The Case for a Command Center

I am a little late to correct this but modern NextGen ships are multitasking already to a point where in any real navy only three kind of ships are necessary: a carrier, a sub (questionable because some proposed destroyers outdated them), and your multitasking destroyer.

What is the reason why ships have to be independent where infantry or tanks or whatever don't? Because they're out in the middle of nowhere.

We can easily rewrite this as "Real outposts/CC's have to be fully independent and flexible units on a big planet."

Where there isn't much else to support any unit- be that ship, or outpost base, it is greatly benefited by being flexible and independent.

Ledarsi, I think on this one you're trying a bit too hard to push the desired gameplay with a unit.

You can't simultaneously make a unit cheap enough to use to expand (compete against sole engineers building mexes) and yet more expensive than a factory, and have enough hp & weaponry to act as a deterrent to the enemy. It's going to be a constant fiddle of too good / not good enough as you try mash it into the build lineup.

On the other hand, if you made the CC the CORE of your base, and used it to regulate your base activities, distinguish between bases, and start new bases, you could definitely justify a higher cost than a factory and additional 'extras'. So rather than an expansion unit, it becomes the front line 'we are going to build here' unit.

Imagine if the base development cycle goes like this then:

solo engineer -> Mexes -> light power & defense -> CC -> Factories -> Heavy defenses -> large scale production


You could also make a CC deployment pod- something that can be airlifted or orbitally inserted for quicker construction of a CC in remote locations.

This is a legitimate possibility. It may turn out that a CC may be simply too good if it is cheap enough to build conveniently in the field, or if it is cheap enough then it won't have enough capability to justify building it anyway.

Actually the build order progression that I was expecting was more along the lines of: 1-3 engineers --> CC --> Mexes --> engineers move on to next destination, repeat. It's not competing against sole engineers- the engineers build it to leave a presence behind when they move on. A grid of CC's cuts down on the number of roving engineers and randomly interspersed defensive structures you need just to minimally control territory.

I am by no means set on the CC being approximately a factory in cost. If it needs to be significantly cheaper, with even less functionality, and it works, then by all means. However I am quite skeptical of the possibility of it being useful if it costs too much more than a factory. A factory in FA is only about 250 mass- something approximately that much in PA can be easily produced at regular intervals around the map.

Droppable structures are indeed an interesting possibility- and if there are droppable structures, a droppable CC which can then build engineers is indeed an interesting application of that functionality.

This "core" structure you propose Pawz sounds much larger than a cheap outpost base, and with quite a lot more features.

This is a war where units build units that build units in order to build more units, and by then half the world is already conquered. It is a war where solitary ships go out to die, only to be replaced by 20 more. There are no such thing as outposts, frontiers or stations for a Von Neumann army. There is no such thing as a lonely unit in an uncertain wilderness. There are only vanguards for future invasion.

What do you mean by "Nowhere"? Is it away from your Commander? Away from artillery? Away from air units? Away from planet killers? Is it so far out of range that no other enemies are in sight? If that's the case, then you don't need any infrastructure. Attempting to build an overpriced all encompassing thing is a waste if there's no one to appreciate it.

Also, don't build CCs before mexxes. A structure likely on par with factory cost is not as important as getting mexxes up fast, or moving out to grab more.

A flexible and independent, self supporting unit already exists. It's called the engineer! Anything that an engi wants to build, reclaim, or fight against is done with the nanolathe. Anything an engineer can't fight is already substantially dangerous. It is the most omnipotent tool forming the cornerstone of the entire war.

This Command Center is supposed to be a prepackaged land grab, right? If I can't build them at home and drop them in from orbit, then I don't want one. I already have an engineer to fill all my needs.

Yup, it's a larger structure, and it's meant to slot into the 'just before I want to build factories here' stage of land development.

Otherwise, Bobucles is entirely correct - you're going to want to build mexes. What is the strategic advantage of beefing up your defense in an area if you're not going to anything else in the area? It's just metal wasted whereas the same metal invested in more engineers and more mexes will be the better choice.


Alternatively, we could look at the concept of perhaps requiring a 'production centre', which collects the resources in an area for transmission to your main base.. so rather than being able to scatter your mexes across the map and get 100% of their output, you need to improve the infrastructure of an area to get the full benefit..

