One-Unit Army Mega-Bots... FOO-y

With the swift release of the Mega-Bot concept to the backers forum after a fairly heated discussion that started in the Super Units thread, I have started to become concerned with the potential direction that Planetary Annihilation could be taking. That is not to say that Uber is going to implement these Mega-Bots, nor that it will be completed before the base game is released to the public at large, nor even that I am necessarily against Mega-Bots. However the shift between what I see as Total Annihilation vs Supreme Commander inspired gameplay and the huge potential change in the fundamental focus of the game has forced me to put fingertips to keyboard in an effort to express my thoughts and feelings.

I was asked the, rather broad question; "What do you guys think about this?"

I am going to try to jot down everything that currently jostles inside my brain regarding Mega-Bots and their potential… and also pitfalls with regards to design changes that may need to be implemented for Mega-Bots to function in Planetary Annihilation.

This first post is:

One-Unit Army Mega-Bots... FOO-y

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Mega-Bots may have many potential uses within the Planetary Annihilation game. For me there are a few standard roles that a Mega-Bot might fulfil in a typical game of Planetary Annihilation. These are;
The One-Unit army,
The Force Multiplier,
The Grand Support,
And,
The Ultimate Specialist.

This Post will concern itself with the first role, the One-Unit Army, and a little-known Acronym known as 'FOO'.

The One-Unit Army.
Somewhat of a misnomer, the One-Unit army rarely consists of but one solitary unit, but rather a small gathering of the same unit. This Mega-Bot in isolation, will beat any other unit 1v1. It’s vastly more powerful than any single unit of a lesser status (and usually larger to indicate this), hence it is a Mega-Bot. The fundamental elements of a One-Unit Army Mega-Bot are as follows;

• Has enough fire-power to win a 1v1 fight with any other unit, other than itself or other Mega-Bots, by a very comfortable margin; that is to say it blows up little things VERY quickly and efficiently.
• Has fire-power that is flexible enough to take on multiple types of enemies; The Mega-Bot is usually just as capable of destroying buildings or medium sized tanks, slow planes, all the way up to heavy tanks and sometimes even other Mega-Bots, though this last one is usually costly to the Mega-Bot due to the next point.
• Has enough HP or ablative armour, or shields or what-have-you, to sustain major amounts of damage before dying.
• Does not scale linearly in power when massed.

This final point may need a little more in depth analysis and explanation. What do I mean when I say that the Mega-Bot doesn't scale linearly in massed numbers? Well when you add 1+1 you get 2. 1+2=3, 1+3=4 right?

Wrong, at least when it comes to the One-Unit Army Mega-Bot. If the power combined of these Mega-Bots were as though they were one new single unit with 4 times the health and 4 times the fire-power then four Mega-Bots are only four times as powerful as one. But that's not true. Each Mega-Bot can fire at different targets. A healthy Mega-Bot can protect a weakened one by stepping forward. A weakened Mega-Bot stays fully functional until death and can be used to attack weaker targets of opportunity while the rest continue forwards. As you increase the number of Mega-Bots their power is spread across a larger area. There is built-in redundancy between the Mega-Bots. If there is a sudden, precise strike against your Mega-Bots, because they are separate entities, not all of them die. Over kill against One Mega-Bot, like a nuke, is wasting energy since it did not do all of its damage to one unit, but rather spreads it out amongst many. Since One-Unit Mega-Bots are so survivable and can go toe-to-toe with most units while taking next to no damage the more Mega-Bots you add to the mass, the more multiplicative, rather than additive, their force becomes. This is why a Defensive line can easily be capable of fending off a single or pair of Mega-Bots, like a Monkeylord, or Galactic Colossus , but shatters without a single kill against them, when 3 of the same unit occurs. The First Mega-Bot to be focused is pulled back, effectively wasting the time and energy of your defensive line as the other two barrel forward to exploit that wasted time.

Strength in numbers indeed...

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So what is the One-Unit Army Mega-Bot for?

The One-Unit Army Mega-Bot is a First Order Optimal Strategy, (or 'FOO' Strategy, coined by the good folks at Extra Credits) the Unit with the least effort to power ratio in a game. Basically, the strategy that will get you the most results, for the least amount of skill.

