Hello everyone So i heard PA is very much about macro gameplay but having watched many many casts, (thx to exodus esports, zaphodx, marschall, pamatches and the many others for beeing awesome!) i came to the opinion that the roster could need some love to make for a more interesting army on army micro gameplay. And in that i do not mean it does need more units. but the units need more character to them especially when it comes down to tier 1 units. i may not be a strategical genius nor a game designer but i have played rts since dune 2 several hundet hour of ta forged alliance and not to forget a mediocore 166hours of pa and feel confident enough on the genre to suggest some changes in the existing units characteristics. if i had the time i would try to make a mod displaying said ideas but time is what i critically lack So here are my ideas for a more interesting to play and watch tier 1 army on army micro. lets just start with bots. the grenadier. if the grenadier is supposed to be an anti-bot bot. which i suppose it is? i would love to see them lobbing their projectiles a little bit faster so they actualy hit a group of dox when they are closing in on him. if it is supposed to be a "siegebot" (quite ridicoulous idea i guess) it should lob its grenades above wall not on them. (walls will be addressed later on again...). Dox. give them back some of their turn rate. i remember it beeing nerved to 75 from hundred. how about something like 85 or 90. cause imo it was really fun to watch them beeing wiggled and it realy gave the player paying attention to a fight a big advantage over someone who just issued "fire and forget" order to them. Boom! Sightrange plz. for the ultimate suicide unit experience. On to vehicles. the skitter. scout only? do we need a unit you will build 1 to 8 of the entire game just because they have speed and sightrange? i guess giving the skimmer a dps that would be decent enough to deal with at least a bot engineer would spice up early game vehicular gameplay. what would be wonderfull were, considering i just gave dox their incredible wiggling powers back, the skimmer could be a anti bot vehicle fast enough to track them down with enough sightrange to spot them in advance enough fire power to deal with them and a miniturret that is turning fast enough to counter their RoT but too less hitpoints and turnrate to deal with tanks. The inferno. I envision the inferno beeing the mobile equivalent to a wall. in the moment it feeels a little useless in its role as a siege unit for me. but what if we weight its stats differently. give it the speed of tanks so it can drive in a tankformation without slowing it down. nerf down its dps to not make it op due to speed. and higher the hitpoints a bit. this way we would be able to use infernos to cover the advance of a tank army against another tank army without beeing horribly outmicroed. this current state promotes spamming one unit type above varying imo. The Spinner. I don´t know if it is entirely possible within the range of current ui desing. but what if we gave the spinner a deploy button. deployed the spinner would fire its missles ground to ground at a much slower rate within a belt between a minimum range equal to the maxiumu range of dox and a maximum range that does equal the pelters range. this way we would have an option against early game wallofs with turrets. forcing the defender to move out his army. also it would make the spinner just a tad more viable in ground to ground combat. also it would introduce a risk vs reward mechanic to them. you would have to choose if you deploy for a slight advantage in a ground to ground combat situation but make them vulnerable to flanking maneuvers and losing part of you ground aa coverage. also i would make their speed to be somewhat between tanks and dox. so they can close up to your tank army again if undeployed but be hunt down by dox or boombots or even aa group of skitters. if all this is not possible for the spinner i would at least introduce a t1 siege unit with characteristics simmilar to the spinner in explained "deploy mode" to offer a counterplay to early game walloffs. also the speed change is neccessary to make switches from "early bot rush" to "anti air/tank" builds feel a little more smoth due to the first spinners not utterly incapable to defend a remaining bot army against a single bomber. The ant. Fine as it is. love the idea of the turrets RoT not matching up to doxes move speed and RoT, outmicro tanks with infantry!? totally legit. Buildings. Factories. Again don´t know if in any way possible and a quite radical idea for a X-annihilation game but... what if we would introduce a diminishing return in buildefficency proportional to the number of factories of the same type there are. meaning you build 3 bot factories which produce at full speed if not stalled. but from number four on you get a slight decrease in buildefficency stacking up to nearly zero efficeny at the 99nth factory.