Why remove Unit Wreckage?

Wreckage is not an essential feature. It's nice, sure, but not essential. The concept the game was sold on - multi planet, planet smash, spherical worlds - is essential.

And they haven't proven otherwise. A lack of polish due to time does not mean they lack the know-how. Especially since they are as you say, veterans.

Well, I can't speak for other people's priorities, since we all vary. But you can't say there's nothing extraordinary in one sentence, then follow up a list of unique features . And you also neglect ground-breaking things like chrono-cam, which even Starcraft would wish it had. But to expand:

• CSG-based procedurally generated spherical worlds
• Multiple planets
• Planet Smashing
• Chrono-cam (!!)
• Area Commands
• Coherent-based UI modding

Plus many features that may not be the first, but are still excellent for an RTS:

• Twitch Integration
• Scalable support for massive numbers of players
  
• Re-join games in progress
• Shared armies
• Transient server mods

The problem is that currently, I would rather play games on single planet with no orbital because of the balance/UI. And I didn't see much improvements on that for the last few months.

ie. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/interface-bugs-and-now-improvements.62420/page-2#post-970271

These are some basic (and mandatory if you want a game that is playable on multi-planet without going insane) stuff that people keep repeating since PA is in alpha, and none is worked on.

What's left (land/air/naval) doesn't sustain the comparison with previous iterations of the genre, and it's not by removing core features that it will do some day.

And yes, it's a core feature if you want to be a spiritual successor of TA. (and AFAIK, it was marketed as that during the kickstarter).

Did someone actually say that PA does nothing extra ordinary? You can fly planets into other planets, and rewind the game to watch it over and over again, on several screens at once...how is this anything other than an extraordinary occurrence in an RTS?

I can live without wreckage until the core game shows that it needs it, which currently it doesn't.

It's because we're approaching release and all their focus is on preparing their product for 1.0 release. I suspect they're working obnoxious hours right now, which is why we're getting things like weekend releases.

- Procedural : it procedurally generate the same planet, just slightly different. People are whining for hand-crafted maps with good reasons.
- Multiple planets : Won't go there again, sure it's unique, but it's not interesting gameplay-wise or even humanly playable due to the UI so far.
- Planet Smashing : A gimmick. Could be a mega-nuke or a insane T3 arty.
- Chrono-Cam : I don't know how many hours were spent, and how much drawbacks are coming from this, but I'm not sure it's worth it. I never used it in game (if something happened and you didn't see it, checking the chronocam will just make you miss the next event), and I don't see casters using it that much either.
For me, it fall under the "it's a nice idea that everybody wants, but that no one will use" since day 1.
- Area commands : It's not unique (check TA Spring engine
- Coherent-based UI modding : FA/TASpring engine has a moddable UI too. The language used for it doesn't really matter, it's a preference thingy (I hate js with a passion, so I personally put that to the "minus" on my list of feature).

- Twitch integration : Nice.
- Scalable support for massive numbers of players : Still have to see that working. So far any big game crawls because of server issues.
- Re-join games in progress : Very nice feature. Would be nice to be able to use a replay to restart a game too.
- Shared armies : Possible on FAF.
- Transient server mods : As it's the first iteration of a RTS using a server, it's kind of mandatory if you ask me. Not really a "feature".

Don't get me wrong : The list of features in PA is awesome!
But not a single one is really shining due to lack of polish/design decisions.
I feel the same kind of dissapointment that I had with supcom 2 so far.

Notice that I'm using "So far" a lot : I know it's still in dev (even I don't think it will change a lot with a release date coming soon) and subject to change.
I can't comment on the future, only the present, while acknowledging that things may change.

It's still present, just not on mobile units. Sup Com wreckage didn't block movement or weapons, presumably to bypass the issues that game had with pathfinding (sound familiar?), but it was still considered a spiritual successor to TA. I don't think many people will agree that wreckage is a more important aspect of PA than spherical planets, planet smashing and all orbital features combined.

Are you sure? That doesn't sound right.

It's true. I actually spent a lot of time working around hard-coded behaviour in Sup Coms engine to get it to work. There's a bug that needs working around to get them all to block movement, and there was no way for them to do collision detection with projectiles (it was simply not checked for by the engine) - I had to spawn an invisible shield with each wreck to get that behaviour.