FOO Strategies are notoriously difficult to balance. Not effective enough leaves newer or low skill players unable to compete with anyone even slightly above their skill level. Too effective and the player never HAS to increase in skill until they hit a brick wall of difficulty. This frustrates players and causes a mass exodus from your game when that strategy no longer works. Compounded upon that fact is that if you ever change the FOO Strategy by nerfing it, you immediately have a lot of low-skill players without an effective strategy to migrate to, since they never learnt anything else.

On the opposite side of the Strategy Coin to FOO Strategy, there is another strategy. I am calling that the "LOOS" or "Last Option Optimal Strategy". I believe that Supreme Commander suffered from this problem, and though Mega-Bots will never be a LOOS in Planetary Annihilation it is worth mentioning here.

A LOOS is a strategy that takes the least amount of effort to end the game one way or the other. Employed when all other strategies will undoubtedly fail unless the player has beyond human skill, a LOOS is a method of breaking a stalemate with absolutely no counter. In Planetary Annihilation the FOOS will almost certainly be an co-ordinated Asteroid Strike across multiple planets at the same time, or the reactivation of several Death-Star-Like Battle Stations. Because of the nature of Planetary Annihilation a LOOS strategy will almost certainly win the game for the first person who attempts, and succeeds in pulling it off… or cripple him if he fails. If your Multi-Asteroid Bombardment is shot down or you Battle Station Planet is destroyed you have lost a significant edge, not to mention resources in your arsenal and are now open to a counter-attack, which you will probably lose.

In Supreme Commander however it was One-Unit Army Mega-Bots that were the stalemate ender, the LOOS. Experimental Spam was not only a winning strategy for low skill players, but also a high skilled players last ditch effort to crush an unbreakable defensive line. Whoever had at least a handful of Experimentals left standing at the end of that fight, would surely crush the enemy forces in counter attack.

This made Experimentals in SupCom, Mega-Bots, an excessive focus of the game. They were a FOO Stratagy, AND a LOO Strategy.

One-Unit Army Mega-Bots, the FOO Strategy, is very rarely appealing to average to high-skilled players. There are (or there should be) strategies that beat the FOO strategy if the player puts in enough skill (though never enough to discount it entirely).

Balancing these Mega-Bots, this FOO strategy, is very important and never let anyone tell you otherwise.
If the FOO Strategy is too low in power to skill ratio, you will lose your new and low skilled player base quickly due to an almost instant wall of difficulty provided by the entrenched higher-skill players.
If the FOO Strategy is too strong then you will lose the new and low skilled player base more slowly because only the highest skilled player base will be able to defeat it, or the game will present next to no challenge for the majority of your players.

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tldr; Mega-Bots are a potential FOO strategy in Planetary Annihilation. If Uber wishes to implement them they must take a serious amount of time and effort into balancing them. If Mega-Bots become a FOO Strategy, as I believe they will, they may have a greater impact on the game than people might realise.

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I will continue my thoughts soon. Keep a lookout for my next post.

In the mean time, Can we have a discussion below on the potential praise and pitfalls of Mega-Bots as First Order Optimal Strategies, (FOO strategy for short)?

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

You seem to be taking this one man crusade a bit far nano.

And I feel it's post's like these that will cause more damage then the potential imbalance of a unit that hasn't even be conceptualized yet.

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The problem with this post is that it assumed that experminetals in SupCom were do all, end all units.

But like most FOO strategy's once you dig a little deeper you will find them very lacking and quite underwhelming when say compared to building and equal time and cost of T2 or T3 units.

One unit army's were only ever present in experimentals if the other player absolutely refused to change strategy's, and even then with enough persistence it was still and easy enough feat to bring them down.

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

I agree with igncom1, it's like you are seeing a storm in a glass of water.

igncom1? BROHOOF

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

Tier 2 and Tier 3 units as an "upgrade" in power over lower tiered units do not currently exist in Planetary Annihilation last time I checked.

T1 are "standard" units.
T2 are "specialised" units.

One tier is not stronger than the other.

So we are left with 3 options, either several Mega-Bots are beaten by a swarm of standard units (cost for cost), several Mega-Bots are beaten by a few specialised units... which implies there is a Mega-Bot "hard-counter" in specialised units (cost for cost), or finally, it takes a combined force to take out Mega-Bots (cost for cost)...

