OP, I pray you are wrong, SupCom and FA were spectacular games and many if not all of its features deserve to be implemented and improved on. I suggest if you value 'simplicity' you go ahead and stick to Starcraft 2 with the rest of the unwashed masses who think having a ten minute game with the perfect build order is the cutting edge of strategy. I only hope you are in the minority here at PA. I for one hope for more. More units, more depth, more experimentals, bigger scale, we have a vast amount of 'simplicity' in games these days, the last thing we need is TA or SupCom lite. After all SupCom2 already gave us that giant ball of suck.
It's actually used a lot in FAF to drop troups : easier than ordering the units to get into it and give the drop order... You set the ferry point, and you just have to move it around to drop on multiple places.
I'm most dissapointed that they've chosen to keep the awful distinction between advanced and basic construction units. It only leads to a bunch of unnecessary micro trying to find the right constructor. I feel the TA fanboyism is getting in the way of making genuine improvements to the gameplay. Supcom wasn't perfect, and it certainly doesn't represent the only way to take the genre. But it did make many important improvements across the board and it seems like they're just throwing it all away and taking many steps backward for the sake of nostalgia.
First off, this is Alpha and although you can get a good feel for the game and it does play more like TA than Sup Com (as it is meant to as far as I am aware) you shouldn't be complaining about what improvements they should have taken from Sup Com, for example. The game isn't anywhere near finished so I cant understand why people are disappointed when the game is lacking in any one area. As for Experimentals and PA supposedly having one... someone appears to have forgot about a certain Core unit from the Core Contingency that was an Experimental in all but name... The Krogoth. I was a massive fan of TA and I really hoped Sup Com would be TA but updated but it just didn't tick the right boxes for me, far too many Experimentals that just seemed to ruin games more than make them enjoyable and the units in early tiers felt very useless later on. I think Sup Com went too far, if you liked that then that's fine, just wasn't my taste. But from what I have gathered PA is to be truer to TA than Sup Com was and we've been waiting a very long while for that so I really hope it is. Maybe they will use more good features from Sup Com, I look forward to seeing how things progress.
to me i don't see why all the hate on sub com... :cry: sub com 2 was garbage but forged alliance i still to this day play it and have epic massive LAN partys! i hope PA will take the best of both worlds (FA and TA) and make the best RTS of the decade
Totally agree with this, and occasionally as a SupCom fan I have said "oh it would be great if blah blah was more like blah, just like in SupCom" and later bite my tongue over the post. Glad how this game is going so far and hope it stays true to being unique, albeit slightly inspired by past games.
I am not seeing any hate for Sup Com (maybe I missed it), the OP was expressing his/her opinion and specifically said: My opinion happens to be similar in that I didn't enjoy Sup Com as much as I hoped and instead preferred TA. I do not hate Sup Com and I do not think people who preferred Sup Com are wrong, its just a difference of opinion.
The only thing i actually think that i disagree on with most people is longer matches. It seems like everyone hates them, and I think it's pretty much the optimal target. In SupCom, longer matches became boring because you'd both hit the unit cap and then just start shoving nukes up each other's silos. That's boring, 100%. However, in this game, there's much less power to nukes and artillery, so a longer game would result in fantastic battleline style skirmishes, where you'd defend a point to your absolute best for as long as it took, but then lose because your opponent managed to sneak a transport full of bots into your main metal farm, dropping your income so you couldn't build any more. It has the potential to look like a true war, grindy and extremely flippable at the smarter commander's touch. Hundreds upon hundreds of units just rushing towards a gap between a mesa and a crevasse, doing their best to try and get to the energy reactors on the other side, while the enemy mobile artillery moves further and further back to stay safe. You would see the sort of underhanded tactics used by commanders in BOTH World Wars. You'd build walls and walls, but also dozens of transports, and just try and break the enemy's fearsomely guarded supply. Imagine that. No true deathballs, since keeping you eggs in one basket just gets you flanked. No nuke spam, since it's a surgical strike tool that requires precise knowledge of your enemy's forces and structures. Just death. An eternal cornucopia of robot death for a goal as simple as occupying a planet. Units dying just to allow other units the time to fire, not because you forgot to micro them away. Dozens of factories churning out units that are never expected to return. Bombardments of artillery that doom the units you used to hold the enemy in firing range. Sorry for the rant. I just see all of this potential, and people don't seem to care about it.