(just some numbers. i am no mathematician may need to be radically diferent to actually make it feel good) having the effect that you can not use all you economy efficently if you just spam one type of force or stay at t1 for to long. making to tech up rewarding and natural to you economy (must encourage teching, must encourage teching, must encourage teching Ohhhhhhmmmmm) seems unlogic? need a explanation how this fits into "lore"? well, the commanders "Factory handling routines" just can not handle infinite amounts of factories at full efficency even "scifi-integrated-nano" systems have their limitations...you know!? ;D Walls. So shots collide with debris but walls are targetet!? please just make it that fire collides with walls and not primary targets it. as mentioned with the grenadier love to see artillery not targetig walls first like they where some kind of malfunctional ai. also plz lower the hitpoints a bit. i can see a dox not beeing able to force down a wall. no problem with that. but a whole tank army firing on a wall for about 15 seconds ore more? why are tanks not build out of the material this tiny walls seem to be made of. its vastly superior in its damage absorbing characteristics I hope this or at least some of this seems to make t1 much more interesting to play and watch to you as it does to me. i just love to see more moments in 1on1 commentary where actual encounter micro is hyped rather than having mostly macro talk while encounters are pretty much pre determined by numbers most of the time. also i guess it would ballance the game a bit between more micro and more macro heavy players as i think my changes would make it possible to win encounters with superior micro or composition and as a result decimate a macro heavy players force to a point where harrass will be possible again without the risk of beeing steamrolled for a while. this is of course heavyly reflects my personal opinion on rts gameplay in general and you may like it or not. it may even conflict with your vision of pa. i am totaly ok with this, and just ask to show the same respect when criticising my ideas Also i want to thank everyone that even read all of the above.
No micro pl0x. More refines discussion later for me! But yes this game is a very much macro oriented game.
Personally I already find that the game has enough micro already. Now as for your suggestions: -1. Grenadier: The grenadier is meant to be an anti wall-turtle unit as explicitly emphasized by Tvinita. It already currently serves this purpose. -2. Dox: The issue with the dox was that too much turn rate made them far too op since a good microer could win the game just dox micro trolling (as some people have put it) -3. Boombot: The reason it doesn’t have sightrange is so that they can be balanced. Having too much sightrange would make them op. Booms are meant to be complimented by scouting. -4. Skitter: The skitter is extremely helpful since it can detect mines(how cool is that?). If this isn’t a good enough reason to build skitters then I don’t know what is. -5. Inferno: “I envision the inferno beeing the mobile equivalent to a wall.” Wut? It already is a mobile wall, one that is designed as such to not make it op. Maybe it’s just me though? -6. The Spinner: This acutally sounds like a really cool idea, Uber plz? -7. Ant: It’s called the Bolo, not the ant L As for the rest of the stuff… maybe I’ll comment about it later. Also, there’s probably some bias in here I’m sure, but meh
It's an ant you traitor. And no more micro. This game should not be about micro. We are fighting in a solar system for pete's sake - who cares abou one bot vs another bot when you have a thousand of each?
1. grenadiers. litteraly never in any tournament or casted laddermatch saw them used that way.. but to clear large groups of dox. 3. they are a little underpowered because 1 dox counters a whole bunch of them imo. agree on the scouting thing but at least double the sightrange. can´t even see what im running in if the scout dies early. 4.Did not even know. never seen mines beeing used. seldom see combat fabs. is there a tooltip stating this? 5.But they slow down the advance to a point where they are just kitet by tanks not to speak of dox.. another option would be nerfing the ants movespeed down to the same crawl i guess and i know some people would like this to make the maps feel bigger. i in opposite prefer not beeing able to prepare for an incoming attack for 10 minutes from the point i recognized it on radar for the whole who cares if a dox wins against another dox a) my post is totally not about dox on dox combat!? :O b)i guess every good Commander would care wether his or the opponents dox hold the ground no matter the number. c)i am totally not suggesting making pa ABOUT micro just to spice up existing micro with to a point where people with 200+ cpm capabilities can show their brilliance more. also in my opinion the whole "share army" option would heavily profit from a more fleshed out army on army micro.