And exactly how many people modded the UI in those games? Language does matter, a great deal, and is far more than a preference, especially when it opens up so many possibilities that other games don't have. Modding the UI in FA was horrendous (it's actually one of the reasons why GPGnet was a separate application), and TA was even worse. HTML is EASY, and Javascript is POWERFUL, and you have immediate access to the whole internet's worth of JS libraries. Have you seen pastats for example? All we need is some kind of sandboxed file support, and then the options get really crazy.

There's been 40+ player games before they locked down the player count, and they were decently playable. And that was long before most of the optimization was done. Just remember too that Sup Com was unplayable with more than 2 people for a majority of people for a long time after it was launched.

In the works.

Server or not doesn't matter. Auto-loading of non-client mods should be in every moddable RTS. The ability to not worry about mods and have them automatically deployed to other players when joining a game is great.

I know a lot of people would dismiss this as another post from "that guy who hasn't liked PA for ages" (or at least that's how I labelled you at one point!) but I can kind of see why you are frustrated. A lot of features either have been taken out, were never implemented, or aren't polished.
That isn't to say that I agree with your assessments though, and so I will try and provide a few counter points :

Some people are requesting hand crafted maps, but others are happy with the random nature of procedural generation, such as casual players like myself. Granted, I guess this isn't the place to discuss what casual players of the game do or don't like. That said, I think Uber intend to make map creation possible eventually?

I disagree that multi planet isn't interesting. It allows a game to take interesting turns as people fight over resource rich, new planets, and allows those that may be losing the fight on one planet to try a fresh start on a new planet. Perhaps this is no different from just having multiple islands on one map, but I find the added depth unique, and pretty.

Calling the planet smashing a gimmick is a bit mean spirited, as it makes the game bombastic and adds suspense and excitement. And I'm sure some people would have something to say about you implying that t3 or experimentals are a gimmick

I think the chronocam has a lot of potential, especially for reviewing old games or watching particularly epic bits back over. And if it somehow utilised for save games, that is even better.

Area commands are new for non modded RTSes though, right? So that's a first? And the areas we are Arlington about are planet wide, so it's pretty unique in that regard.

Can't talk about the ease of UI fiddling because it's not my forte.

Anyway, just a few opinions on why those features are better than maybe you are giving credit for. And indeed, as long as Uber keep supporting the game, all of these things and more should become more polished and more effective. Personally I think there is still a lot to be excited for.

I would still be interested to know how this game compares in terms of money invested, man hours used, advertising funds allocated etc. to the teams previous ventures, like SupCom, which was publisher backed. I suspect that, in regards to scope, the investment is far greater from Uber's perspective than it ever was as part of previous games.

With regards to investment and so on, reading between the lines I get the distinct impression that uber have done alot with very little. PA looks like a AAA title in terms of its ambition and has really delivered on many counts, yet the budget they're working with is undoubtedly an order of magnitude less than the big studios get.

I think the thing we all should keep in mind here: given what uber have already done, and given they've had very little to do it with, if they stopped development right now for good, what we have is already a big achievement and delivers the goal they set out in the kickstarter campaign. To say otherwise is just plain wrong.

There are going to be rough edges, there are going to be things that don't make it at release. Hopefully uber will have the opportunity to keep going and deliver more of these features. Thing is though taking a step back, uber are pretty fantastic, so please people keep it realistic with feedback.

As for the game not being close enough to ta, they have delivered what they pitched. You can't criticize them for that, even if your not keen on those particular aspects.

I must strongly disagree.

Wreckage is an essential gameplay mechanic, not primarily for combat pathing or unit blocking purposes. Its tactical implications are cool, but not essential.

Wreckage is essential because it creates an economic benefit to a player who repels an attack. When a player sends an expensive unit or attack force into enemy territory, the defender will be able to reclaim the wreckage of the attacking units. As a result, kamikaze attacks and suicide blobs are discouraged because the defender will actually get more money.

Without wreckage there is really no disadvantage to losing military units (even an expensive force) in enemy territory. As a result, you really should just always attack. Grab a blob of units and attack. Best case scenario, you find undefended economy and kill it for free. Worst case scenario you engage enemy forces and trade evenly.

