Geothermal Plants and Liquid Metal Processing Mines

And also, Brad, justifying not all of our expectations are not in the current game by stating Uber has a small Dev team isn't at all a good justification. The kickstater clearly states it : "Because we are the right team".

Lava planets with trenches were in when they were first released, they removed the trenches due to pathing, IIRC.

It looks like the difficulty to implement pathing has led to many features being removed / simplified. Taking into account business deadlines, i can understand that if pathfinding can't be fixed within required time, then postponing features makes sense. But simply just discarding a feature (like for wreckage) instead of postponing, while you claim PA 1.0 is just the beginning sounds like a big contradiction and tends to make people believe, they won't simply manage to fix this issue at all. Which isn't going to make people confident about the future of PA. Now if Pathfinding involves so much issues, then i would have appreciated some kind of livestream about "why is pathfinding so much challenging to implement and how it's impacting other features". Honestly having experienced such a solid pathfinding in Supcom 2, i do not understand why it's so complex to addess in PA. Except maybe the fact it's all happening on procedurally generated planet. Unfortunately, we never got any statement about this.

Sup Com 2 has (effectively) 2D maps when it comes to pathfinding. PA is not only fought on spheres, but arbitrary 3D terrain, at that. Furthermore, The unit count and map size in SupCom2 is significantly lower.

Why is it so hard to implement? Well... isn't it obvious? PA you don't play on a flat map, you play on a rounded map. That already ups the difficulty by a large margin, not to mention maps in PA are also randomly generated so the path in is basically set up on the spot in the hopes of being correct.

Also they didn't necessarily say that wreckage is gone for good, Brad even commented that it may make a return.

Well, when you decide to implement a feature, it's because you think it's good for gameplay. I feel like the feature has been removed not because it was not serving the gameplay but just because it was making pathing even more challenging. Don't get me wrong, but it's been 2 years Uber is supposed to work on pathing on spheres. If that's so much challenging, it basically means a STR on top of sphere is simply not feasible. What i really would like to know is if these issues are likely to be fixed and finally really opens the potential of complex planets. Otherwise, procedurally generated spheres + pathing on top of sphere is just simply ruining the game potential.

The game isn't finished.

Don't expect everything to be as polished as SupCom 2, which had a larger team and a much larger budget.

Well, don't expect everything to be as polished until PA is finished.

Not to mention wreckage is not a core feature of this game, compared to round planets that is. Yes round planets cause issues with pathing, yes it means lava pools and wreckage are more difficult to work around.. But honestly, what's more worth it? The whole randomly generated planetary systems, or a couple gameplay mechanics that aren't necessarily *Needed* in the sense I'm talking about. Planets are what makes PA unique, revolutionary even, the first rts on an entire planet, a whole solar system.

Round planets is PA's core feature, those other features that are great, and I'd love to see.. Just don't, and shouldn't, mean as much as the whole premise behind the game.

Unit wreckage could be, and possibly should be, a core feature.

As people keep on bringing up, wreckage was a core component of TA and it is a pretty integral component of RCBM.

When you're sparce on metal, reclaiming wrecks is very important – and should be very important.

Oh I completely agree, I only mean to say that it is not of the same level as the premise of the game. I'd love to see wreckage make a comeback in a more refined form, but as it was it was clunky and rarely used. The costs for fixing that would take development time away from *Arguably* more important features, and that wreckage isn't as central to the game (And in my personal opinion, shouldn't) as spheres as maps. Planets for PA is the biggest feature of the game, the eye catcher for it. A person thinking of buying an RTS game probably won't be like "ooh it has wreckage, that's revolutionary, that's awesome!" they'll most likely comment on how revolutionary and awesome playing an RTS on a planet is! It's a great thing to differentiate PA from all other RTS games, makes it interesting.

No. But they may say, "No wreckage? That's such a basic core concept that's missing!"

Kinda like if PA didn't have any aircraft or naval units.

By finished you mean according to kickstarter promises ? Afaik 1.0 release will not be "finished". I have défenses the concept of game as a platform which is evolving over time, but IT then become allways easy to say : it's not un because it's not finished. And since PA is virtually never finished then there will allways BE an easy way to justify a feature takes forever to Come in

What i meant is that if during thé polishing phase you remove a feature such as wreckage because IT makes pathing issues difficult to fix then i do not call this polishing but rushing.

But they've been working on pathing for two years already! How does anyone expect them to fix the wreckage/pathing issues in at most... a couple months? o.o

(I wouldn't be surprised if Nordic games gave them a bit of a deadline as well, which it's so hard trying to find which features should get worked on.)

When you increase the unit cap to 1000 per player, the path finding breaks down fairly often.

It's a pretty safe bet. To release a boxed game on to a store shelf, among the things that have to happen are a final publisher QA cycle (in this case, by Nordic), disc pressing and manufacturing of the retail boxes, and shipping of the assembled boxes to retailers, each step of which takes a couple weeks, and all which needs to occur in time for the rapidly approaching holiday shopping season.

This, two years working on pathing (even if probably the main coder involved in pathing has also probably worked on other parts of the game). So this basically means pathing is not good enough to handle many obstacles, which after 2 years let me a little bit puzzled, or pathing algorithm has not been worked that much and it was lately discovered that having too many obstacles was a problem. In both cases this does not sounds good. Hopefully, second hypothesis is the good one, meaning there's possibly large room for improvement. Even without wreckage i can still see lots of issues with pathing when groups of units are blocked by an obstacle. In these conditions i hardly see how we could have more complex biomes. Considering the complexity brought by procedurally generated planets, i really wonder it that was the good option.

Thank you for the continued insight into the games industry, and the unique approach that Uber is taking. I love it, this commentary, and how 'meta' it is. Thanks.

It gladdens me to see the 'support down the road' response, as one of my friends is incredibly cynical about Uber's post-launch support, but whatevs, home skillet!

Hopefully with time the game will be all that we hope it can possibly be, but yes have to remember its a much small team regardless of how long they've been working on things (like 2 yrs for pathing) for 1 guy thats still an obscene amount of work I couldn't imagine. Why I said early in the post that by 2015 I hope to have all the things we hope it will.

Elijah may well log on and verbally castrate me for this if I'm wrong, but I sincerely doubt he's spent anything near the majority of his time solely on pathing for PA. From what I understand he's one of the best in the industry - I'm fairly confident that once they've fully locked down features for release he'll be able to get the current voxel model working near perfectly.