Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factorys?

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

Possibly, still doesn't mean you should insult people in order to prove your point.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

Stay on topic folks I rather like this discussion, please take it to private messages if you must continue.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

Well I think it depends on a few thing. First off there is the amount of different units, it wouldn't be fun if you only have like 2-3 units per factory. the second thing that comes to my mind is how tedious it would be to produce a varied army. it depends on whether or not it is unified unit production. if you have to press every factory, and you have like 7 different factories it would be hard to control, I think

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

In a game of this nature, where a player would normally have a choice between factions whose units vary in type and ability, the fact that this game will not present the player with this choice must IMO be balanced by a larger array of units than would normally be expected in a faction, say in Sup Com for example.

Furthermore I feel that in place of factions, the player should be presented with clear choices to which he must bear some commitment. Choices that will dictate the type of units that he should be encouraged to specialise in. This is not to say that a player must be limited to a particular type of unit or punished for using more then one unit type. Moreover that should he choose vehicles as his primary factory, that he should be encouraged to upgrade this as opposed to perhaps building an air factory.

A wide array of units and factories that are clearly defined are important to distinguish each type from one another and each should have unique strengths and weaknesses that may be complimented by another unit type - therefore promoting team play.

Care must be taken not to confuse having more unit types with the requirement for more factories. I believe that it is unnecessary to have so many factories due to the definition between unit types becoming blurred. A good example of this is quadrupedal and bipedal kbots. This is unnecessary and simply clutters the UI and will take up build area. It also doesn't fit in with the overall point of view that I am trying to illustrate.

On a side note; I think that upgrading factories SC style, as opposed to TA's lab and advanced lab approach is the way to go. It increases the importance of the decision by introducing lost production time as well as cost to the upgrading process. This means the player must give more consideration to the timing of his T1 - T2 jump. Also, if the factory is destroyed the time lost replacing and upgrading to T2 is often more valuable to the player than the cost consumed in the process. This significantly increases it's a value as an asset and a strategic target.

I think a set of factories comprising of kbots, vehicles, amphibious, naval, air and orbital will provide sufficient choices to the player. Anything more will cause the clear definition between the unit types to overlap and this will make it harder for players to make both definitive choices and to assess the strengths/weaknesses of the unit set that the enemy is using.

Context sensitive factories is an interesting idea. But I think the drawbacks outweigh the novelty of having a factory deciding what it can produce depending on it's situation.

EDITED: Because my English should be better.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

I think they should, yeah. As has been said, with the lack of factions there needs to be an aspect of "commitment" to give a bit of a turning circle to your strategy, to encourage planning and forethought.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

That's a good way of putting it.

EDIT: As long as it doesn't completely destroy the player's ability to respond to a change in situation, that is. It's just a matter of balance. Oh, how often that magical word arrises.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

Actually, Zero K does have separate factories for wheeled and tracked vehicles, and for VTOL and fixed wing aircraft. Not for subs. It's a good system imo.

Don't forget that PA has only one faction, so should be able to have a relatively diverse unit set within that faction. With a large number of units, splitting them into factories by movement type seems like a good design principle.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

Why? All it means is forcing duplication (quadruplication, in this case) of all the basic combat roles (at a minimum, scout, anti-air, anti-ground, engineer) and all that creates is fiddly balance and learning issues due to having to handle four sets units which are essentially the same.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

The answer is to make units with similar roles play differently, and to give factories different strengths, for example some might have better scout options than others.

I'll take just one example from ZK, a game which also has only one faction and therefore serves as a good comparison to PA. Let's take a look at scouts from different factories in ZK (many factories do not have a dedicated scout, so I've looked at the cheapest unit from each factory).

Fac 1: Cloaky bots. No dedicated scout, but raider unit (glaive) is cheap and fast enough to double up in scouting role. Glaives are great for early metal spot raiding and in a small group can overpower light defenses. Also great in large groups late game. Glaives have high DPS, low HP, but fast HP regeneration.

Fac 2: Shield bots. No dedicated scout. Raider unit (bandit) is slower than glaives but more durable. It's also a bit more expensive.

