Still No New Content?

Ah, goalposts moving, sounds like... defeat.

i think nobody disagrees that uber released the game too early with missing content
that was primarily
offlineplay, the unitcannon and what we get now with saves ...
everything else may have been added later on with no one realy complayning ...
though i would say there is content direly needed to make multiplanetplay a bit less of a chore

what i would however disagree with would be poeple that say uber wouldn´t have delivered from what has been put in the kickstarter considering the stretchgoals ... a lot of things that have been tossed around in the kickstarter were various ideas of how the game could have looked but weren´t realy prommised but people took as such ..

When tit comes to how people reacted to the game when it first came out boggles me, yes there were thing missing and bugs here and there, but the game gave what it promised, galactic sized battle, On the reviews on Steam people were talking how the game would not run on even the best of computer, which is why I did not get it earlier, I got then got it, and after fixing the drive problem, the game runs great on my laptop. and on the look of the game, people didn't like it because it was cartoonish, that is what got me into the game.

On a side not, I still would like some kind of way to have mini orbital bases, and this asteroids thing may be it!

the sad part of this all is that many people seem not to realise and/or not care how much it takes to make such a game ..
it comes often with the experience from earlier games that people carry their expectations to the next game as granted (people who played SupCom or TA expecting a similar experience in both content and presentation f.e.) no matter which company does it with what resources ... the other thing is people simply having their prefferences which you can´t realy argue with ...


as for asteroids .. yea gotta wait and see ... quite curious how they may end up being ...

This is actually the very problem I face on Halo Waypoint and why the community is split in half.

I've had enough of Uber's balance, to heck with it all. We don't need balance, not at this point. We need design. Show me the design documents, show me what Uber's doing to make the game feel better from a gameplay standpoint and then we'll talk about unit balance. Until then, Uber can add in whatever the [expletive] they want because the game needs it. The game needs more possibilities for unit -> unit interaction, it needs to not be stale.

what unit interaction are you speaking of?

The ones that are allowed by, for example, adding in hover units. Now you have a method of ground -> naval interaction fundamentally different from amphibious in that it is vulnerable to surface -> surface weapons.

I think the reason it's not been added yet is it requires a new layer.

Not that complex a task in of itself, however it probably then needs said new layer to be added into each individual unit, probably multiple times to cope with layer interactions, then it needs adding to gw, which requires AI modifications to support it... It quickly becomes a much larger task than simply adding the unit.

That's not to say is insurmountable, just its by no means the 'quick' addition it first appears. Adding in a new standard unit that conforms to an existing set of rules is easier, however it's also less clear what role needs filing. I think any new unit would overlap roles with something else, which doesn't worry me but also doesn't follow the ethos uber have with their units. They don't really have any same tier direct overlaps, the unit set is very efficient as is, and I don't mind that really. I would like to see hover units eventually though...

kinda what i said about the game needing more fluidity (more mobility options) with orbital multiunittransports and carriers, hovercrafts (+factory) would add a lot of fluidity to planets that are water or lavaheavy without having to use air ... another thing i like to see are orbital (and naval) teleportals that minimise orbital travel time .. i think if that stuff gets in PA is pretty much gold skirmishwise ...

All that is needed is a new navigational layer of hover; nothing else is needed because everything else uses world layers and hover units would use WL_Anyhorizontalgroundorwatersurface, which already exists.

I think that before we start theorizing on new unit types, the existing unit types should be worked out further.

Stuff like hovercrafts and alike would add more interaction possibilities between water and ground forces, that's true.

But where's the diversity inside each layer? And what's with the existing interactions?

Every single ground unit behaves the same, on every single terrain type.
There is much which could be done, mostly by using the existing navigation system to introduce movement penalties. It's already supporting such things, as the vector field flooding algorithm already has support for increased movement costs, only the individual units aren't respecting that yet.

Air still dominates by far, since it has no chains whatsoever attached. Once you go air, you are present planet wide.
And that's not something which could be solved by a new unit type either, it's inherit to the mechanics.

And naval?...
Naval is mostly suffering from planets being waaaayyy too small for them to act at a reasonable scale. What I mean is, naval units in real live are designed as a support role for land operations. With planets being so small, the range of most naval units in PA is also rather low. And yet they have the same properties a real ship has, namely the low speed and turn rate. It's just not sounding reasonable to use full sized ships on such tiny water bodies.


Hovercrafts would fit nicely into the naval theme.

But not because they are using a new movement layer. No, it's because hover units typically are at a completely different scale and have a much greater maneuverability, which fits much better with the size of water bodies and general scale of units we have in PA.




It's not so much unit on unit interactions which are missing in PA. It's unit on world reactions which are completely missing or lacking. Land based combat is rather dull, because it's just swarming along the path of least resistance. A path which is always the same, no matter what units you are using.

