Just read reddit...

My god @stuart98 how much you have had to suffer reading that bullsh..it.
My god, are they jusy utterly oblivious or is the fact that they ignorance overcomes the really low levels of mental capacity to understand how entitled they are.

I think we can all fully agree that kickstarter is bad for developing games. The amount of bullshit Uber had to suffer because the Omg they alreagy got 2 millions to make the game and they want me to pay for a expansion ( always saying about promised features that were never ever promised...).

Almost every duck outthere saying try FaF PA is trash... I couldn't help but feel that FAF should die. It is harming more the rts market than helping it.


Edit: I wanted to post this on titans but didn't look and posted this on normal Pa. Any moderator cam close the one in normal Pa please?

NOOOOO !!!! DO NOOOT!!!

SPARE YOUR SANITY!!!

strongly disagree one this one .. uber HAD to kickstart the game because after the failure with SMNC they were pretty much on death´s bed ..

google uber´s hail marry ..

don´t let yourself be influenced by a minoritygroup speaking against haters and answering with hate yourself is a waste of time and sanity ...
just inform those that want to know as unbiased as possible and be done with it ..

Lol.
I is certainly infuriating. Is like a syndrome, I need to correct people who are wrong (...slowly descends into madness cause reddit)

No kickstarter. No Planetary Annihilation. Because no publisher would touch RTS. The return on investment as to low to make it worth it. Maybe only one publisher stardock would be willing to take the risk.

1st mistake- cared about reddit

2nd mistake - trying to feign superiority while ignoring spell check and trying to sound intelligent at the sem tiem.

3rd mistake- implying a company of 30 avg income people could afford to make this off of their own income is absurd. They aren't Nintendo, they are just people from the sup-com franchise who wanted to make a good game. They had to do a crowd fundraiser.

4th mistake- PA came from Faf. Like Overwatch and Tf2 comparisons are bound to be made and to wish the original dead is like saying I wish the old Doom would have never been made, the new one being release this year is sooooo much better and is gonna bring in so much money.

Disagreeing with someone doesn't mean they're making mistakes. It means you have a different opinion to them.

Otherwise he could do that condescending quote-reply rubbish and count your mistakes as a response.

I get where he's coming from. The gaming community's "love affair" with Kickstarter is over, and PA suffered from the backlash of that. Especially with the announcement of Titans. But equally, Uber didn't have much of a choice.

This! That is why i just bought Titans, after paying 100$ for alpha. Does not matter if we feel entitled because we already paid, what matters is if devs will have money to finish game. I do not blame them for asking $$$ for Titans.

Only one mistake that Uber did was starting too ambitious project, they tried to chew more than they could with PA.

Amen Marshall. Aim for the stars and you will at least reach the moon.

When I first played StarCraft, I thought "yeah you have to limit to 200 the number of units for pcs to handle it".

Eons after, I saw the first video of SC2 with the same units that can't attack while moving, the same fixed perspective AND the same ***** counter set to 200 units WTF? Developers what have you been doing all these years? Why can't my ultralisk just trample over a marine?

So **** SC2, go hard or go home MFs!

I agree the project was ambitious, but I think they have done a great job at delivering what they promised in there KS video. I think some of the stretch goals turned into a lot more effort more than the extra funding they added.
I'm really happy to have kickstarted this game and think what has been made is amazing, unfortunately some people seem to have wanted a different game or don't understand how low the budget for this game was, and think Uber have somehow been greedy, when the truth is they have been very generous.

Couldn't agree more. Uber greatly improved RTS genre, something no other company did or wanted to do because of risks. All other RTSes in last year or two are the same old RTS type, that improved nothing. Played Ashes of Singularity recently, and there is nothing new, its big regresion in UI and gameplay compared to PA. Unit limit is build into game as a one of mechanics! (Upgrade you make with one of the resources) It's really sad that kickstarted bullshit brought so much hate for such a good game. At least you can see in recent reviews of Titans on Steam that people REALLY like the game, even compared to Starcraft 2. When you don't involve any hate because of money or kickstarter, people really like the game. Go figure.

I hope this is not last time Uber improves RTS genre, we need them and something new in incoming years. Tho kickstarter is probably a no-no now.

