[Discuss] Total Annihilation's Spirit in Planetary Annihilation - Updated Page #6 05/08/14

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Awesome! Me too I'll have to get it once I'm back home ^^

Necroing this thread to add some more cool stuff to it

Terrain:

Fighting between lava pools:


Gunships shooting troops perched on cliffs:


Fighting and building in valleys:


Bases built atop hills for natural defenses:


Wrecks of bots creating a unique obstructive terrain:


Economy:

Reclaimable buildings - this map had few Metal Spots (only found in public parks), so reclaiming was the primary source of metal for armies. Could be cool for Metal Planets?


Reclaiming is easier when wrecks are more durable and tell you their worth in Metal.

Nice screen shot of Desert Triad in there I see... can't tell what the other maps are, maybe Painted Desert for one of the other desert biome maps...?

Not sure mid-teens of the Arm Campaign (I love the narration!).

Not sure how much of your original post is still relevant so I'll just reply to the bits I'm interested in

Terrain:
I'd love to see some of the effects added. Things like moving slower on different terrains, movement speed being affected by gradient, etc - all sound like fun. How they'd actually play out I don't know but the principle sounds good.

Terrain already blocks certain shots, but having range increase when you're on a mountain would be cool. I think line of sight should only be an issue though when NONE of your units have vision .. even now you could broadcast your enemy's exact position to your entire army. In the future with these super-advanced robots, it should be even easier for your entire army to know what each single unit knows. That is, unless the enemy deploys signal jammers, and PA doesn't have those yet (maybe it should? But they should give away their own position while concealing everything else in range). Of course, if none of your units are on the far side of that mountain then you shouldn't see past it ..

I'd also love to see more variety in the terrain itself - ridges, cliffs, plateaus, valleys, mountains ... I can't see them being added anytime soon though, without a massive overhaul of the current planet generation system, storage mechanics, etc.

Not sure I agree about forest being more obstructive than it currently is, either. I've seen a picture a few times lately showing the relative scales of the units. In that picture the Commander's about 15m tall, and the smallest units are 4-5m tall. I'm pretty sure even the small ones could push your average tree over pretty easily, simply from their weight advantage. That is, unless there's thickets of Redwoods around However, if you're talking about forest restricting vision of ground units .. that could make sense ...

Economy:
I like the idea of metal being scarcer and reclaiming being more useful. When it comes to power though, I don't see much point in TA's variety. Again you're talking about an advanced civilisation; they've invented a way of generating power which can be dropped anywhere, including water, and is cheap and efficient. Whether it's true or not I've always thought of it as something like fusion. If you've already got that, why bother with solar / wind / thermal / tidal energy? You wouldn't unless you could get better energy vs cost. We already have orbital solar arrays and I'm not even sure they make sense.

Units:
I'd love to see them being much more durable, though you'd also have to make them relatively much more expensive. At the moment they feel like they're disposable, and they shouldn't be if they're intelligent / sentient in their own right.

I don't like the idea of units missing either. Again .. advanced civilisation, highly intelligent. They should be precise, accurate. That's not to say you shouldn't be able to dodge but there's a big difference between missing your target and it dodging away.

Logically most units should be able to shoot air, especially most bots since they're generally more humanoid. Units with guns, missiles, lasers - most should shoot air. Artillery shouldn't. However I also like the idea of different unit types having different priority lists ... artillery preferring enemies that the rest of the army can't reach, units that specialise in anti-air / anti-tank / anti-bot, etc.


These are just my thoughts in reply to the OP; I already love PA, I think it's an amazing game and I'm impressed with what Uber have done so far. I'm really looking forward to seeing what else they do with it

I edited my OP to try and make it more relevant/white out things which no longer applied, whilst reducing the word-count

Forests are now obstructive (they weren't when I posted my OP). I agree we should be able to force our way through them (I think Infernos seem best suited to this role).
Redwood forests and alien plants would be awesome!

I agree with your line-of-sight suggestions.
I also think we should have some sort of cloaking, both from Radar and direct LOS.

Missing =/= Dodging for projectiles. Slow enough to dodge and see, fast enough to hit most of the time and reward getting point-blank with a target.
[Edit: Now that I think about it, it's not so much that all projectiles are more likely to miss, it's just that TA's variation is more obvious than PA's;

• Lasers which don't miss.
• Rapid-fire energy ball streams which usually don't miss unless the target is fast.
• Slower energy balls which often miss moving targets.
• Missiles which are quite likely to miss moving targets.
• Beam Lasers/Straight line defences which cut through groups.

To name a but few! All interact with height, range and speed.]

Agree with your AA suggestions

As far as the diverse TA Economy goes, here's a dedicated Thread I made outlining how I could see this working. I agree Nuclear Fusion should be in-game - but it should be high-yield and volatile because explosions are awesome!

Burrito out!