Or you can drop a meteor on them :twisted:

The thought of "hard-counter" specialised unit that is specifically for taking out Mega-Bots is an interesting one. That in itself is a worthy topic to discuss regarding Mega-Units is it not?

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

Mega bots might be cool. There are multiple issues to work out, but there's at least a dozen different angles, an alpha, and a beta to get everything sorted out. Signature related.

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

/]

Indeed!

TA had it's paralysing spider all terrain tanks, and I feel like SupCom:FA had it's armoured assault bots to harpoon them to death.

SO it depend on what way you think we should take them on.

Personally the ability to Dakka it to death with EMG (The weapons peewees, flash tanks and brawler gunships used) weapons and the rapid-fire artillery are choices I feel we should emulate without causing other problems.

Starcraft 2 could be an examples, it's Marauder infantry can be upgraded with a slowing shot for it's rpg cannon thing, and would could do something similar in a unit that causes effects on units hit.

SupCom T1 artillery like the cybran one could emp enemy units hit, and emulating this is a choice that I think fits well for a whale hunter army.

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

As one of the low skill players you mention in the OP, I can only agree with your reasoning, while being annoyed that you are criticising my favourite crutch :evil:

Having said that, while megabots are the current OUA FOO du jour it's not like other units are not (or have not been) used in the same way. When I started playing TA, it was Brawlers. Once my circle of friends started liberally spamming Flakkers to ruin my day, I switched to radar creep with Berthas. Progression from there was remembering to spam anti-nukes everywhere (people always seem to overlook nukes as an OUA style FOO strategy, probably because nukes always end up with specific counter nukes, and everyone who isn't a total n00b builds plenty of counter nukes), and once Core Contingency came out you could continue the artillery+radar theme with the rapid-fire version, or (as I usually did on metal maps) go for Krogoth spam.

I briefly toyed with heavy tank spam (Bulldog?) but that never seemed to be as effective as artillery or going the Krogoth route.

To move to a discussion over OUA FOO possibilities for PA, even without any T2 units, there has been discussion of orbital bombardment platforms, and the highly awesome smashing of asteroids/moons wholesale into planets. Unless the megabots get big enough to outperform asteroids, I would assert that they will lose out to other units as FOO strategies, ending up as OUA ground war candidates certainly, but not performing at a level where people will see it as an overarching game ending strategy. We are not talking about single map encounters any more, and that toys with balance far more than simple units stats would predict, especially if players are starting on separate planets.

I would suggest that the biggest OUA FOO candidate would be an aerial unit that had planet hopping capability in-built, whether it's a mega-unit or not. If it doesn't require separate transport to move between theatres, that's the one that low skill people like me will focus on initially (shades of the Brawler all over again ) due to the simplicity of reusability, and the ability to pool production from multiple bases. If all planetary units require space transport, and mega-bots cannot be transported due to a balance restriction (hello Krogoth!), they become a localised weapon and no longer a valid candidate for low skill OUA builds, unless you are n00b enough to forget that you have more than one planet to take over.

tl;dr - You don't build Krogoths to fight someone on a different island, and PA can has moar planets. Non-transportable makes them a liability once you work out you don't need them there any more, which means low skillers like me are forced to look to other units to fill their shallow needs

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

I dont like the Idea of "hard counters". But there should be defenetly a way to deal with them. If the Bots are like you describted i would say massing T1 Units will beat them cost effectiv, the Mega bots wont be able to targed all of them and do overkill.

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

Why do you dislike Hard-counters gruenerapfel?

Can't be sure that 100% of all Mega-Bots will be planet bound. Not yet anyway. It's only a proposed balancing mechanic, rather than set in stone :?

Also, as a random thought that popped into my head; Population Cap hasn't been finalised in any way... if it's large enough you can leave your Krogoth behind and use him as a VERY effective guard dog, especially when combined with base defences/MCU (Mobile Construction Unit) support

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

Long story short, hard counters are lame. Most things should be able to deal damage in a large number of ways, even if it works better in some places than others. Save absolute trounce counters for a last resort.

