Why remove Unit Wreckage?

Is wreckage still removed? Because I played in the stock Piratical System last night and had a miserable experience trying to command my boats. Even before the ocean was riddled with sea wreckage.

Ships wreckages haven't been removed.

Only wreckages for land units are gone.

Boats are, strangely enough, the only units that still leave wreckage.
They're the units that got the most flak because of the terrible pathing and yet they're the only units not effected by this change. So either this is some elaborate troll from Uber, or there's still plans for sinking ships.

Huh? I'm talking about the metal spot count.

Oh, I thought about the stuff in the lobby... I shouldn't post stuff during the night...

Ehh I hope they change it soon. I was excited to try the water-based system without terrible boat pathing. Next time I'll just mass slammers.

They should scatter the area with little metal fragments (a simple texture change), so that the fabbers can still claim wreckage but it would make the area pathable.

But those are the ones with the worst pathing issues, derp.

I bet that majority of casual players barely even use the wreckages as resources, either because 1. they don't care or 2. they don't know how important reclaiming is. Wrecks and other reclaimables are a hidden source of resources and I would maybe even consider it as a noob trap.

Not true. Static structures that weren't animating could turn into sprites via a script command to save performance (and the same with wreckages, since they didn't move), but mobile units and animating structures were rendered in 3D.

Might have worked when the camera viewpoint was fixed, but 2D sprites won't work in Planetary Annihilation where you can view the action from all angles.

Of course I wasn't suggesting they do it in PA, just clearing up the record on TA.

I know you weren't, I was just pointing out the obvious

Meh, even hardcore players didn't use wreckage too often as it was mostly inefficient. I used combat fabs to reclaim forests before, and a dead enemy base, but with all that's going on in PA it's a bit difficult to track them as well. Combat fabs required no energy (Or well... one energy) to reclaim btw.

http://www.mavorsrants.com/2012/04/total-annihilation-graphics-engine.html

we underlined that the problem with people not using wreckage was that there was no need because of the overabundance in metal. but the other games that had it, meshed it well with the rest of the gameplay, and it became indispensable.

Interesting! When you said "sprite", I assumed you meant the traditional "have 2d images of the unit at every orientation and only use those in-game", rather than this. I knew they did impostors for static things, but didn't realise they were so aggressively used (especially since you can visibly see the change when structures turn into impostors, but can't see the same for mobile units).

Gotta' save as much as you can of that 32mb of RAM.

Bots could be differenciated from vehicle by letting them move over wreckages. This would give more strategic depth as to which unit use to attack a specitif point.

I would love to see wreckage used to balance the metal economy - PA needs a negative feedback mechanism to give defenders a better chance at winning.

Making wrecks turn to rubble would keep them from gumming up troop movements or blocking shots, and ensure they stick around for reclaim after a big firefight.

Once players figure out that reclaiming wrecks = huge army to get back at whoever invaded them, I think wrecks will become a lot more fun. It would make where you fight just as important as who and when. On the negative side, noobs would wonder how their opponents are building such huge armies so quickly, but I kind-of think that's what good matchmaking is for.