotic machines; why would they suddenly become stronger by killing other machines? Even if you make the case that they have learning algorithms and could become "smarter", that still wouldn't explain being suddenly able to go beyond the limits of their machinery by shooting faster or dealing more damage.

The game isn't done yet. I expect the unit counts and performance to both increase dramatically. That said with tons of units it doesn't make sense to have vet. system. Also it promotes micro, which this game is aimed at macro. Might I ask how it makes the game more fun?

For me its just a no. If people want to mod it in fine.

There is one exception to this. In galactic war it does seem like it might be beneficial and make sense to have the commander unit gain something for more victories, but certainly not any other unit. However, for this I think with a bit more tweaking the techs you gain accomplish the task.

You can say the same thing about ANY other RTS. Why does it have to make 100% perfect sense. Even if the units were human, why would they be doing more damage and have increased range? If anything it makes more sense with this.