Planetary Annihilation LiveStream: April 19th, 2013

Sorry if I sounded angry or something. Looking back it might have had a little air of bluntness to it, but I just wanted to throw my concerns out quickly and without it being too boring to read. The scale of the game is really one of the most important things to me and many others I'm sure, second to interplanetary warfare and massive destruction!

Anyway a planet that has 4 times the radius of the one in the demo sounds really promising. And yeah, I guess gameplay mechanics have a lot to do with whether or not a game will be fun at certain scales.

Not that I don't have confidence in Uber's abilities, but lately, gamedev companies have been letting their fans down *cough*Sim (micro)City*cough*, so it's understandable that people may give nervous. Unfortunately, some people stop listening when they get nervous, considering you stated in the video that the planet shown was only 1/4 of the max size.

I think another part of the problem is that it was also mentioned several times that it was a decent sized planet, when you really should have been saying it's on the smaller side. This was mentioned several times, where the relative scale of the planet was (I think) only mentioned once.

What realy broke realism for me was air. To slow, but not fragile enough.

So true, few games ever got this right, and those are the ones where air is not part of the units built but are called in using "abilities" (airstrike).

Just to clear I'm not picking on you in particular. This seems to be a question that comes up a lot. Some people really really seem to want big maps.

HOW DOG YOU'RE ON FIRE TONIGHT

I think the one thing I liked more about SupCom2 was the explosion effects. StarCraft should be classified as an RT game since it brings so much shame to the S

I'm one of those people, even though I know deep down that it's NOT designed around huge maps and week long battles. I know this, but I still want a game that gives me that. So perhaps others are like me and it bleeds through a bit.

I've hankered for decades now for a game that is real time with massive scale, where the game is balanced around hitting your top tier units at hour 2 or 3, and where things like troop movements can take considerable amounts of time simply due to the size of the map, and strategy actually plays a factor in winning the game, instead of mostly tactical economic & battle decisions. And yet, with the ability to zoom in and control individual units just like TA.

I'm actually really excited about the whole network & server setup PA has. I've been playing FA:F with my wife against some Sorian AIx's lately and we both can't wait to run an epic game that lasts for hours and allows us to save & continue at any time. The biggest flaw Supcom has imho is the poor networking capabilities - peer to peer just isn't nearly robust enough to support the kinds of games you can run, and it gets so very tiring to try get into a 4v4 game - spending 2/3 of your game time sitting in a lobby trying to connect AGAIN for the 15th time is frustrating to say the least.

You are not alone.

Games that last for hours and hours aren't as great as they sound.

RTS games tend to get boring after a certain point in my opinion. Maps can be too big when the units move at certain speeds.

Completely agree

Sure, it'd be awesome to have a full-scale model of the earth to wage war on for world domination, but that would be a completely different game where troop movements could take days. It'd act more like an MMORTS.

I love the new server architecture that's planned though. We will be able to have MMORTS-esque games by the sound of it. You can have 40 players dropping in and out of the game at their leisure across a ton of planets.

I'll just leave this here.

http://www.mavorsrants.com/2013/04/bigger-planets.html

While this is useless for games under 20 people for 21+ people large planets like this could provide long games with great dynamics.

I like this, i likely will play SUPER PLANETS a few times.

Holy ****. Just that patch of green in the upper left part of the planet is big enough for a small game, and it looks relatively flat with minimum curvature.

Starting to look like real planets. Its the LOD that makes it more immersive.
But its huge to play on.

Hmm, assuming that those small pixelized green dots are trees which are as big as tanks this is definitely a big planet. Hard to tell how it feels to play it, but it looks good.

Did I mention that I think you guys are going to be loaded from how sellable this engine is after you have completed it?

Think of how this engine could be used for Civ for instance.

Really awsome work.

Forgive me for asking, but you perked my interest. Who was on the design team for SupCom2 and who was asking for Star Craft?

I always assumed there were similarities between Star Craft and Supreme Commander 2 because GPG was on a budget and turn on a dime fast acceleration and impassable terrain was easy to design for. It also offered a plate to rehashing favorites from the original as 'new' content. Less units and unit stats equals less work to put together. The entire game was aimed at easy. Easy for GPG, easy on PCs and easy for new players. Whoever worked on the engine was the hard worker, because it runs smoother with better graphics than FA on low end machines. Anyway...

To me this is a case of D&D 4th edition vs. 3.5. If 4th Ed had been labeled D&D Table Top most of us hard core fans would have known not to buy it.

Don't ask me what I would call it. Probably Supreme Commander Essentials.

To be honest, some of the maps in the Supreme Commander 2 expansion are rediculously large for 8 player matches. There was a lot more concern in the player base that there was no new maps coming out because there is zero mod support for SupCom2. Also, experimental gantries are horrendously large in SupCom2. It's problematic even on large boring planar maps.

Lets keep in mind, the path finding in Supreme Commander and FA was not great. In Star Craft you have these small but super complex maps and the units find a way to the other side easily through a labyrinth of small pathways. This was one of my favorite features about the original Star Craft. I designed a few maps entitled trash planet because I wanted players to get a little frustrated with the amount of trash they had to wade through and rust was one of the smallest paths available in the map maker. It makes space a premium and made worming troops in for an attack a big deal, because they would invariably be shot at more. I have always been disappointed with the massive open plains given in Supreme Commander to do combat. I like how right away we see a lot more terrain breakers in Planetary Annihilation even if these aren't that fancy and units buildable on top of plateaus; good developments.

To continue map craziness. I would also like to add that the spiders and fleas really added to the maps of TA. You could have these shear faces that were impassable and have an entire swarm of fleas or spiders clambering up it. Crazy fun if you ask me.

Back to the Star Craftiness. It's easy to see how some knee jerk reaction took place and the game's unit acceleration didn't resemble TA, but you may know better than me what happened with direction and design. I would much rather hear what occurred than make conjectures. What I do know, is that the more complex the unit's motion (slower acceleration, turn rate, size, etc.) the harder the AI has to work for each of those units to keep them moving effectively and efficiently across the battle field. Don't we love ships? I do despite these small challenges. For instance, in FA when a unit is facing into a wall it generally takes a while to get re situated. A lot of times the unit requires multiple commands to even get turning at all, because I can only assume it really wants to move forwards rather than in reverse.

I know Scathis is lead on Design for PA, but I also have a feeling that Garat gets to contribute a lot by the nature of crafting unit models, I believe that you do too and the rest of the team for that matter I am sure are share feelings on things they like or would like to see; as it should be. I trust in your vision for PA as you described it. I believe you are putting game play first. I am a big fan of TA and look forward to the economy model Scathis has provided us. Playing FA recently has made me realize just how much I want that new economy to leave behind variably construction costs. Also, I am sure Scathis has plenty of new AWESOME for us incoming since we are talking about an alpha by end of May and the fans have no idea how orbital mechanics will function yet, what new units may be in store (more commanders are surely on there way) or how to count the ways we are going to invade other planets. Mind boggling.

Anyway, I hope you understand I offer this discussion, because I am very interested in the design process and I want to see you succeed. As far as 50 times a massive map on a planet with multiple planets in a solar system... That's hard to comprehend as a gamer who is supposed to fill and control that territory. I was about to say space, but obviously we know that has a totally different connotation in Planetary Annihilation. Needless to say I think making gratuitous use of Ceres size asteroids may be in my not too distant future.