General feedback.

So I've played a bit since launch and figured I'd just throw up what I'm thinking so far into the mix. Just going to bullet point it in no particular order.

My overall impression is the following:

• If I was to pick anything out that stands head and shoulders above all else in this game it would be the musical score. I think it might actually almost rival Total Annihilation for how much I like it. I always felt the SupCom music was a little flat, but in PA it's totally epic and completely captures the scale of the game.

• To contrast that if I was to pick something out that I think is quite under developed I would go with the UI. From the menus to the ingame UI everything feels very placeholder-y. It's obviously not the most game breaking thing for an element to be in an ugly box as opposed to a pretty box but it still just is dare I say quite a poor job.

• I'm not sure I'm totally onboard with the economy in this one, or there is something new about it I'm not yet understanding. In SupCom if I bottomed out on either metal/energy I was in trouble, if I bottomed out on both everything screeched to a halt. In PA I find I can basically play the match with no metal and not really notice the difference, if I bottom out on both I'd probably move it to the 'in trouble' of SupCom but I'm still capable of churning things out. I do prefer the SupCom economy to this one; it just felt a lot more intuitive in how it punished / rewarded you.

• Another one based on the economy... but I also find to have positive metal I need to have A LOT of extractors. This seems to be because the metal sites are just littering planets. I'm not sure I like this, I feel like a more tactical element could be introduced by increasing metal income / reducing metal costs and have far fewer metal sites on planets that appear in distanced clusters.

• The planet geography I find on the whole quite boring. They need tiered gameplay. Now that is not vast complicated mountain ranges / valleys or the like, but just your basic RTS cliffs that provide up/down seperators of areas to make each planet feel a bit more like an RTS map as opposed to just a flat surface with the same crack cut and pasted around.

• I hope planet sizes not so much increase as the floor is moved up. I know this would require a lot of optimization work, but I honestly don't feel like a planet is 'right' until it's at around 1000 radius. Then it feels like a good size that provides a familiar SupCom scale in ground wars etc. I hope multiple 1-2k radius planets becomes a viable option in future without killing framerates / taking 10 minutes to build before launching the game.

Some AI feedback for good old Sorian (a big fan of his past work). This is brilliant work again, I can't wait to see where it goes in future updates. I should note that I mainly play against relentless/absurd AI.

• I like that you've got that probing, testing the water style for the AI. But almost every game I play I notice that the AI has many small groups of units all over the map and usually a huge ball of aircraft or whatever in it's base... I basically win these because the AI isn't attacking me, at any point if it took everything it had and right clicked me I'm pretty sure that would be it, but it maintains the small probing attacks beginning to end. I guess I'm just requesting an 'all-in' command from the AI at some point during the match.

• The AI doesn't seem to understand anything about the orbital layer of the game. It builds lots of fighters and then has them hovering over my base waiting for an umbrella to wipe them. When it builds a death laser it suicides it when it could set up a very easy contain on me. I would love to see the AI improve in this area as I think as soon as the player hits the orbital arena they can't lose because of how little the AI understands this arena.

• Commander survivability is obviously a big issue with the AI. I've seen the thread requesting the game mode where you have to wipe all factories / fabbers also which I think would be the primary fix to this. But aside from the random suicidal strolls the commander takes I often find there is no real attempt to protect the commander with units the AI has, I've often sniped the commander when a huge enemy ball was present nearby.

And finally some suggestions.

• I'd like the return of the old game setup options. Other game modes so you can pick between kill the commander / kill all factories fabbers etc. Disabling nukes / game enders / artillery / tiers as an optional list also was quite fun to shake things up with once in a while.

• I'm not advocating space battles here, I know that isn't the direction this game is heading. But I would like a way for my air units to move between planets, so just figured I would suggest an orbital carrier that can hold 1-2 dozen aircraft to deploy between worlds.

I think that's about it. Thanks for reading.

TL;DR - Merry Christmas everybody!

You've got a lot of good points here.


I've got one gripe though... We haven't even made it to Halloween nor Thanksgiving. Do not say Merry Christmas... It's waaaaaaayyyyyy too early. This is worse than Christmas commercials....

I definitely agree about the music (and sound in general), but completely disagree about the UI - to me it feels pretty polished but minimalistic. There's things I'd like to see (additional PiPs, more control groups), but realistically I'm not sure they could be added without a disproportionate impact.

Your economy points I disagree with too. If you've only a few, high-income metal points it's really easy to defend them; on the flip side, lots of lower-economy metal points means it's easier to harass and harder to defend. Crippling someone's metal income can bring them to their knees. If as you say, you can play the game with no metal income then I'd suggest you're doing something wrong - probably not building enough. When I get harassed I notice my factories drop from churning out a unit every 10-15 seconds, to taking several minutes, and then it's time to turn most of them off. Suddenly you've lost 80-90% of your ability to replenish units.

