A word of warning on crazy over the top units.

Please don't let them become novelty units. Give them a legitimate, meaningful role (even if it is slightly niche).

I say this because novelty wanes quickly, and I would hate to see a potentially amazing game burn brightly because of esoterics and irreverence.

somewhere it was already stated that there will not be many experimental units at all anyway.
I like that.

It doesn't matter if you call them experimental, T4, prototype, of Uber(TM) Units. Novelty units are novelty units, irrespective of their name.

But still, the fewer crazy units, the better.

Indeed, I like crazy over the top units, but if they're not viable, I will only use them once to see them in action probably.
Don't go to the other end of the spectrum though, and make them necessary to be able to win.

Experimentals, in their last iteration, pretty much screwed over the entire gameplay of larger matches in Supreme Commander. I would definitely not want this to happen again. Units should not be sorted into tiers, with just gradual straight improvements in strength and nothing else. There should be no two units having exactly the same nieche, or the exact same behaviour with one having higher stats. I think everything should be useful in some way.

Yes, I'm slightly afraid there'll just be too many units for them to have distinctive, meaingful roles.

I think that's one of the few things that was done right in Supreme Commander 2 compared to Supreme Commander 1, there was a good amount of units with meaningful variation, although it suffered the aforementioned problem with experimentals.

I hope the developers don't just follow the Total Annihilation trend of having hundreds of units just for the sake of it. In any case we know early tier units won't become useless later on, which is certainly a good thing (that was a nuisance in Supreme Commander 1).

You're exactly right, thezj, they ruined the balance of the game.

I think having no corners on the map, since they're all spheres, will help avoid some of the problems of turtling that experimentals were intended to resolve.

Well and to resolve turtlebases in PA you got still the good old "Throw some stones on there Head" option. Only with the exception that the Stone has the size of a Mountain and a Rocketengine! :>

Thats way more cool then to launch a nuke strike that looks like a LOL ^^

Edit to the Topic:

Experimentels was never a big issue for me, except for SupCom 2, where you simply had experimentel options that could A: easly and quick reach every corner of the map and B: Had way to mutch Firepower.

I think , only my personal opinion, if you build a Experimentel, it should be slower then the rest, and not quicker. It should really bounded on 1 attack layer and not 2 or 3 and it should be rlly costly and take considerable amount of time.

In SC1 in the beginnin it was still okay, the Monkeylord was a little bit IMBA but the buildtimes was still acceptable. But when they introduced the Addons and Upgrades Like engeneer stations and quicker building times it became mostly a little bit ridicioulus. The Solution in SC2 that you couldnt support Experimentel Building anymore was a good step, but there the buildtime itself was in my opinion to short.

If experimentels, they should be rlly checked carefully if they dont ruin the balance and they should be rlly costly and time consuming projects.

I find that the Krogoth was the perfect example of how an Experimental unit should act. It wasn't too powerful on its own, but it could destroy armies if it was well supported with a force of its own. Not only that, but it was also quite expensive and took a long time to build.

The experimentals in Supreme Commander are too cheap, too powerful and too quick to build. Of course, they were incredibly fun to use, but when it came to balance, they caused a few issues. It took a massive army of T3 units in Supreme Commander to take on a single experimental, which makes them effective game enders. As I mentioned before, an experimental should act as a powerful support unit that can do a lot of damage if used properly.

But I do want to see experimental units in some form in the game. And the Peewee, everybody wants the Peewee to return.

I agree with what you guys are saying here.

PA gameplay is meant to be more inspired by TA gameplay, not SupCom.

Yeah but you dont will come around that some ppl also see a SupCom spirit in here. Specially you got ppl on board who worked on TA and SupCom. SupCom itself, as far as i know, was also a inspiration based on TA and looked at it as a inoffical successor of TA.
So many ppl will look at Planetary Annihilation from a SupCom view and a TA view of perspective.

What i try to say is... i think there will be mutch more ppl around here that will try to compare PA in many ways more with SupCom then TA.

I thought the Krogoth was fantastic, yes.

A big mistake that was made in SupCom, I think, was the fact that many experimentals had ridiculous ground and AA capabilities. One or the other is okay, because as you stated, that way it will need to be supported by other units if it's going to have a chance. The Krogoth had great ground weapons and decent AA, but not to the crazy extent that some of the units in SupCom did.

Most SupCom T4 do not have real AA at all. Many of them could actually die to a single t3 gunship.

Many units in supcom have just aa for the visuals, aa that doesn't really do damage at all. I hope they don't do that in PA too, attached weapons should always be there for a gameplay reason, not to fake more pew pew.