Do we need tech levels?

Sure t1 and t2 come into play on small maps. So much so that t3 does not even get a look in (and it should not, because the majority of the skill should lie in T1 and T2). But if ur playing a bigger game that goes on for lets say hours, after you have upgraded ur eco ur gonna be swimming in mass and energy (generally the way TA/supcom goes) and ur gonna want to spend that on stuff.
If there is no experiments (which is fine by me) what are you gonna spend ur money on?
The answer is T3. T3 ground units, naval and most importantly planes.
You say that makes T1 useless but they are essential in the early part of the game in getting urself going. Also used for engineer harassment used for slowing at the early part of the game. I cant see the problem with late game switching to higher techs.
You can still use T1 to swam areas of maps, act as distractions, cannon fodder to protect ur more expensive units.
And then you have to plan when to upgrade ur tech, So either you capture more of the map than ur opponent and therefore have more mass so you can upgrade safely then destroy them. Or you can gamble and sit back and defend while upgrading mass extractors. The fact that you can then tech up again to level 3 adds even further depth in my opinion which to me adds to enjoyment.
And if les say you have just landed on a new planet i doubt you will want to go straight for T3 as the enemy might come and destroy you while you are upgrading. Your gonna want to colonise a planet as fast as you can with t1 to gain all the mass. Your gonna have to do that every time you move planet. So here is another possible reason for making use of T1.
The point I find hard to imagine is the actual engagement. Lets say you and ur opponent have colonised two planets next to each other and you have some levelled up units. How are you gonna actually engage the enemy? Stick all ur units in cannons and fire them at the planet? sounds a little weak to me.
Sorry if this makes little sense, I am not the most literate person I know. I just love RTS =)

You'll be spending your money on smashing asteroids into each other.

What and thats it? How else will you be attacking? cus you wont be using ur precious T1 units then. You will both be sitting back safe on ur plants with loads of T1 units not being used smashing moons into each other? lol
What you want is to drop some T3 units on a planet that can stand up for themselves and actually have a battle?

Okay, Pureriffs.

Step one. Take a deep breath and slow down.

Step two. Make paragraphs properly; press that Enter key twice. Spelling is important, so you'll have to forgive my confusion because ur is not a real word.

There's one reason why T3 doesn't often appear in small maps: the time taken to upgrade a factory, and the resources spent in upgrading it could be better spent in tanks. If you spend mass in order to tech-up, I'll spend mass on an extra 80 tanks and roll through your base.

This is your opinion. It is not a universal fact.

As someone has already astutely pointed out: comet rockets.

Also, what are you going to spend your money on? I think you have forgotten the golden rule of SupCom.

• BUILD MOAR TANKS!!!1

No, on large maps they are not essential, and you can't engineer harass. You have to move those T1 units from your base to a position where they can harass.

THAT TAKES TIME.

On large maps, building tanks early on is a waste of resources. It's better spent on teching up faster to reach those T3 units. Because when your T1 tanks reach me, I'll have a better economy and will have started making T3 units. My T3 units will demolish your T1 units. Brilliant harassment plan you had there.

Basically, switching to higher techs means you have an optimum switching point. On small maps, that switching point is almost always never. On large maps, that point is immediately.

Yes, that's true. But it's also an inefficient use of resources.

If teching up again adds depth and enjoyment, why not have four tech-levels?

Wait, no. Lets have five of them.

That gamble is really just a calculation. If you know what you're doing, you will know when it's impossible for them to reach you before you tech-up. If you know you can tech-up without harassment, then do it. If they try it, you'll have T3 units ready.

Remember, if they can reach you; you can reach them. So, conversely, if you know that you can't tech-up safely... neither can they. At that point you should rush some T1 tanks and kill his stuff while it's all upgrading.

Why did you say this? It works against you, and is in favour of the two tier argument.

Lets say there's eight planets. It'd be more fun to sneakily go colonise some of those, and then surprise him with a larger army.

Quote:
There's one reason why T3 doesn't often appear in small maps: the time taken to upgrade a factory, and the resources spent in upgrading it could be better spent in tanks. If you spend mass in order to tech-up, I'll spend mass on an extra 80 tanks and roll through your base.

That’s what I said?

Quote:
This is your opinion. It is not a universal fact.

Just that way RTS goes generally.

Quote:
As someone has already astutely pointed out: comet rockets.

So you are just going to turtle with comment rockets and sit on planets making more tanks that you cant attack with? I hope the gameplay mechanic allows for more than this.

Quote:
If teching up again adds depth and enjoyment, why not have four tech-levels?
Wait, no. Lets have five of them.

They did have 4 in sup com. The 4th was experimentals. I think the line has to be drawn somewhere but I would prefer it to be at T3 not T2. Just my opinion dude as I think T4 is too far although really it depends on unit balancing.

Quote:
Why did you say this? It works against you, and is in favour of the two tier argument.

I said it because it gives a use for T1 not becoming redundant which seems to be the biggest argument for not having T3.

Quote:
Lets say there's eight planets. It'd be more fun to sneakily go colonise some of those, and then surprise him with a larger army.

Surprise him how? How do you get all your units to his commander? Blast them all in a cannon? This is the very point I was making. I wonder what the invasion mechanics will be and hope they are useful enough not to reply on moonslams all the time so that you actually get to use the units you have made..