Fac 3: Light vehicles. Scout unit (dart) is fast, short range, fairly good DPS for cost, low HP, better than most vehicles on hills.

Fac 4: Heavy vehicles. No dedicated scout. Raider unit (kodachi) is a hit-and-run tank that fires an AOE napalm grenade with a long reload time. The kodachi has fast HP regeneration. It can be useful throughout the game but does require micro for best effect.

Fac 5: Hovercraft. No dedicated scout. Raider unit (scrubber) has longer range and slower reload than other raiders and it's a hovercraft (travels over water, terrible on gradients and bumpy ground). It also has a weapon that is unaffected by shields.

Fac 6: Spiders. Scout unit (flea) is extremely cheap, fast, all terrain, fragile, good DPS for cost, cloaks when immobile. Fleas can be placed on cliff edges to act as a surveillance camera for the rest of the game or used in groups to raid.

Fac 7: Gunships (VTOL aircraft). No dedicated scout. Cheap EMP stun drone (gnat) or kamikaze drone (blastwing) can double up as scouts. They're also useful all game.

Fac 8: Fixed wing planes. No dedicated scout. Light fighters (avengers) double up in this role.

Fac 9: Jumpjets. No dedicated scout. Walking bomb unit (puppy) can double up in this role. More commonly the flamethrower raider (pyro) will be used to scout, although it is expensive for a raider. Jumpjets make up for poor early game options with excellent artillery, anti-air, and heavy units for mid-late game.

Fac 10: Amphibious operations plant. No dedicated scout. Raider unit (duck) can be used in this role. Ducks are relatively strong underwater (they fire torpedos) but weak on land.

Fac 11: Shipyard. Scout unit (skeeter) fires a medium range guided missile that can hit surface and air units.

Fac 12: Strider hub. T3 factory, no scout units.

Out of the 11 units described above, the only 2 that have a similar feel are glaives and bandits from the cloaky and shield bot facs. Potentially one of those units could be removed or changed (probably bandit, they're not quite as useful). The general point I'm trying to get across is that units, even ones used for fairly similar roles, can play very differently, and I disagree that all roles need to be present in all factories.

As long as the strengths and weaknesses of units are intuitive (i.e. no special damage or other hidden parameters) and units have clearly labelled roles, then the learning curve shouldn't be too harsh.

In any case, I'd much rather have a diverse game that takes a while to learn than a simple game that gets boring quickly.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

If more factories really does equal more depth, why stop at twelve? Have one factory for every unit in the game. Or one factory for every subset of units. With a hundred and fifty units, that's some fantastically huge number of factories (more than 10^40) Sure, the game would be impossible to learn but look at all that diversity!

The distinctions between production facilities mean something, not just be vague groupings of units that sort-of look similar. The units are being assembled on a nanometer scale, so it hardly makes any sense that tracks are so fundamentally different to wheels than an entire new facility is required to make them (yet the same factory can produce a whole selection of diverse weapons), and only really has relevance in the first minute, where you only have one factory, yet all the decisions you make in the first minute are basically being made blind since you don't know what your opponent is doing. What you build first is based on the map type and your intended overall strategy, and you can hardly claim that it's a significant strategic decision to decide before you've even seen the enemy to build a factory whose basic combat unit has slightly higher basket weaving skill at the cost of having poor taste in wine and a -5 modifier on table manners checks, or whatever other minor changes get made to each of your nine different land factories.

Once the game's gotten going, players have loads of factories and could potentially have built the full set, so having nine land factories producing slightly (you may claim that the units you listed are all fundamentally different, but the differences look minor from here, especially compared to the difference between a boat and a plane) different types of units is nothing but a UI annoyance (making factory grouping impossible, and meaning production orders have to be given one by one).

