There Be Dragons: Slaying the Deathball

Other than samsons are there any real units that are conducive to deathballing? Even in sup com the only times deathballing happened was because air units could stack.

While it was said in the OP that RPS type units are bad because it just forces players to use them all, and in many cases this is true, but I would say that in a game like TA or hell even a game like Awesomenauts the best kind of counter unit system is units that not only counter each other in stats, but in how they fundamentally function.

ANd I feel games like, once again, zero-k might be on to something.

Raiders countering skirmishers is more then unit A beats unit B because in many cases skirmishers can indeed beat raiders is played well, but in most cases raiders will close ground on the skirmishers and dps them to death, even with short range and less burst damage the speed and often numbers of raiders beat skirmishers.

And I feel like this combo of stats countering and game-play or skill countering is the best way of dealing with a death ball.

Now while this kind of RTS does lead players to ball up all of their units, consider this.

If players in TA had no access to AA units and no access to point defences, that shift would lead players to use fighters to defend against bombers, and tanks to destroy bases, but tanks can't death-ball with fighters because they work differently.

Planes are highly mobile, but have low HP, with fighters doing enough damage to down other planes but little hp to sustain static AA fire and can't deal with tanks due to their low damage output, Bombers then are the players best choice from defending against tanks but can't deal with enemy static AA and fighters, using this mobile combo of fighters and bombers to defend themselves from attack, and to defend their own forces from enemy bombers.

But tanks do what tanks do best, and tank damage form fighters and even bombers, and are the players best choice for attacking an opponents static AA, but they are themselves vulnerable to being bombed, they are also very slow in comparison and struggle with terrain, but hold positions very very well.

Now a player could mass all four components, fighter, bomber, static AA and tank, But each unit woks very differently to the next, not just in stats but in play-style, you cant mass all of these units and just attack move to victory, because you would them have all of your units de-constructed, fighters and bombers by other fighters and static AA, then tanks by bombers and finally static AA by tanks.

And it's that I feel is the best solution.

Bam. EZPZ.

Round planets make it very difficult for LoS units to attack in a thick battle. LoS based AA will spend most of its time doing nothing against ground.

Peewee is an essential unit in TA. It have speed, mobility and firepower. Why can't you mass an army of Peewees and march through everything with a deathball?
Because Peewees have low HP and low range and against concentrated forces of enemies many Peewees will die before they can reach the enemy.
The staple unit in TA was the Flash which very similar to Peewees besides that it were more costly, was a bit faster and had a lot more hitpoints.
It is still a "squishy" unit according to you where 2 Flashes would kill eachother in about 10 seconds.

Glaives kill each other in 2 seconds. In TA and Zero-K heavier units have much more health but usually not much more DPS. This means that lighter units kill off each other fast but in large numbers the battle can last longer because all the light low range units can't be in range of eachother as the battle start.
Heavier units takes much longer to be destroyed just because their HP is so much higher relative to their DPS.

In Zero-K raiders kill off each other in just a few seconds. The raiding game is still much more tactical and micro intensive compared to FA but that is because of a bunch of reasons besides HP to DPS ratio.

Thank you Raevn. I have no problem with an explanations as to why Balanced Annihilation may be good, but I doubt even balanced annihilation would be considered a more high DPS low health game than Star Craft. The lower range on the Peewees definitely helps make them more like zerglings and less like marines.

Marines in mass = death ball to zerglings

Tanks in mass = death ball to marines but not so good versus zerlgings (even in brood wars if you knew how to throw lings effectively...)

Zues = death ball to peewees but less so because fights last longer and zues range was short

Bulldogs = death ball to Zues but less so because fights last longer and the splash isn't a big deal to a Zeese

In generally, it sounds like maybe I should play some games of Balanced Annihilation if there are a lot of people that want to use it as a provider of some fundamentals. I see reading the history of the game that it is based off of Absolute Annihilation a child of Uber Hack. BA really should do a better job of completely describing the development history because we spent a lot of time working on UH. Anyway, I love Uber Hack. I want to see Uber Hack style tanks that lob projectiles at enemy forces. This may even increase the value of small squads of units because they can far more easily dodge enemy projectiles when larger groups would be too large to dodge.

I don't think we can avoid too big to fail eventually, but we can make it expensive and put it off. In the end, whether it's a single asteroid, a number of nukes, a balanced army of bulldogs-AA-Zeese-MML-etc or a few Krogoths there needs to be good methods to win and without playing supremacy there will always be an incentive to cluster an attack on the enemy commander.

As far as I know, the economy in PA will be scattered all over the map in the way it is in SupCom.
Which means having all your units in one place leaves a big part of your economy vulnerable, giving Deathballs a pretty big disadvantage the enemy can exploit.

In other words, in PA they aren't even a problem to begin with, because they have a severe disadvantage.

