Linkage

Congrats on figuring out how previous games worked. Congrats again for forgetting that T2 artillery failed because of shields, which we won't see in PA.

In a game without shields, the longest range weapons are going be disturbingly overpowered. There is no doubt that intercepting defenses are going to be needed in some capacity.

:lol: Shame about it not being in the game however.

Congrats for missing my point . I have no doubt that an equivalent to T2 artillery will be present in PA, and is likely to be very useful - I was merely pointing out why the the adjacency bonus for reload time in Sup Com wasn't. If there's no shields, then there's even less reason to have volatile energy production structures right next to your artillery.

Have you guys played a full match of Supcom in T2?

I don't think that T2 artillery is particuarly powerful even without shields, it's purpose is to attack and destroy incoming enemy forces not bases.

That's why T2 tactical missiles where there, as your anti-base weapon, possesing superior range and firepower to the artillery and could eaisly topple shields, even with a few anti-tac defending them.

A similar thing happended with TA, even the T2 artillery there barly had the range to get across the map, and that's if there wasnt a bit of the terrain in the way, so really the only effective deployment of these T2 artillery was in the field where they would be batle to rain down on enemy bases in the case that Tactical missiles were not present.

In TA radar jammers and the terrain were your choices against artillery turtles, and that's not counting the huge cost for building them and fireing them unlike SupCom.

I do believe igncom1 is correct on this count.

I am so glad this is not in the game. Anything that forces you to build in a certain way should not be added. You shoul be able to design your base freely without artificial disadvantages.

Possibly your right. I now think that dumbing down(Chris Taylors way) could be the most attractive element for the new game.

Don't think that I'm an avid supporter of adjacency bonus, but I think that it does not effect the game to the extent most people imagine it to do so. It does not force you to adopt a certain build strategy. In fact, it does not force you to do anything.

What it does do is give you options. Which are different things altogether. I find it alarming that most people think that if you do not build according to a certain code that you will lose the game. That is certainly not the case. Though there are things that most players soon learn to do automatically, such as storage around mexes and mfabs. I use this example as it is possibly the one thing that you cannot do without.

I agree that the bonuses were negligible. This has a great deal to do with my above point - you cannot determine the outcome of the game purely by adjacency simply because the effects were so small and most people used it to some extent. Also there was a trade off - usually in the form of stacking volatile buildings next to valuable structures or grouping valuable structures together to make nice juicy targets for the enemy (An example of this is storage around mexes).

I suppose if you had two identical players and one uses adjacency and the other does not, the player using adjacency should have a stronger economy and therefore an advantage in that respect. However, he has taken a risk to get that advantage and we must also consider that the option is available to both players to take exactly the same risks if they so desire.

Finally, this was true in TA, but in PA the similarity may well end with the absence of shields. We don't know the cost of firing artillery in PA. We also haven't taken into account units like the unit cannon and potentially we have a whole new orbital layer to deal with, which likely includes it's own artillery.

I think the negative effects of turtling will be exaggerated. Map control that extends into orbital layer could really present a problem to the player who wishes to pin himself into a canyon somewhere on a planet.

And I agree, the ability to build a solid defence should be a product of your economy to feed it.

Just like in TA defences that cost energy and possible even metal to fire will mean that even a turtle will have to secure a proper economy to keep his base up and running.

You can manage without surrounding your mexes with storage but not surrounding your t3 mexes with storage is simply playing suboptimally in FA.
Most adjacency bonuses work like that in FA and SupCom. You have to start with a cost-benefit analysis doing math to conclude if the proposed adjacency setup is worth it.
After that you do a risk-benefit analysis if the setup is too easy to destroy to be viable to make on the frontline, unshielded in your base or shielded in your base.
This kind of complexity adds alot to the learning curve and doesn't add much to the strategic options in the game if at all. The strategic counterplay is truly passive. Either the enemy get an opportunity to take out the targets or he doesn't.

The risks are usually negligible. Unless you are using t3 massfabs and t3 powergens which rarely happen in FA. Adjacency bonus is simply something that increases the learning curve and adds little or nothing to the strategic gameplay in FA.

I'm sorry but you seem to be contradicting yourself here.

