Do we need tech levels?

I was exactly asking myself the same question. Honestly, I don't know. So far, I only know what I don't want to see in the game.

There are multiple solutions existing to manage tech upgrading. We wan take examples in other games :

-Starcraft/Warcraft/Dawn of War... : the tech upgrade is mainly done by improving a main building. We could imagine a similar system by replacing this main building by the commander. For example it is possible to unlock the next building protocols immediatly available to current engineers.

-Command and Conquer : the tech upgrade is done by building specific tech buildings. I don't beleive this system would fit in PA.

-SupCom 2/Civilization : the tech upgrade is done by unlocking a tech tree. It is an interesting solution but maybe too abstract.

-SupCom 1/TA : the tech upgrade is done by improving manualy each building to the next tier and building multiple tier engineers to allows new constructions. Too much complexity and micro involved in my opinion.

-Zero-K (I will quote you beacause I haven't played this game) :

As I understand it is an economy driven tech upgrade. I thing this is a rather good option.


There may be a lot of other possibilities. I'm eager to hear propositions. As long as it does not involve too much micro management, I'm okay with it.

I disagree with regards to heavy veh and Zero K. Heavy veh is a very viable start factory for team games. Maybe not 1v1 because it concentrates resources into fewer, larger, slower units, which isn't great for map control, but in team games it's fine. Zero K developers have done a great job of making two vehicle facs feel quite different to play with.

I would like to add that tech levels, independant of gameplay, are also psychologically satisfying.

Having an "Upgraded" base fulfills a certain level of accomplishment. Similar to the desire for achievement hunters.

I voice my support for Zero K's flat balance. It is simple, directly encourages all units being viable, and incorporates all the benefits from having a tiered tech system into the costs of the units.

The effect of having "locking" features like research or tech structures is that an upfront cost opens up options which can then be acquired in large numbers once the requirement is met. This is a bad way to start balancing units, as units with higher requirements will need to outperform units without requirements to be worth the upfront cost of their prerequisite. If they are flat balanced, then the only balancing factor is the cost of the unit itself, and not the cost of the tech it is locked behind.

I am of the opinion that more units, provided they are all interesting, is always better. Those players who think they want "more tech levels" think they are asking for more unit types, when what they are getting is fewer effective unit types as many of the units become obsolete. Having all units be viable at any time is far superior.

That said, it is very possible to have all units be viable with a two-tiered tech system. TA did a quite good job at this, although some of its mods did it even better. In OTA, a sufficiently strong economy would spam T2 as a matter of course. T1 remained useful for much of the game, though, until your economy was very highly developed. And the only T3 unit was the Krogoth, which was basically never used, and never used in numbers. Due to its cost and build time, the Krogoth would never obsolete all of T2.

I like that there's a wide variety of factories. This lets you gear your economy for a certain unit and thus build yourself into a corner if your opponent gears his for the counter. Helps avoid the slippery slope issue, the game gets more dynamic as you can always make a comeback if you're smart. I'm leaning more and more towards the zero-K system.

Then again I also like the idea of upgrading your commander like a zerg hatchery. I imagine you can upgrade his 'body' or chassis into a tank, artillery, spaceship, shield generator, cloaking field etc, depending on what kind of balance-tipper you're going for, and upgrade his 'mind' or CPU to unlock higher tech levels. Beats upgrading every single factory.

Is there some way to combine the benefits of both approaches? :geek:

I totally agree. People should think about units instead of tech levels.

Personally, I have no issue with 2 tech levels. For those of you who may have played TA: Twilight, or any of the other balance mods (Uberhack/AA), I'm sure you'll recall they did an excellent job balancing things out very nicely between tech levels. There was never a time that lower level units became obsolete. I remember when I first tried using the Twilight Stumpy's and being impressed with how usable the unit was, even after getting access to beefier units, like Bulldogs. Even lategame, it was very practical to send in a group of light units to scout things out for the heavy units and then use them as raiders while the heavy units did their job.
That said, tier 2 units definitely were the backbone of the army, so they were valuable to have in any battle, especially when you had to deal with some of the impressive defenses.
While I love Supcom, the fact that each tier unit was so much more powerful than the previous tier, coupled with how easily supported the tiers were once you got your economy rolling meant that as you advanced in the tiers, there was less of a reason to use previous tiers. Tier 3 was unstoppable once you could support it.