Any way you look at it though, if we assume a Supcom approach, the CC just won't work. Supcom style means you don't NEED a defensive presence nearby, and a poor defense is worse than none at all, since an attacker at that point will just run straight over those defenses.

If we assume everything is as SupCom/FA then you're right. However the SupCom/FA paradigm of naked engineer expansion becomes quite unwieldy as map sizes get much larger. Even on the larger SupCom maps, having engineers deep afield get picked off means you're going to have to send new ones on a very long trip. And factories don't really provide much map presence- although the armies they create certainly do.

I'm not saying the player would always want to build CC's near every mex. If you don't intend to build more later, then why build a CC there? It is a question of player choice whether they want to play greedy and go for a mex-maximizing expansion strategy, and risk losing a lot to harassment. Alternately, they could go for a more conservative expansion approach which won't take as much territory, but holds onto it more securely. I think having both players playing as greedily as they can get away with while harassing each other is a good source of tension in the early game.

The CC presents itself as one option available to a player who wants to control that territory more securely, at the cost of resources. The spacing between CC's is also a matter of player preference- or even whether to use them at all, or to rely on more specialized structures exclusively. The option to naked expand also still exists, naturally- adding a structure to the game doesn't change that.

The CC's function is to act as a durable engineer source at a distance from other engineer sources, which is better able to defend itself than a factory. If the nearby engineers/mexes/etc. are killed, you don't have to send engineers all the way from where the original ones came from. You can get more engineers out from the nearest CC more rapidly, with much less travel time to get to your frontier. As your territory expands, this ability to always get more engineers from the nearest CC, wherever you need them, becomes increasingly useful.

That's kind of the flaw though. You say it can defend itself.. but against what? A light raiding party isn't going to be interested in attacking it (mexes being a better target), and a heavy assault is going to roll over it.

This is very similar to the discussions we used to have about the armed mex in Uberhack. In the end, the cheaper mex always won out in terms of what the player wanted to build. Too much overlap with other units made it useless.

Oh I don't expect it to effectively defend mexes.

I expect raiding parties to blow up the mexes, and leave the CC alone. And then the CC makes an engineer and that engineer rebuilds the mexes.

A naked engineer would get killed by the raiders also, meaning you have to send another one all the way from wherever your first engineer came from.

If you want to actually stop the mexes from being destroyed, you should build real defenses- whatever would be the PA equivalent of a few LLTs and/or missile towers.

Air cons would, of course, make it completely obsolete.

Well, yes, but then we have global buildpower, enabling a "buildpower singularity" if you will. Positional buildpower would be more interesting, and make buildpower potentially cheaper for cost, which enables faster development.

In my opinion the removal of aircons is one of the smarter design choices about SupCom as opposed to TA. I wouldn't be opposed to PA having aircons, but their design needs to be looked at to make positional buildpower better, and to discourage aircon spam.

I know what would give them a purpose that would make them both important and dangerous. If communication was added to the game as a necessary way to command troops. They are robots after all, and if they accept our orders, they are not autonomous so how do they get those commands? Communication of course! So why not make it part of the game instead of an invisible given.

Make commanders have a set communication radius around them selves, but if you want to attack the enemy base you need to either send your commander there with the troops or build a CC which will play relay for the communications across the planet. In between planets an asteroids, there could be communication satellites. Think of it as a new feature that drives you to build outposts instead of just building one mega base.

The CC could still have the other features but now it would have a unique one which would make it necessary for early planetary development.

-Seth861-

Ugh, the more I see this idea expanded on the less I like it. The CC already comes across as too necessary a building for an expansion, now communication nexus to boot. OK game design question, under what circumstances would I not build a CC if I was expanding? When would I build normal point defences and factories instead of a CC? When would I vary the order in which the CC would get built? When would a CC not be the best option? You're initial design post is all sorts of contradictory on this. You say it shouldn't be an economic hub, than it could be (energy production). It can't be too robust, but than later it could bunker and possibly withstand nukes. It's wouldn't be like the Starcraft command center, but later it would produce engineer units just like the Starcraft CC. It's would be a defensive structure, but it's also a limited production facility (engineers).