Yes, there are exceptions like walled towers which require certain units to break such formations, but that's the same in every single match. If you see such a formation, you already know what units to send. It's just a trivial paper-scissor-rock mechanic.

As it stands, you could play PA on the sandbox biome, and most matches would play out pretty much the same. That might be, because most of the unit mechanics have been only designed and tested with that one, featureless biome in mind.



Interplanetary gameplay is yet another case of units not actually interacting with the world. There are some notable exceptions, such as the T2 interplanetary fighter, but in most cases, units haven't been designed with interplanetary gameplay in mind. Most unit roles we have, are obviously designed to fight and reproduce on flat, planar maps. Extending that to spherical maps was already a huge stretch.

"Transformed into brutally efficient machines of war"?
Not really.

"For a purpose long forgotten",
that is a much better description of most unit designs in PA.

disagreed

You know how I mean that. Not that units don't have a role, but that their roles aren't exactly adapted to the theme of the game.

remember that the original idea of the game even though it has a futuristic theme to it was that it kinda reflects how modern day warfare is with the satalitestuff added (main reason why no star wars/trek like starships and planes) ..

@exterminans

I don't understand what you mean here. You say air dominates, but the only maps I've seen it really dominate are Duat and Amplus. It has its time on Meso, and is an integral part of the game, but even on that map the game is ultimately decided by navy. On Forge, Berg, and Styx forget it (except when defending Hades against orbital). I've won games against better players on all of those by building one air factory and the rest vehicle or bot. Perhaps I'm just not at the level yet where I can properly micro air to its full OP status. I do realize how devastating air micro can be despite not being able to perform it.

I agree with your proposal though. Different speeds on different terrain types for different units would be really cool as long as it didn't take up huge amounts of resources.

As for air being planet wide, you are right (at least as far as I've seen) that as soon as the map gets big enough air is all important. Having a water map can nullify that for a time in my experience since navy AA is so much better, but ultimately with as planet size increases air will dominate. The solution seems relatively simple: Implement a more draconian version of the fueling system for supcom (I've only even watched videos of supcom and seen this explained, so I could have no idea what I'm talking about here). Make planes land at refueling stations periodically or drop out of the sky (perhaps make them automatically run for a refueling station when not given other orders or when about to run out of fuel). Then players couldn't keep their air force in areas of the map where they didn't have refueling stations. Perhaps to avoid structure duplication we could have air factories work as refueling stations? This would also save any hopes people have for aircraft carriers since they would act as refueling stations. Air would of course have to be majorly buffed to keep it relevant under these conditions but hey, then we might see it on small maps as well since the refueling wouldn't be a big problem there with all of the map in easy flight reach of the base.

This would also break the invincible anti-orbital air turtle. Players would have a much harder time defending all of a planet with air if they had to build refueling stations all over it and keep different air forces in different sectors to defend. The strength of an attacker against a planet is that he can concentrate all his force at one point while the defender has to guard all points. Air lets the defender be everywhere, negative this, but not with a fuel system.

Anyway, just my completely uninformed internet opinion here. Feel free to disagree and inform me of my stupidity on this subject

And that's precisely what I meant. Unit roles which come from an antiquated form of warfare.

It's rather obvious that air is inferior as long as ground units have a sufficient mobility, due to lower cost and more efficient hard counters. So as long as the planet is small and traversable enough, you can deny air control even without going air yourself.

But once you scale that up, and movement for ground based units gets hindered, mostly by movement speed, air becomes superior the second you can no longer get a 100% ground coverage using ground based units, as air now can slip through.

Once you successfully go air, you are virtually omnipresent on a planet, up to a certain critical point where even air units become to slow.


The fuel system in SupCom actually worked quite well, even though it had different effects on different map sizes. On "small" 10kmx10km or 20kmx20km, it mostly limited the effectiveness on bomber runs, as each bomber had to return to load another bomb. Making bombers almost too valuable to waste them against mobile units, they were better used for actual snipes against more valuable structures. Most planes, however, had sufficient fuel to do a full patrol with a single tank load on these small maps.

On larger maps, air was now actually limited to regions where you had established air recharge platforms or naval carriers. Sending air units too far away, meant that they would run out of fuel. And air units out of fuel were basically sitting ducks, waiting to be hunt down by fighters. They could still move, albeit much slower than usual.

OOH! OOH! I have some really cool unit ideas! Some larger scale ones and a way for the Comm to take part in combat!

I know how to make coms take part in combat. It's called giving them a decent gun.

what i wanted to say is, variety of unit didnt change anything. balance is ok but when you have lot of unit. you can adapt their strategy. see games like zero-k they have more than 100 units. and its free to play (the hardest game to master than this game, seriously).