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

I think this solves everything (can no longer spam them, since it comes with extreme penalty for loss there is automatically a reason to give it more power and counterplay in that it's something an enemy will want to dump everything into killing, also stops the commander from being a glorified engineer you place behind as much AA, PD, and anti missile as you can muster). Care to address it?

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

Agree. "Soft" counters are OK(I dont like the Idea of direct counter Units tho, more counter strategies); Hard couters creates coinflip situations; sometimes just luck decides who wins(Rock, Paper, Scissor). Furtheremore, i feel like its kinda casual and "dumped" down. Its kinda "simple"

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

I would never suggest such a thing.

But what about the idea of a kind of T2 tank destroyer, designed to kill the stronger T2 units and when sufficiently massed, the best choice for combating the super units?

With T2 armour, and guns designed for combating heavy armour units they could be the saving grace for a player who has to fight on the behemoths.

Good idea? Bad? Comment?

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

While it is definitely bad to design relationships between units that counter each other, it is definitely a reasonable thing to have units that aim to work against other specific unit-types.
Like AA vs Air. So I think some counters are necessary. Ofc it is best if you have only a few general counters and many others that only work under certain situations.

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

High power burst damage is super effective against big HP units. That would mean bombers, snipers(the Annihilator is valid), nukes, tac missiles(SMD works too), the uber gun, orbital death rays, and asteroids. The excessive damage would end up ineffective against small, swarmy units.

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

True, but it certainly feels to me like a valid balancing mechanic if you make a megabot be mega huge, and therefore mega difficult to transport

Also with the posited orbital bombardment unit, a Kroggie style short range megabot would still be out of their depth if they can't attack orbital units back, and you'd need to liberally spread them out over the whole land surface if you want to avoid situations where someone hotdrops some builders in to put up some artillery at edge of range on a planet you thought you owned. They're still a valid base defense unit, but no longer an OUA base defense strategy, you still need your own long range / AA etc. to complement. As you mentioned in a previous post, they also prove less than useful against asteroid tennis :mrgreen:

At that point the balance comes in the decisions made on dps, health, cost, etc. as to whether the mass is best spent on a megabot, or on an equivalent tank / bot army. Make them less versatile (e.g. remove AA so they are ground assault only, or vice versa) and they become even less attractive versus a balanced land army; at that point it's pop cap that would determine whether you want a few big defenders, vs lots of capable small ones.

As a visual (visceral?) concept, I love the idea of humungous units. As a tactician, I completely understand the need to ensure they don't overshadow the rest of the units, but I don't feel that it is either insurmountable, or even that different to ensuring all units have a good balance between usability, cost and tactical value. Since the focus in PA is currently on a single faction, with no real power tiering (the focus appearing to be on ability tiering instead), huge bots would feel more natural if they were huge due to complexity, rather than huge due to carrying an entire platoon's worth of guns. The massive, expensive megabot could be a mobile factory, or a mobile intel gathering station, rather than the ultimate assault unit, which would come under one of your other categories (Grand Support, or Ultimate Specialist) instead of being an OUA unit.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that someone is going to mod a Krogoth or Monkeylord equivalent OUA megabot into the game, it's purely a matter of time. I'm equally as sure that most players who enjoy the genre, and especially most players willing to early back an ambitious project like this, know broken when they see it. I don't see a need for OUA units, whereas the argument for having Grand Support or Ultimate Specialists is far more appealing, to me at least.

The Shooter, from memory, also had a hidden multiplier against Krogoths. Either that or there was a custom unit based on the Shooter that did. Damn, it's been a long time since I played any TA...

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

Did it? The sniper bot hit like a freight train. It was pretty nasty.

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

Did only shoot once every half an hour though :lol:

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

Megabot as a structure. Everyone wins.

A massive late game stat booster that can be seen from ANYWHERE on the battlefield but once built, cannot be destroyed without destroying the planet. That is of course if planetary annihilation is a late game, expensive thing to do.
Otherwise, make it NOT visible but destroyable only when the planet is destroyed.

The unit boosts stats of everything that you own to the point of making you stronger or equal to your opponent(depending on your situation) and unless your opponent doesn't destroy the megabot within xx time he will eventually be too weak to do anything(provided you play properly)

Re: Mega-Bots... FOO-y

That... doesn't sound very "awesome"...

Sounds brokenly powerful actually.