I'll admit I only browsed through it the first time I went through it. And you're right I should have read it through, perhaps you should have too. Almost every feature you list for your CC design is in the Starcraft CC, the only thing your CC doesn't do is actually harvest the metal/mass. Otherwise your unit has more functionality than any unit I've ever seen in a RTS game. It will have robustness/weapons/radar(sensors)/bunkering/manufacturing(limited)/energy(limited)/ and maybe build other buildings around it. All this supposedly for the price of a factory. Even Starcraft with it's love of piling lots of abilities into units to keep the unit count small breaks these functions into different units. It sounds like a good idea from military point of view, it's a horrible game idea though.

the problem with multi-role units/buildings is to fit them into the balancing scheme of costs vs utility.
if it is underpowered, it is ignored in favor of a few single functions buildings to create the desired use case.

if it is overpowered people will build it even if they are just looking for a subset of it's functionality

An idea, which came to my mind while reading the thread, is to combine this topic with some of the ideas concerning the topic building queues/preset patterns

What if you could, instead of building a multi-role building, build a small base as a set of a preset pattern of multiple buildings (those which fulfill their normal roles (defense, power,..))

let engineers build "standard bases" at a lower price and/or build time than the sum of it buildings, let's say because standardized building processes are cheaper. The limitation for the player would be that they have to build these as a set, but gain a bit of resource efficiency (at least if the given set matches the desired buildings). It would go along with most of the reasons for standardized military bases (or parts of those) we know.
Nothing stops the player from later on adding additional buildings to fit their personal needs.
If you want, it could be limited to a small core base, but that's more a question of taste and balance.

My main beef is it's just too much functionality in one unit, it will never be balanced properly, each function added increases balancing difficulty exponentially.

Having some base expansion building units though might not be too bad. A bunker that makes engineers as one building. A point defence turret with it's own in built radar another building. A repair turret that has some energy production. Each of these as a dual purpose, higher tech level building wouldn't be bad. Mashing them all into one building though is a balancing nightmare, and boring from a gameplay decision making process.

I will start again from the top because the idea seems to be unclear.

The CC is not an adequate defensive structure in the sense that it effectively safeguards an area of significant size. Neither is it an adequate sensor in the sense that you can build a CC and expect to have a solid intel picture of the entire surrounding area. Nor is it a power generator in that you want to build a large number of them in one place for energy generation purposes. And it isn't a factory because it only makes engineers, not actual troops.

What the CC's does do for the player is create an enduring presence in the location where it is built. Particularly the potential availability of build power in the area, in a package that requires more commitment than a couple scout units to destroy.

It is not a self-sufficient base by itself. It is not a defensive tower, radar tower, and factory all rolled into one. This seems to be a major point of confusion. Each of those structures would have functionality that quite significantly exceeds the CC's. If you want a real base in the area, you would use the CC to construct other facilities and greatly expand the capabilities of that base from just the bare-bones CC.

I fail to see why this kind of structure would even be difficult to balance in the slightest. It's very simple- design the CC for a particular price point which is amenable to expansion, and design its functionality package to fit within that cost.

But the question is WHY? You say it's used to create an enduring presence in the area. What do you mean by this?

Also, if a player is expanding to this area and wants to give it a bit of defense, why not use the engineer (who would have to be sent to construct the CC in the first place) to drop down a light, quick to build turret instead? If you're really serious about keeping the area defended, why not send a couple engineers and build a few turrets and a factory? They would be infinitely more useful in keeping the area secure from a light enemy threat until you sent an army, especially since the factory can build units.

You have not explained how this is so much more compelling a structure to build over the other options I mentioned, and until you do, the CC seems like a waste of space that could be better filled with other structures.

Possible reasons to build a CC:

1) Cost. A CC is cheaper than a set of other infrastructure, but with much reduced functionality. Losing a CC is less of a blow, allowing more frequent and more risky/ambitious placement.

2) Energy production and localized mex defense; early game decentralized economy scaling with territory, without centralized soft target energy generators. Player is not obligated to even have a "main base" unless they want one. A couple mexes and a CC together yields some metal and some energy, which can be used to expand further, and make more mexes and CC's.

