More megabot types

With the right structural equipment you can totally camp on a fence

"I only want to use endgame weapons so no one else should be able to use anything else"
What if people want to play a game without endgame weapons?

I think 1 is enough and Uber has still not decided if they are making this Megabot.

Hmm, maybe not have the super unit as a bot but a structure, like a super artillery or a special factory or something...

Mod them out (that reasoning goes both ways so people should stop using it ).

Seriously though there are a lot of issues with not having end game weapons, it basically means you can't have any decent static defense because if static defense was good enough then no amount of unit spam would be able to break into a base late game, which would make unit spam a poor choice of build path and leaves turtleing until you can destroy the enemy with an asteroid impact as pretty much the only viable option (which I'm sure people don't want). Conversely balancing static defense so that unit spam remains viable late game means static defense is just going to need to be nerfed to the point where it is just way too ineffective to be worth building and unit spam becomes the only viable option which will make for some very predictable and boring games (which I'm sure people don't want either).

Megabots allow both turtleing and unit spam to be viable because if a unit spammer encounters a turtle the megabot allows the unit spammer to break through the defenses albeit at great cost, though a unit spammer will usually have more map control to get the resources to make that possible, and the slow nature of megabots (both building and movement) allow the turtle to prepare for such a unit should they scout it early enough creating a nice sort of balance and more strategic thought (like attempting to hide the building of a megabot).

However that's not to say that having megabots is the only way to have both build paths be viable, out ranging the static defense with artillery can help to balance things between the build paths (though it's a lot more difficult to balance correctly), so Uber may try to make things work without them trying to keep unit battles with smaller units at the core of the gameplay.

Ultimately though it'll come down to how Uber want the game to play, personally I feel a megabot unit would help create more varied play, but Uber have more talent and experience than I do, especially when it comes to RTS games, and could probably think up a better way to improve the gameplay without adding megabots than I can so I'd rather just bow to their superior knowledge of RTS development and let them do what they think works best, I'm sure that we'll get a better game that way.

Lets see, unbeatable static defense (unbeatable against mobs of units leeroy jenkinsing in their line of fire).

How about you:

- orbital bombard them
- drop units from orbit on top of them
- move mobile artillery in their range and take them out
- blow them up with a concentrated force of bombers
- attack from their rear
- precision strike their nuke defense, then nuke them
- precision strike their nuke defense with orbital dropped units then nuke them from orbit

Nowhere did this include silly megabots.


PS. I'm not saying all those options will be possible in game, but I prefer those features then huge units for the sake of having a huge unit. As somebody said apt in this thread, no arcade-end-game-boss in my rts please.

No static orbital defenses? Then no point building anything but orbital units they will clearly dominate the game, I'd MUCH rather megabots than orbital bombardment units, if you think a megabot is a game ender just wait till you see how unbalanced these will be. If there are static orbital defenses the you just end up in the same position where static defense is either too powerful or completely useless, except you now don't bother building land units ever.

If static defense is any good at all then dropping X mass of units on static defense of the same cost will just be a waste of mass and you will never be able to drop high enough numbers to counter static defense late game, if static defense isn't better than units for the mass then they become pointless as it's better producing units for defense instead.

As I mentioned this could work, but forces the turtle to add their own artillery into the mix or better yet go air and bomb any artillery, and it'll be a tricky balance to get right since it could make artillery WAY too effective greatly reducing the viability of other units.

This could also work as well, though I suspect that if anti-air defenses can't deal with that then bombers will be too OP and the game will just end up a rush to snipe the enemy commander with them. SupCom's shields prevented this from becoming too big an issue, but since PA apparently wont have shields I'm very worried that sniping is going to be a bit too easy unless static air/orbital defense can trounce such tactics most of the time.

A much more viable option in PA because of the spherical play field, but again if static defense can't deal with that cost effectively it becomes pointless to build static defense at all and it'll all just be unit spam without other viable strategies to mix things up and keep the game interesting.

