The Case for a Command Center

The core concept of this post is quite a simple idea for essentially just one new structure. However it represents a significant departure from the TA and SupCom approach to expansion and map control. In those games the player's map presence assets are typically bare-bones. Naked mexes, and perhaps light defense. I propose a type of structure which gives more robust map presence within controlled territory, and essentially acts as the seed for developing a base later.

My gameplay skeleton for PA involves the player needing to build many bases in different locations around a planet in order to have effective control over it. Essentially, large planets with limited influence for a single base, incentivizing players to spread out over its surface to be able to reach anywhere on the surface. This type of gameplay is desirable as it creates a greatly extended "war" with many smaller decisions and events, rather than only a few huge decisive battles. I think this is fairly uncontroversial, but I can elaborate if anyone disagrees that positional play with armies as a density distribution spread out over area is preferable to battlefields composed of compact army-blobs and lots of empty space.


Addressing Gameplay

One significant gameplay hurdle with this type of approach is the amount of player micromanagement needed to manually build a large number of structures all over the surface of a large planet. Some method of easing the player's construction-micromanagement burden is most likely warranted.

However the most significant gameplay hurdle is the incentive structure necessary to create this kind of decentralization. A factor as simple and trivial as build power access can be decisive for players selecting to centralize their infrastructure. A single location is naturally easier to defend, and assets like energy and production are somewhat location-agnostic. Consequently there is a natural tendency to build everything in a single consolidated location. Even if metal extractors must be constructed on specified sites scattered around the map, sending constructors to build isolated mexes without any defense or nearby infrastructure remains a highly efficient approach, both economically and tactically.

There is also a quite justified concern about the fragility of such outposts, and the quite considerable risk of expending resources to build in areas not already well developed or secured. A significant advantage to building developed areas is to minimize risk. If the area is compromised, you already lose considerable materiel, and the additional risk added by further construction is less than by exposing yourself in a new region.


The Command Center

The basic idea I propose to address the above concerns is a big, very tough structure that a player uses to establish versatile and rugged positional control over a local area. Something engineers can throw down to act as the seed for a new base. A jack-of-all-trades structure that is inefficient at everything, but has the critical advantage that it is very difficult to destroy.

I don't really care what this type of asset is called, but for lack of a better name, I will presently steal a name from Starcraft since it is evocative of a similar type of structure- it's big, hard to kill, and used as the backbone of brand-new fledgling bases. However this "Command Center" differs very significantly in function from the Starcraft command center. Where the Starcraft CC is an economic structure which must be defended, the PA CC I propose is a defensive structure that protects economic structures such as metal extractors, and provides a number of other functions essential for an outpost in the middle of nowhere.

The PA command center needs sensors, weapons, and armor. It needs a robust sensor suite, but with short range relative to dedicated sensor structures, allowing a fledgling base to delay construction of better sensors. It can attack ground and air units with some effectiveness and limited range. It won't defeat even a moderate-sized force, but it will take considerable time to destroy without big weaponry. And it can defend against harassment of multiple kinds, but not enough to stop the enemy from harassing. Destroying an extractor remains just as quick and easy, even if the harassing unit takes a bit of damage and has to leave after.

A command center should also be a rugged but highly inefficient economic structure, producing a small but significant amount of energy. Dedicated energy generators would, of course, completely obliterate the command center in energy production for cost, but lack the command center's durability and other features.

If logistics are implemented, the command center would also serve as a huge supply repository, with limited nanogel production as well. Dedicated supply production facilities can safely store their produced supplies within the base's command center, and the command center might have an exceptional supply distribution range, enabling it to distribute anywhere in a medium-size base.

In addition, the command center could be able to load ground units to hide and protect them. Engineers, even the commander might be stashed inside to protect them from artillery, missiles, air strikes, etc. A command center might also be able to survive one, perhaps even two nuclear strikes. Even though everything else in the base (or even in the region) is destroyed, any command centers might be used to rebuild unless the nuking player either mops up, or uses enough nukes to completely sterilize the area.

To legitimately steal a page from Starcraft's book, this CC might actually be able to build engineers, but not combat units. One possible implementation of this is to have local-only engineer drones which allow the CC to build structures around itself. Another is to offload engineer production from factories onto the CC, and have factories dedicated to military production.


