A proposal for the implication of "mega" units

My problem with the "super" unit is not it's size, cost, or damage, but rather the "one size fits all" approach. You want something that can survive nukes, wade through artillery, and ignore bombers. If you have a unit that can do all of this why would you possibly waste your time with another unit. Igncom1's "distill it" post was spot on.

I would like to compare Super/EXP/Mega/etc units to Tier 2 naval. Leviathans are huge, expensive, and lethal, and they are fine. The Leviathan fills a very specific role, it is coastal artillery, and they kind of suck at everything else. You can't win a game building Leviathans alone. Even if you mix Stingrays with them for the AA you still have a very situationally limited force because of their terrain/layer restrictions.

If you took away the Leviathan's terrain restrictions and let is role up onto land it would instantly become a BS mega unit capable of winning games. Why build anything else? Building a few AA support units for you rolling wall of Leviathans does not count as a mixed army.

With that in mind, I'm 100% cool with adding some large role specific units. Orbital AA, Orbital Anti-Nuke, Orbital Long Range (anti-anchor), I want these things sooo bad, but not even one of these allows you to take over a planet without depending heavily on other units to get the job done. I want them because we lack units that can fulfill these roles now.

Even if they are large expensive units like (water only)Leviathans they remain balanced because they don't replace your need to build an army. For that same reason I am against any mobile Orbit-to-ground unit that out performs the SXX, I don't want to add even one. I like the current anchor, but it only works because it is stationary. If it could move we wouldn't need any other unit and we're back to my problem with the super units.

I feel like the case for mega units is based on the idea that players want a mega bot, so they look for rolls it could fill. "I want this unit so bad I don't care what it does, just add it!" is a backwards development plan. Instead we should look at "I have a serious problem with the current state of interplanetary assaults, teleports are too vulnerable and enemy air patrols are too effective." Then we can look at solutions to each of these problems individually and find novel ways to fill them without invalidating the roles of other units in the game.

Question did people only build fat-boys in supcom? spidermonkey's? Soulrippers? ...not really, the same goes with everything else, maybe a particular exp/mega unit precluded somewhat a lesser unit that filled a similar role (scathis trumps artillery of all tiers for instance), but that was why in that game they had several such units, and no-one built all of them except in a fun muck about game, so other units still had their roles to play and were used, at least by me but I am and was by no means a solid player, so I can't say for certain, but I've never seen army-less xperimentals in any of the uploaded you-tube replays. Now game enders like the super nuke, the mavor and the scathis to a lesser extent on account of its lack of reach were a different story but their role was much like a the haley correct? Fatboys and their ilk still had a role to play and so did the units they built or what was the point of the factory? What am I getting at? Simply that it is almost inconceivable for a mega-unit to preclude all units roles and be the main unit built short of a major brain malfunction of the dev/modder implementing it. I also completely disagree that the leviathan would be totally unstoppable if it could walk, it would be slower, more cumbersome far less likely to make as big a splash as it would in water, this by my supcom2 experience of walking battleships - their use was almost entirely situational and fire-support.

never saw lategames without them ...

Actually, I've seen far too many rounds of supcom 1 where the entire focus of the late game became spamming experimentals. Tiers 1-3 were just road bumps designed to slow down the construction of more T4.

what? says who?

Shouldn't the games have been over by that stage, or the winner more or less decided? i never got more than two experimental before I either won or lost...or none. I believe that the problem there was more to do with the tier system. XPs added variety to that game that PA somewhat lacks, it doesnt need such units I agree, but it does need something more and I do like big robots, tanks, and flying aircraft carriers... In supcom 2 the xp spam was far more pronounced than what I think your getting at but they were more like teir 3.5, but even in that game the ratio was pretty close to 100:1 more or less depending on the focus of the faction, playstyle of the player, so I do find it difficult to imagine t3 units being speedbumps and not much else as at that ratio the megaunit is purely support.

edit: unless those 100 units are mobile sheild gens...

I believe there were some large bots in unmodded Total Annihilation and modded Total Annihilation. I would like to see something like this as well cause it would make games very interesting.

And so its good to just remove units so that we only play with t1 and t2 instead?

In some ways it could be, heck, LABWars was pretty damn fun back in the day and it's unit selection was very limited.

It's not about how many tiers there are, but what's in them and how they interact.

Mike

Knight nailed this one. T3 and T4 add nothing to the game if they invalidate the techs below. In SupCom they most definitely did exactly that. Instead of a 4 tier game you had a 2 tier game focused on Tiers 3 and 4. Honestly, I think 2 tiers is the wrong approach. T2 shouldn't be the "better tier" it should be a variety of units that compliment the abilities of T1 instead of replacing them.

This guy.

Nearly every match I've played involved at least one player building an Aeon T4 hax reactor thing for unlimited resources, once it was finished there were hundreds of super units on the field and usually nothing else.

As I've explained, my problem is not having a gripe against large units. I have a gripe against any unit that risks invalidating the roles of lower tech units. I love huge units, but don't mistake that for a "mega" unit. I enjoyed superweapons and super units in Zero Hour, but I also played with "limit superweapons" and my mod treated hero units and mega units as superweapons. You couldn't spam them so they couldn't replace your army. As a result they couldn't invalidate any other unit.

listen I have no problem with you being against t4 but avoid telling lies about supcom (faf in particular), it's just going to force me to contradict you.

so putting aside the whole for or against t3/t4 debate, here's a future notice : they do not invalidate the lower tiers.

