Keeping the commander relevant through out the game

Well, I didnt want to get into specifics, but then I got nothing to do at work right now.

In the Original SupCom (and how I got into the top 3) was by ignoring ACU upgrades and just focusing on the big picture, ACU upgrades were a chance only deal for me and they never influenced the outcome of a ranked match. Quickly moving into tech 2 bots and microing them won 95% of the battles.

FA basically enabled comm rush (frowned upon in TA) which IMO is a cheap move, unit veterancy just made this worse, 100 kills for a main gun upgrade was nothing. Personally I didnt like it, simple as that.

Supcom2 made things worse and tho I really ranked quite a bit, it didnt feel good but that was basically the whole tech tree. ACU upgrades were too easy to achieve, specially if you got a couple early on. decently upgraded units could keep them at bay but as the game progressed, ACU's received greater benefits from upgrades.

I much rather have experimentals than overpowered commanders.

So, that is the core statement. Everything else around it is just stuffing, as it simply says what the other games didn't do well, but not what fighting coms actually might add or take away from the gameplay and it's overall quality. So again, stating that you don't like it without giving general arguments as to why you think com fights devalue the gameplay is neither a solid nor a valid argument.

If you lose when the commander dies then it will be one of the most relevant units throughout the entire game. I don't think it needs later 'obvious' use such as being a combat unit.

Having the choice to play with the commander as a very powerful unit because some people like it isnt a solid or valid argument. :roll:

Like others have said, the commander is always relevant despite anything, putting resources and time into upgrading it doesnt make it more important and by the time you're done upgrading, someone might have a giant asteroid crashing on its head.

Basically this. While i personally didn't have a problem with vanilla supcom acu upgrades, I think this game should have more of a TA approach to the commander.

The problem is, if it's only relevant by being the Unit to Kill, then there is only one strategy with it : hide is somewhere, preferably behind the thickest defences. And that's a problem with what is the Most Important Unit.
If it is also relevant for others reasons, there are more choices with what to do with it.

This just in: Neutrino is wrong and should go play league of legends!

(And I do play league of legends. That has little bearing on the fact that I would prefer PA not devolve into a game of commander smackdown because all you can do with it is use it as a glorified engineer behind as many shields and AA turrets as you could care to muster)

The problem is that you lose the game if you lose the unit. It's not worth using it no matter how strong it becomes because your army strength is also increasing the entire game. If the commander power curve stays ahead of the unit power curve, you'll just have commander duels all game, which kind of wastes the scale of the game (having 100 units to back up your commander duel is unnecessary when you only need 5).

You are describing two extremes here : the Commander being outclassed, then you can't risk it, and the Commander being OP turning the thing into Commander duels.

Things don't have to be that extreme. If the Commander stays powerful but not OP, it would be a gamble to send it fighting : you will gain the edge, which may mean eventual victory, but you are exposing your Commander and one wrong move (like underestimating the defensive forces) and you loses.
That's for offence, but it works also for defence : keeping it in an attacked base means that you may repel the attackers, but also that you're risking it, while retreating it means that he's safe but you will have a harder time defending the base, which may mean eventual defeat.
And its interest don't have to be in direct combat only. If it's good as support, it means that, for example, sending it to build new bases is an option : it needs fewer escorts and will do the job faster than an engineer.
All those possibilities disappear if the Commander is just a "glorified engineer" that you can only hide once the real war begins.

It is the most important unit. Its gameplay shouldn't be so dull. Being the Unit to Kill isn't enough to make it relevant. If it does nothing else, then it could be a moving box as well. It's not the Commander that is relevant, it's only the base where it's hiding.

I agree with thorneel, there must be balance.

How comes the sudden change of mind?

I did say it before, the commander must be powerful enough to survive a good pounding but not destroy half an army, its not an experimental and this isnt DOTA either.
TA commanders were able to destroy near 50 units in mere seconds at close range, medium to long range fire was doomsday for it. That is balance.

Neither did I ever claim coms had to be as strong ea exps or close to that. I said coms should be so strong that it is reasonable to use them offensively - but not for assaulting like an exp, but supporting.

I think at very least an armor upgrade would be justified to increase the amount of damage it'll take to bring your commander down. After all later game armies will dish out way more damage than early game ones but the commander has to be killable at nearly any stage of the game. You don't want games decided by the equivalent of a raid starship slipping through.

in Supreme Commander the ACU is relevant throughout the whole game, both as engineering unit and fighting unit. I hope Commander upgrades in some form come back to PA in a similar way.

I mostly agree.
I think that the only problem which could arise with the commander at the end are their hit points.
In TA, they could easly be shot with a T2 Penetrator for example. ( one shot if I remember correctly ) And penetrator had a long range, so it was quite suicidal to take your commander in the front.

In TA my commander was the last line of defence (usually because the first line got nuked when my nuke defence was to close to the enemy launcher lol).

I basically had enough energy storage to spam the D gun 100 times. That's a lot of energy. None of my friends realised you could eliminate a 100-200 rocket bot zerg with the commander single handed-ly or that you could use the D gun with no cool down. Funnel them into your base and say good bye.

In Supcom FA I used the op seraphim support commanders as a squad with the normal commander and overcharged the crap out of anything near me, then the patch oh the nerf to the seraphim overcharge WHY WHYYY!!!

In Supcom 2 you could quickly build your commander for a commander rush. But generally I used my commander for base building (well and truly hidden). Me and my friends strats usually ended in sending 100 hiding gunships with teleporters to snipe their bunkered commander.

Remember in SC you can build those huge super bots, well maybe PA can have huge super bots that have to be piloted by the Commander and when they get destroyed the Commander gets teleported back to the main base again.

This will give the Commander a very important role in the end game because without him to pilot it the super bot is just a flashy piece of modern sculpture.

Regardless of what you all think or want, knowing the devs are aiming for a TA sequel here is what I observed and think is going to happen.

In TA the com could defend itself at short range with the d-gun. This was to not prevent rushes, but to make them a gamble. Because assuming an expected favorable trade from the attacker's perspective, if the units fail, they serve as a metal donation. Although I remember the d-gun left no wreck. Hmm...

TL;DR
We will have TA style comms regardless of what you want or think should be done.

This is entirely nonsensical, but I thought the escape pod abilite from supcom2 was a great idea. Which is really rather symptomatic of the game, lots of great ideas in a horrid framework.