I think i remember you Bullet, were you from FA yea?
= Aeolian

I have not read the entire thread and its arguments but to answer the OP I would say no, we do not need tech levels. It is a nice way to pace the expansion of your technology but I think a better way to do this would just simply have higher level units be generally more expensive. That way, you would be forced to expand to more resource deposits and more battles over resources would be more likely.

Also in a tech level based game, I do not like the fact that one scout of the opponents main base can give you a general idea of what they are building/could be building at any one time. Whether i have a secret base, moon base, resource station etc somewhere else, as soon as my opponent has scouted my main base you can see what tier of tech I am in. This is something I would prefer to be hidden, so that if I had the nerve to try a slow build of a higher tier unit when I clearly cannot afford it on a secret moon, I could choose to do so without anyone knowing for sure that I am lacking economically.

I could have generators feeding me resources on a far gas giant powering my economy while having less in my main base. While in FA for example, you can immediatly prepare yourself for T3 or experimentals regardless of whether or not you see said units based on the tier of your factories.

I would also think that unit cannons would be only for transportation from and to orbit, due to course correction and avoiding unit cannons skimming units off of the sun.

Moons.

Or wait does that equal orbit? Guess it does.

In any case, moons.

I think this was intended for a different thread.

Though it's hard to keep track with the same people spreading the barbeQQ sauce on so thick.

I do have a tendency to have multiple threads open at once.

For those that haven't seen this or forgot, Uber's plan of record is having 2 tech levels, including T2 engineers. So that answers the OP's question - yes we should have tech levels and there should be 2.

Above all, I would hate to see complex tech levels stunt the life of the game by turning away new players. Downsizing to 2 levels is a good move.

Even still, I think Uber has a difficult problem to solve... give the SupCom and TA fans the complexity they want all while making the game straight-forward enough to usher in a whole new generation of fans.

Well, 2 tiers is the TA formula, and many of us encountered this formula for the first time in 1997, and we had no problem figuring it out. And as we've seen, it definitely leads to appreciable gameplay complexity. So I don't think that new players will have that big of an issue coming in, nor that old players will begrudge the supposed "lack of complexity."

Jumping into to TA was a lot smoother then SupCom, a game I bought on release and only just figured out how to play.

That's just personal experience. Plenty of others (including me) found the transition seamless.
And objectively, the differences in gameplay implementation between the two games are pretty small. The only standouts are the extra tier (which is fairly simple to understand for the new player) and the adjacency system (which really isn't that important).
Besides, the devs seem to be focusing on making PA more like TA in the parts we're concerned about, like economy and tiering, so this shouldn't be an issue, right?

Most likely not, but I would still feel better if the economy was explained in terms of:
"Running one basic factory takes up to 2 mass deposits and three power plants" in the description of the factory.

So new players would know what to do, and better players could them maximize the efficiency in the way they do.

But it doesn't even work like that in games like Supcom 2 or even Starcraft. In none of these games does it cost resources to run a factory alone, only when it's actually producing. And then the resource cost is based on the unit produced.
Since it's dynamic, the player needs to focus on ensuring that the unit cost is met, rather than the factory. In Supcom 2, if you don't have the resources, you can't build it. But in Supcom, if you don't have the income, you can still attempt to build it, it will just take from your savings. Balancing that out is something we've done since TA, and as we said, that's simple enough to do.

The only time the game really changes is with adjacency (which isn't that huge in Supcom, and won't be in PA) and when you add on engineers. Engineers aren't necessary for new players, but the logic is simple enough once they start thinking about it; Pay more, get stuff quicker. And again, it's been something we've been doing since TA.

I feel you have overcomplicated what I meant, but its probably my fault .

In SC1 T1 units cost around 1-6 mass a tick, leaving the base line for mass extractors at 6 mass income per tick, which I believe is 2 extractors.

So basically 2 extractors to a T1 factory without going into to many details.

The same fundamentals were present in SupCom2, even to the point where 2 extractors could produce the resources for 2 factory's, and when leveled up 3 possibly even 4 without much slowdown.

So essentially the running cost of factory's is when its building, and generally that should mean constantly.

So if I understand you correctly, you want each factory to state the maximum impact it would have on your economy? This just doesn't seem practical in the real world implementation. Looking only at a KBot factory in TA, the unit cost between a Peewee and a Warrior is a pretty big difference when you consider a low economy situation. A factory that estimates the max based on a Warrior will grossly overstate its cost, especially at the start of the game. In fact, this would be MORE confusing to new players, who would wait until they built several resource gatherers before starting on their factory, when the factory should be one of the first buildings they build. Even ignoring the outliers, standard units, like rockos, seem to cost too much, but that's offset by the buffered resources.

But moving on from a low economy situation, or to the midgame, now the cost of the factory doesn't matter. Whereas before, 1-10 ticks per second was a HUGE difference, on the order of several extractors, now the player has enough extractors that a max of 10 is only a drop in comparison to the 50 that an advanced factory would cost. And then you add engineers, and costs go up. And then you add advanced extractors, and things get really weird.

The point is, you're trying to declare a dynamic economy to be static, and that won't work. Better to have a good UI that allows you to track your economy easily, and tools like pausing or prioritization that allows you to control it.

I wasn't trying to say that the economy is static, but be are using different references for things and our arguments are discussing different things so its hard to comment further.