If the effects are negligible then how do they increase the learning curve? Surely if the difference they make is that small then it doesn't matter if players use it or not and therefore you cannot attach a learning curve to it. It's just becomes a pointless feature because it has little influence over the game. In all honesty, this is the main reason that - as far as I am concerned - I will be quite happy for adjacency (as is) to be left out of PA. It's a tough thing to balance into a game though. I don't think it would hurt to make the risk:reward ratio a bit more extreme, but it's much easier to forget it all together and move on.

It's because they're negligible in most cases but not some which drives up the learning curve. Do you always use adjacency or don't you? I'd like to emphasize that surrounding t3 mexes with mass storage pretty much had to be done or else you were playing suboptimally. It wasn't a decision that needed to be made, a trade-off, an interesting strategic choice, it had to be done. You could increase the cost of the t3 upgrade and give it storage and have the exact same effect. Mind you, I don't think the design team foresaw that when they made the game.

This is what I'm talking about. The risk:reward needs to be more extreme in most cases (in this case just more balanced would be fine). I think you are correct when you said that the dev team never foresaw this particular issue.

To elaborate; the reward was high, but the perceived risk wasn't there because as a good player, your mass reserves would always be low anyway. So losing the storage rarely meant losing a huge chunk of resource. The idea was that without adjacency the intelligent thing to do would be to keep your resource storage in a safe location (like inside your base). Giving the player the option to increase productivity of their mexes at the expense of spreading their resource storage all over the map sounds like a high-risk high-reward option. But as we all know, it didn't turn out that way.

The thing is that players should need to think about structure placement. It's an important part of the game and the placement of resource structures should be just as important as the placement of a factory or point defence. Adjacency bonuses were an attempt to do this and it did have limited success.

What annoys me is that no one seems to be upset when we talk about the optimum position for point defence or many other structures, so why do people get so angry when people start talking about the optimum position for pgens or storage? I agree that the adjacency bonuses could have been a lot better (and much easier to understand) if it was clear that when a player went to place storage next to a mass extractor that it actually indicated the increase in production on-screen in one form or another. Simply displaying "+10" over the extractor when positioning your storage might be acceptable, but things change when you upgraded and so this is easier said than done when you look at how it's worked out. This is why in my previous post I stated that it is simply easier to forget it and move on rather than try and fix it. I feel bad about it because I personally think it's a neat idea.

After all the time that has past since it's inception you would think the developers have had enough "tweaking" time to better implement it. The fact is that it still doesn't work how it's meant to..

Maybe it would be a good idea to think of new ideas instead of drawing of of the gameplay mechanics of SupCom and TA.

Linkage for example, shouldn't have to accomplished by immediate adjacency. The devs could implement something like infrastructure nodes, which would connect to economy building and factories in a medium to small area and "improve the resource flow" allowing factories to draw more mass/energy and making them build faster. (where the amount of mass extractors in the node area gets divided by the amount of active factories in the area resulting in the bonus). Doing it like that would make the nodes a strategic target, even more so if their cost is high and/or if you could connect multiple nodes to draw from the extractors farther away from your base.

you could also allow mass/metal extractors to each setup one link to a factory or storage, allowing exceptionally good micro managers to change the bonus linkage effect from extra income to increased production rates. the link could be something like a dedicated mexx drone ferrying a bucket full of green liquid to and from the building you specified the link to be with.

I would encourage everyone here to think outside the bounds of whats been done, and focus on what's possible.

I know that the scale test renders are just that, but there are non-adjacent buildings that are clearly connected in some manner.

i think this is a good idea, putting lots of engineers to assist a factory is kind of silly to my opinion. well it should be possible, but increasing the building speed by improving the efficiency of resource transfer from mexes/pgen to factories makes more sense

i am strongly against any idea that rewards micromanaging, i personally want to play a game about robots blowing up each other, not a game about who is the nerdiest man alive or who clicks the fastest, no thanks.

Adjacent bonuses are stupid anyway, making little sense.

If we need need to support factories with builders, why aren't the robots building optimal factories in the first place? This relates heavily to the unit upgrades conversation.

And shields just slowed game play down, and were turtle-enabling.

If someone was building arty near enough to your base, or has an arty force which you aren't engaging, you're doing war wrong.

May I ask how you make the buildings and units look all funky like that???

Edit: Its cartographic view. It's been so long since I used that I had forgotten how it looked!

Yea its indeed cartographic view, i tend to switch to it for the performance boost when im in big games (or just long games).