...try winning a game solely with t4. are they going to do your air? are they going to stop t3 bombers sniping your commander? t2 bombers? even t1?

Are they going to stop ships pummeling your shores? are they going to stop a TML strike bearing down on you? a teleportation attack? a nuke?

T4 stop absolutely none of those things. Nor is there an Exp in supcom that can survive a nuke.

get your facts straight.

sure t3 made t2 somewhat less efficient, but on same mass spent they were almost on equal grounds. you're probably not taking into account faf balance and that's your issue. know that a group of percies can take down a galactic colossus or an ythotha and can in that respect be much more valuable then them.

please please please; to avoid setting me off, refrain from claiming things about a game you have erroneous beliefs about. You're spreading falsehoods about it and I can't just stand and watch.

Don't over-simplify things. The idea is less that you can ONLY use T4s and more so that Specific Experimentals do tasks much better than thier T3 Equivalents.

Also Most T4s can survive Nucks, in the exact same way that your ACU can......by moving out of the way.

Mike

so they can't survive nukes, no need to dance around the facts if, they're anywhere within the blast they die. Let's make it clear for all those who could be confused by not being exact.

As stated above I can't really see what those certain tasks could be that their mass worth of t3 couldn't accomplish.

they are a choice.

they could, they may, they can, they are not the only outlet for any given situation.

Oh don't do that, I was perfectly clear. Don't muddy this discussion by trying to say I didn't say things I did clearly say.

Of course they're not the ONLY option, just that there are times when they are the best option.

And lets not forget that this applies to every tier, not just Experimentals.

Once you have a T2 Factory, there is no point in it making T1 units, and once you have a T3 Factory there is no point in it making T2 units.

Mike

that's my point there is never a time where they are the best option. They are just a simpler choice. it requires more talent to weild other units such as t3 or support commander, but it wields better, faster, more efficient results with less casualties.

watch pros matches, you'll see that they choose t3 over t4 :

t4 is the noob choice, you never see more t4 units than in noob matches.

As for "muddying" the discussion I can't see what I'm doing wrong here, I'm rectifying pendaelose on what he claimed about supcom, you're saying I oversimplified things and claiming that pendaelose was right because ...hey ...dodging? as if that qualifies it for "surviving a nuke" as if exps and coms are unique to dodging. Don't deny that to someone on the exterior who has never played the game you're painting a misleading tableau, and seemingly purposefully so to push your agenda. I'm here on behalf of the truth. .... hold on...

I can't make this stuff up. these are your words. You wanna play that game, fine, but I can deal with trying to say i'm muddying something. I'll be there taking your accusations and making the best of it by not letting it get to me.

I know I'm backed by the truth, and if I'm the last guy sanding protecting it, screw it, I'll take anything you want to throw in my face.

Except that's not strictly the result of T4s being bad, in fact, it is mostly a case of that when you have two highly and equally skilled players how and when they Tech up is VERY nuanced and most games tend to end before they get to the later T3/T4 stages.

In fact there was a very good example of a steady progress waaaaayyyyyy back in the day when 2 really good players played a ranked match on Finn's Revenge that escalated all the way to the T4 Stage.....but not before they traded bases and went through T2 and T3.

tatsujb, why are you bringing pendaelose into this, you made the comment at me based on my comment. Focus man.

I wasn't lying with my comment, Anything Mobile(including many T4s) can "survive a Nuck by moving that would have destroyed them had they not moved, I'm not sure why you're focusing so much on this.

End of the day, in a game about scale, how easy something to use is an important factor to consider because it DOES come into play, even for the really good players sometimes. But it's not really fair to just focus on the Good players, because they'll be good regardless, it's important to consider the casual players because they do make up the greater majority of the game's player base. If casuals always latch onto the same unit/strategy because it's the most effective I'd say that's a fair problem that needs a solution and shouldn't be dismissed because they're "noobs".

Mike

How about limit the number of mega units that can be built? Have them require a particular factor for a particular experimental (extremely expensive of course) with that factory being dormant after it makes it's single unit, (and if the factory is destroyed, perhaps the experimental goes crazy)

Then give various experimental s hard weaknesses (eg no AA, show up further on radar, enormous ongoing costs in energy, potential to be nuts and attack the friendly force) Make them truly experimental in that they aren't fully developed and have problems.

I personally would like them, though I think PA is going to introduce them in DLC.

Give them a reason to be in the game other than them being bigger and better. For instance, make it a teleportable unit with a single use teleport capability. This lets it invade, but it's not coming back... Lets you build an invasion.

How about a slow mega-bot that can stride across lava or oceans, is enormously tough, but doesn't necessarily have all that big DPS, something that can attack from a different angle however

I certainly agree that mega-units shouldn't' make previous tiers obsolete, instead they should add niche capabilities that supplement them.

Mega-units ARE fun, there is not denying that, I think most people enjoy them, but they need to be in addition to not instead of previous tiers.

Limits are a no-go, but otherwise I feel this could all be much more simply stated as "Stop trying to design SuperMegaExperimentals and instead focus on Unit Roles/Mechanics that simply require a "Large"Unit to function."

The terms Super Units, Megabots and Experimentals are just arbitrary labels, on thier own they don't mean anything and we should be relying on how they've been used in other games to define things in PA.

The Easy example is Transports, If you want a large 40 unit transport you just make sure it's scaled and balanced according to that, no need to incorporate gimmicks and such simply because it's a 40 unit transport.

Mike