Uber over reacted to balance complaints? vote vote vote

Alpha/Beta We have mutifront battles that get to T2 late game. With well fought equal battle we get some T3, nukes, long range arty. In the end we get huge battles with tons of different units, multiple fronts, radar coverage, and grand epicness that could only be expanded upon with interplanetary play. Granted several things were unbalanced, naval, some ppl didnt like the focus it took to take down multiple multiple metal spots, and the apm requirement.

Release: 3 Facts first sometimes two apm shift to starcraft like dox battles to determine winner with mini tank balls forming. NO t2 with absolutly no t3 in competive games, unless super map specific, vs previous rule of thumb(t2 necessary)(sometimes t3) of equal opponents. Units and production facilities extremly diminished.


Granted you cant get up set things to que walk away smoke/****/shower/shave during either play and expect to win. Gandalf. LOL.

Going back to point I think the game has added epicness in leaps in bounds to concepts but has fallen back to ground zero in execution.

Should we go back and work our way to a happy medium of gamestyles or start from this retched point?

Which type of game is enjoyable to you?

Now the game is lame to watch as a spectator, and is lame to play competively. (personel opinion)

Before people start claiming Judicator knows nothing, he used to be one of the top players back during Alpha and Beta. He was ranked #1 on the ladder for a while if memory serves me.

And I agree. These days balance is very lacking. The large scale gameplay, combat all over the planet, the variation in strategy... it is mostly gone when you compare it to the early days of Planetary Annihilation.

Unfortunately Uber thinks the current balance is "fun" and by all indicators they aren't going to be bothered with balance any more – even though there are glaring issues like naval.

Balance really needs an overhaul.

number 1 no, that was cola colin, bouncing between number 9 and 5 yea, but thats besides the point. Im talking about enjoyment of equal players and that of spectators. With even matched opponents games are not as fun now. Watching high calibur players as a spectator is not as fun now. The game is not as beautiful as it once was.

Im now more casual hoping to work my way back up(got a masters to get afterall), but watching the best, playing the good, and seeing the outcome and flow of the game is now simply dissapointing.

I will always love and play the game based simply off the concepts but there is so much more to be expierenced if the balance can be worked with.

I think the epic game expierence is closer to the alpha/beta phase than to the current stage is all.

This is where Community balance mods come in. They don't even need to be as radical as Statera and RCBM, the only condition is that they need to be accepted by everyone. But Uber needs to make modded servers visible by default before that.

Agree there. As you said as well the fact that Uber decided to make modded servers hidden by default instead of just providing a message that says eg "This game is using these mods - - - - -" is a huge issue atm, hopefully one that they will remedy soon.

Agreed. Modding is a huge selling point and kick *** feature of Planetary Annihilation, but aside from the fantastic modding capabilities, Uber has done nothing for modding, which hurts them just as much as it hurts the entire community.

Yeah I agree, I'd love to try out some of the community balance mods, they look like a lot of fun. But other than playing with your clan it's simply impossible to use them at the moment, for your average player who just downloads PA to play an RTS without looking at forums or doing lots of research first, there's no in game indication whatsoever about the many excellent mods out there.

EDIT: as for OP, I agree that early beta balance was more fun than what we have now. I don't really feel familiar enough with the game at the moment to suggest things though.
Also, sorry for sentence structure in initial post, and well done if you managed to pick through all the punctuation.

Uell if'd like to try out RCBM pm me or @liquius one of us will probably have the time to play a couple of games with you.

Cheers, might take you up on that, although I'm not very good atm, don't have much free time so I've only played a couple of dozen games since release. I've been planning to get a bunch of clan members to download RCBM or statera (haven't looked at them in detail yet) to try them out in some team games which I tend to enjoy more than 1v1.

+1, myself, flop and holt tried out a few games of Statera a while back. Haven't gotten around to testing RCBM yet.

Statera does feel more 'TA like' though I think there are a few concerns regarding balance (t1 gunships for example). I haven't played it enough to be more conclusive though yet. Whilst in game mod visibility is important, perhaps the community could promote the balance mods more?

We've had a statera tournament, so how about an RCBM tourney? Also if we can drum up enough interest what about an RCBM ladder?

With respect to the OP... the game is currently pretty t1 focused (which I think is a good thing). I keep hearing this 'dox win all' argument yet that really isn't my experience. Dox + air maybe, but dox alone only get you so far. The way I personally play is start dox + air, then move to tanks later game. Dox are great raiders but are very weak when attacking a base with units mixed into the buildings as the building can take so much damage.

Also T2 can turn a battle, but has to be used in conjunction with T1. I dunno I'm just not sure the balance is that bad right now. Also many players have *stopped* doing things like proxy bases but I don't think that is due to them not being valid, there is an element of 'fassion' in the meta. Another point missed by many, dox are *rubbish* against commanders unless you have a critical mass of them (unlikely early game) so commander expansion is a very good plan if your loosing too many fabbers to dox raids.

The number of people saying dox are completely dominant is bizarre, it simply isn't true in my experience and hasn't been for a couple of months now.