I´m OKay with more micro if the first step is removing all senseless micro from PA! I got nothing against a package of good, intelligent micro, but won´t be respecting micro that results of "wrong implemented orders"...
No more micro. Micro is nor intelligent not strategic, it is reflexes and learnt bold mechanics. For micro I play a Moba where u only control 1 unit. No one can control 100 units to their fullest potential so I prefer games where there is not a huge difference between units perfectly microed and regularly microed .
Actually, and i highly apologize for this, the threads title "More Micro <3" should tranlate to "More micro love" as in "the micro needs more love" not that i want MORE micro. but better ballanced with more distinctive counter units. You will alway have micro in an rts anyways. the question is.. is it any good?
200+ CPM is not brilliance. It's practice. Brilliance is undercutting an enemy's attack with your own or anticipating his actions successfully. I never said anything about DOX - any unit should have as little micro as possible at all times. The best games of PA I have seen are 3v3s or FFA10s or 4vv4s. Not a single 1v1 hits that level for the simple reason that they are so easy to win early with micro instead of playing the rest of the game to fruition. The Beta Balance did a decent job of forcing 1v1s into the mid-game on decently sized planets, something this balance sorely lacks.
Well i get your point and I fully accept that the majority of (the minorityof remaining) active players seems to like the lack of refined army on army micro. As for the best games we have seen also our opinions couldn´t differ more as for i find 1on1 gameplay to be kind of acceptable to watch and play but especially on bigger planets with more players and time dilation for me it is utterly boring to play and watch. "clanwars showdown" beeing a good example where i watched of turtling and people plainly beeing outnumbered for ages just to see some very very slow ssx laser snipes in the end which were the only thing interesting in any way. may just not be my game then which is sad. but i doubt i am alone with this (game not beeing my game) considering the recent steam stats for pa. http://steamcharts.com/app/233250
I'm kiiiind of working on a mod that introduces more micro if you're interested. But bringing up the stats is a bit of a low blow.
i brought up the stats to correlate that there must be something inherently wrong with the latest changes or even the rts gameplay in general. if you feel this beeing low tier retoric tactics. i am sorry. i never ment to offend. i love the premise of the game! and bought multiple copies which i distributed amongst my friends like i were some kind of drug dealer seeing the games stats is kind of frustrating to everyone that feels like me. especially seeing all these balance patches just not recognizing that in a non-rock-scissors-paper system you will alway end up with some kind of op or most cost efficient unit beeing spammed. and thats one of the most major points oft critique i hear from people not liking the game at all. Despite whining about the 3 dimensional multilevel maps, which i anticipate to be nonflexibility. The fact that there is not enough chess likeness behind the army on army micro is something i really can understand as a major problem for the average rts player. I guess it comes down to our western culture that people in general are more entertained by chess mechanics rather than go mechanics. with pa beeing some kind of (involuntary !?) Hybrid between both. and as i statet its just my opinion and even if i try to defend it strongly in the end i accept that it is not absolute. and as this will just stay away from PA until next patch, leave it to the people that like current gameplay and let this be my last post of criticism. be sure i will try your mod! also i suggest that you ask quitch to add queller ai support for your mod if done.
stats like that always spike at big updates and drop afterwards. The current updates (save+load and after that a lot of bugfixes) are not very "exciting" ones, so they dont create large spikes. However they are very important ones, as a good portion of polish and bugfixing is required to get the next spike -created by a content update in june or july- to reach full potential. The nicest content update wont have player retention if it has many bugs, so it is a good idea to do the polish first, even if may seem boring and won't directly make player counts spike up.