3) Safer, faster frontier expansion. Engineers can throw down a CC and quickly provide the player a significant amount of influence in the area. Even if the engineers are destroyed, more can be built from the CC and continue on, and make another CC a distance away. The shorter walk distance greatly accelerates expansion, even in the presence of active harassment destroying engineers and mexes, but such harassment is still highly effective.

4) CC's are excellent to have spaced at regular intervals across territory of arbitrary size. CC's are far more useful to have in many locations that don't justify more infrastructure at the time; they are more durable than a squishy, defenseless nanotower, and more useful to build expecting to leave idle than a factory.

Each CC makes build power available around itself regardless of the locations of engineers, which allows the player to start developing any of them into a significant base quite rapidly, at any time they choose. Consequently, CC's allow for flexible decentralized production anywhere in controlled territory. CC's enable expansion in any direction, and enable rapid industrialization and militarization around any CC.

5) The spaced network of positional buildpower CC's also tends to create many smaller bases of clustered facilities, rather than a single large base. These bases add a great deal of character and texture to the map, which may be different in every game.

Where the early game is about choosing base positions and what facilities to build where, the midgame becomes about interplay between your bases and your opponents' bases. They may build local armies, air forces, fleets, etc. and have reinforcements from other bases. A player might use a CC from behind the front lines to build long-range artillery to bombard an enemy base, and then march an army in to destroy it.

Losing one base is a blow, but not game-deciding. Because a player has the option to decentralize their early game economy and production, they retain the option to keep it decentralized- at least dividing energy and other infrastructure between their CC proto-bases. If a base is destroyed, all its infrastructure is lost of course. But the player can retreat with their army, and immediately start building military and defense materiel at whichever of their bases are the new front line.

Every single goal you mentioned can be achieved with a factory+3 turrets+radar, with the exception of energy generation. (Which you wouldn't want to put in the open anyway, because it just gives the enemy opportunity to deny you power in addition to metal, severely hampering your economy.)

Actually, the factory/turrets/radar combo is even more useful because it can be built progressively. Radar goes up first, because it takes no time and additional situational awareness is always handy even if it gets destroyed soon after. Turrets next, so that at very least incoming enemies can be delayed. Factory last, if you really want to establish a presence in the area.

All the goals are met, but with more flexibility and no need for adding a superfluous structure to the build list.

See point 1. Yes, you can build specialized structures to do all of those tasks. A factory, three turrets, and a radar, and an energy generator would indeed be (very obviously) similar functionality. You can come up with any laundry list of other structures you like which would be "the same" or "better"; the point is the CC offers minimal functionality for minimal cost.

See point 2. You don't want to build solar collectors in the open. You DO want to build CC's in the open, on your frontier.

It's like you're ignoring everything I am saying, in order. Yes, spending a larger lump sum on a set of specialized buildings is more efficient. It's also more expensive in total, less expendable, and less safe. See point 3.

I also think you are confused if you think building them "progressively" is in and of itself an advantage. It only helps because of the greater total cost. Because the entire base is more expensive and time-consuming to build, it is divided into smaller, specialized pieces which are built separately. Then, the order you build these specialized chunks matters. However note that there is a discrete presence/absence of that functionality for whether that facility is built or not. Before you build the radar tower, you have no radar. Before you build the first turret, you have no defenses. A CC mitigates the harshness of the transition from zero to one of each type of facility by providing minimal functionality of each.

Furthermore, this exact choice and sequencing dynamic still exists once the CC is placed, depending on whether you prioritize more defenses, more economy, military production, etc. etc. A CC and a turret is a quite different animal from a CC and a factory, or a CC and a radar tower.

First of all, I don't think RTS players are so mind-numbingly stupid that an addiitonal line item in a build list is a tremendous drain on their mental capacity. PA is not going to be Starcraft with a hard 13 unit limit. Even the base game of TA had over 100 different units and structures, with expansions and mega-mod packs adding hundreds more. Oooh, one structure in the build list. So even if it were "superfluous" the cost involved is miniscule.

Second, I strongly disagree with your assertion that it is superfluous. The CC enables a quite different expansion and economic system in the early game, which translates into greater decentralization of energy and build power in the midgame, and even the late game.