Design Concerns

The first and biggest design concern is that the command center would become the go-to economic or industrial facility. This is easy to prevent by ensuring the CC is a jack of all trades, yet master of none. For cost, it should be a truly dreadful defensive structure, sensor structure, energy producing structure, supply producing structure, and indeed poor at pretty much everything else. Unfortunately, these properties may discourage players from building them at all, depending on cost. The motivating factor for the player to build the structure is its versatility and durability, which are especially important when building in undeveloped areas.

Another major concern is that this structure will be effective to build in large numbers in a single location. If its energy generation or defensive abilities are too great, this becomes an especially large concern. As a result, I think the CC's abilities should skew towards features like logistics, which are most useful when spread, and features like radar, which do not stack.

The last possible serious concern is the price point necessary for this structure to have a purpose. In order to be able to effectively serve as the seed of a base, it needs to be possible to build in undeveloped places, which most likely means it must be cheap. However its feature list, depending on implementation, may require it to be too expensive for this to be workable. My intuition is that there should exist a functionality threshold low enough to be useful, and also cheap enough to build far afield. But this is an estimate that can only be substantiated by gameplay testing.


Conclusion

Overall, this is a quite lengthy post to justify a fairly simple gameplay concept for a single structure. However it represents a somewhat significant shift in how players would expand. Rather than constructing soft targets everywhere in the form of mexes, possibly with scattered light defenses, players would construct enduring positional structures about the map which gives their territorial control some teeth while simultaneously bolstering their economic, industrial, and intelligence capabilities.

A command center type structure would essentially serve as a seed to a new base. It would provide a little of everything in a region, and give the player a firm enough foothold in the area to decrease the risk of further infrastructure construction nearby. It is neither a self-sufficient base nor a defensive structure, but has enough of each to prevent just a couple enemies from wiping the fledgling base out, and to facilitate further infrastructure in the area.

But all of the Command Center's functionality can be achieved using individual buildings designed for their purpose, but at a lower cost and with an increase in flexibility. For lightweight raiding defenses, build cheap turrets that will prevent those annoying pokes, most players will scatter radar around the map anyway for sensors, etc. Not only that, but they are quicker to deploy than a monolithic structure, and as a result they can be more easily replaced.

Now the issue that you seem to be trying to address is that the player should be encouraged to build more bases, at a greater expanse around the map, rather than consolidating themselves to one major base per planet. However, while this was an issue in Supreme Commander (depending on the map), in TA players tended to build more prolifically (unless they were porcing). It wasn't uncommon to see bases spring up in areas with a higher concentration of metal deposits.

The problems that arise from many bases scattered around revolve primarily around base management and defense, which is why players tend to be less eager to play this way. However, that mostly stems from UI limitations. If the UI makes this easier, I suspect a wider base distribution will become more common, without the need for a monolithic structure that, in all honesty, is somewhat superfluous, especially if you keep its effectiveness limited, as you describe.

You are absolutely right on all counts, sylvesterink. However I would add that there is a bit of a practical difference between multiple specialist structures and a single consolidated versatile structure. It lets you cover all the basics that a brand-new base needs for minimal total investment. Although if you built one of each dedicated structure, you would get much better subsystems more efficiently, the total cost of building them all would be higher.

And there is in fact one thing that the CC lets you do that no other structure does- act as a somewhat secure seed for a later base. The CC can build engineers, or has the ability to build structures on its own using a nanotower or construction drones with limited range. Engineers can throw down a CC and then leave the area, and you retain the ability to build in the area later even if you have no engineers nearby. This gives you the ability to develop anywhere in territory you control with spaced CC's.

While I did say the CC would be large, I don't know about "monolithic." Perhaps a bit bigger than a SupCom factory is what I was thinking. The cost does need to stay low enough to use it to expand. I am not sure what kind of price point is ideal- somewhere in the range of slightly less than a factory to significantly more, but less than double a factory's cost (SupCom based approximation; if factories are redesigned around lower price point, might be irrelevant comparison). More expensive CC's will be more widely spaced by players, and could have better functionality, but that also means fewer bases at greater distances. In any case, this isn't a superbuilding; it needs to be quite affordable to encourage expansion.

By "monolithic," I mean one structure that unifies many purposes into one whole, at the cost of flexibility.