I'd say that saying they "aren't a problem at all" is going to far, part of teh premise is that once you have a deathball, you can defeat smaller forces in detail and then move on to the infastructure and base in time, so even if a player makes a deathball and you start going after his Eco, it's still entirely feasible for him to just roll up to your base and lay waste to it, likely much quicker than you can cut off a significant portion of his Eco, and recapping Eco isn't that hard so long as you have some remaining.

Spread out resources helps, but it's not the silver bullet all on it's own.

Mike

The deathball becomes less of an issue when the map holds greater importance and the ability to deal with massed units is effective.

In Company of Heroes the map is divided into sectors for ammunition (for abilities and individual unit upgrades) and Fuel (necessary for purchasing higher tier units and army upgrades) which was combined with a supply lines system, where each resource point had to be connected to your base in order to receive it income amount. Each base had between 1-2 strat points which connected the base to the network of the other points.

Due to this supply lines system it became easy for people to raid the opponents economy by decapping the strat points outside the base, thus cutting them off from the vast majority of resources on the map. These points had to be defended, however the High Fuel and High Ammo resources points also had to be defended, which were spread out on the map. Combined with the Victory points which prevented the ticket drain system from defeating you needing to be captured and protected and player's army is spread out across the map.

Since the game had extensive focus on infantry, to prevent infantry blobs from becoming prevelent Suppression was added in. Suppression came from MGs which were designed with a scaling accuracy system. A single squad could be in cover and hold an MGs attention while it was being flanked for quite awhile without any serious threat to death. However the more infantry in the cone of an MGs fire, the more accuracy the MG got. It could kill off entire squads in seconds if an infantry deathball came in front of it.

Armored vehicles were sufficiently expensive that turning them into a deathball was difficult, and the base vehicle counters, the AT guns, were cheap and easy to produce. Thus insuring that vehicles could not become too much a problem, just because the vast majority of them are immune to all non-at infantry weapons. Vehicles required infantry to work at the best efficiency.

Company Commander abilities were also thrown in which gave the player some on command AoE abilities that could deal with a player attempting to deathball by destroying or forcing off a large amount of units at once. This encouraged people not to blob up into a deathball unless they wanted to see a lot of units get removed from the battle.


The only 2 times that a deathball has been successful was with Flamethrower Pioneers and Rangers, the Pioneers were nerfed by making it so they became more vulnerable to damage the more of them were in the area to anything. The Rangers were nerfed by moving the armor type buff they got up to higher veterancy levels which required them to be babysat for a long period of time. This ended their respective Deathballs, as the Pioneers were forced to be spread out a lot more to prevent you losing a large number of squads in seconds, and the rangers vulnerability was returned making it easier to kill them. Vetted Rangers were a lot harder to replace, so there were always few of them.

Company of Heroes has reasonable methods of discouraging deathballs but I wouldn't want them to be in PA. In CoH there are a lot of random numbers in the background which explicitly implement these mechanics. The physics of the game is often used just to visualise the random numbers.

TA style games have simple unit characteristics which interact via some sort of physics. Many mechanics cannot be implemented with simple unit characteristics but I think that is a fair price to pay for the simplicity of the resulting system. I don't think the TA way is always best but it is probably what most people expect from PA.

It is useful to look at all types of RTS for mechanics but I don't think (or at least hope there aren't) high level explicit mechanics. I'm calling a mechanic explicit if it is directly implemented without reference to subsystems. For example I would call units taking more damage because they are close to other units an explicitly implemented mechanic to counter clumping.

I see that this is a bad definition because it relies on your assumptions as to what the physics of the game does and does not include. But most people here are familiar with TA or FA so we should be able to get by.

tl;dr arbitrary capture/win zones bad intrinsically valuable metal spots good

That mechanic existed in TA. Everything blew up when they died, thus taking more damage as they clumped up.

I think there is a difference between units exploding when they die and units taking more damage from weapon fire due to proximity.

The big difference is imo, if it can be shown visually, ie. its not a hidden dice roll or number crunch, its good.

Units exploding on death, obvious effect. Units suddenly taking more damage because they're close together, bad.

Both ways accomplish the same goal in the end.

OK,

Looks like a lot of thought went into this, and I'm seeing a really simple solution to the problem...

Mechanics like the ones in the 'old' strategy games - Red Alert, Age of Empires etc, and similar mechanics from CoH and so on.

Basically you stop units from stacking up too close to each other, make it so they hinder each others' movements enough that you only have partial effectiveness at range, and everything behind the first two lines either has to try to navigate its way around the front lines, or becomes ineffective if there aren't enough paths around. Of course, as each side tries to swarm around, the battle's 'front line' will inevitably become as wide as it can, with units getting cut off from the main group as one side wipes out the other side's central forces.

In short... Limit units per space, limit pathing and firing lines between units (ie if the unit trying to fire doesn't have a clear LoS, but has a LoS weapon, it can't fire, or damages its own team), and try to ensure that the really long range units fire slowly enough and move slowly enough that they can effectively be 'rushed' by short-range high-maneuverability units.

It's all about the balance...

