Building units : Single units or squadrons ?

I'd love to see drone carrier type units, but that's about it for squads.

It WOULD be pretty cool to have an APC-style tank for example that could park and out pops a 'squad' of marines that are human sized (2m height).

Well, I grew up playing C&C ans SC1, which only had 1 unit "squads". But with game like Age of Empires/Mythology, you had the option of setting up ranks and formations, while also dividing the units based on ranged/healer/or melee. I LOVED this aspect, and hope to maybe see it in this game. I'm not too much of a fan of the squad type single units, it complicated maneuvering quite a bit, like if a single unit of that squad got stuck behind a tank or something. (Dawn of War) Very annoying. I hope this was helpful!

I did enjoy the way squads were handled in the first dawn of war game. But I don't think it would work as well in the massive scale of PA.

I think just having good unit AI will take care of a lot of the things that a squad structure does well. Like having healer units automatically repair nearby units and not wander off when everyone gets and attack move order.

Single units is what I prefer better I really don't want see this game turn into the horrors of command and conquer 4.

The ability to switch would be a massive problem. If I am a player who sticks to single units while my enemy pumps out groups of units then his units would outnumber mine making him the stronger opponent unless somehow the groups equal the same amount of hit points as a single unit.

Also in my opinion I think that its crazy everyone wants all these new things and well that takes time to develop and I think the game is already awesome enough and am hoping they push it to alpha.

Rather than something like this, I prefer the classic grouping methods. Good 'ol A1A2A3 does it for me thanks.

Now, if you want to talk about tweaking the interface for such things, making sure health bars are usable, making sure units in a group are clearly identifiable in some intuitive way (symbols, colors, etc.) or other little pesky details to help make that easier to read at a glance and appreciate, than I'm all for it.

But if you're talking Dawn of War style where they effectively locked you into 10 units or less (squads) for the entire game, than I'm very much against the idea. It's too restrictive.

We are much more in the mindset of get the game out and iterate than anything else. Stuff like this isn't even on the radar as we have a ton of basic stuff to do before making up new tasks

And their goes my dreams of beta by May lol

to balance bulding a single unit would be faster and cheaper because you only get one and making a squad would be slower and more expensive since the all need guns and ammo

We need to have a moratorium on players using the word "balance" without a bloody license.

Do you really think having players build 100 bots for 1 metal would be imbalanced, or just poor design? Because if both players build their units like this, it seems perfectly balanced to me. It would mean there will be tens, even hundreds of thousands of bots created and killed over the course of a game.

But difficult to balance because a squad would be slower/more expensive and "all the bots require guns"? No, it just changes the meaning of what a unit is, it doesn't make them slower or more expensive, and it is irrelevant if they have guns or ammo or any other property of their profile.

We need to have a Department of Balance Discussion Licensing to prevent people with no idea what they are talking about from talking about game balance.

Balance is old hat.

Even blizzard knows this, as they design their games so that everything is overpowered.

So why bother here? If something is overpowered, the it's time to improve something to counter it so that is also overpowered.

It makes no sense to talk about balance in a game we haven't even seen, and don't have any information about its units, or even its mechanics. It doesn't make sense to say anything is overpowered or underpowered.

It doesn't make sense to talk about mechanics being "balanced" since they apply to every player equally. It doesn't make sense to say that building units in groups will cause them to be more expensive or build more slowly, since the same features apply to both players. It does not make sense, igncom, to say how PA should be balanced, whether by nerfing overpowered features or buffing underpowered ones, because talking about balance is pointless at this stage.

The math part? Yeah. However, that hasn't stopped anyone talking about what sort of trends and design decisions they'd like to see in PA. Those options gotta be ironed out sooner or later.

Talking about the game design certainly makes sense at this stage. For example we might say we want a game that emphasizes positional play and downplays unit composition rock-paper-scissors.

But any discussion about X being too strong, or a certain strategy or choice being overpowered, is fruitless.