In any case, let's take a look at this on 3 points. Firstly, using the CC as a defense. In order to fulfill the practical use of multiple defensive turrets, it would need to have a longer firing range than most ordinary turrets in order to defend the same amount of area as several defensive turrets. It would also need to be able to fire at multiple targets, or perhaps have some sort of AOE in order to have that same effectiveness. Keeping all of this in mind, the CC would need to be priced higher than the equivalent number of turret defenses in order to prevent it from becoming an imbalanced, overglorified turret of its own.

Add to that the sensor capability, which again needs an appreciable range, but perhaps not so much more than an ordinary radar, and the cost only goes up.

And then there's the ability to build constructors, and in this case the CC needs to be cheap enough to balance out the fact that it can only build constructors, where a factory could build so much more. But the CC already needs to be pricey enough to justify its defensive capabilities, and that would put it well beyond the cost of the defenses alone.

Take a look at the cost of the most inexpensive turrets in TA in comparison to the cost of a factory. It takes 3 Defenders to equal the cost of one kbot factory. These 3 turrets have about the desired range that would be needed to make a CC useful in its role, so already the CC will be over cost, not including its sensor/construction capabilities. (Note that the cost of tier 1 factories tended to be cheaper in TA, but that is something to be encouraged for PA, especially since they should be easy to toss up in the case of a planetary invasion.)

But don't forget that you will HAVE to build a factory anyway! You can't build offensive units in a CC. So building a CC is essentially the cost of building 3 defenders a radar, and perhaps half a factory, PLUS a factory. This is versus 3 defenders, a radar, and a factory alone. Add to that the fact that 1 target is much more vulnerable than 5 targets (unless you give it substantial armor, which should again increase the cost), and suddenly the CC becomes too expensive and just not as useful as the non-CC method.

So we have several strikes against the concept of the CC. The price will be too high, comparatively, or it will be overpowered. (In other words, why build 3 defenders when you can build 1 CC for lower cost and bonus sonar.) Then there's the fact that it isn't as effective. Then there's the fact that it's a more vulnerable target. And finally, it's just not as flexible of a system. (Especially when you start taking terrain into account. Why build 3 defenders at a choke when 2 will do, etc.)

While it's an interesting attempt at solving a potential gameplay issue in PA, I don't think the CC concept would work as well as using the standard, TA method. (With a better UI to make it easier to manage.)

I would say it should not defend as much area as several turrets- or even a single turret. the CC should have a limited ability to defend its immediate surroundings against very light attacks.

If you want more defenses, factories, or any other facilities or units, you can use the CC as a seed to construct them nearby. The CC confers a limited amount of protection to the fledgling base- it isn't a map control asset by itself.

Again, its range should not be more than an ordinary radar- but considerably less than a dedicated radar.

Based on this, I think you may be somewhat confused about how unit utility/cost works. The entire point is that the CC costs more than the defenses alone, and more than the ability to build engineers alone. But by carefully designing the CC with limited functionality to keep the cost down, CC's can be made by engineers to construct durable positional control in the area- much more influence than just a squishy engineer. A squishy engineer which, if it dies, will greatly delay any construction or expansion. The CC is much harder to kill than an engineer, and gives a similar kind of presence to engineers.

To sum it up concisely, the CC is sort of like a commander that doesn't move. By building it, you are claiming territory, and gain a durable, fixed source of influence and the option of building whatever you like there later if you wish.

Once again I think you are confused about how balance works here. "Overpowered" is not a relevant concept for this issue, much like naked mex expansion cannot be "overpowered."

The issue here is the price being too high to use for frontier expansion, or the price being too low, causing many CC's to be constructed in a localized area, without spreading them out. Within those two possibilities there is probably a wide range of balanced costs, where there will be different maximally-efficient distances for CC spacing across the map. More expensive CC's would be further apart, cheaper ones closer together. None of these possibilities are "overpowered."

The trick is to create a structure that is very useful in the boonies, but which is strictly less efficient than specialist structures in safe areas.

Why don't I just build a solar panel, a A light laser tower, a missile turret, an engineering tower, and call it a day?

Players will only build a base when it makes sense to build a base. The command structure doesn't provide any feature that you can't already build from another unit.