Current balance is a lot better than it was through most of beta, but I feel there's not a huge opportunity for 'cleverness', by which I mean sneaky, unusual strategies and unit compositions that the opponent doesn't expect. The overall strats in most games remain more or less the same. This could be to do with the fairly limited unit roster though.

I see modding as something for singleplay or total conversions.
Not for balance or anything that needs to be installed by all users in order to join eatch others game.
I like many player matches, splitting up the community with balance mods (of wich everyone has its own variant) does not help me find many player matches ...

As for the topic, I liked the beta's where you could do snipes or be sneaky and build a base in his back.
Since the 3 sec cooldown on orbital I had to quit on 2 games already because they became orbital stalemates.
Not to mention inper planetary movement seems to be my nr 1 reason to expirience server slowdowns.

Last game I send 7 ssx to a commander, covered by 4 radars and as they can take the biggest punch. There were only a few umbrella's and few orbital fighers and I still didn't get a single shot off. I made the 7 ssx all at the same time for the element of suprise.

The way PA deals with mods means it doesn't have to divide the community: If you join a modded game *and you don't have the mod* PA simply downloads it in the background. Only the host *has* to have the mod installed. This is why we would like modded games to be visible by default. Players can simply join them, no fuss, no hassle.

IMHO, I think for every kind of balance, people will always disagree
Early on, the real tactic was air, go air and you win, go T2 air and you win. Then they nerfed air, some people liked, others say that "uber forgot about air too!" . After that time, people went only T2 strategy, first person to reach T2, either bot or tanks, wins! It was a race for T2, and then people complained complained about that, then they turned T2 expensive and less effective, turrets were nerfed as well. Now is only T1 spamm because people complained about the T2 race, and I agree with them, there is no point in going T2 for short 1v1 games.

Now people keep complaining that "uber abandoned us, there is no longer any unit balance update!" and that is totally untrue. It has been last than one month that a patch brought the doxes from the ashes to be something viable and good strategy, doxes are now good for fast moving attacks and raids, but they are not perfect.

And again, the old complaining of "uber abandoned us"....
I am sorry.... didn't you see the offline patch? Do you have any idea of how crazy coding that is? Have you ever hosted an offline game and opened your task manager (windows folks) to see that there is a new program called Server.exe? Have you ever considered the difficult of doing the same thing for Linux and OSX?
They created an entirely new application just to be able to play OFFLINE and LAN, and to do that, they had to recode all the game, everything operation that dumped memory in the uber's servers had to change, everything. Now imagine you, after almost two years of work and having to revise all files and scripts to change the very very base of your processing memory.

Rebalancing one or ten units isn't something straight forward. Take the Bolos for example, their max speed is 10.0 m/s, but why not 11? why not 10.5? why not pi*sqrt(123)*exp(-5)? I am pretty sure they have some devs working on rebalancing, but they will not be pushing small changes in each patch, they will adding changes in pack. Have you ever imagined everyday a new patch rebalacing units? What about the players that can only play during weekends? They will not have the chance to test even half of the "daily" updates. If doxes are so overpowered, why don't you suggest a new value for velocity? Damage? Line of Sight? Range?

Finally, promoting mod is something that uber encourages, but not with an extra huge banner like everyone would like and expect them to do, that is very selfish and egocentric. Mods aren't something uber did, it is the community's work, it can be stable or unstable, and uber can't encourage this for the common players with little to no knowledge about mods and programing. Good thing that now you can see matches with server mods!!! Now people complain that the default setting is not show server mods? Like the old saying... "Haters are gonna hate"

As a conclusion, if you really want to help uber delivering a better unit balance, you can:

• Propose a new set of unit's values that most players agreed (50%+1) and deliver this unit balancing to the devs; or
• Make a competition of server balance-mods. Have 5 different server mods rebalancing everything that you disagree with uber, and by the end of the year, people will vote and the top mod will be implemented.

Other than that, I would like to wait for the devs to do their work as they have always been doing.
I wouldn't say that balance is better or worse, I would say that it is different, and like all changes, they cause an impact, and not everyone is ready for changes

No one is saying uber abandoned us people just want expansions and more unit diversity. We had that in alpha/beta more so than we do now.

I was always of the opinion that if a game was forced to be designed for competitive play, it lost any form of enjoyment it once had. I find it interesting that the OP thinks that now that the game is (arguably) more friendly, that it is less watchable.

The thing with rts's is that strategies get developed and refined over time, so the longer the game is out the more established a certain meta gets over other others so that's why you see a reduction in variety, because people are figuring out what's effective. Although if it was balanced ideally people would still use variety, but that still may require additional skill. The game definitely isn't balanced perfectly but variety well eventual be lost as the strategies that don't work will eventually die out.

This is not completely true. One thing that is missing from that download/upload is the strategic icons and the associated files meaning that if any unit were moved or added in the strategic icon for that unit will not work unless you also have the UI part. I have PMed @jables and @garat about it, but I have yet to receive any response.

Ah! In which case I can understand the hesitation to show the games as default. Someone new can probably handle the fact "this is a modded game". However joining such a game *has to work* without them needing to go and download other stuff first....