As to whether tech levels are even required, it's definitely an important aspect of getting your economy rolling. With a couple of tech levels, you can use the lower level to establish yourself, start your economy, etc, and then once things are in place and you can afford it, then you can start building your army's backbone. If the tiers were all homogenized down to a universal tier, there would be less of a commitment required to tech up. Now you just add some stronger units to your build order, rather than focusing on building up your base. Also, someone already mentioned that it places a large importance on scouting your enemy and being aware of what kind of power they'll throw at you. Now you need to be able to see those upper tier buildings to be aware of their progress. It also adds a layer of strategy, as now you can prioritize your targets. If you take out their tech 2 factories, it has a pretty big impact as they can throw less massive units your way. Or you can decide on whether to attack their metal, power, defenses, etc. It all depends on how you want to proceed with your attack. With a universal tech level, a factory is a factory, and each one is as important as the other. Destroying one means the enemy won't have to devote as much of their resources replacing the loss.

In any case, for those who haven't tried it out, I recommend giving TA: Twilight a spin, if only to see how well-balanced TA can be, and how well the 2 tier system can work.

Ok so we really have beat this to death. I would just like to say that I agree with Googlefrog that we don't need 2 tech levels. I also agree with Pawz that tech levels can be a great way to guide new players to the correct units.

Solution: Have two tech levels, but keep the price of the tech 2 lab the same or at least in the ball park of the tech one lab. Why? Because we aren't going to make Tech 2 units better than tech 1. Generally they will be more expensive. Some of them will even be very good against level ones due to AOEs or hardiness, but overall will just be a different kind of option. I believe that super cheap/small swarm units and faster units will be especially susceptible to slower harder hitting tier 2 units.

I think we capture these agreements that way:
1. Tech levels may help new players.
2. We don't want tech 2 making tech 1 obsolete. I have been on a lot of balance discussions. Believe me when I say that tier 1 will be our priority balance wise and rightly so.
3. We don't need to upgrade the tech 1 lab to tech 2 if the tech 1 lab is just as relevant.


I am interested in seeing teleporting tanks and jump jetting bots similar to Supreme Commander 2 in Tech 2.

This is just an idea and it will probably be very unpopular. You could always take a flat economy based tech tree (like zero-k which works very well) and lock the construction of certain units depending on the number of extractors that you have (there would be a correlation between unit cost and the extractor requirement).

The idea being to have a flat tech tree for most of the game that gives you freedom while having early game constraints to make sure you don't ruin your economy. I might offer this would make raiding and controlling space critically important. If you're not raiding, your neither controlling the enemies economy or his tech level. Likewise if you're not controlling space, you're not defending your economy or your tech tree.



edit: Wording.

Frankly why do we have to make it harder for newbies to ruin their game? It's not like there's not a million other ways to do so... :? If that's the only reason to add something it's a bad reason.

I would like to add a poll. What options should there be?

Total Annihilation essentially had a flat system by accident because the tech 2 units were too expensive and slow.

I quite liked how units you built at the start could still be useful at the end, although you'd need more of them.

The problem with lots of tech levels like SupCom 1 is you could find a whole army you'd built became obsolete. The whole game mechanic in that installment was a bit exponential. You'd make one **** up and the other guy would have jumped up a tech level and you'd be left behind. There was teching of sorts in TA with people going for pels or big berthas, but those units could still be countered with tech 1 units like Conquorers or bombers should you have decided not to tech.

I think the fixed tier system of TA is the one i'd like to see reproduced in PA the most. However a few small changes should be considered in my opinion. Let me elaborate:

Talking of a two tier system is a little ambiguous. It basically means, that for every production building you create, there is an advanced version that creates different, more expensive units. This however does not mean that there are only two stages that a game progresses through. For example: To build a, let's say orbital bombardment weapon platform, you'd need an Engineer -> Vehicle Factory -> Construction Vehicle -> Orbital Launch Station -> Orbital Engineer -> Orbital Construction Bay -> Advanced Orbital Engineer -> Orbital Bombardment platform.(Or something along those lines)

So while it's technically a tier 2 structure if you count the stages your game has to progress through it's more like stage 3 or 4 and that's not counting that it may be so expensive that you also need to up the tech level of your resource production in between. So i think many people are needlessly afraid of a two tier system because they think it means that you basically can build everything after 5 minutes, which will clearly not be the case.

