Do we need tech levels?

Yeah, I was probably pushing it a bit with effectively 6 tech levels. I wanted to see planetary battles reach to a secondary tech level without suddenly expanding the play area to other planetary bodies.

On a macro level, I'd like to see different tech 'eras' (either comprised of single levels, or 'basic' and 'advanced' levels) .. namely: Planetary, Interplanetary, and Interstellar. My setup was essentially 'basic' and 'advanced' per era, leading to 6 effective tech levels.

I support this idea. I have played ZK for awhile which is similar to TA but without tech levels and it works surprisingly well. You can not possibly afford the high end units unless you take a gamble with your economy.

The gamble of getting more powerful units is still there, instead it is mostly limited by your economy not by what arbitrary tier you're on.

There's no doubt that "level-less" gameplay can be done well, but tech-levels enforced through TA-style buildings (rather than 'research') has some distinct advantages/features/differences:

• Simplest tech-level system (apart from none)
• Tactical (a 'gamble', which you guys say is accomplished well enough by Zero-K, fair enough)
• Scouting/Intelligence (Immediately obvious what threat-level my enemy is by looking at their buildings => I know what they can produce)
• Attrition (I can bomb my enemy into the stone age without having to hit every factory they have... just their Level 2s or Level 3s...)

I think another difference is that with a level-less system, players can build XYZ whenever they want to. Sure, in practice, they will need to progress up in other manner in order to build XYZ in a practical time-frame, but then that will just raise the learning curve while still enforcing some form of "progression" in practice... basically a tech level-like system that you only learn from playing the game.

And at the same time, you lose out on the intelligence and attrition factors that a tech-level based system like TA has.

Edit:
Also, with tech levels separating players into their particular capabilities... such as planetary, interplanetary, and interstellar... it can really factor more into scouting/intelligence gathering, as well as attrition. Now I can destroy a player's interplanetary transportation systems and supporting tech-level X factories, and now they will no longer be able to send in reinforcements to the asteroid I'm fighting with them over.

All I can say is I'm with burntcustard Impressive arguments.

The only possible issue I can see is that if interplanetary travel is T2, players will essentially be forced to tech up to get at players on other planets, reducing choice. But maybe that's not a big problem.

I would prefer if teching up gave access to whole new units that complement the old ones, rather than upgrades to the old ones with 25% higher damage or whatever. I'm also not sure I want T2 factories to make units faster at all. That way teching is even less of an all-round win proposition. If you just want to mass cheap units it should be better to focus on lots of T1 factories. A typical mid-late game base might have either:
1) lots of T1 factories, a handful of T2 factories and one or two T3 factories, for a balanced combined-arms strategy;
2) Lots of T2s, several T3s and a handful of T1s, for fewer, more powerful/niche units;
3) Mostly T3s, to mass produce hard to counter uber-units;
4) Lots of T1s and few if any T2s and T3s, for a proper 'zerg swarm' strategy.

T1 units should be fairly easy to counter with T2s, encouraging you to level up once your opponent has. But it should not be a no-brainer. No-brainers = bad!

Personally I'm in support of the TA style tech tree system. It had several advantages, not least of which it limited your initial unit set down by quite a bit, preventing new players from trying to build something that was way out of their economic scope.

I mean, it may *work* to have a flat tech tree delimited only by resource cost, but it's not a user friendly way to introduce units, and it's not fundamentally any different than requiring another building - all you're doing is requiring the user to have x number of resource buildings before starting your unit.

Making sure that no unit becomes obsolete will be the most important thing. In TA T1 units were always useful compared to SupCom where T1 was completly useless against T3.