I agree with your comments on geography too though. I also much prefer the larger (900+) planets, they usually result in much more interesting maps. However I get the impression you're thinking of e.g. StarCraft 2 maps, where you have terrain at different levels, with cliffs and ramps. Personally I prefer maps like the old TA ones where you have hills / mountains which block line of sight, affect unit speed and range, etc. Some kind of combination of the two would be awesome!

I kind of get what you mean about the AI. I play against the AI a lot and it seems to focus mostly on harassment with small groups; there's no giant death balls, it never uses the annihilaser and it appears to have stopped using halleys (it used to, but I've not seen it in a while).

I've come to really like the economy in this. Bottoming out on energy in SupCom caused a horrible negative feedback loop that was very hard for even the best players to recover from (especially before the mex upgrade bug was fixed by FAF), whereas PA feels much more progressive in the hit you take when power goes down.

The way that every different type of constructor always uses the same amount of energy is a masterstroke, it makes it so much more intuitive as to what you can get away with building. The way it stops you using fabbers to assist factories due to the massive disparity in efficiency is also tremendous. When the eco changes were first mooted, people worried that it would make fine-tuning the costs of things too difficult, but I don't see any evidence of that being the case in reality.

Care to elaborate? It's not something I've seen / noticed, so more explanation would be great

He means how factorys are more efficient then fabbers, while leaving in the usefulness of having fabbers assist due to mobility.

Personally I like that, this game is about lines of factories, not about fabbers assisting on factory.

Exactly, I've played FAF for a while and the engie mod was one of the best things that were added. Fabricator assist for factories should always be a short term solution, not a long term one.

Yeah that's fine, just wasn't how I interpreted the original comment

If I have fabbers assisting a factory it's usually to get advanced fabbers out quicker. Any longer than that and it's because I've forgotten they're there!

Yeah, that's what I meant. I think a basic fabber uses 10m/1000e, whereas a basic factory uses 15m/675e, so it's vastly more efficient to make more factories. No more 200 engineers around an air factory.

Although if I ever get to lategame with a runaway eco then swarms of air fabbers building nukes seem to be the only way to spend it all.

It is probably just something I'm going to get used to. Just so used to the SupCom economy and with this being so similar just makes it feel 'off'.

So I take it no one on this forum ever watched Stargate SG-1? If it's not from that, or some form of that or original movie, then I don't know what is. I don't know, though. This game doesn't come with a manual, so I can't quickly flip through the credits, if it's not the same score, then Joel Goldsmith certainly must have been involved somehow because it sounds exactly like his music.

Edit: Oh, but so there are no misunderstandings, I love the music, too!!

i wouldnt mind the engymod if they were to throw hq's out ...i totaly hate those

Everyone's saying it's more efficient to make more factories as opposed to assisting one. And I suppose that's true in term's of energy cost but the time and initial start up cost should also be considered.

If you need an army of dox to do some raiding/scouting, assisting your primarily engineer producting factory into pumping out a few dozen dox, is probably going to be quicker and easier on your eco than building a dozen bot factories to produce your army. However if you want to build infinite dox raiding parties then in the long run that would be a far better option for efficiency providing you have the room and capacity to defend them.

Factory role off time limits the time it takes for a unit to be made, that means there's a hard limit, no matter how many fabs you put on it.

true

So, I refused to buy the game until it was officially released, because I've been burned before committing to a game before it was ready. I learned my lesson and I was patient.

Now I discover that in the official release version of the game they have single player games that need constant online access, that will crash the instant you lose your connection (still a problem for lots of people), and that there is no way to save or resume a game once it disconnects - is that right? And I see in this forum that we have Uber representatives still talking about something so simple being a feature that they hope to have in the future.

It is incredibly amateurish and condescending to talk about hoping to deliver features in an undefined future as if you were still in beta. I'm not a backer, I'm not a beta participant, I'm a customer that paid for what should have been a finished product and here you are acting as if you're doing me a favour by trying to finish basic features that have been in games since before the original Total Annihilation. What a joke, it's farces like this that really make me dubious about crowd funding and the companies that pursue it.

All I can say is- you should have done your research before purchasing?

Also, don't make assumptions about Uber themselves when you haven't been around to be a part of development.

Everyone makes reasonable assumptions about products that they buy, most importantly we assume that a product released for sale is a finished product. PA isn't finished, that's on Uber.

I don't have to be around for their development to know that they've not behaved in good faith by releasing a game that they know is not finished. I think the fact that you have been around for the development has skewed your perspective. Under what other circumstances would your response be reasonable?

My car has no tires!
Well, you should have researched the car first.

They sold me an oven that doesn't heat up!
You can't hold it against them unless you were around for the development of the oven.

Those are not reasonable replies in those circumstances nor are similar comments reasonable for computer games. The size of their company or their available resources aren't relevant either; they have a responsibility to deliver a finished product, and if they can't afford to finish the game or they can't meet deadline then they've botched their project management. Again, those excuses aren't acceptable for any other product, why should I accept them for a computer game?

If only game development would work like building cars :S