Rushing, TA, FA, and PA

Hello everyone, good to se a strong forum community already established.
OK, I did search for site:forums.uberent.com/forums rushing, but only found posts for other games, so I hope this hasn't already been discussed to death.

TA was launched way back when as the largest-scale RTS game ever developed, weapons that could fire across huge distances, maps so large even air units took minutes to cross them, seas large enough to hide fleets.
Supreme Commander came along, and kept that approach, nukes taking minutes to reach their targets, huge machines of war that took a significant investment and risk to build, but were valuable was assets when completed.

And what happened?
T1 spam
Endless, endless T1 spam!

I left the FA community when I realised the best players, the ones who controlled the FA Forever servers, were all only interested in T1 spamming, small maps ruled supreme, the scarcity of experimental and T3 units an obvious indicator of this focused gameplay. This occurred only because it was the most efficient way to play, the only time T2 and T3 emerged in any numbers was when one player was sufficiently better to allow them the luxury of upgrading.
Two evenly matched players at the highest level would simply build more and more T1 factories.
Is this what we want for PA?
Are we going to have a game that offers 100 or even 1,000 units, but only 15 or so will ever be built?
Is that what we wanted when we watched the trailer?
Well, I don’t.
No before you start stamping your fingers into bloody stumps on your keyboard bashing out a retort, please realise I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be able to end a game with a quick rush of units if you are sufficiently better than your opponent.
What I am trying to say is the game should be balanced such that it isn’t the ONLY VALID TACTIC for 1v1 ladder play.
How do we achieve this?
Careful balancing.
T1 units should be scouts, spies, light escort units for engineers. These are fast units for getting out there to find and acquire metal sites, scout enemy activity, fight skirmishes, gain the initial economic upper hand.
Make that T1 stage more about scouting and early economic development, less about attacking the enemy base. Make Scouting and exploration important, by distributing metal sites far and wide, so if you don’t get your T1 right, you’ll fall behind economically.
T1 defences should be strong, able to cut them down like a hot knife through butter. T1 defenses can only be built by the commander, who in the early game is a builder, he is SLOW, tough, but not 10 tank, not a strong attacker, not yet! He has to be upgraded first.
T2 Units is where the main battle tanks, anti-air units, artillery etc. start to come into play.
T1 defences will fall to T2 units easily, outranged and outgunned.
T2 defences are more or less on par with T2 offensive units.
T3 offensive units are obscenely powerful, expensive, but, and here’s the crunch WORTHWHILE BUILDING!
T3 defensive units I don’t think should even exist!
No shields, no uber long range missile towers, only T2 structures, and T3 UNITS for defence AND offence.
This forces mobility, prevents turtling from being too powerful, but most of all prompts diversity and choice. The goal is to make all tiers important, achievable, giving flexibility to gamers.
Thoughts?

Well that's the real issue here. It's not that the game itself favored rushing, but that people enjoyed small maps that forced rushing as the most viable tactic.

Look for a server hosting an 80km map and you won't see as much rushing. Or better yet host your own maps that encourage whatever gameplay you like. Do you like turtling? Host an island map. Hate naval? Only play on Painted Desert.

I will say that the energy eating PD in TA did kinda discourage swarming with T1 units, due to the structures ablity to eat them up!

We could possibly introduce a similar anti-swarm device to keep the smaller maps from becoming a swarm fest, encouraging players to plan out their attacks rather then just consuming the map like locust.

The weakness is in the power, go for it in raids or airstrikes and you might get your window to swarm in, otherwise you will need to manage your T1 artillery in order to keep out of its range, but then your best bet might be to simply tech to something more ranged or tanking.

Wrong.

FA is just like you want it, you just dont realize that.

Two evenly players on a medium sized map (10x10 and bigger) will often not be able to kill each other with just T1 and tech up. If they are really equally skilled this can go on at least up to t3.