If that is ensured then high tech units will be specialised units that may work better for some tasks but be worse than generalised T1 at others. I think 2 tech levels is fine. T1 normal units, T2 specialised units including some more expensive end game buildings (unit cannon, nukes, asteroid engines).

although I have not played TA and only so little SupCom

another way of dealing with tiers is, which would require 3 tiers, which isn't the dev's plan so far.

but here is the idea:

tier1 gets outclassed by tier2.
tier2 gets outclassed by tier3.

but tier 3 gets outclassed by tier 1...

now you think how could this work?

well:
- by giving tier 1 higher relative speed
- by giving tier 2 around same strength, but more AOE damage.
- by giving tier 3 a high damage output, but limited AOE damage, and making them relatively slow and give them a relatively slow rate of fire.

this way tier 1 gets a dip in usefulness midgame, but regain use later in the game as they would be the most cost efficient way of dealing with tier 3 units, as they can greatly outnumber them for the same price and tier 3 units would not be able to destroy all tier 1 units before they do at least some damage.

the same logic could apply if you replace tier 3 with experimentals, as I did hear that those were possibly coming back to PA.

Tech levels will be enforced through building stuff.

So for example if you want a tech level 2 tank you would go:
tech level 1 factory -> tech level 2 engineer -> tech level 2 vehicle factory -> tech level 2 tank.

So the tech level of something is roughly defined by the engineer or factory that builds it.

Currently planning on sticking with 2 tech levels for each set of units (e.g. 2 levels of factory for each type of unit bots, vehicles, orbital etc) but there could be special units that require their own gantries.

TA inspired, eh ? ^^

So then would a tech level 2 factory produce any engineering units?

Or would we have the Commander be the focus, being able to produce all Tech level 1 factories, defensive structures, and resource gathering structures?

As an example, if this were done in TA, the "Vehicle Plant" would now instead build Advanced Construction Vehicles and Tier 1 vehicles, and the ACV could build the Advanced Vehicle Plant and other Tech level 2 structures, and then the AVP could build stuff like the Bulldog/Reaper?

That would be a nice way to streamline the number of construction units needed, if I am understanding what the intent would be correctly.

Awesome!

A little sad that there's only two tech levels... (that said, it was fine for TA).. I was hoping there'd be a bigger rift between planetary technology and interstellar technology... but I'm hoping that there might be room for expansion with stretch goals... or, at least mods

TA had mods that effectively added three tech levels, and did it fairly well - I don't think there will be a problem when it comes to adding that kind of stuff through mods.

For the base game I think it's best they keep it focused in scope, especially because they're adding additional categories of factories. Three tech levels and five or six factory trees is a lot of stuff.

I wasn't really thinking necessarily T3 tanks, but more that interstellar travel (because there can be multiple star systems in a single game) would require a higher techlevel to reach... so that you'd need to reach T2 to travel between your planet and its moon, T3... between planets.. T4 between stars.... (or something like that)

I guess this could be partially enforced as is:

T1 Factory -> T1 Engineer -> T2 Factory -> T2 Engineer -> (T3) Spaceport -> T3 Orbital Engineer -> T4 Interstellar Launch Facility ...

As TA did it as tech levels increaesd unit power didn't necessarily increase with them (although there was a general trend towards slightly tougher and stronger), however unit specialisation did. If techs instead worked towards units inherant abilities, like breaking orbit you could increase the amount of tech levels without making previous teirs redundant.

Yeah, pretty much what I'd like to see! Thanks!

I mostly agree with exuvo :

I hate units becoming obsolete. Basically, I think every unit has a role, every unit is designed for a task. Tanks constitue the main battle line, missile launchers are building killers, air fighters dominate the sky... I don't see the point in getting a new unit with the same role which would render the old unit useless.

In SC1 the game was escalating through tiers. Once you reached the next tier, you could forget about the lower tier because it became useless. The only interesting thing consisted in getting units with a new role to support basic units and to diversify the available strategies.

Having tech is interesting, because it is a gamble, an investment, a strategy to get the upper hand on your opponent but it should not be as basic as "I got better tier units, you lose". Other strategy games have understood it well I think. In Starcraft 2 even in late game basic units like Marines or Zerglings are still useful. In Dawn of War 2 even when you reach Tier 3, you still use Scouts or Eldar Guardians. In Red Alert 3 every unit is a hard counter for another unit. What is very important is the role of a unit, what it is designed for. Do not have multiple units with the same role.