A unit limit is not a regression. It caps snowballing and promotes meaningful decision making throughout the game, especially to the aid of a healthy late game where you have cycling phases of what factors are more valuable at any point. It is generally better design to add more than one dimension of strategy to an RTS.

In PA, the only dimension is metal. +planets are simply repeats of the same one dimensional strategic consideration. If a planet does not have metal, do you go to it? Where you get unique resources (halley and catalyst slots), they arn't interesting flavours added to the decision making pot as much as they are gratuitous game enders. It's telling when in the long term a mechanic only creates moments of enjoyment when used to end unenjoyable games.

Compare this to multidimensional RTS games like WC/SC that have main resource, special resource, map independent resource(food). Even very casual facing types of games like MOBA's have multiple dimensions - towers, mana, ability and experience caps, item slot caps.

*You're right that ashes is pretty mediocre though

tl;dr
Uber didn't improve as much as they did innovate. Not judging whether either is more valuable than the other, just trying bring some clarity to those trying to understand why PA may not have taken off with the general public. Alot can be learned from both sides.

You dont need much in terms of complicated resources or systems to have good strategy.

Chess have no resources, yet its one of the best strategies I'm not saying PA is perfect as it is and nothing is possible to make it better in terms of gameplay, but I'm pretty sure its solid as it is. It's hard to compare it to games like Starcraft, because they play very differently, and are almost a different type of RTS, different genre.

PA shines on good maps, that are custom made, and with good team. Metal is simple resource, that makes everyone expand. Planets are different maps, battles, sometimes very good "resources" (metal planet, asteroid), or just good base, if you can take it for yourself. I think this is more than enough, especially with all the units we have, the entire balance. The entire "planets" idea is one of the things that make PA so fresh and good. And make it very scalable, even for future (tho 16 planets is hard limit, even if you can make every planet very, very, very big).

What I'm saying, because PA is so simple, and yet balanced and full of possibility of strategy, its so innovative and good. You don't need many resources, or limiting army, you need good maps that make you compete for resource, and give you possibilities for different strategies, simple rules, yet plenty choices and strategies. And a teaspoon of awesome. Huge scale helps too.

Entire UI and usability of it is for sure improvement compared to any comercial RTS. Any other game that comes close or is in the same place is free Spring RTS engine made by community of hardcore RTS players.

And I just don't like RTS's like WC, SC2, or other similar. They don't click for me, closest game that did was TA, FAF, and PA just did click, its perfect for me. I'm actually good at it. I was sometimes weak in FAF in terms of 1vs1 close combat, but I was beginner then.

Let's leave ARTS away from this discussion, its sooo different type of game.

Also, I'm not really sure why RTS like FAF or PA don't go well with general publicity. They are a small niche since forever. Who knows.

Ofcourse you don't need alot of resources for depth, but just saying that truism about how interactions are exponential doesn't really do anything for PA. WC/SC style blizzard RTS has only 3 resource types or 'dimensions'. PA has 1. 1^9001 is still 1.

Chess is actually not one of the best strategy games and is a good case showing that inpenetrable depth can be sufficiently mistaken for creative freedom. Its design has some serious flaws that even Fischer himself was quite outspoken about. Chess is a solved game, with performance based not on creativity as much as rote memorization.

Even then, chess is able to take a bunch of simple rules and create a crapton of variation - something that PA cannot begin to hold a stick to. Vanilla PA has very little strategy and the decision making goals, tradeoffs, are limited.

And if you want to talk about balance you can do a quick acid test:

• 50% or more new units in titan are unviable
  
• 50% or more t1 units are unviable or rarely used
  
• 80% of t2 units are unviable
• Naval boils down to 1 unit across both t1 and t2 (~15% of total set)
  
• Air scales wildly across maps, creating heavy biases that smother choice.
• Starting land builds are all the same 1-1-1 with no significant variation.
  
• Economic pacing has a huge bug in the form of commander reclaim.
• Orbital interactions have the depth of a pond and make up a miniscule % of total unit production if they are even used.

Whether an individual plays PA or blizz style RTS is a subjective choice that says nothing about the objective design of either game. I got hooked by PA because of

1. 1v1 moons
   
2. mindless dox spam
3. ladder trolling

Not because of any incredible strategic depth.