Pure t1 spam is something you get in 2 cases:
Equal players on very small maps, which is fine. Thats what small maps are for.
A good player just wiping a not-so-good player from the map.

Anyway: I do favor gameplay where you start of with balanced tech1 spamming that transitions into higher tech-spamming.
Just make sure to spam stuff the whole time

Crippling t1 in order to make very small maps play like larger maps is a terrible idea. If you prefer that play style then play larger maps.

Maybe you should calm down and read what I said, not what you think I said.

The crux of my post is to make sure T1 spam is not the ONLY VALID TACTIC, not to eliminate it altogether.

What cola_colin said.

T1 spam certainly was/is a viable tactic, but it was used mostly because it’s the easiest way to play. Plenty of maps however favoured teching, such as 4 leaf clover, open palms, eye of the storm etc.

That said, the balancing between tiers was pretty much my only complaint with FA.

The end result of it being the easiest way to play, was it becoming the ONLY way people played.

Then play a bigger map, or be the guy who learns how to play using harder tactics and always win.

sorry yxalitis, but that's simply not true. not sure exactly when you left the game (but i remember your complaints on GPG) but people certainly learned more as the game went on.

Well, it was certainly the dominant playstyle, and I was playing on the FA Forever servers, which were probably a bit biased towards 1v1 small maps.

Still, I would like the game balanced around making the upper tiers desirable, achievable, and relevent.

The only problem with competitive larger maps was the time they took to play was dramatically longer. You could have several matches on the smaller maps in the same time. Which people preferred.

PROTIP: THERE ARE NO T3 UNITS IN PLANETARY ANNIHILATION.

You have T1 and you have T2.

There won't be 100 types of units. If you want 100 types of units, you need 100 different uses for units. There isn't 100 different uses in a game for units, so if you have that many units you'll see things overlap. When they overlap, players will choose the more effective option of the lot.

Maybe you should try reading what everyone else is saying.

Your premise is false. The style of play you are advocating already exists and works just fine. If you don't like the way very small maps play (which is the only scenario that t1 spam is dominant) then play on larger ones where it isn't.

While ensuring that T2 can be used you have to be wary of making T1 too weak to be useful once you have T2.

You can have 100 unique viable units if you think creatively.

If PA comes out with a better way to successfully play longer games, it will naturally solve the entire problem.

At the heart of the 1v1 small maps issue is the fact that long games in FA have a high probability of lagging out, losing players, or crashing. Ergo, large maps are unpopular.

If PA can successfully solve these issues, it's going to quite naturally expand the battlefield to the full tech tree.

No they didn't. 1v1 were fine. The 10 player matches were worse, granted but still most matches were still fine.

I can remember losing a game because I tryed to stay t1 for too long. In fact that happend so many times that I started to have a look at how to tech up while spamming t1, so I would not lose vs t2 again. If you just spam t1 on medium sized maps you will lose vs any kind of good player. On small maps this might be different, but thats just the point of small maps. If the ladder has too many small maps (5x5) that is a problem of the mappool, not of the game.

yep. my padawan used to get over me all the time by teching better. those f'n early riptides on canis were an absolute killer :lol: i think i have brainsteel to thank for that strat.

This irritated me as well in FA. The thing I thought was interesting about it was what changed that made it the defacto initial strategy in FA since it wasn't in SC. There could have been some other background changes to production (I don't think there were). From what I could see playing it, it basically came about because of a small change to the T1 laser turret. In SC the laser turret had a firing range longer than a t1 arty, but it's sight range was shorter than that. So to stop t1 arty you needed to have radar in place. in FA they changed this so that t1 arty out-ranged t1 laser turrets all the time. This made it super easy to crush a defensive line with t1.

I was quite irritated at this change because it removed a great deal of depth from the game, at least the first few minutes.

Anyway I thought the mechanic of having a longer range than sight radius is a great balancing mechanic. It also has always amazed me how a small change like that can totally change the dynamic of a game.