Wreckage changes this calculus substantially by making an even trade attack an advantageous outcome for the defender because of the metal obtained from reclaiming the attacker's wrecks (as well as the defender's own wrecks).

There is also a second, less obvious implication from reclaim. And that is metal preservation after it has been mined. Because units' resource cost is not completely destroyed when the unit is killed, the amount of metal present in the game continuously increases over time even with less income rate. TA had a slow rate of income, but as the game progressed the amount of metal in play steadily increased because metal is preserved when units are lost in wrecks.

Without wreckage, the entire cost of a unit is removed from play when the unit is destroyed. The entire state of your economy is based on your income and the live units you own. When those units are destroyed, the only way to get more of them is to mine more metal. You can't preserve and recycle metal that has already been mined by using reclaim. Without reclaim the only way to get more units is to increase your income. With reclaim even if both sides' income is constant the amount of metal in play still continuously increases.

Reclaim is a simple and organic method of causing steady economic progression with less raw metal income. It also supports players having larger armies without needing such prodigious income and production rate in order to pay for replacements for casualties.

You misunderstand me, or rather my use of the word "essential" in the context. The argument put forward to me was "spherical planets should not have been implemented if it meant there was not enough time to implement wreckage properly, because wreckages are an essential feature" (and by extension, spherical planets are not). It was quite literally "Spherical planets vs Wreckages, pick one".

When a game is sold on the very idea of spherical planets and the offshoots of that - planetary smashing, multiple planets, orbital mechanics etc., then it's simply not an option to even consider removing that feature, because you are then asking for an entirely different game, as I suggested to @thepilot. You may as well ask for PA to be Starcraft 3 or even an RPG by comparison. In this sense, spherical planets are essential to this game "being" PA, whereas wreckages are not, and this is before gameplay is even considered.

I don't disagree with your argument at all about why wreckages are important for gameplay; they are good points and I hope Uber consider them and manage to get mobile wrecks back in for launch. But from the point of view of what features define the game (one of which is used as the title of the game, even) and without which the game would be something completely removed from what was on kickstarter, wreckages don't really rate, but spherical worlds are indeed essential.

... there is auto reclaim... uhhh patrol engineers and they will auto reclaim in that area... yea you should know that

Then are you arguing that aggression shouldn't be rewarded? Because it feels like this game is all about the push of units, and that is why I suspect wreckage is not part of Uber's future plans. I prefer the idea that he who turtles loses out, thus encouraging aggressive expansion. Who knows, if it ruins gameplay I think they will listen to the fans. I'm going to give it some time to settle though.

Uh, worst case would be an uneven trade.

And wreckage hasn't been a core part of PA gameplay ever. Nor is it a core part of many other RTSs. There's nothing essential about it as a mechanic.

Aggression is inherently advantageous in ways that are extremely difficult to design around by any method. Aggressors can control when and how a battle is fought, the fight happens closer to an enemy's sensitive and valuable assets, and aggressors usually have the element of surprise.

However, I do think that intelligent aggression must be incentivized in order to stop mindless aggression from becoming the obvious go-to strategy. And that means that blindly throwing units at the enemy needs to have significant risks and downsides.

One good method of discouraging blind, reckless aggression is wrecks that give the enemy resources if your attacking forces are destroyed. If you can get in, destroy something, and get out, then this doesn't matter. And if you have planned an attack that will result in a positive trade (e.g. an air strike on a fusion) then you have enough information to decide to make the trade for your advantage.

Quitch, reclaim is essential in most TA-style games. Total Annihilation itself relied very heavily on wreckage, and Balanced Annihilation, Zero K, and other more updated TA-style games also depend heavily on wreckage. True, there is no wreckage in Starcraft or Command and Conquer, but those games are very different in many ways.

In my opinion TA gameplay was at its absolute best when spread out across space instead of in blobs, and 'battles' took enough time for reinforcements to keep arriving on both sides. This created a fairly stable line of battle that stretched across significant space and which could be pushed by either side in different places. Groups of units of many types would be scattered across the battle line, rather than blobbed together for a single massive attack while the rest of the map was mostly empty.