I see what ledarsi is saying here. I actually agree with his idea on a kind of affordable (Not necessarily cheap) stationary "command unit." It would be balanced by its limited effectiveness at any one task but when all of its capabilities averaged together it would be more effective. Unlike building a factory, defensive weapons, radar, and a power generator you build one structure that has a little of them all that can be built in less time and at most likely a lower cost then all those other structures combined, but greater than any one of them.

So sure you could build a factory, defensive weapons, radar, and a power generator and have a nice little base that would be very effective and rather well defended, but for some people that may be to much of a commitment to an area that may not be very strategically located in the near future.

One of ledarsi's "command structures" can be built and be used to built a greater base if needed on its own, or if that location turns out to be a rather poor spot in the future you didn't waste as much space, time, and resources, as well as not having a bunch of your assets in a bad location.

-Seth861-

Ledarsi, have you read the modular factories thread?
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=41715&p=625849&hilit=modular+factories#p625849
It has some similarities.

I don't think the modular factories idea is related in any significant way.

If we suppose that we separate engineer construction from factories into its own facility- the CC- then a base is begun by building a CC in the area, not by building a factory. You add factories when you want to make military units from this base. The CC approach has the additional advantage that factories should not have defenses or economic functions; but a CC whose primary function is as a base seed can afford limited capabilities of both.

My vote is no, but only because I think this is already being accomplished without the necessity of a single structure. I don't think concentrating functionality is a good idea, at least to the degree you suggest.

~~~

Factories will probably be unified, so instead of having one for each unit type, several types are held within one factory.

Resources should rarely be merged, and defenses should be independent of manufacturing.

Thus, a command center is never needed. Between resources, construction, and defenses, there isn't much left to cover for a CC to be useful.

Also, Jon, and many players want to avoid 'build order' gameplay. Introducing a single structure to accomplish most things goes against this principle.

~~~

That said, I like the idea of 'seeding' new bases, instead of just plopping things down wherever you want. Not sure this fits with the design of PA, but it certainly sounds good enough to think of how it might work.

Well, the nice thing about using build templates, like in FA, is that accomplishing this is fairly easy. All you need is a few engineers to set out to the planned base location, drop a preset template for a factory, some turrets, and radar, and suddenly you have a nice little firebase that can be used to control the area and defend against light attacks.

The problem I have with the Command Centre idea is that's basically a stationary hero unit. It's a multi function (micro managed) building. Personally I hate the CC structures of starcraft and similar games. One of the things I loved about TA was that it got rid of that hub and allowed for more organic game play. The other problem with the CC is the issue of obsolescence and redundancy. Once forces are too large for the CC to provide adequate defence than it's obsolete, unless you build more of them, than they have redundant features like the sensors.

I personally favour staying away from multi function buildings, there's a reason the only really multi functional units of real military are massive naval ships, and even than an aircraft carrier doesn't have artillery turrets and the like. Each unit has it's speciality, and it's the best at that purpose, start piling more functionality on top and the primary focus suffers. Look at cell phones today, battery life is abysmal, they're kinda awkward to talk on, they're not as good as a real computer and not as good as a real cell phone. They're handy despite not being good at anything really. In the military you don't want handy and convenient, you want good enough that you can bet your life on it.

I'd be interested to play a mod that uses this design thinking, along with a range-limited economy (ie needing to build pipelines across the map from mexes), but it's not what I'm expecting from vanilla PA.

Real naval ships have to be fully independent and flexible units in a big sea. That expectation does not apply here. A PT killbot can cross the entire ocean just as well as, if not better than any other oversized ship.

In an RTS, ships will pretty much always fight in fleets. Individual ship weaknesses are not an issue when they're protected by other ships.

This line makes me think you did not actually read my original post.

The CC is not a hero unit. It is not a micro-managed building. It is, in fact, the epitome of automation for tiny outposts, which require no further attention after their initial construction.

Building such an outpost using a CC preserves your options in the area with regards to building more, later, when your engineers keep driving past to expand further. If those engineers are lost, you can use the nearest CC to build more and keep expanding, preventing you from driving all the way from wherever your first engineers came from. Speedier and more durable early game expansion, and the presence of heavy active harassment, are both good things. However we want the game to advance- and against harassment, a CC is basically permanent (unlike engineers or metal extractors).

