The commander is the ultimate boat destroying machine! I was facing off against someone in the water, I was winning hands down until he walked his commander into my fleet. I was not expecting the commander to stand up to 20+ t1 ships. In fact, he didn't just stand up to them, he bashed right through them all! and then destroyed 3 shipyards before my commander managed to walk there and take on the enemy commander himself. Basically my T1 ships did nothing, I had about 20 and they took off about 1/4 of his health before they were all dead. The ships have a slight... slight range advantage but they cannot kite the commander as the ships are so slow and so large they all block each other and make things worse if you try and kite. I understand that a commander should be able to defend himself vs a boat rush... but... this is crazy. In fact, I find boats are quite annoying in general as they are so large but only as powerful as a T1 tank. Perhaps they should be scalled up, more power, more armour but equally more cost. so that you don't need 100 boats to do anything that all block each other when trying to turn etc. I also think boats need their physical size reduced a bit as most planets don't have a tonne of water on them and you run out of room fast when you have a water start because ship yards and boats all take up so much room.
Commanders also are REALLY good at destroying aircraft. They need either a boost to their ground laser, or a nerf to their missiles and torpedos.
I don't mind their power vs air so much as air is an option no matter where you start but if you're on land or in the water then you can't chose the other boats or tanks. But that said, if it should all be balanced then he needs a nerf not a buff or commander rushes will become the norm again.
I want the land weapon to be like @burntcustard 's laser from his boom bot mod. (mostly joking, but it is quite cool)
Is this some egalitarian instinct? Who's to say that the Commander ought be equally effective at destroying all types of mobile enemy units? I mean, there's no reason to change the ground attack laser solely because his other weapons are more effective at their roles. Inequality is not, intrinsically, wrongly ordered balance.
Why is it that every time I look at what's going on with Vanilla " balance ", I see steps further and further distancing itself from the game I used to love?
Dude, i heard its WAAAAY worse then what your describing now Darac. I believe that if you would have added 3 leviathan and 3 stingrays to the navy fleet the commander would have still wrecked it easymode.He might have needed some extra walls to defend, but the commander would still win bigtime vs a mixxed T1 and T2 navy. Also, tanks eat T1 navy for lunch. They just crawl to the shore and wreck them. I think navy isn't seen as part of the game balance wise.
Make ships way more powerful, many such problems go away. Navy should be very strong, especially given its situational...ness. I think it would be much more okay for ships to be OP than say T2 vehicles, simply because they find such limited use. I think Uber should do a huge, blanket boost to navy like they did with the commander and AA tower. Since that's apparently how we do balancing in PA.
Thinking about it, maybe Uber are actually being rather clever with this.... PA is meant to be a platform, and *many* players want a more TA like game (as that's where many of us have come from). Uber look intent on delivering a very different experience (not saying if that's good or bad, just a thing) whilst the true TA die-hards are now busy delivering a complete rebalance mod that is TA like. Point is, if their balance was good enough, you probably wouldn't see the need for RCBM (same for the Statera guys), and I think for PA to be successful long term it needs to be a 'platform' and mods are central to that. Either that or I've been watching way to many conspiracy movies lately!
That is a lot of reverse psychology going on there xD Right now I do not care for PA as a game anymore but my interest in PAaaP[tm] is still going strong. Actually, at this point I would actually prefer Uber delivering more mod hooks and engine functionality rather than concentrating on PA gameplay. As such vanilla balance does not worry me too much - the result might be far from perfectly balanced but it will be most likely serviceable and fun. Which is all Uber need to get new players hooked and what they rightly focus on.
Btw one little question... why 2 'aa' in the middle? I got... "Planetary Annihilation Application Platform" but I can't figure out what the additional A is for?
I just want to highlight something that I mentioned that covers both vanilla and the modding community. Naval units are super annoying to use at the moment because of how they move. I'm not sure how easy that is to mod and I'd like to see that fixed first and foremost. They power relative to other units is an easy fix tweaking numbers and any modder can do that. But the naval path finding, turning and blocking each other is a major issue that need to be resolved.
This is partially a numbers balance thing, and partially a lot of gameplay issues. Ships are slower than commanders. They smashed commanders when they outranged him and outspeed him. Ships still beat commanders outright when they outranged him because they at least superceded his presence, he either fled or died so ships territory pushed commander safe area. Ships being the only offensive unit, and slower than commanders, means a commander can micro through ships that are practically stationary structures themselves. Statera probably doesn't have this problem. Lots of small cheap seabass can swarm him, they are small and cheapish and fast and fairly damaging, they at least stand a chance the same ants do. Lots of sunfish can harass him if he is on land by shoreline or at least cushion ships to get him, which ships are a tad bit faster and should be at least AS FAST as commanders. My opinion was always that vanilla needs more naval variety, something that is general purpose combat and raiding speed, maybe 2 or 3 roles, while ships are "heavy enforcers" that come in like slow moving turrets and own their area. Tweaking turn rate sort of fixes pathing. Their large box always pushes themselves around, can't be helped for that size. What fixes a LOT is the removal of ship wreckage. Ones that die don't bring the rest of them to full stall.
They're just too damn big. Without a model overhaul I'm afraid that we're stuffed when it comes to making Naval functional.