Pushing up the line lets you reclaim the wrecks from the more or less continuous skirmishing that had been taking place over the last half hour. The wrecks were in many ways the most important resource in the middle/late stages of a match, most especially after naval battles, since shipwrecks were extremely valuable and tended to be clustered in a single location after a big naval battle. Securing the wrecks could literally decide the game.

One good way of increasing the snowball effect of an advantageous team is to give them reclaimable wreckage for killing the enemy one-sidedly.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This principle applies to games design as much as it applies to science

Wreckage hasn't formed a part of PA's strategic gameplay in any build, beyond ruining naval battles. I think it's time to accept that this is one of the areas where PA differs from TA.

The reason wreckage has not been significant in PA is simply because it gets destroyed instantly by weapons fire, frequently the same series of shots that killed the unit. As a result there hasn't been much actual wreckage to reclaim.

What should have happened is making wrecks more durable so they persist even after a significant amount of damage. If wreck pathing is a problem, then make wrecks pathable (e.g. rubble). This sacrifices the tactical implications of a large wreckage field, but it's not as big a loss as the economic implications of wreckage.

As a result of the functional lack of wreckage because it is almost always destroyed immediately, Uber has pumped up the output of mexes to make armies bigger.

While it is true that this means you get more units on the field faster, it also makes the economic aspect of the game quite dull. When units are destroyed it takes an equal amount of time to mine that amount of metal again to replace them.

An army of 7,000 metal takes 100 seconds at an income of 70 metal per second (10 mexes) to build in the first place. Without reclaim, every single 7,000 metal army you build at this income rate will take the exact same amount of time to build, even assuming you are spending your income perfectly and directed entirely toward unit production.

With wrecks, not all the metal is lost when units are destroyed. Assuming a wreck is worth 50% of the unit's metal cost, that 7,000 metal army turns into 3,500 metal in wrecks. Rebuilding that same army now takes only 50 seconds; you only need to spend 50 seconds of mining time, plus the 3,500 metal of reclaim.

And actually, that's an extremely conservative estimate. If we suppose you used those units in battle and traded evenly with an enemy army, that battlefield would actually have contained 14,000 metal in units. And, presumably, about 7,000 metal in wrecks. If you reclaimed it all, plus the same level of income, you could have an army of twice the size you had before in the same amount of time- 100 seconds. That is the power of reclaim. Player income has not changed, but the more time passes, the more total metal has been created.

Without reclaim, the only way to get more units faster is to increase your income. That means more mexes, more energy, and upgrading mexes. While it is undoubtedly true that players would constantly build their economy in TA, the amount of time and resource investment needed to grow your economy was much higher.


The biggest difference between TA and PA, in my opinion, is that in Total Annihilation I always felt broke. Zero-K is the same way. Resources are scarce and your decisions about what to spend them on matters.

PA is the opposite- I always feel I have such immense amounts of resources that I have nothing to do with them except constantly make more economy, with which to make even more economy... To be brutally honest, I find it boring.

Most of the game in PA, and most of the actions in the game, are spent building economy and factories as quickly as possible rather than making strategic moves. Instead, whoever has more efficient economic management and faster hand speed will invariably have an extremely large army due to the miracle of exponential growth. And there's just no way to beat such a blob except having a bigger blob. Therefore, faster hands-->more economy-->larger blob is the best possible PA strategy.

Reduced mex yield means more time is needed to create metal. But creating new metal isn't the only way to acquire resources. Reclaim recycles metal that was previously mined. In effect, preserving mining time and reducing the amount of mining time needed to pay for units. As both sides mine and use that metal to build things, that metal stays in play for the rest of the game.

While this arrangement can lead to a slow game start due to limited metal income in the beginning, this is a very straightforward problem to solve by giving players flat income on the commander, or a fixed extra resource bonus in the form of an "egg" or resource boost or facplop as in ZK. Slow early game can be easily accelerated without ruining the game.

But without reclaim, if you want a fast game then you need an economy that grows like crazy. Which in exponential terms basically means you make economy until you're too bored to make any more. And then you attack with your giant blob, and hope your opponent's got slower hands so your force will be a hundred times larger, or he got bored sooner than you did and stopped making economy because he couldn't be bothered any more.