Yes, yes micro. Micro should be an option and a viable one, but not the only one. You have to make it so that there's a cost to microing, that whenever you're microing your time could be spent at least just as well macroing. You need to decide if it's better to focus on growing more forces or on making the forces you already have at the front lines count. There shouldn't be a "right" answer as to whether you should micro or macro. As Sid Meier said, "A game is a series of interesting decisions". Anytime that there's a "right" or a "wrong" choice you take away from the potential for interesting decisions. You really have to leave a balance between different types of decisions to make sure that you keep it meaningful. Is the choice to macro or micro meaningful right now? This is really the question that we need to answer.
Let's start with the stats issue: PA hasn't taken off, but it has a core playerbase who love the game and what it presents. This can be good and bad, but the top players have all mastered some form of micro in the game to dominate everyone else. ColaColin can be everywhere at once (when he practices....), Elodea has ecoing refined to a science, Matiz is amazing at expanding all the time, burntcustard is a master of the Dox swarm, I am the go-to representative of Orbital Micro, and OrbNet just out-macros everyone and ignores everything I just said. Essentially, if you want more micro, you need to say something besides *can we get moar*. This forum will shut you down really fast that way. If you can mod, I highly suggest jumping in and fixing the balance to the way you like. It's really simple and there are guides in the modding forum on how to do this. Showing your ideas to people is a great way to gain support and will help us understand where you are coming from. If you don't mod or don't want to, please sit back and make a more detailed presentation on WHY you wish micro was more prevalent, HOW you would make this so, and WHAT you think the end result will look like. Otherwise, your arguments can be nit-picked into oblivion. They might still be demolished by some of us micro-haters (cough) but at least we can't fault you for cutting corners. Also, you can edit titles for threads if you created them
Strategy in Chess revolves around mastering maneuvers using fundamentally different units, whereby achievements can be gained mostly on comparably shortsighted opportunities. In Go, there is only a single unit type which also has an invariant location once placed, and about every single move only plays out in the long term. If you compare the literature around these games, you can find a lot of lecture on tactics for chess, covering only 5-10 moves at most, whereby literature about Go disputes mostly how strategies and patterns can unfold over the course of an entire game. But could I agree on the claims that Western culture prefers that? No, not necessarily. The difference is not in the culture, actually we do have quite a number of more Go-like games in our culture as well, such the Civ series or about every other simulation from that genre, while you also have a lot of purely micro focused games from Asia, both with massive player bases. The question is more likely what type of players you want to cater. Those who enjoy going borderline on mastering a single trait and exploiting it all the way, or those who like to beat the game in all aspects by developing a deep cognitive model of the entire game from start to end with all possibilities. It's not really about whether you have units with unique mechanics or not, but about whether the games favors opportunistic maneuvers over long term strategy or the other way around. A heavy focus on micro, even more so when there is diversity in micro, caters the first case, as cognitive resources are bound in precise execution of maneuvers which inevitably means having less resources to spare for developing an universal model (at least for your average human, not so much true for shared armies or super minds). It also means that disregarding opportunistic behavior means an asymetric advantage for the border line player. What does this lead to? You can observe the results in Starcraft and alike: Players are aiming on mastering the controls for a limited set of units, because that's what grants the hugest gains. For the long term strategic component, most players are following fixed, ready made schemes. Since users are not rewarded for developing there own cognitive models, large scale meta game play evolves only extremely slowly, with only very, very few users ever pointing out that there are still significant gains to be made.
Yes, definitely. There is a tradeoff between micro and strategy, where strategy usually means more thinking between game decisions. But I'm not sure what actually causes micro. Obviously it depends on the relation between the advantage you can get for micro managing your units versus the advantage you can get by playing a better long term strategy. But this isn't easy to write down formally. And it on an actual game it depends on your opponent as well, so there may be feedback loops within a game community. The funny thing is that there seems to be a really thin line (if there is a line at all) between snipes, cheese and strategy. As for Go vs. Chess, from afar they a very similar: Both are board games, with no time limitation and no hidden information. Personally I see the main difference only on required search depth and complexity of the search tree. Where Deep Blue looked eight to 20 moves ahead to beat Kasparov, the current research in Go aims for Monte Carlo Tree Search, where you can not relate the depth of selection and expansion to the classical min-max search depth.
