For Backers Only: Megabot Experiment

Perhaps it wouldn't be able to leave the planet. In that case, building the megabot becomes a strategic decision. One could win the battle on that world more easily, but lose grip over the galaxy if the opponent manages its resources more efficiently.

To bet on a megabot is a big risk in terms of time and resources. You'd better make sure it survives or face instant defeat. That's the thrill.

In Magic The Gathering there's an archetype called "Stompy". It contains big creatures such as:



Expensive? Vulnerable? You bet. It takes only a cheap, simple removal card to get rid of it. Despite that, in many formats Stompy is a top tier deck.

For many young and beginning players Stompy is the first deck they'll play, often without even aware of the fact. Those big creatures are what attract them to the game.

A second reason for Stompy's relevancy is its place in the metagame. If Goblins, White Weenie or Tokens (many small creatures) rise in popularity, others will respond with board sweepers. When people fill their decks with board sweepers, it's time to pull out Stompy's more robust big creatures. The PA analogy is clear: use megabots to counter area damage.

It is a cool looking design, all the weapons just scream danager.
However I must join the others and express concern for how it will be balanced. I’d love to see the ideas in it separated out tho, e.g. Jackhammer and bomb bouncers from Supreme commander 2, they had huge power when used right but were weak in other situations like when they were unsupported.

Do like the idea of commander powersuit tho

edit: Just to say I also love the look of the other units, Good work guys!

Personally, I'd prefer to see slightly bigger T2 units. The megabot just looks out of place, IMO.

But in PA you won't chose a deck. The metagame in RTS isn't about deploying counters to the enemy deck. That would be reminiscent of the metagame in Starcraft where players chose different buildorders to exploit the current metagame. In TA and SupCom it is mostly about deploying counters in real time.

The Stompies that draw in players to PA does not need to be big land units. It can be asteroids, unit cannons or death stars for example.

First of all: Thanks to the Uber team for doing things like this to seek feedback from the Backers! Really makes it more fun to have gotten involved early on.

As for the scale: I would say this is a good maximum size. Nice scale for a super unit. Could be a bit smaller and I'd still be happy with it.

Thanks again, and keep up the awesome work!

So what you are saying is don't show stuff to you until it's done and all questions can be answered, right? You can't have it both ways. Either we show you stuff that's work in progress where we don't have all of the answers, or we hold off until we have those answers. Units like this are currently not part of the design of the game.

Off the top of my head I would expect a few things:
1) Balance will be tricky. It will probably need to only be super powerful in certain strategic situations that possibly are map dependent. I don't want the game to degenerate into just these so I would be including it more for the cool factor.

2) I wouldn't expect to move these between planets. This could help balance the strategic aspect.

3) Design wise I would expect the usual stuff. Stomping units, very tough armor, lots of different weapons to take on land/air/sea. There is an particular special ability conceived off for this guy at this time.

Pictured is a rough block of wood I just whipped up and a pile of pennies for scale purposes.


Don't worry about the purpose of this block of wood, I'll think of that later; what I need to know is what do you think about the scale this block of wood?

Is it too big?

Too Small?

Just right?

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This is what you are asking of us Garat & Neutrino. Without Function or Purpose scale is meaningless.

If all you wanted was one of these three answers you could have used a poll

Choose one:

• I like big robots, make it bigger!
• I don't mind, it's just fine!
• I like small robots, make it smaller!

You've told me not to discuss anything bar "scale" in this discussion thread.

The scale is currently inconsequential. Without knowing what this robot is for, or what it does I don't know what the point of its size is or why its size matters.

Unless of course the robots are compensating for something... in which case it should obviously be much much bigger

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I Really REALLY want to stress that I in no way want to discourage you from showing rough or raw stuff. It's interesting to see things in their most basic and early form and seeing that evolve over time.

But you must realise that we're going to discuss things and ask things that you may not know yet.

Without a frame of reference for what unit size means in PA, then every persons comment here will be personal opinion on how big the block of wood should be in comparison to this pile of pennies..

Name one.

Aaaaand this is why I am not sold on Megabot. I, for one, am infinitely more interested in the interplanetary aspect of PA; i.e., setting up moonbase, shooting my robots in the middle of the other guy's planetside base, or dropping the meteor.

Also looking forward to massive slugfests with insane-but-nigh-instantly-replenished casualties.

Scale-wise it looks good. Even if the huge units aren't much more powerful due to balancing, being able to zoom out until most of your army is just blips, but still see some details on a few mega-units (like the Great Wall of China being visible from orbit) is a cool visual effect

I agree with the people that mentioned you need a bit of variety for mega-units; most people would expect a close quarters combat unit, but I also like the idea of being able to build / use a giant mobile artillery piece, or perhaps an enormous heavily armoured repair bot, with no direct damage but an array of magic repair lasers keeping your smaller units alive on the front line. Since it looks like this is the size placeholder for tier 2, I'm definitely liking the direction so far :mrgreen:

Could have done without the snark, but other than that I'm thinking more or less the same thing.

