Progressive tech & upgrades

Basically, I'd like to see more of the ability to customise the amount you improve on a technology, rather than having everything a pre-defined static quantity like 'X hit-points'.

E.g. lasers: you choose your upgrade, it costs a certain minimum amount to invest in to "unlock" the tech, but then you can also choose how MUCH you upgrade them by, i.e. how powerful they are etc.

Or, another example, 'charge' abilities. If some tech or units have 'charge', they can tap into your resources in real-time (i.e. energy) and you can micro them with charge on a for a few seconds. In this state they are perhaps faster, or cloaked, or can see further, or shoot farther, etc. It would likely be expensive to do this and restricted to a few units or tech perhaps.

Intriguing suggestion, having less static upgrades would be cool, but I don't know how well it would play out in PA though.

Customizing sounds like it would cause alot of balance problems while giving little strategic effects.

Persistant unit upgrade unlocks sounds bad because it would take alot of time before you would be able to play with the "real" upgraded unit. I wouldn't mind so much about unit unlocks on units that didn't affect 1v1 gameplay much.

Charge abilities sounds like it would require alot of micro and most people doesn't want additional micro.

This has been discussed before.

Edit:
Example of charge abilities from TA and SupCom:
Dgun, cloak, stealth, laserfire(in TA), Overcharge, shields.
Okey, I guess charge abilities are common but it sounds like you want micro heavy ones.

I don't see that it necessarily affects micro one way or another in particular? I mean it's basically the same as SupCom and TA had anyway in many respects; what I'm suggesting is that it's done progressively though, fluidly. A player can tweak their units/structures/tech to the exact way that they like to play (in theory).

Something like 'Charge' could be a generic button on the UI. All it does it enhance certain abilities, seamlessly in the background/UI, that you can play around with. Like, channelling the last of your energy to your deflector shields in one last desperate attempt to hold off a bombing raid. Certain tech is connected (maybe itself a tech choice) directly to the "power grid".

How will this tweaking be visible to the opponent? Will units glow more as you charge them more?

Why wouldn't you want that deflector shield to last longer? Why wouldn't you want your units to move faster? Why wouldn't you want extend your range of your units?
All of theese questions can be answered with a cost/benefit ratio. Will your energy be put to better use somewhere else?
If there are situations that the usage of the special ability is trivial because you have spammed hordes of fusion power for example then using thoose special abilities will become very micro heavy unless the abilities can be activated by themselves.

I'd like it to be visually obvious yes (e.g. scoutable). Some units might literally grow in size or start flashing or shaking (almost splitting part under stress). Some might simply have their bubble-like shields change colour and expand outwards by 25%.

Right. So I'm suggesting that you could basically shift "energy" (resources, mass, power, whatever it will be) into certain units or structures dynamically to enhance them at critical junctures. Maybe you just hold down CTRL or ALT-GR while doing normal stuff, and the charge is building up. It's fluid, like using a dimmer switch rather than always using on/off regular bulbs.

Well it might only be a special ability on some units or upgrades. Like a Commander unit gets a "Fusion Core" repair upgrade or high-tech tanks use "Fusion Drive" lasers. In this case, these high-energy weapons (or shields, whatever) can be used more tactically and at very short notice on the battlefield. You simply select them as normal, move them as normal, but you've toggled one extra button, and it's gone into Charge Mode (a bit like Overcharge maybe from SupCom 1).

I'm thinking there'd likely need to be a "cap" on how powerful you can make it, of course. Maybe upfront energy costs on top of the specific unit's energy consumption? And maybe there are interesting side effects too, so it's always a risk.

So fight at one place, turn on the charge and after you have won the fight you turn off the charge so that you don't waste energy. I think that can become very microintensive. In Evolution RTS on the Spring engine all weapons require energy to fire and if you run out units can't fire. It is a similiar mechanic but requires no micro and it works.

So you have to upgrade the units ingame? Is it a global upgrade or do upgrade induvidual units?

Honestly i dont like this idea for multiplayer, when you use a system like this people tends to find the most "effective" (and easy to use) customisation and suddenly everyone uses it and only it.

There will allways be some units that get a unfair advantage if you can upgrade them in certain ways using a system like this. Theres no way to balance it so perfectly that it wont happen.