There's the issue of time that you're glossing over. If you wait until after he builds his deathball to start going after eco, then you've made an obvious and fatal mistake. The idea is, that through continuous attacks on your opponent's economy, they'll not only have fewer units, but they'll also be less likely to clump them together.

Ideally, both armies will still grow, and eventually one or both will have enough units to form a deathball and roll over the opponents base, but isn't this a part of strategy? You're obviously not going to take your opponent's heavily defended base without a mass of units. But you need to know when to combine your units and abandon your resources for a decisive blow.

This doesn't even say it strongly enough. The SCALE of this game is going to pretty much completely remove the deathball as a way to win the war. It may very well win the planet, but that isn't enough to win.

The early game of econ expansion and unhindered expansion followed by skirmishes and raids of disputed MEXes will happen. Those with the upper hand may feel they can clump up and try to take out the opponents main Econ/Bass (energy farms and/or factory clumps). The defending player doesn't have to stay put however.

The attacker either
A, got the upper hand through good strategy/tactics,
B. Was considerably superior with econ micro manage than the other player, or
C. specifically front loaded military spending at the expense of one portion of balanced play (No advanced factories, low number of engineers, no rocket gantries, few or no fixed base defenses)

In A and B you lose and should lose. Players of equal or similar skill will find themselves 'outblobbed' only in situation C. At that point proper scouting to determine which of the weaknesses your opponent has and a proper response will easily defeat a slow moving blob that can only be one place at a time on a planet (or a solar system).

They have all their units in one place and it is much stronger than everything I have on the planet? So what? The notion that my ONLY choice is to attempt to make a bigger death blob is kinda silly and not going to happen in PA when (and I do mean when, not if, with all the community involvement in the alpha/beta) there are so many possible avenues to defeat such a strategy that has nothing to do with destroying the death blob.

You discovered with your 3 scout planes that he has no fixed defenses built and only a handful on tanks not in his blob (that's currently annihilating your main force 2-3 minutes away from your base)?

Sneak behind him with your half strength force and shred his econ while rocketing all your engineers to the moon (or TEN moons, claiming 4 times the number of MEXes on the entire planet you just ceeded control of). He can't do anything about it with his deathball cause he can only be in one place at a time... (Or he only has a deathball that can defeat you because he didn't spend resources on orbital or extraterrestrial tech and you get first dibbs on the solar system)

The SCALE of this game completely destroys the idea that a single undefeatable blob will make a player undefeatable.

Air deathballs MAY be a problem due to extreme mobility, but the fact that air is stuck on the planetary body on which they were initially built is a pretty strong negative all on its own. If they super death ball on one disputed planet, oh well. Let him have it for now while you kick his underdefended *** on the other three disputed worlds.

A half hour from now you'll have outproduced him so badly you can easily defeat even an 'deathball'. At that point who cares if it was with another, slightly larger deathball? Its called end game. Seeing a few hundred (or in this game a few thousand) units in mass combat against each other is going to be fun as hell.

Planets do nothing with respect to deathballing. Each planet is a more or less self-contained RTS map.

If PA is played with deathballs, then having more planets will simply mean each player will have one deathball per planet, which can't leave that planet, but also cannot be defeated on that planet. It beats the enemy deathball, and you just claimed that planet permanently. It is just as stupid as having a single deathball battle decide an entire game.

I completely agree that PA should have a huge scale. However that huge scale should mean every player has lots of groups in different places, not just a single very large deathball. Building just one extremely large army and attacking a single very large enemy base for a "decisive blow" is just not interesting. The very fact that the game would boil down to one "decisive blow" would be bad. Insanityyoo seems to presume that there is a single heavily defended base that will consume an entire player's attention and resources to break, and that that will end the game (or at least decide a planet). This is boring.

It would be much better if every player had many bases, and many groups of units moving around the map. A single group might need to team up with a second group to strike a decisive blow on a single base, and gain a local advantage. But that doesn't end the game since the other player has many more bases, and many other forces apart from those that were just defeated.

So do it the TA way; when something dies, it explodes. Kill off units and you start a chain reaction.
This isn't considering things like tactical missiles, base artillery, ect. One of the things I really enjoyed (I have a feeling I may have said this before) about Total Annihilation and Supcom is you can stop a blob dead with a few gun emplacements.

So you're taking my comment out of context. Orangeknight made a comment that while deathballing wasn't a big a problem as some thought, it also wasn't completely irrelevant, and he stated his reasons for believing so. In his comment he states a "base" that gets run over by a deathball. I countered that basically that it's not that simple; that there's a time component involved that he ignored. (Orangeknight: I apologize in advance if I'm summarizing your argument incorrectly).

Now, responding to you specifically, no, I'm not saying there has to be a heavily defended base. I merely pointed out that that was the only reason you'd need to combine your smaller armies into one big one. Now, if there's no heavily defended main base, then there's no reason to combine armies.

So to sum up my entire argument: as long as resource placement is handled intelligently, and in absence of large concentrated bases, I don't feel that deathballing will be an issue.

Also: What you think is boring is irrelevant. You do not represent everyone.