That is probably the next easiest solution other than megabots, though if you can snipe a nuke defense so easily surely you'd just snipe the commander instead, without shields it's not like the commander can take cover anywhere and then the building of nukes becomes just a waste of resources that are better spent on more bombers to snipe. A better option would to make the static defenses better against snipe attempts and just to build more nukes than their anti-nukes with a superior income from greater map control rather than needing to snipe their nuke defense.

Pretty much the same issues as with orbital unit drops and the previous solution.

True, but as I said it's a LOT more difficult to do than just having a unit that is basically designed to break through a turtle's defenses, but that takes long enough to tech to and build that the turtle can make significant progress towards their end game strategy before it becomes a major threat. But if Uber do want to do the massive amount of balancing to make things work well without the megabot I'm sure they can come up with a good solution for it, I'm 100% sure it is possible to have a great game without megabots.

But you are OK with orbital bombardments? That doesn't make much sense to me, I think any orbital bombardment would be much worse for gameplay than a megabot especially if it doesn't cost as much as a megabot.

Eh, imho you're seeing the whole thing a bit too black and white.

If a static defense can't stop something 100% all the time doesn't mean its suddenly useless.

For example orbital units which can bombard ground. It heavily depends on how you implement it. You could make them only travel in fixed orbits which very slow movement towards new orbits. (Makes them easy to avoid and to hunt.) You could give them low-hp which makes them weak to any anti-orbital weaponry. (They just have the inherent advantage of not getting hit by the usual ground or air based weaponry.)

If they're slow in movement, you could hunt them down and destroy them before they get into the range of your units. That's different then air units which often are hard to hunt down and can go everywhere fast.

Yes, they could destroy your static defenses easily when the get into your reach, but a bunch of anti-orbit mobile units could destroy them before reaching you. Just building orbital units would make you lose then.

Static defenses could have fixed firing arcs, so dropping stuff behind them makes them useless while still keeping them excellent against frontal attacks. And even if they don't have fixed arcs, they could still be slow to turn arround giving ample opportunity to destroy them. Also, defensive weapons often are only that strong as they can engage the enemy at such a range to not suffer too much damage themselves. Dropping stuff on top of them guaruantees them getting damaged.

Also, I highly doubt you can design bases with multiple economy buildings that have their static defenses positioned in a way that they can cover any frontal attacks as well as covering the whole area of the base. Remember, you only have to drop in an area where there are economy buildings and less turrets while the defender would have to cover their whole base. You could try to cover everything, but I highly doubt you'd be able to expand much then.

It forces the turtler to build artillery. Sounds good to me. The tricky part isn't so tricky. Mobile artillery would have lower range then static. As long as they can't be detected by the defender they can shell it unhindered. (Just don't make the silly omnisensors again that can see every ground units everywhere. I hated those.) But if they get engaged by other units, they have a hard time. Sounds good to me too.

Commander sniping is always an issue, but the commander can be moved while nuke defense is usually immobile. Also give them some limited stealth to keep them save late game. (In TA they had stealth that was energy expensive and kept the commander hidden unless it did something besides moving or an enemy unit was too close to it.)

Hm... no, that doesn't make static defense useless at all. You could still defense areas cost effective, but just not all the time against all directions.

I can still build a bunch of statics to defend an attack vector against twice, thrice their cost. And the enemy can avoid it, which gives me the desired strategic victory (I denied the enemy the path I didn't want them to take).

As said, you can almost not make it that commander sniping won't exist, but you can give the commander options to avoid detections which makes commander sniping very hard to do.

Yeah, but I would want it to be more difficult because its imo also more interesting. I don't want the basic options against a heavily defended turtler to be, wait 'till you can build a megabot. Its not a strategy with much finesse or elegance.

Nah, depends how you implement orbital bombardement. If you just make it like airbombers, ofc you will have a hard time balancing it (or worse, make it like spacetanks...).

One could make it orbital movement based on "real" orbits (good luck getting a stationary orbit over anything else then the equator). Ie. powerful but kinda unreliable where they go.

You could make it expendable. Ie. has to be built on ground, gotta go to orbit, move to enemy, deploy weaponry, now an useless piece of space rock after all weapons deployed.

It could have high alpha damage with incredible long recovery/reload rate. (Resupplying weapons in space is hard.) Swarm it then.