PA is much less enjoyable to spectate than a beautiful game of SC2 between korean pros, and i mean that beyond anecdotal evidence. The market itself has decided how people would rather spend their free time. And I don't mean to tell any one person what they should or should not find fun. Only that PA's RTS quality in terms of bedrock things not related to genre innovation are kinda lacking.

I hated reddit before it was cool...

PA has 2 resources: metal and energy. And calling dimensions to resources isn't appropriate. Is the Settlers a 20 dimensions game? Can a brain cope with that?

What's ladder trolling?

And fun is very subjective but innovation isn't. Not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change.

No, it's not. A solved game is one where you know the right move in every given situation. This is not the case with Chess.

I still don't know really what those extra resources add besides giving different places on map different priority. Resource is resource, you have two kind of those, scarce one on map that you need to take control of AND protect, and generating one, that you make in base and NEED to protect. PA has both, metal and energy. Most other RTS has one type, that you can only extract in one specific spot on map, and only there. Making more of them is not really creative or necessary.

Let me not start on "updates" that most RTS have, that make game really confusing, because you never know what enemy really has, because its not obvious visually. Even FAF went that way with "leveling" units. Ugh. PA did really well with not going that route.

TL;DR More resources of the same TYPE don't add much, only artificial complexity.

You could argue that you can remember every counter to every unit in PA or SC, but you still need to react to specific situations, same in chess, but on smaller scale. It's never that simple.

About second part, I disagree, you have plenty variation in terms of maps, opponents, strategies. Game rarely is the same, if you make different maps, its never the same. I can't really recall a match where I was bored because I was doing exactly the same thing. Because I never do. (unless you count first 2-3 buildings, but that even changes depending on map)

Well, this is just weird thing to say, because I almost always use all the units. Depending on situation and map of course. In naval I almost always use all the units, except scout, that one only sometimes.
Ugh, just really, all this depends on situation in game, not all units are universal. I use all units.

About air, often in RTS like this "air dominance" is often something you just DO. In FAF, in TA, in PA its just something you do in game, and build up AA in terms of planes and tanks. You have eco, you build at least one air factory and build up AA. It's a part of the game, and everyone should build air, just because its so important.

Well, I have different builds depending on map or where enemy is. On Earthlike I might go bots because tree eco, on more water like planet I might go air and naval, on ice planet go tanks and air. It all really depends, and you like variety, right?

About that bug, never used it, but saw it recently. Well, meta, right? Uber might fix it.

I actually like orbital, and often people forget about it. I like it to close off some places, and to scout more easily. It's not really that complicated, but its a good start, and has most needed units there. Thats a good spot for improvements, right?

It does not mean it doesn't have it. It's fairly subjective for some.

Well, I will agree that PA lacks in polish, and couple things like smoother UI or optymalization. But thats a given.

About spectating, I actually disagree, but its subjective I guess? I would say that best game to spectate is Dota 2 in International. Besides that I watch FAF casts by Gyle, and some PA matches by our dear community casters. I like them all, and I don't really watch ever Starcraft ones.

I wouldn't consider energy another resource because all it does is control how much metal you can use. I suppose it could be though because you need to gather it as you gather metal. The amount of energy used by energy specific things are minimal so its not really a factor of more energy will let me do X hence it is good to build more energy. Well maybe it is a resource but I wouldn't say it adds the depth of gas in SC2 for example.

I get your point but i don't like comparing chess to RTS games. Strategy is important in RTS games but i would think that control, micro, macro etc play bigger roles where as chess has none of these factors.

I don't think he is saying there is no strategy involved in PA, just minimal strategy which i agree with though I do think he goes a little to far with this.
One thing that makes up for the minimal strategy is the map variety which I haven't seen anything like in any other game. The same units may be used each time but the game still plays differently.

The problem is that air becomes a necessity which greatly limits the options available. It is not as simple as building AA when you find that all you expanding fabbers are dead and your opponent has air fabs sneaking all over the map which you can't kill because you have no air force left

I used to love watching PA games but as I got better I found them less and less interesting. Now I pretty much only watch PA games involving me
This is because I find PA repetitive to watch and lacks the depth of other games as elodea said.

So... chess is a solved game.