Uber Weekly Update - August 13, 2014

once aggain no disrespect to any modder .. but mods should not be needed to make the game fun at all ... im also getting tired of people constantly trying to shove mods into others throats like they are the lead plattform for general ballance ...
sure show a couple examples and how you made them work .. but stop threating them as the holy grail of ballance ...

I do NOT discount the good things that have been done. I just don't believe that previous good work allows bad work to get a free pass.

Ultimately Uber is making a game. When they remove key gameplay elements (such as the negative feedback mechanic of mobile unit wrecks) they are damaging the game. Praise for previous work is one thing but that should not be at the expense of critical analysis and pointing out failures.

I only quote mods to those who are of the opinion that the vanilla balance is *unplayable* due to *instert hysterical over reaction to topic of choice here*....

Personally I'm enjoying the game, unbalanced units and all.

As always, there is no accounting for taste.


Imbalance makes for a less enjoyable game in my eyes due to the inherent limitations such imbalances place on gameplay and strategic thinking.

Ok, I can accept that- as I said I wasn't targeting that specifically at you. I think the problem is we are at a point that *nothing significant is going to get fixed before release* and reading between the lines Uber had to do something regarding wreckage so they pulled it.

From the sounds of it, we're going to get Gas Giants on (or just before) release and that will tick off the last major feature promised during the Kickstarter.

The key question will then turn to what comes next, and I guess that depends on how well things are going financially but *hopefully* they will be able to continue working on all of this and things like pathing and wreckage will get the attention they need.

What makes it interesting is the fact that the imbalanced units change on a regular basis Seriously though I always enjoy finding strategies that *work around* the poorly balanced units, or finding good uses for things that most people view as 'unusable' as 9 times out of 10 it isn't as black and white as that. Don't get me wrong, a finely balanced game is the ultimate goal, although I don't mind the fact Uber are taking a while to find it (TA really was NOT balanced when it was released, neither was Sup Com). I guess my long experience with spring (and some of the *terrible* balance decisions they made) has made me less sensitive to 'strange' balance changes (Spring AA / BA mods have had everything from scouts being > all, to T3 stomping everything to reclaim wars as the main meta over the years).

I agree that this game has been unbalanced since i started playing it (late alpha steam user). Still its almost always been a lot of fun to play. There seems to be a new PTE already where they seem to have done some balance fixxing so im just hoping for the best and that all the players will come back and play this as massively as before. I will stay around for a while, and hopefully be there then. Maybe it will come to it maybe not. I certainly hope for the best for this game and if they make ideal payments possible i might even trow some money at that Gamma Commander if he comes to the store. Or a skillfully assembled balance mod perhaps

So what you're saying is that PA is managing to live up to your lowered standards?

Well it's *no* worse than TA version 1.0 balance so I'm not sure what your point is TA had many good qualities, however balance? Not really. Core was almost impossible to play due to no fark, op hawk, no emg. I managed to win enough games to have a reasonable rank (I'm stubborn and *always* played core in competitive games) however that was more through me brute forcing my opponent and preventing T2 getting involved than TA being remotely 'balanced'.

Balanced Annihilation, after many many years of tweaking is reasonably well balanced now. Lots of viable strategies, all units are useful *at some point in a game* and Arm v Core neither side is outright better than the other. My point was that there were lots of balance changes that *didn't work* before coming to what they have now. Everyone is holding PA to account based on games that have had *years* (or in TA's case over a decade) to mature and settle to where they are, I just think the comparison isn't really fair, these things take time!

The FARK was a 3.1 addition. I also played a lot of CORE and managed to do well enough most of the time. Late-game Core was a total beast and few ARM players could recover from a poor start.

TA was also (relatively speaking) the first of its kind. We've had 16 years since then and apparently no one has learnt anything from it. That PA is as broken (if not substantially more so, as I believe it is) than TA was at 1.0 is just depressing.

As I've said before, Id be willing to bet good money that the decision-makers at Uber don't really understand why Total Annihilation was a ground-breaking game and genre-defining classic. I'd be willing to bet more money that, given recent comments by the balance team, they find TA to be "boring".

Considering the current pathfinding state (especially the naval units pathfinding), I really wonder if it's really all about polishing. Seriously Brad, of course pathfinding has been improved over time, but even with the new implementation, naval pathfinding is just a nightmare, even with a large ocean, units manage to block themselves.

And regarding land units, in the very last build, i can still find tons of units keeping idle behind a mountain while they should move. It may happen that after a short blocking time, Units decide to move, but not allways.

Are you really serious when you are speaking about polishing ?

Naval is just unplayable with such pathfinding issues. So i do not play naval.
Is Naval likely to be removed as wreckage ?
Sometimes i find it surprising to have gaz giant currently being implemented while we allready have all sorts of biomes and at the same time, major core features like pathfinding still in a beta stage when it comes to naval.

Well I'd argue that Spring has done some superb work building on TA as the foundation, similar with Sup Com FAF.

As for what the devs have learned- well there are a number of very good architectural decisions made in PA that stem from TA so they have learned *something*

Again, never bashed Uber for their technical and coding prowess. That the engine functions at all is mind-boggling.

So why the game is such a hodge-podge of half-baked, broken or abandoned mechanics is shocking.

Have a look at the backer forums, then you know why...

You mean all the terrible... I hesitate to use the word "ideas" because that would imply somewhere, somehow there are human beings that actually think that way, yes?

that's the wrong question to ask and thus completely irrelevant.

want we want is pass-through wreckage. a 0-collision model on the map that allows for mass boosts.

that would be more interesting than the completely-in-your-face-can't-do-****-until-gotten-rid-of approach of "mobile wreckage"

No, I mean the schedule...

Oh.

Ohhhhhh.

...

oooohhhhhhhh.....

I agree with cdrkf, as great as Total Annihilation was, in the years following modders and new game devs in Spring games have improved substantially on the old formula.

PA is currently an absolutely phenomenal engine and platform.But as optimistic as I am about the future of the game, as it stands right now, the game itself is not as strategically interesting as other real time strategy games available, whether that is Zero-K, Starcraft II, or Wargame: Red Dragon.

PA will get there, though. Building the engine is the difficult part. Making the game fun and strategically deep is hard, but ultimately not as much work as coding and building the game. It mostly depends on what numbers you put in those fields. That leads to giving players interesting choices, and making a large number of such choices by multiple players during a game add up to a unique in-game situation, just like how there is such a staggeringly large number of interestingly different chess games.

I would comment, though, that it is not correct to say that the problem is "balance." Balance comes after the design has been nailed down and you're interested in determining whether something is too strong or too weak. I think there are more fundamental design concerns that involve changing how the game plays, not just whether a certain unit needs to have its stats tweaked.

You know, we all complained like baby girls when Uber was not communicative, and now I can see why they weren't. With the way some of you are acting I would never open these forums again.

I reckon they should post the weekly update here and lock the thread, to avoid the inevitable **** storm.

It's like some people think Uber aren't aware of the pathing issues, or any other issue for that matter. Of course they are aware! They will fix it, why wouldn't they?

Wreckage will come back at some stage probably.

This **** needs to stop though, everyone crying like their favourite toy has been taken away. It will get fixed. Just be patient. They know what they are doing.