Hey, I posted this in GD, but would be interested to hear backers thoughts on this and maybe get an official Uber answer. A good point from supcom that I would like to bring up is early recliam. Working rocks into your build order was critical to succesess and opens up many diverese build orders, such as building no mass extractors with your commander. Recliam, such as dead units and rocks creates locations to fight over initialy, and can funnel the action at the start, making for interesting gameplay. Im not talking about maps with STUPID amounts of recliam in one location, the amount can be balanced. However the crux of the matter is that this will simply not be possible with PA. Completly evenly dispersing the reclaim over the entire planet would almost defeat the purpose of it entirely, however there is too much variation for clusters to be distributed randomly, eg craters, oceans, ect. This would no doubt give one side a large advantage in certian seeds. This is only assumeing spawn points are predetermined however, and the problem becomes even worse, when players could potentialy pick their own spawn positions. I am not agianst this, but I am unable to see how this could be handled, bar removing concentrations of recliam entirely, something I believe should be avoided if possible.
Technically speaking it could be seen as a form of flame baiting...... Frankly I've given up on the Backer Lounge, 80+% of the threads here should really be in the General Discussion Subforum. Go ahead, making copies of threads across the sub forums, after all the only people it really affects are Uber. Mike
Sigh. Sorry my attempt at a reasonable attempt at an explanation st the start fell on deaf ears. The last comment was meant as a joke. I cant tell if you are being serious or sarcastic with that last comment. In that case ill simply remove that last statement. -_- OT: Some discussion on the topic raised would be nice. Does anybody have any opinions?
Not having to memorize preset wreck locations for every map is going to be a good thing. Supcoms early game, especially in team games, being mostly decided by who can hoover up the most wrecks is pretty lame. There's so many things wrong with the mentality behind posts like this that I don't even know where to start.
It should be very possible to just make it part of the procedural generation to have a certain amount of reclaimable items near the start. Take 500 mass, split it up over some different props (rocks, buildings, wrecks), give each start spot 4-5 different things to reclaim, and scatter them within a radius 2x the commander build radius. Voila. Problem solved
The randomness of reclaim can be greatly mitigated through map design, core rules, and the use of dedicated reclaimers. - With a nimble reclaimer, the spread of material isn't very important. (in FA it could take 5 minutes to reach a metal wreck, rendering conflict over wrecks nearly impossible) - If the AI is fast about it, then large bits won't be overwhelmingly better than small bits (in FA the bots ZAP up a worthless tree and wait half a second. Repeat 10000 times.) - If hoovering is fairly slow, then more units (and thus more resources) are needed to get a solid return on reclaim. (in FA a T1 engineer could get like 50 metal/sec from a wreck, WTF) - Rich reclaim points can also be placed far from metal deposits, as a tradeoff between short term and long term gains. - Rich reclaim points may not be valid spawn points at all for things like team games. (thus keeping it a no man's land)
How I remember reclaimable mass in FA. You could either: • reclaim all the mass you can reach with micro • ignore it and most likely lose the game On most maps there was absolutely no decision regarding reclaiming. You had to do it, period. It was all execution and zero strategy. If we get reclaimables I would like something more interesting tbh. You should have to make choices. If you reclaim the mass you get no energy. Good for land factory first. Or you could 'invest' into a destroyed powergen to get extra power for early air. Would have to be a pretty beasty PG though...
Re: DIY Custom Commander Mods Meh, i think reclaim should be only worth it if you managed to time stuff correctly enough to squeeze out an extra engineer to do it. That way really good players would have a great reason to reclaim it 'cause they deserve it because of their good macro timings, and worse players could use it to not completely stall their economy all the time. Knowing myself I'll probably be in that second category.
You already make a choice. Choosing to reclaim means putting non combatants on the front where they can be easily killed. If the enemy puts more firepower in place, they get all the reward. Not everything has to be a self contained tradeoff. A good enemy will provide all the risk you need for any choice.
I agree. I think that generating the map opens up a lot of variety within gameplay. This also forces players to start differently based upon the resources they get from the beginning. As for balance, I think that there could be a spawning algorithm that would measure the amount of given resources in an area, and try to place the players in roughly equal locations, and if one resource could not be gained then it would be made up for in the other (e.g. if blue player's starting location is lacking in mass he can have more reclaim that gives power such as trees). This would probably have to be done with a ratio though, mass seems infinitely more important early game so the algorithm would have to be coded so that mass is considered more valuable in starting locations. I am no programmer so I am not sure how or if this would be possible, but this seems to me like this is the only reasonable solution for balance, or there would just have to be designed maps for competitive play, which I think would be lamer.
