Pretty sure robots in the far future would have the ability to replicate themself without factories. Could this work in PA?
Sound like a horrible idea to me. Basicaly as long as you have ressources you could grow your army exponentially! Also you could simply build one large army and then send half of it to attack the enemy while the other half replicates again making losses almost meaningless.
Sounds feasible as a special ability. If they limit it to one or two special units (weaker then normal, but with the ability instead). Then it becomes that units ability only and since they are weaker then normal units you wouldent base your whole army on them. But i am concerned how it would work with the economy, not needing factories and all... would need to be tested and balanced carefully. Summary: It might be feasible and it sounds like a cool idea, but it needs to be tested ingame before final judgement. Might be better as part of an expansion when the rest of the game is done allredy and testing is easier.
I played a lot of Supreme Commander, and one of the things that annoyed me was how much work and micro it took to reinforce my army. Had to give factories orders, and organize transporters. This was mostly a problem on huge maps. Was just thinking about how you could spent more time with combat and reduce the micro. Maybe the unit replicating should be completely disabled when replicating, so you are more vulnerable.
I... I honestly do not have a prepared response for this. I didn't realize anyone could come to a logical conclusion that factories are a bad thing. Should we also remove Power Generators and make it so Mass is gained by being in Line of Sight of Metal Points? And walls are automatically erected when an oncoming army is approaching from an unexpected direction? Logistics are a key point of RTSes. In fact, without advanced Logistics, an RTS game would just be a MOBA. PA is NOT A MOBA!
I'm going to take a wild guess here and say that Uber won't say anything like: "So originally we promised a RTS successor to Total Annihilation. But we're not gonna do that anymore. We figured robots need to grow up and do their own damn replication."
I can't possibly call that micro. This is what you need to do to reinforce armies in TA, Supcom or PA (so far). 3 (hotkey for grouped factories). Shift-click a few times on unit portraits. Optional: right click to set new rally point by the frontline. Done. As for transporters. You should already have your factory rally points on the ferry point, so.. All you need to do is to shift drag the destination to the battle. Done. How is this micro? It's the bare minimum of what can be called gameplay Without that, what game would there be to play besides watching autonomous bots fight? I DO think that self-replication is interesting. But it's not for the base game. I think a mod or DLC or expansion with ONE type of unit that can do that, perhaps en-route to another planet, would be awesome. But making that for all or most units in the game would just mean the game stops being an RTS with base building and starts being another mindless "i dont have to think about anything but combat" game. That's what C&C4 had in mind, look what happened. It's like the audio guy said about "there needs to be quiet moments to have loud moments". There needs to be suspenseful downtime and base building and preparation in order to have interesting large battles. Otherwise the battles just become throwaway nonsense nobody cares about. Too much of the good stuff.
Id like to see a range of mods, ones with less micro, ones with more. So depending on how I feel like playing I will have variety.
i'd be wary of units with special abilities and self repairing/building robots Save it for a mod, i say
Replicating requires a lathe, and lathes are more expensive than weapons. Even if a unit wanted to be permanently self-replicating, it A) doesn't have the limitless resources (extractors get that) B) doesn't have the limitless energy (generators make that) C) can not compete with a dedicated kill gun (everything else does that) Thus the game is about robots building robot cities that craft robots armies to shoot enemy robots.
what about having a specific type of bot, thats weak and when destroyed has a x% chance of splitting into two smaller and weaker versions of itself? (think replicators in stargate or other nano machine type stuff)
