Map control not comfortable like on rectangular maps.

Basically, the solution to almost all the problems people have with this game is: team games w/shared armies, because that is the essence of this game. Just like in the real world. As the scale of the war increases, you simply need more people giving orders. So players who prefer to play alone will have more and more problems as Uber keeps cranking up the complexity of the mechanics and the scale of the simulation.

This is one of the points I will be making in my review, along with many others.

Agree. I think in 1v1, it's not really possible to do more than just 100% concentrate on t1 spam because, well, we're only human.

If you move to a team game though with shared armies, then it becomes possible for one person to manage the t1 spam while someone else starts thinking bigger picture

Pole lock should really be a default on. I got really lost without it.

And people like myself find it to be horribly limiting with extremely detrimental effects on actually managing to navigate.

Sadly, I doubt this is something that we could get full community consensus on. Especially as pole-lock becomes more detrimental the better you get, what with it making play near the poles unmanageable.

I would, however, love for them to actually make a 'tutorial' that explains some of the more useful keybinds. Such as the one for toggling pole-lock (Or it might just be 'orient camera', I've not used it in a while).

I wrote an entire article on why this is.

It's mathematically impossible to map a sphere's surface to a 2D rectangle without distortion.



I adapted to it pretty quick. If you can't, then I'm sorry but PA might just not be for you.

Games can't make everyone happy, and they shouldn't try.

Big maps are the way to avoid this!

Try it, in my experience you still don't proxy. Maybe on a 1300. And wouldn't you just build a teleporter?

I think the struggle with spherical maps would be decreased if we had the option to let the camera revolve around a static planet instead of the planet revolving underneath a static camera. The current pole lock helps a tremendous amount, but is very tacky when your base, or your target, is near a pole.

Maybe Geers is right and this game is not for me .
When i boot up PA my experience is that i am playing something unfinished the units look blocky there is not a lot of diversity .
This i can live with as different units can be added later and teh visuals polished later.
But the interface system simply sucks even with pole lock its really hard when you have to play near the top of planets. This game as it is is not fun to play you really have to work at it and even then you end thinking sod this i got better things to spend my time on.
This will limit the uptake of it and What happens when the uptake is bad the game fails and people go elsewhere.
I stark contrast i boot up Forged alliance i get a polished game with units that have a feeling to them and a lot of diversity and an interface system that is second to none.
Even when i boot up the original TA its more fun to play.
Cudos to Uber for the concept of the planets thing but in my opinion in trying to stick to the original plan and trying to make it work they have forgotten that they need to get new people involved to make the game succeed.
As one of the other posters mentioned a lot of the reviewers tried it and hated the system and never tried again.

I like to think of pole lock as training wheels. But a tutorial that showed you the difference as it toggled it on and off and then allowed you choose to keep it or not, would be amazing. as alot of new players just don't know it exists.

Tips for people who are trying to get used to PA spherical maps. It should take you about a week and then you'll start seeing all the good things you were missing out on .

1) Play small radius maps and start by using keyboard to control your camera.
2) If you get lost, use your pole reset button and hotkey jump back to your commander
3) Stop thinking in terms of left, right, up, down. Think about where your base is and where your opponents base is. The only direction that matters is the direction inbetween. Think in terms of relative directions, not absolute directions.
4) Set your factories to rally units towards your enemies base. Now you will have moving units as a reference to help you orientate.
5) Zoom out more often.
6) Stay away from teh PiP. It will mean nothing to you as you have not built up the ability to reference where your camera is relative to where you put your PiP.
7) Work your way up to middle mouse button camera control so you can now learn the hotkeys on keyboard instead

I'd actually recommend to avoid pole lock. It makes you incapable of playing reasonable if something important happens to be very close to a pole.
Imho the key to finding orientation is to use camera hotkeys to get back to a known starting point. From there I actually do think in right/left/top/down and move away. Depending on how much practice one has it is possible to just keep moving around without losing control from there.
Once you've lost control just press that camera button and you're back at your base. Where you want to go all the time anyway.

I btw heavily disagree on "1v1 is only t1 because too complex for human players". That's completely a balance thing. If it would be possible to get an advantage out of controlling more stuff people would try it and some would manage to do it. Currently expanding (which is required to tech up to expensive t2) is economically rather ... weak and takes ages, during which the dox wars usually end the game already.
The energy that players have during some reference minutes are actually kinda interesting in that regard:

This is a game during the glorious (imho ) phase of mass expansion we had before changes to the dox and the startup economy broke it: http://pastats.com/chart?gameId=74998
Check the energy gross income graph. I reach 20k energy income by minute 7:37. Around 10 both my opponent and myself are pushing t2 power which was the key to get away from the energy limited economy of the first 10 minutes of the game. Since t1 sucked it was okay to do this, as t1 would not be able to hit early enough to do anything before a player reaches t2 and thus much better economy.