DON'T YOU DARE SAY SUCH THINGS. For every critic like him, there are ten people like me who are glad you're so involved with the community, even if they don't all say it. Just remember the old adage: If you want people to say nice things about you, either die or go away. Many people will criticize anything and everything. Do this for the ones who love it, like me.

I agree completely on the balance issue. Keep in mind, however, the FA example: Engineer could build giant experimentals more than 10 times as fast than equivalent resources in smaller units. PA won't have this problem. Thus, unless an experimental is wildly more effective than the same cost in smaller units (at least 50% more), it'll be difficult to make it overpowered. That said, I would like you to make it strategically interesting. A few ideas:
-Make it able to fly between planets by itself
-Make it able to shoot near and far targets, but only one at a time (must deploy to switch)
-Make it able to shoot air and land targets, but only one at a time (must deploy to switch)
-Make it extremely damaging, but only able to shoot directly in front of itself, and with a really slow turning ability.
-Make it a long-range only unit that is defenseless (or nearly so) at short range
-etc etc

Or, that could be the only thing that makes this better than equal metal in tanks.

I don't care what you do to this giant robot as long as its never been done before.

Let me ask you this Neutrino or Garat;

Does "Size" matter in PA?
Unit-Pathing, Accuracy, LoS (shooting over obstacles), etc.

What do you want me to say?

What does "Big" mean in PA?

Without knowing anything about how the game plays or is simulated this is just a popularity contest of BIG vs small .

If what you wanted were binary answers, give me a binary poll.

For the record, it's too big.
I vote - small robots!

Dont worry I haven't thought about the purpose of the Snark yet, Snark is there for scale only.

Size always matters.

Ok, humor aside, we're dealing with multi-planet battlefields, and a huge unit like that, even if powerful, is going to present some pretty interesting deployment issues for any army using them.

The actual design of this unit was Steve being told "Robot with as many guns as possible, but present the scale so people can see how it looks compared to current units".

The idea is to continue on much of the same conversation as was in the Super Units thread, but with a least some visualizations to help the talk along.

We're not looking for specific feedback, but we're also flashing the entire Backers forum with an open kimono approach to some very early thinking. Maybe I should have linked to the super units thread in the first post and led with "where do you guys think we should go from here: aesthetics, gameplay, balance, etc", including "Just don't go there" as valid feedback.

We're basically asking: Where does the community think we should go from here? Take the red pill and see how far this rabbit hole goes, or take the blue pill and just not even discuss for now. If red pill, what are your design concerns with super units, and how you would want to approach their addition to the game. No need to get into "Does the team have time for it", because we'll only add features if we know we can do them. Whether we do this in the next 4 months, or 10 months from now is largely irrelevant.

Actually, I see this as an attempt to figure out, based on community feedback, how big should big be? Which this is good I think(the relative scale and the asking for feedback).

The current design parameters are "Big, cool and not game breaking". sounds good to me.

It's all arbitrary at this point, if you want hard facts, leave and come back at alpha time.

Trust me, I know about the super units thread.

Then why was I chastised for doing just that?

If no thought has go into the design how can I bring any of my own thoughts to the table?

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How much of the mechanics of Super-Size-Me robots are you willing to disclose. If you can tell me what mechanical impact this unit has on the game, and the game upon it, I can tell you a great deal about it. I can form opinions based upon the facts you give me. With no facts about how scale can affect the game beyond "he probably wont move between planets" and "will be more powerful-er than the little robots" then I can only say what I think about the art design because that's all that's been presented. :lol:

In the original post you didn't exactly ask a straight question, so you have a bunch of very squiggly answers.

This is a really good point, actually. Mind, you shouldn't LEAVE, but if the uncertainty bothers you, you may want to just lurk in threads like this, because it'll be Alpha before we can really have concrete discussions with facts on the table.

But this kind of thread is how we actually have to design games.. talking through the implications of an idea before we have any idea of if it'll be fun, how it might be fun, and why we should, or shouldn't, do it.

I apologize for not framing the initial conversation a little better, but I was, at the time, having a hard time figuring out how to couch the conversation until I had read your questions, concerns and assumptions.

No problem, you've rectified that now, Thanks!

Give me a minute to write a 10 page essay on Scale and possible mechanics therein.
I'll be back.

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I dislike youre tone.

I'm mostly in the "don't go there" camp. Secondarily, I'd like to see balance be a focus. Basically, I don't want to see Megabot as a game-ender. That's my major beef with the topic: I do not really wish to see single-unit game-enders.