Now that this is out of the way let's get to what i would consider an improvement over a direct copy of the TA layout:
In my Opinion the TA tech-levels were too parallel and flat, the only structure that required you to first build two types of other structures and the corresponding Construction Vehicles was the water plane factory (And i don't know if anybody used them, for me it was always like they made vulnerable planes even more vulnerable by letting them be attacked by torpedoes if ever idle).

In PA i would therefore like at first more different construction facilities (i think this is a given with orbital units and whatnot) and also make them only be able to get constructed by certain other construction vehicle (so that a first tier construction kBot can't build all other first tier construction facilities).In essence make the building selection of different construction vehicles more specialized and less overlapping.

(Maybe even make it so that at first you can only build a kBot factory and a shipyard and if you need a vehicle factory you first need a Construction kBot to build it)

And a further point i'd like to see: (this was done to some degree in TA) even in the same tier make some units much more expensive so that they would only become viable later in the game.
Related to this: give us more options for resource generating buildings, In TA you had solar plants and then fusion generators, something in between to bridge the gap (and units that are cost effective in this new region) would be greatly appreciated...

So to summarize: I think two tech tiers is plenty as long as the progression of your base takes you through many more stages then there are unit tiers.

I hope all this was halfway comprehensible (and that there are other supporters that think alike).

THIS

There seem to be levels of Zoom in this game (very close zoom is direct unit control, where high zoom is less control but more macro). Maybe instead of having one supercomplex tech tree, each level of zoom should have a different, more limited tech trees that apply to a level of zoom. For instance it doesn't make sense to be building a bunch of small units when your looking at a solar system, but it does make sense to build satellites or bases.

Can i as what tech levels are and how they work? My only experience in these things is C&C Generals/Zero Hour and Starcarft 1-2

The basic idea is that your initial unit, the Commander, can build a limited set of buildings, some of which are basic factories. These basic factories produce lower tier (tier 1) units, which are relatively inexpensive and quick to build. Some of those units are engineers, which can build a less limited set of buildings, including advanced factories. These advanced factories give access to higher tier (tier 2) units, which are more expensive to build, but are stronger and have a wider variety of uses. Some of these units are advanced engineers, which can build a limited set of very advanced buildings.

This chain of construction provides you with your technological progression (similar to multilevel upgrades in Starcraft), but with some key differences.
The most important aspect is that it is possible to lose progress if your enemy is able to destroy a part of it. Say they take out an advanced factory, now you are forced to adjust your tactics to accommodate for the lack of heavier units, while rebuilding the factory you lost. On the other hand, with a game like Starcraft, any advances you make with upgrades are persistent, even if you lose the associated building. There, your main disadvantage is the disruption of you production.

If you want to try it for yourself, I recommend popping over to GOG and picking up a copy of TA, as it's fairly inexpensive.

Im good, seems like an intelligent system. Cant wait to see what comes of it.

This was in large part due to veterancy. A few higher tech units could not effectively be killed by more numerous lower tech units because despite all the collective damage the lower tech units would be doing, the higher tech units would constantly be getting hp boosts as they jumped in veterancy from quickly killing individual lower tech units. Fortunately, it sounds like veterancy will not be part of PA, so low tech units may actually still have a chance to be useful against higher units instead of just feeding them xp

That is a giant exaggeration. Tier3 units were simply much much better than the tier1 units they were slaughtering, but veterency on these units was negligible. Only the experimentals suffered from this, and even then it was more due to just how much more powerful they were than the tier1 units than to the veterancy.

Don't forget that TA had a veterancy system too. The effect it had on gameplay was about the same as non-experimentals in Supcom. I recall creating the Epic Peewee, who had something like 200 kills, and then putting it against a Krogoth to see how long it would take to kill compared to a green Peewee. The veteran Peewee took about 3/4th as much time to take down the Krogoth. Not exactly an incredible difference for the work it took to get there.
With Supcom, the main advantage of the veterancy system was that experimentals tended to get large numbers of kills quickly, and that new veterancy levels healed the unit.