On important, and not so important, visual effects

One of the key problems that SupCom had from an effects standpoint is the lack of physics for wreckage. When you killed a unit, it kinda flashed white, and then the wrecked mesh was there. For PA I'd like to see something a lot more physical- I'd like to see the bones ripped apart and thrown in all directions. Bigger units could shatter in stages or pieces. Bonus points if they are thrown in the direction of the weapons fire that destroyed them, and triple points if units are pushed by being hit by weapons. It could really add something to the game to see a little tank being thrown afar by a large gun, and then to see the Deadly Giant Bot of Death, Doom, Destruction, and Dragons simply shrug it off.

This would make every battle unique and awesome to watch... but the cpu.. and gpu.. and server memory storing all those bits of robots... :/

There were some serious physics limitations in the past that hopefully we'll fix.

That being said we want lots of units so if something kills perf it's gone.

Yes that would be nice, but I would also prefer performance rather than awesome effects slowing down the gameperf...

I remember all the posts from GPG when they developed SC2 and what they did for performance boosts... here we got dedicated servers, newer technology (software), so there will be even more performance boosts on that side, but I don't believe in miracles... if we want to have games with tons of units and planets, I guess the game cannot be too fancy, especially when there are still players around playing games with a singlecore cpu and onboard GPU...

It also raises the issue of these hundreds of units spawning wrecks that may be in several individual pieces...

Although, thinking about it a bit more, Supcom already had a function which 'wrecked' a unit - it shouldn't be terribly hard to enhance on that function and have unit parts that can get blown off (and disappear in appropriately flashy explosions) and the rest of the unit breaks into pieces but stays close together and is treated as a single entity. As long as the server knows that 'position xyz has a wreck', the actual physics & final resting place of the wreck could be calculated on the client pc.

Death anims are not necessary, an explosion leaving some bent metal or nothing but a smear is all we need, after all we'll be too busy with strategics to watch units die in a cool fashion.

Im not saying there shouldnt be any, but its not worth too much effort

I'm sorry, I have to completely disagree with you here. There is a huge degree of awesome that can be had from things like space stations falling out of orbit and smashing into your base, from wings of bombers getting blown from the sky and tumbling down to leave their shattered corpses on the ground, and from seeing that giant Monkeylord stagger to its knees and crumple to ground in defeat.

Not to mention the awesome effect of repelling an assault on your base and surveying the sea of smoking wreckage your effort has left behind.

If we're just going to watch things from orbit because we don't have time to look at the battle, we may as well just put some red x's on the ground.

With things like bomber wings falling off and mechanical arms flying through the air, you get the added bonus of unexpected side effects along the lines of damage to units and buildings in the way. More simulation = more awesome. Like the fact that a launched nuke could hit a plane by mistake in Supcom.

Plus it would make everything feel more chunky and real.

I can't agree more with eukanuba.
More physics = more awesomeness to me. :3

The whole concept of "planet killing" will just be lame if the visual effects are dull...

The original TA had "directional" bits and pieces shattering from heavy artillery hits with no performance loss so I don't see why it's not doable here... I'd expect something good rather something unsatisfactory in this category.

AT THEY very least, PA should have scraps in a similar way to SupCom1 and 2, allowing you to harvest fallen units, ideally they would be simulated, but that might be a couple of generations away yet...

Attach D-guns on every unit, problem solved