Unit Veternacy: can we skip it?

Kill-count is part of it, but auto-healing is good. Make it 1hp/s and it won't negatively affect balance, but it will mean that the group of ten tanks you just won a battle with will be useful again if left to rest for a few minutes.

And it's not an either/or with game satisfaction. Obviously winning is most satisfying, but little achievements along the way are good too. One if the biggest criticisms levelled at RTS is that unlike FPS for instance losing can feel like a total waste of time. In FPS games even a total noob will get one or two kills, so likewise in PA there should be as many mechanisms as possible to encourage the noob to persevere.

no to normal veternacy.
However there was a mod in FA (the learned commander) that instead of applying veterancy to a single unit, all damage done added to your whole armies veterancy, with a small UI to show the relative power of units between you and your opponents.

This worked well because it rewarded the player won won lots of battles and took less damage while still making the power of units transparent so there was no guessing at how powerful each unit of your opponents was.

This has the same issues as research in SupCom2, as soon as someone gets a lead, they are rewarded for doing so by being given more of a lead and so on and so forth, its a slippery slope mechanic and it severely limits a 'losing' player's ability to make come backs.

Mike

Broadly there seem to be two types of people here.

Some people like veterancy because it gives you an incentive to keep units alive and provides a feeling of accomplishment. Most of the other people dislike veterancy because it either has a negative or negligible effect on balance.

I'm on the balance side of the argument so I would say that the incentive for keeping units alive is that you have units where you otherwise would not. The accomplishment tends to follow from having more units than your opponent. These arguments have been stated before though so I think we just have a division in priorities.

Clearly the only solution is to create a system which looks like it does something but actually doesn't .

I would actually not really have a problem with that. just a kill counter and a cool chevron/star for your honor bots, if the kill counter would get implemented, a small visual gimick shouldn't be really hard and it would make a lot easier for modders to implement extra veterancy features later on.

I can't believe I didn't mention this, but veterancy in its current state is inherently flawed.

You get veterancy based on how many units you kill, but not all units are created equal. If you mow down a bunch of scout planes, all of the sudden you can rape everything else in the game. That's dumb.

The system could be improved, but like someone just said it, we can keep the "sense of accomplishment" side of it without actually disrupting the balance of the game by recording kill counts just for fun.

Maybe repairing units should cost less energy/metal and/or time than rebuilding them (for the given amount of HP)...?

This has been discussed already. You would improve upon the system by measuring total damage dealt instead of total units killed.

But...

What about units that naturally have high damage output? What about units with area-of-effect damage? If all units rank-up every 100 points of damage they do, then weak units will scarcely see veterancy, and Uber units, and artillery will see all of it.

Basically, you'd need a threshold for each unit. This is a further balance variable that needs to be tuned just right, or it'll fall into useless/overpowered territory.

Then, when balance changes between patches, these thresholds need to be re-evaluated (all of them - because even if you don't change unit x, you'll change some of the things unit x shoots at).

Um since when? There was no veteran modifiers at all in TA. And I don't recall them being all that meaningful in SupCom either.

I personally would vote against the idea. I wouldn't mind kill counts because those make for good memorable commentary, but robots getting smarter by shooting stuff? And they didn't upload this valuable data to the mothership why exactly?

How about we just keep it simple and not include any veteran nonsense to further complicate the game balance okay?

as i said in the other vet thread, vet for commanders was awesome in supcom. if PA intends commanders to be military units, then i would like to see vet on commanders only.

Ok, after 7 pages I'll weigh in. I'm honestly not a fan of veterancy. We are going to keep track of individual unit stats though so this information could be taken into account if we wanted to. We'll also store total stats for unit types.

Excellent. I'd say displaying kill count is more than enough.

If people want more, the data is available, and modders can go wild with it.

Having stats like that available for extremely detailed after-game reports would be pretty cool, though. During gameplay, however, it just bogs things down with unnecessary information.

There were. Units that achieve five kills receive "veteran" status which increases health and damage, as well as giving the unit the ability to lead moving targets. This effect grows with every five subsequent kills.

They were . They mostly mattered either only in very small scale battles or on Experimentals and the Commander in general.

Cool

Yussssssss! Exactly what I was hoping for.

Mike

Yes.

Veterabcy could provide a good way to update yourself -as the commander- keeping it at the same relative power throughout the game. All kills for the army would be credited to him, and he'd gain extra life or whatnot through experience.

Or it could be a stupid idea

"Kills" isn't a fair way to measure who's commander should be stronger, because you could have killed a bunch of cheap scout planes instead of large units.

Perhaps all commanders should get equally strong (only harder to kill) as the game progresses, so it's not as easy to pick them off with more powerful weapons. It sucks when your commander gets sniped late game by a force that's almost impossible to defend against.

Wish this was a poll....

I'm with Neutrino, I'm not a fan of veterancy either. I think it's kind of gimmicky really.

I'd wouldn't be upset if they left this feature out. In TA the effect was so minimal that it didn't matter for anything but Betha cannons. In SupCom it seemed a bit overpowered.

If there's a wreckage reclaiming mechanic (as there should be) then people are being adequately rewarded for winning a battle. They can repair their high value units and then they've already got a significant advantage out of winning a particular exchange. No point in discouraging attacking and encouraging defensive play too much.