All those implementations would make orbitals bad as the mainstay of your army, but still good in specialised roles. They'd be limited where to go (with orbits) or slow oneshots (when expendable) or only good against higher value targets (with slow fire rate).


PS. I'm not saying those are good ideas, but they are ideas that can imo work and are still more interesting then Godzillabot.

On the subject of megabots, I loved SC's variety the colossus reminded me of the robots from Nausicaa. and the spider tank and aeon saucer were also hella cool. However they were so strong and cheap that within 30 mins all other uits were redundant and megabots decided the game. and Worse yet its as though this was acknowledge by devs but rather than correct the costs to make them an expensive yet cool folly the decision was taken to use this as an excuse to avoid any interesting design variation in other units, basically battle tank or bot was your choice. This isue is going to be even more potentially problematic with a single unit pool. Its all well and good asking if we'd rather have 2 races with 50 units or 1 with 150, but given what you gain in time not spent essentially re-skinning bots you more than lose in having to think up and programme new ones from scratch, the numbers simply dont add up. I worry were heading for 1 race with 50 unit and most of these will never be built if all these megabots and megaweapons come to fruitition. The misbalancing of megabots was SCs 2nd biggest letdown IMO (after the inf zoom rendering all battles a chain of red dots v blue). So though i loved the Krogoth, Given what Ive seen since then, I think it best theyre not in the game or as few as possible. And to those who would mod, I implore you to remember that they are for coolness, NOT as a staple of your army. If they give more firepower per unit of build-time/cost then youre doing it wrong.

Stephen

For static defense to be useful it needs to be significantly more cost effective than units, if units are ever even close to being effective against static defenses for the same cost then it's completely pointless having static defenses because units would be just as effective and can then be used later for attack. This is the main reason I'm so worried about it, if static defense is as cost effective as it needs to be to be viable then a late game turtle with lots of cheap static defense will be near impossible to attack without some kind of end game unit to break through because units can't all move into attack position simultaneously and will just get cut down without being able to advance.

I meant the turtler would build mobile artillery, if static artillery had a longer range then it would make mobile artillery quite ineffective and would not solve the problem.

Ugh, stealth, anything but that .

It's hardly a victory unless you want the enemy attacking you where you are least defended.

Again it's no different to orbital bombardment or nukes, however it is a lot more fun to play against, pretty much anything can help kill a megabot so no matter what strategy you have adopted you can actually attempt to prevent being destroyed by it by commanding your army or building up more static defenses and strategically focusing targets which is usually quite exciting, with nukes you just build anti-nukes which is ridiculously boring, and with orbital bombardment it'll probably be pretty similar since there's unlikely to be many units/buildings that can counter it and it's also unlikely that you will be involved much in countering it either it'll just happen which is also boring.

Yeah I get that, and certainly megabots are a pretty mundane concept now, but I'm concerned with the gameplay, not the concept, and although megabots are mundane the gameplay they can create is not. Whereas something like orbital bombardment which has an interesting concept is likely to create some pretty terrible gameplay, to differentiate it from a normal bomber you would pretty much have to have hard counters to it (what's the point in it being orbital if all AA can hit it) and if you don't get the tech for the hard counters and an orbital bombardment unit shows up there's little point in continuing play because without shields you will never get the opportunity to build the counter so most people will just quit. That said you did have some good ideas to make orbital bombardment units more reasonable, and perhaps they would work, but we'll have to wait to see what Uber does or at least until the alpha where we'll actually have some hard evidence on what works and what doesn't.

Yeah if megabots are implemented they should be heavily over costed compared to normal units and only really be effective against single targets so they would be great at breaking through static defense but terrible against unit spam. That way they'd be rarely used but available if needed.

This is a two part "problem". One is player choice, you can choose how far to zoom in or not zoom in. I always view battles up close just for the awesome factor and for a little bit of microing.

The second part is the engagement ranges, if the engagement ranges based on vision, radar and weapon ranges are too large compared to the size and speed of the unit you will need to zoom out further to get a good overview of a battle. Supcom errs on the side of small, fast and long range, compounding the problem.

Not being able to effectively scroll or adjust the view angle also compounds the need for further zoom ranges.