The CC is not a hero unit- they are meant to be built spaced across an entire planet in considerable numbers, for planets of arbitrary size. For very large planets this likely means a LOT of command centers. None of them is a hero unit, and none of them is "micro-managed."

Read before you write something knee-jerk.

It's a fire base. Everything prepackaged into a single unit. In fact, I've seen this kind of unit before. The fire bases in TotalA:Final Frontier did the same thing.

Fire bases were special units for Final Frontier maps. They put a cluster of various weapons, radar, and some resources on a single unit pad. Their special power is that they were "orbital" units. They could be built on the "space" layer where classic defenses could not be. Overall they were very expensive and slow to build, so you did not build them recklessly.

In fact, I highly recommend playing the final frontier mod (if you can still find it). It does a a lot of things to create a space layer for the original game.

Hmm that's the part I remember reading. That looks like micromanagement to me. Perhaps my use of the word hero unit was incorrect, I have a different internalized meaning for that word than most other people do. Perhaps I should use the word keystone/experimental/super unit.

Either way I don't really like the unit idea personally. It's just too much in one. Balancing it sounds time consuming from a play testing perspective, balancing multi function units/buildings like this is a razors edge balancing act, the more facets you have the harder it is to balance out. A dual function unit is already hard enough to balance out. This one, which seems to be potentially be 5 different things, sounds like a nightmare.

Perhaps I'm still just longing for Total Annihilation with a new coat of paint, but the CC building you described just doesn't seem very TA to me. I'm not sure how much of a spiritual successor PA is supposed to be to TA, but I really dislike most of the design implementation of Starcraft, and it's multitude of clones.

Just.... no. I categorically stated the CC is not a super unit, not an experimental, not even expensive. I expressly said it needs to be comparable to a land factory in cost. And the lowest possible tech- everything can build one; commander, engineers, whatever.

And I see nothing that tends to suggest micromanagement in the section you quoted. The ability to build engineers? The ability to put engineers inside the CC? Neither of those things are micromanagement intensive. In fact they require no micromanagement whatsoever unless you expressly want to utilize that capability, such as by queueing up an engineer to be constructed.


The most significant change from TA is that at an important location, say a spot on the map with a couple mexes, the player builds mexes and a CC in that area, and then the engineer(s) move on to the next mex. The CC guards the spot. If the mexes are destroyed, the CC can build an engineer and rebuild the mexes. If you want to build a base in the area later, you can make some engineers and build whatever you like, rather than building constructors somewhere else and walking them all the way over.

In fact your comments about redundancy/obsolescence seem to demonstrate you actually don't understand the nature of the problem being addressed, much less the behavior of the proposed solution. Features like engineer construction and sensors are not useful to have a huge quantity of in a single location, which encourages spreading these structures out across the map.

That is the primary intended function of the CC- so when you say this facility is redundant to have too many of in one place, that's like telling someone their boat doesn't work because it's going to float.

Ledarsi, I think you'll find a very similar unit in a very familiar place. The Supcom 2 factory, when upgraded, has virtually all of the features you listed. It has radar, some guns, high endurance, construction power, and an ability to shelter nearby units with its shield. All it needs is a turret(or a few units) to be a complete base.

I think the question you need to ask yourself is: Did anyone use the Supcom2 factory as a long distance Command Center?

You actually make a good point about the SupCom 2 factory. However I think you are misrepresenting its "weapons" in that tactical missiles are totally useless against anything which can move, much less for defending against harassment. Factories with missiles would kill enemy structures at long range... eventually. However factories couldn't prevent just a few units from point-blank from killing it, and anything else nearby, such as mexes.

Furthermore, due to the ridiculously high cost and high HP of mexes in SupCom 2, there really wasn't any harassment whatsoever to defend against. There also weren't any real harassment units, analogous to a Jeffy in TA. In fact, map control and positional play in general were completely irrelevant in SupCom 2, whereas a CC being useful presupposes territory control is significant. And, given the absolutely tiny effective size of maps in SupCom 2, there wouldn't really be any use for a base seed type facility anyway.

So while you make an interesting point about multifunctional SupCom 2 factories, it seems to me that the functionality of a CC, and the game's total circumstances, are both completely different.