That sounds more like an issue of balance generally. I could say that of any unit or tech choice really. I think the key is trade-offs. Almost anything can be balanced as long as it's FUNCTIONALLY reasonable. E.g. going off-screen in TA gave aircraft a devastating functional advantage, which clearly could never ever be balanced by degree (e.g. some maps just meant air won the game for you every time – nowhere to hide your reactors from bombing raids).

In fact this whole concept, if balance became an issue, could be an expensive tech tree path in and of itself. A play style. So your "faction" evolves with FusionNet tech (or whatever you want to call it), and your weapons, units or systems are perhaps more expensive or less powerful generally, but more flexible in battle as you can tailor certain functions to the situation (like leaving your units just out of regular weapons range of an enemy base, then charging up the lasers for a few seconds for a hit, then retreating).

The difference is, that if you limit it to a tradional tech tree you can balance every step in the tree, since there will be a limited amount of variations of each upgraded unit.

But using the progressive idea the amount of variations of each unit becomes HUGE, so balance would become unfeasible.

I would love a way around this. Main way to avoid it is to rebalance over time until people just get used to using everything.

Trying to not include anything in the game at all is a poor way to balance the game. That is like saying "I don't want everyone to overuse one thing all the time, so I want the game to be only made with one thing"...

Well duh, everyone WILL only use one thing and only one thing, if that is literally the only thing that is in the game. You will ONLY see that one thing, it will get boring, people who happen to have a natural talent at it will stay but thats it.

If they made things that people could choose different in their strategy, and then when that MNCassault-SSF4guile-MW2ump45-BLOPSak74u-SSF4AEyun-SMNCspark-TCROSStank crowd comes out, nerf them to sort-of-low and force the illegit-playing easy-mode ones to move onto something else.

If they kept updating constantly based on that, eventually everyone would have had to play every type of strategy, and they would know which they actually like, and would probably finally stick to playing it through nerfs and buffs, so everything can be rebalanced and everyone can play.

Yes I see what you mean: good criticisms I think. But I suppose I'd explore things like making 'Charge' or whatever a tech upgrade itself, on certain items, and even then restrict its affect and see if it works as a gameplay mechanism.

So, lasers could only charge betwixt 1 and 7 or something, not indefinitely. Or it makes the energy consumption while using the charge exponential (or asymptotic, is that the word I want?!). Meaning it can crash your economy easily if overused.

Units could change based on the metals and resources of the planet it was made, giving each world a different gameplay tempo.

... while a idea that might be considered, it has nothing to do with the suggestions mentioned in this thread.

Make a new thread instead.

The title is also kinda misleading.

I'm trying to figure out how this will improve gameplay. If you want better lasers, build more lasers. If you want faster armies, build fast units. I don't think we are looking for the next edition of robot princess maker.

Mooks should be mooks, or the game is going to get very messy, very fast. The only unit special and unique enough to have complex mechanics are Commanders.

It's just a new mechanic. I'm not sure how it'd feel until I tried it out, but I'm introducing the idea. The main purpose is to be able to pull off high-risk moves by "boosting" units beyond their normal capacity. Build times can often be slow and while I love war-of-attrition games and timing attacks based on production cycles, I also love the idea of being able to push resources very fluidly into a unit or group of units to give them temporary enhancement. It doesn't conflict with the standard upgrade mechanic, I'm thinking it'd augment it. (StarCraft has some similar mechanics like Stim Packs on Marines, except I'm thinking you'd tie 'Charge' directly to resources via a generic UI 'Charge' button, to avoid complex micro/hotkeys.)

Not helpful.

I respect your opinion, I just disagree (in part because I'm hypothesizing it could be a very simple one-click UI toggle).

Is there a way to edit it?

Research and unit upgrades have come up before and been shot down a few times already.

In addition to the plethora of reasons why the game would be a bit better without a tech tree, if you let people open endedly upgrade units then everyone is going to use the same one super unit.

If you can upgrade any stat on any unit, then the best thing to do is pick a unit that starts out withe the most versatility. For example the gunships could fly, shoot at land, and air units. So you'd just pump all your research points into the T1 gunship until it has the stats of an experimental. Then everyone in every game is just sending out swarms of T1 gunships that have krogoth level HP and damage.

No

Sure but this isn't what I'm suggesting. I personally didn't like the Tech Tree system in SupCom 2 for example. It should all be visual, i.e. on-map (maybe even pure structures like TA).

Not what I'm suggesting.

Well, there's always going to be micro. It's just a different mini-mechanic.