Why remove Unit Wreckage?

Killer Robots would have armour. They aren't being vaporized, they're being disabled.

So? SupCom had durable unit wrecks. TA played on a large scale can have hundreds or thousands of units.
Unit wreckage is supposed to do precisely that - present and obstruction for people to overcome.

The unit wreckage we had for PA was not grains of sand. They were slightly smaller than the units themselves.

Slowing down an assault and being a nuisance was one of its roles. I just played TA: Zero on a remake of Seton's clutch- that land bridge in the center was covered with thick wreckage that blocked unit's path and made firing at an enemy when at lower ground difficult. It gives the defender an advantage for reclaim.

Just a small nitpick: Wrecks in SupCom didn't block movement or weapons fire (I spent a lot of time working around some hard-coded behaviour to get it to work for SC:TA). Having said that, I'm all for TA's implementation.

Dude, these are killer robots from the future! With lazers!

Ehh, so it entirely depends on how you think the tech works.

As long as it provides a real strategic advantage (preferably for the defender) unit wreckage is fun! Unfortunately, PA tends to focus more on "you there robots go shoot this please thanks" rather than controlling individual units, so as it was, the idea was to simply avoid unit wrecks and attack from another angle, which tends to give the defender a disadvantage and merely annoy the attacker.

...and I'm not really sure how to fix that, but I agree, bringing unit wreckage back would be nice.

all that talk about wreckage , makes me want to watch Wreck-It-Ralph again

Honestly, I don't mind the lack of wreckage.

Given that PA deals with many, many more units that TA ever did, do we actually want to deal with the wreckage shenannigans?

I'd rather just concentrate on blowing things up.

I would like it back.. and to have wreckage more easily harvested. Currently I never harvest it because it is a pain.

Hahahahahaha! You should know by now that until we actually see something being worked on/Get it in a patch that nothing is confirmed, it's all up in the air. It's like "Schrödinger's Feature List".

Mike

I wish. If PA was predictable via quantum mechanics, I'd already have calculated a set of probabilities for various features by now. I'm pretty sure that the development of this game follows laws beyond that of physics or logic.

In TA, each individual unit was more significant; it had more health so it lasted longer, and left behind a sizeable wreckage. PA has adopted a higher numbers approach, where units are smaller, cheaper, they die faster, and would as such leave behind more, smaller wrecks. More like metal dust than big chunks of goodness. And metal in PA is much more abundant in the form of metal spots and how much you get out of them. To make wreckage work and feel like TA, the PA economy would need a complete overhaul and so would the unit policy. Obviously not gonna happen.

So meh.

Only eco would need overhaul.

Absorbable terrain features (just like in TA and SupCom), reduced yield from metal spots, higher yield from wreckages, auto-reclaim on fabber patrol.

That's already the full receipe. But somehow feels like this doesn't match Uber's vision of "Planetary Rush".

I'm glad wreckage is gone. Annoying at best. In a few weeks everyone will be used to it.

Wreckage as a blocking gameplay mechanic is a poor argument, when you can build walls, and thus 'control' where and when the blocking happens.

It would be nice to see units and buildings explode into thousands of pieces so it looks proper that they don't leave any 'polygon based' wreckage behind tho. I would also like to see better scorch/burn marks.

can't believe some people are actually defending wreckage removal.

Reminder : it may just be an optimisation/bugfixing pass and a temporary state until they fix it and implement it correctly.

to those that defend wrekage removal : WTH do you want with an simulated RTS with no wreakages? why do you care about a simulated RTS at all?

It somehow worked like that in TA.

Once a unit got wrecked, it could only take 1-2 more shots until the wreckage was ground down. It could still be reclaimed for mass though! (Even though at a lesser rate.)

The most important difference? Wreckages were not movable. When in doubt, all you could do was to destroy them. In PA, you could even have them destroyed on collision, since pathing tries to move through them anyway. But either way leave the metal behind.


So in short: Grounded wrecks WITHOUT collision is what we actually need.

Let's face it: Path blocking was more annoying than functional. It frustrated attacker by creating jams in already tight places, while being unnoticeable on open areas where defender may actually need that stuff. And reclaim metal was insignificant at best. And while some of you can argue that it can be made more important, it's clearly not the direction Uber is going and I personally am not experienced enough to argue about balance. So, I think it's reasonable to say that wreckage is pointless from the gameplay standpoint.
But.

It looked awesome.

Removing it is like downgrading current nuke mushroom clouds back to the beta ones. No. No! You should not do that. It is a very dull idea to do that. Please undo that. Make this stuff walkable or even destroyable by walking. But don't remove it - the game looks better with it.

This drama is a bit (read: massively) overblown considering the irrelevance unit wreckage was on land, and the game destroying monster it was at sea. Building wreckage is still in, so the aesthetic element remains.

I dont give a **** about wreckage. For me, it is a distraction...

how bout just limiting the mexxes of a planet than just throwing 60 on them

i have seen close quartermatches were a smaller number and individual units became more important due to lack of mexxes ... i say ii again ... it depends on how systems are built ... if you just throw mexxes on planets it´s no wonder for when scrapmetal becomes redundant ... try to play with 20 mexxes 16 or less ...then see how more important gathering becomes to extracting ...
but doesn´t matter now anyway ...

wreckage was part in total anihilation and supcom and was a majorgameplaypart regarding eco were it could help well gaining an advantage over the enemy ... it was even more significant in supcom with experimentals ... but more than anything it is also part of the spirit of these games that makes it stand out from any other RTS ...

I'm totally for playing with far less metal than a typical procedurally generated planet has. But these have so far set a precedence for how much metal you'll have available in PA, and thus set the mood for the rest of the game and its economic balance.

no i think people just got too used to having lots of mexxes available to even bother gathering metal out of trees and scrap ... i have very rarely seen people actively reclaiming stuff ..