EDIT: Also, the starting build metagame is only interesting when the number of options is relatively small. If there really are a dozen viable starting builds, then you have almost no chance at being able to predict what an opponent is going for, and the metagame becomes 100% guesswork.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

Agreed jurgenvonjurgensen, it can be detrimental to having to many factories. If you have a shear loads of units then many factories can be very beneficial , but I would expect PA to come with a much smaller unit pool. Assuming PA has 2 tech tiers, 2 factories for each type of factory say Vehicle, Kbot, Hover, Sea, Air and Orbital making 12 factories having 10 each would make it 120 unique units.(assumption)

We could say average 15 units per factory(x12) for a total of 180 unique units of varying tech levels, perhaps there would be more tech 1 then tech 2. Add in the 12 factories and various structures energy( Solar, Wind, Wave, Orbital each with 2 tiers?l), mass(direct mass mining and energy to mass converters), defense(turrets, walls, radar, sonar), etc.. could say +30 or so more structures in their well over 225 units/structures all together.

That is a decent amount of work, programming, art and implementation wise. Not to mention that's is a good number of units you might wanna know as much as you can about each one.

Please note I pull numbers out of no where with assumptions. My argument/discussion is towards a simpler layout for factories as to reduce the amount of work needed to complete the game, but still have the variety and complexity needed for it to be awesome.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

I agree with your point here.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

I agree that PA shouldn't need as many factory types as ZK. Bots, vehicles, and maybe an all terrain factory (not essential) should be fine for land. I think it might be nice to see a hover factory too though.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

Whats wrong with only having 2 factories for land? One tier 1 and one tier 2, it's not like PA is going to have tons of redundant units like ZK has. (I know, not two units are exactly the same in ZK, yet so many of the unit roles are duplicate...)

Putting tanks and bots in the same factory doesn't create much of an conflict, those two unit types play completely different (tanks are usually defensive while bots are more offensive) and there is no need to force some complications where the player would have to build both either way.

Even hovercrafts are just another essential tech, except for the fact that we are not going to see all tech adapted to a hovercraft version, simply because there are some techs (like rocket launchers, arty and other long range units) which tend to get OP when you can just ignore natural borders in terrain (because you can place them out of range and you can't get near them).

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

Well heck, why don't we just have one tank and one bot. That's all we really need to fight a war on land, right? Actually tanks and bots both have guns and can move, so they're duplicated within the role of moving/shooting units. Let's just have one tank. We'll call it Captain Boring.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

I don't think the factory themes should be necessary related to move types, I'd like to have two starting factories that both mix the bots and vehicles.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

How is the number of units in the game relevant to the number of factories? You're starting a completely new discussion here.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

You're right, sorry, ill and no sleep, not a good recipe for cogent discussion.

I suppose the number of factory types isn't of paramount importance. I do like the idea of some strategic lock in.

What some people are calling redundant units (because two or more units fill a raider role for instance) I rather like. Even fairly subtle differences between units can make one the optimal choice for one or another situation. I like diversity and (intuitive/transparent) complexity in general.

Or to look at it another way, 100% scouting. If you're on the same planet as your opponent, that is. Otherwise first fac choice might not matter as much anyway.

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

Which isn't accomplished with factory type bloat, since players build dozens of factories over the course of the game, so the actual choice of factories means little to one's strategy once the game progresses beyond the first couple. Unless one made factories so expensive that you can't feasibly build more than two or three, even with a mid game economy but that slows down the early game so much that it'd kill interest in competitive multiplayer.

Of course, you could make teching up be strategic lock in (as one can't reasonably afford all the T3 factories from all the unit types), as in SupCom, but that only works if the teched up units absolutely destroy their lower tech equivalents, and that leads to tier obsolescence, which is counter-indicated by the design goals.

Wait, what? How are you supposed to scout your opponent before you've built your first factory? Can you just magic up scouts from thin air?

Re: Should Bots, Tanks and hovercraft have their own factory

I agree with your point here, I still feel like there should be 2 land factory types however for lighter and faster units, and another for slower and tougher units.

Even when players have many of both and so they will have units that fulfill the same role, the difference is how they accomplish their goals.

Faster scouts likely wont have space for radar but might have access to better mobility like being a hovercraft

Where as heavier scouts would have access to radar, and possibly even access to a support weapon in order to defend escorting units.

This is what I feel is accomplished by the may factory's method, giving players a choice of how they want the job done.