@bmb, I personally found ability to fight on multiple fronts and out flank your enemy meant it always worthwhile being at a strategic view, even in each little skirmish you lost a few through not micromanaging.
And of course i missed out on the graphics, that’s my point, I felt I had to in order to win and that’s a real shame.
BUT I only included some info on Inf zoom as a curio, as to why megabots are only my #2 disappointment (ie this discussion is best had via PM as its kinda off topic lol)

RE this topic i just wanted to impress they need to be VERY EXPENSIVE and time consuming so that we're not desensitised to a maegabot attack, and so that other units are still viable (still pack more bang for your buck).

Stephen

Ok so I read the first two pages, until it started getting a bit..

Anyway! I just wanted to point out that there aren't going to be shields, so Megabots as an end-game turtle buster won't really be necessary, because these turtles aren't going to have shells.

Artillery/nukes and the whole space+sphere map thing should prevent the stalemates Megabots are used to resolve.

Personally, I don't like Megabots, I played some SC today and somebody rushed an experimental gunship and that was it. They suck the joy out of these games because they don't facilitate big battles, they end them.

To balance not having shields, either buildings are going to have to have increased HP or weapons will need to do less damage compared to SupCom. And because shields were shared between several buildings when balancing building HP they are actually going to need to increase the HP such that tightly packed buildings in PA are likely to require more damage to destroy on average than in SupCom meaning it'll probably be harder to bust defenses in PA than SupCom.

You can't just take away shields and leave everything else as is, everything has to be rebalanced to deal with not having that additional protection available and that will make the game play differently to SupCom, not that that is necessarily a bad thing but I think a lot of people are expecting something similar to SupCom and they could be disappointed with the affect certain suggestions are likely to have on how the game plays. Game design and balance are VERY tricky, without years of experience in game development (hell, even with it) it's really difficult to predict the affect a seemingly small change can have on a game and there are a lot of changes being proposed on top of the fundamental ones (like spherical and multiple play fields) that PA is based on.

I can understand not wanting megabots, I'm not a huge fan either, especially of BS flying ones that basically just end the game (I'm concerned that's what an orbital bombardment unit could end up being no matter how nerfed it is), but just a single over costed land based megabot that's not effective against many units might be worth having to keep some variation in the game play.

I'm not hoping for a SC clone, I love the PA style.

I think even with increased HP/armour, bases not having shields means they aren't going to be effectively invulnerable as long as they have enough energy/shields and an anti-nuke. It might be harder to negate the effects of artillery by running around repairing things, for instance. And I think that's a good thing really. If I build a great big gun, I want it to do something other than make a ripple on a shield.

And even if this isn't enough, there's always asteroids >

I'm worried that orbital units might be difficult to shoot down, the UEF satellite from FA was a bit of a pain, but I'm sure there will be plenty of rockets in PA.

I do confess I like the idea of a big bot stomping around, but as has already been mentioned in this thread, they'd probably be redundant, or need to be over-priced to avoid rushing.

I get the impression it isn't taking away what SupCom had, its just not adding to what TA provided.

Well, even if orbital bombardment units are considered game ending units, forcing the orbital units to follow a slow fixed orbit and that have a fixed range could offset the power they dish out. For instance if an orbital bombardment unit is built with a fixed orbit that is selected by the player and only has "X" area of damage, then if the enemies base is "X+1" in size there would not be a way to totally defeat the enemy with just one and would require the additional resources to build another bombardment device and to choose another orbit. Potentially giving the enemy time to move his base or go off planet without ending the game right then and there.

Yeah but then you wouldn't have any really fun units to play with since you would just be modding out the endgame units without having megabots.
Hopefully they put restrictions in like with supreme commander, and even if they didn't some people would still like to be able to destroy their opponent with massive megabots instead of just using nukes or planets or death stars from time to time.

Actually I really like that idea of a fixed orbit for orbital bombardment units, it really would alleviate most of the fears I have over it and would also make it a bit more interesting to use and play against because you could also give it an orbit that defends a particular passage into your base, or deny a particular area to the enemy rather than just being able to dominate the entire planet with it.