Tech is good when it gives a sense of war escalation, and it is good when it brings diversity and choice. It is not good if it just replaces basic units with new more powerful ones.


Another thing I may think of : keep it simple. As I understand, the scale of the game is big thus managing resources and tech should be simple. This is not a managing game, this is a war game. Decisions are important but executing them should not be exhausting. You will already have plenty of tasks controlling your armies, spying on your enemies and building bases. Acquiring new resources and teching should be a matter of decision done in a few clicks.

In my opinion, having multiple tiers for engineers is too complex. Remember, don't have multiple units with the same role. Same goes for extractors and generators, it is more intuitive to think with numbers than to differenciate quality. It's easier to estimate an economical potential when you just count generators and extractors (5 extractors are better than 3) than to estimate the economical potential of various teched extrators (are two T3 extractors and two T1 extractors better than one T3, two T2 and one T1 ?). So keep it simple, don't duplicate roles and don't add to much managment for economy and tech.

What is fun is to send waves of tanks, go to the moon, bombarding with heavy artillery. It is not funny to hunt extractors to see which one has been upgraded and which one should be.


To conclude :
- The bigger the scale is, the simplier management should be. Keep it simple.
- Don't have multiple units with the same role. Avoid obsolesence.
- Tech serves war escalation and diversity.

Tech "levels" wouldnt be needed but rather managed by resource requirements to build something.

This would allow for people to enter later in the game and still be useful. Allies can share/provide resources so that the person can build harvester type X or such.



You could have a commander be useful late game this way by allowing the commander consume resources at a given rate based on the game length timer.

In order to facilitate fast-ish gameplay across multiple planets, I'm actually hoping for only one tech level. TA was micro enough with all your construction units and commander hustling. Introduce what are essentially multiple maps and you have a whole lot of management to do! Too much, I think.

As if multiple planets aren't enough, there's actually orbital units to deal with now too, including asteroids and other "mobilized" celestial bodies. So: sea, land, air, space, commander, tech tiers, and planets...? Yikes!

Too many tech levels kill the fun. Three was too many in supcom.
If the game had only 2 levels, but kept each level useful even in the end game that would be a success.

This.

You are evoking no tiered engineers, and I'm fully behind this, as it would remove a lot of micro. The problem is, though, how would the tech upgrade be done?

You could have that only the engineer of one lab can build this T2 lab, but this still represents a lot of avoidable micro, as you have to choose which engineer to use to build what. Engineers should be varied by their movement type, HP and such, not by what they can build.
Having every engineer being able to build anything is far simpler. Then, to go T2, you would need to make the building itself morph. You should also be able to order the production of the T2 building immediately, the engineer would then build the T1 with an morph order.
But then, we're almost back to no tiers.

IMHO, Zero-K does it well : there are T1-like and T2-like labs, for example light vehicles and heavy tanks. Heavy tanks are more powerful, sturdier and more expensive. Beginning with those is very hard, because their engineers are more expensive. End result, most people use them as T2 units, building a tank lab only once their economy is robust.
On the other hand, some people begin with heavy tank. They can't raid that much places at once because they can only afford a few (powerful) raiders, but inversely the tank engineer is armed so the enemy can't raid them easily. Tank beginning is hard to pull off, but it's still a possibility.

And the most expensive units, the T2-like units from the other labs, are limited by price. Ideally, sending one of those big units alone should get it killed by cheap counters. So you need not only this unit but also several T1-like units to cover it, and you can't afford that in the early game.
Rushing such a unit is still possible to surprise the enemy before they can build the counters. But if the enemy can scout it, they can build those cheap counters, meaning that you can't send it alone anymore and that all the metal you put into it instead of economy/raiding gave them a big advantage. So you have to actively block scouting.
A player is also forced to scout the opponents to see if they try a rush, but you should scout them anyway.