Experimentals

I don't like the idea of hard limits, but an economic cost to keeping them in the in field, to my mind that gels perfectly with the game!
It also gives the devs another easily adjustable lever to balance them.

Is a giant asteroid you can smash stuff with an experimental? Show your work. Is the Krogoth an experimental? Same.

Maybe we have a terminology problem here. There are going to be lots of cool units in the game. Some will be larger than others. Keeping that in mind we do have to focus our efforts here. These larger units suck up crazy amounts of resources to do well. Also keep in mind that we will expand the game over time so there is going to be plenty of time and/or room to add giant units.

One other thing I would like to point out is that we are trying to get the game out fast. Imagine if we took a normal "2 year" game and then released it with part of the game (e.g. multiplayer, one faction, no experimentals, no campaign) only 1 year in? And then the second half of development happens while the game is live and people are playing. This is what's possible when you aren't stuck in a "box" paradigm. The sooner the game comes out the sooner everyone else can dig into the game and create mods and other types of additional content. Welcome to the future.

'Experimental' is just a label, a relatively recent one to the genre, and rather inaccurate one IMO if we want to argue the semantics of the term.
Further the semantics, I say the asteroid moving engines are the 'experimental', not the asteroid.

MMORPG's and the slew of games in perpetual 'Beta' (another label) have been largely operating under that development paradigm for a long time.
But one of the major risks with producing such a mutable product, is large changes to a 'pre-existing' product will undoubtedly alienate some people, even if they're made with a broad community consensus.

This of course goes beyond the usual wailing about balance because XYZ was over-nerfed and ABC is OP.
But I think if you include a completely granular TA style unit restriction list, something SC was sorely lacking, it'll go a long way to pre-empting a lot of the teeth-gnashing.
Don't like Experimentals, turn em off, don't like a particular unit, turn it off, etc.

Plus if you collect metrics on this you'll get a better idea of direction the community is heading and then drill in to the reasons why instead of just relying on the more vocal, but not necessarily most representative, members of the community.

I do think that there needs to be a super unit or "Experimental" to break stalemates with out resorting to destroying planets.

Destroying planets is fun and all do not get me wrong.

But if the only major resource generating planet is left and a few moons. Something will be needed to break that stalemate with out blowing up that planet.

This is assuming that there is more than two players to a game.

But on the same note I want 'experimental units' to not be too powerful. I want a horde of Robots to take down my Experimentals.

When I say horde I mean Army.

One reason for this was the veterancy system. No matter how many lower tier units you had it would almost never be enough to kill an experimental because it would just keep killing your units and gaining health back. Once the game hit experimental stage, yes, there was usually little point to building lower tier units. Of course it sounds like we won't have to worry about veterancy in this game. (Though that still doesn't make me a fan of experimentals.)

I am sure that after the kickstarter ends, Uber will have 10 million dollars to waste on all kind of nice extras and still make the release date dd next summer

of course I am joking, but I have a good feeling we will reach all the stretch goals and Uber is going to deliver a great game next year. You guys know how we want the game and I don't care if some things will not be ready at launch. The only thing I am really hopeing for is to see 2 fractions and unit veterancy (off topic I know).

Anyway, keep up the good work!

I like Experimentals, but TA was fine without a Monkeylord.
The big artillery, Big Bertha, Rapid-fire Artillery and so on were just plain awesome...

I mean everything sounds really cool so far, I even like the idea off having all the same units with the same performance, but I would like at least 2 different looking factions, although they have the same stats, abilities.
I would prefer that over SupCom Exp units anytime.

Thx Neutrino for the information...keep it going...lol

Normally I'd dislike this approachment, but you guys aren't the run of the mill 'big company that makes money without knowing what games it is designing'. So while others would churn out a game, do some pacth stuff vaguely based on community suggestions, and call it a day, I think your approach, this time, could actually work.

Good idea!

experimentals should be extremly powerfull.. but inefficient.

in SupCom, you COULD build a Mavor, but for that cost you could build 20 T3 armies and send em in... the experimentals were the "insult to injury" way to play!

this is exactly what i want, if you build one, you win.. but you could easily have won faster/easier through almoast any other method

For me experimentals shouldn't be just bigger and stronger units. That's...boring. Why not give them special features instead?

If we look at the Air Craft Fueling thread, build a flying/submarine experimental, to fulfill that purpose. A moving Arti-unit or a moving factory. Or make them kinds of..."flagships". For example, a bigger battleship, which gives some hp-regen aura or dmg boost to nearby ships.

If a normal army can't break through, give it something to make the army stronger or change the "normal" rules of the game. That should be the role of experimentals in my opinion. And because these units are "gamechanger", they should be harder to obtain and more expensive to build than normal ones. If you just need to get the job done, build up an army and destroy your enemies. If that doesn't work, resolve to experimentals.

If there are different classes of experimentals (flagship (army support), sneak attack (invis/submerged/flying units which "shouldn't" be doing that), and maybe base support (moving arti, factories), you can even specialize your gameplay, by building experimentals that support your way of playing.

The question for me still is how powerful and rare they should be. Should they be seen in any lategame stage of the game or just rare exceptions, seen now and then as a trump card? In my idea they probably will be more "normal" and I'm not sure if I want that. Epic mechs that burn everything down if they ever arrive at the battlefield sound pretty awesome...

On the other hand, if you don't call them experimentals, just have different classes of epicness, like T4 +T5, that would be fine. T4 as game changers, T5 as game enders, like the asteroids.

Any opinions on that?

If the dev HAVE to add experimental units which makes absolutley no sense considering they already stated even in the concept video ammong interviews there won't be advanced tech, I think they should be able to do a good ammount of damage but can't take much in return fire. The reason I don't like the ideas of experimentals is this, it's nice to see a game that makes players have to use their all of their units not just get the undefeatable high tech ones and then leave the other ones in the dust, there are games where tech trees work but maybe instead of demanding the mainstream things give them a chance to test it without or with a differant perspective on it. You never know it might be better.