Now here is a game of the current meta: http://pastats.com/chart?gameId=214938
Check the energy gross income again. Elodea had around 10k energy income at 7:37, his opponent even less. 20k is only reached by minute 17+. No t2 power is used at all. Considering that the older game actually has a balance where players have less starting resources this is an even more drastic differences than one first may think.

This is only one example, but I am pretty sure many many more just like this can be found. 20k energy before minute 10 was pretty normal back then and from all the replays I've watched lately I've always gone "oh wtf these people are all so low on energy compared to what I was used to a few month ago". That's because the dox buffs make them very very effective at attacking and the new startup economy allows to directly spam a deadly amount of dox without ever growing your economy.
I guess the complaints of "t1 is useless" have been fixed by these changes, but the way t1 works right now it also removed the viability to start multiple expansion around the map in the first 5 minutes of the game and thus removed the "players compete at being able to control multiple things around a sphere" aspect. It's not because players are incapable of that, it is because the balance simply punishes expansion and rewards mass dox pushes.

No offence intended elodea, but I've watched quite a few of your matches being cast and you seem to pretty much be one of those players that only makes direct lines of attack to the opponent (which, as I said, makes sense given you are a 1v1 competitive player). You said it yourself "The only direction that matters is the direction inbetween." - from the matches I've seen you play (and please feel free to link me to other matches if you think I'm being unfair), the fact that you're playing on a sphere is completely irrelevant. You're walking proof of the OP's point - you may as well be playing on a flat surface.

I mean, let's be real here - you play competitive PA. Which means you play PA right at the edge of what makes it completely unfun for the other 99% of us - 1v1 small planet t1 spam consisting of 2 different units.

I'm afraid that most players won't have the patience to play long enough to get used to the spherical gameplay and the lack of battlefield overview they might be used to from SupCom. I actually wouldn't be surprised if a large share of the backers and buyers of PA give up after a few games, though I hope that's not the case.

When I initially backed PA in the Kickstarter I never thought that they would actually use these tiny spherical planets as maps And until the Alpha I expected the game to at least have some zoomed out projective 2D view, but obviously that never happened.

Now that I'm used to the spherical maps, I don't really mind them anymore, but I'd still prefer flat ones (probably because I'm mainly interested in competitive 1v1s).

I'm still hoping Uber is working on some kind of flat map extension for PA, e.g. with the shard land masses they planned for Human Ressources. Such gameplay would be much more accessible and hopefully attract lots more regular players. It might also simplify the sim logic enough to allow for bigger maps with more units.

When i say the only direction that matters is the one inbetween your base and your opponents base, I do not mean that is the only way you should attack. Notice how i've given it in the context of helping players learn to orientate themselves, and not how to play the game?

Maybe if i phrase it this way you won't get the wrong idea. Don't think about left, up, right, down. Think about it in terms of short and long. Both are equally viable ways of sending units, but as with all relativistic frameworks, you need an anchor, and the most convenient anchor is the short distance between your bases.

If you think 1v1 competitive is all about spamming 2 units directly towards an opponents base, then you are grossly mistaken.

Are you sure?
Look, they even had 2d minimap

That mini-map probably only works well because that projection of Earth is so easy to recognize. On random planets, the distortion on that mini-map would make it really hard to follow. Notice how Greenland appears to be about the same size as all of Europe. Antarctica seems to be the largest continent.

I need to finish my alerts-minimap mod to disprove this. The feeling of having that minimap is ... good. People underestimate how helpful it is. Yes you need to learn the map. So what?
Mercator is a horrible choice though.

Mercator is great because a straight line on mercator is a straight line on the planet surface. It's the only projection where that is true, which is why it is used for navigational maps.

The best way to fix this problem is to nerf air dominance, which has already been done to a degree, and make terrain more interesting. The reason you can be attacked from anywhere is because most planets are flat and obstacle free. The only major exception being lava seas and big canyons. When you limit the possible approaches you make it easier to defend them, making it more comfortable to expand.

I know they complained swirly terrain was not a good idea for gameplay, but I'm starting to think thats exactly the answer. Swirls would create a lot of corridors and other interesting features that limit the possible routes. It can only be better than flat and featureless.

Not being able to block off paths with walls properly kills it even more as you can't even create chokepoints if you want to.

Not that I expect anyone to listen to reason here anymore.