Don't seem to care? I'm pretty sure we are all backers here so we all saw the potential of this game and decided to put money down on it. You are correct, Nukes and Arty will be small time... compared to meteor showers blasting chunks out of planets later on in games. :lol:
I acknowledge that PA is probably more TA informed in terms of game-play style and pacing than SupCom, and thus it can be called a spiritual successor to TA. However I think the comparing back and forth between those two titles like this is a bit futile. PA has enough to stand on its own as an intellectual property and its design and feature set is informed by the experiences that the staff at Uber have had from making both TA AND SupCom. Uber decided to not have overt complexity in army management by not having the upgrades and veterancy present in SupCom. This weights focus more towards the strategy and resource management on the army you want to field, rather than where you sit in upgrades (or the awful research tree present in SupCom2). However like you mentioned, tactical zoom, perhaps the hallmark feature that set SupCom apart from every other RTS game, has been incorporated into PA. Repeating "this isn't SupCom3" isn't any more helpful than saying "This isn't TA2" or "This isn't Starcraft". Features should be assessed based on their merits for implementation into PA; not the game they originated from. If someone is relating a feature that they liked in SupCom, I don't see how it is any more or less valid than someone saying "well in TA I could do this". I have suggested features that I thought worked well in Sins of a Solar Empire because I thought the management of multiple planets was really good. I was not suggesting that PA should be "Sins of a Solar Empire 2". I was just using a feature that worked well as an example of how it could work in PA. If the issue is that someone is saying a feature should be in PA solely because it was in SupCom then sure, that is frustrating and I take the above back. But in saying this, such arguments would also be annoying if someone suggested that a feature should be in PA just because it was present in TA.
You totally made my day with your "rant". Excellent! Sums up my feels entirely. And since I am already here... TA could NEVER be annoying
Hahaha okay point taken. TA was fantastic and remains one of my favourite RTS games, so dont take it as a crack on TA specifically. I'll just elaborate a bit. What I mean is that stating that feature "X should be in PA because it was in game Y" is not good enough. One should specify and elaborate on why feature X was good in game Y and whether the feature is right for use in PA : )
I don't think this is either Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander. It's Planetary Annihilation, a new game, inspired by others & will be developed in part by us the backers/players to be the best game the developers & players can conceive. I think the point I'd really like to make is that we shouldn't get into flame wars looking back at what was, but instead discuss what can be. Also both the other games were on flat maps, the global nature changes a lot of things so backward looking comparisons are limited by this.
Given that they helped make TA and SupCom I'm sure features that worked well will be implimated. Alot of the stuff I'd like to see is in the UI to help me better play the game! a good example is the queing of buildings.
XD let's not overdo things. Here is the opening sentence to the PA Wikipedia article “Planetary Annihilation is an upcoming real-time strategy computer game in development by Uber Entertainment. It is being developed by much of the team responsible for Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander.” Here’s the first bit from the SupCom article “Supreme Commander (abbreviated SupCom) is a real-time strategy computer game designed by Chris Taylor and developed by his company, Gas Powered Games. The game is considered to be a spiritual successor to Taylor's 1997 game Total Annihilation,” this article used to also mention PA but has been edited since. http://youtu.be/MQavbTGaJtQ?t=12m36s I'm sorry but you just can't shake it... that feeling when playing the alpha that every part of the way the game UI (so far) is set up, responds to your habits from Forged alliance. I'm sure you know what feeling I'm talking about, the one you get when you send your cursor over to the right-hand side panel and there's a fire-type button that extends to three choices. Honestly what game has the closest feel to PA? What game is the one UberEntertainment has the most boxes of in their office? http://youtu.be/FhEYvOYceNs?t=5m59s not to mention mass points which, contrary to TA, will be in PA http://youtu.be/MQavbTGaJtQ?t=16m53s Understand the people that are making the link in their mind just as these people should understand that this indeed NOT supcom3. Supcom has become the beacon for RTS. It surpasses (in my own private tiny opinion) TA on a strategic and scale and fun level. And PA, even though it aspires to be better than any RTS ever, and it probably will be, has the best role model in Forged Alliance. That’s the way I think it should be. How do we code today? Certainly not in binary. That’s because we’re building up using past experience from our forefathers. And so In the RTS lineage PA follows suit in FA’s footsteps. (but not in SupCom 2’s, he was the evil brother of whom none shall ever speak of again) And I’ll go even further by saying FA is not an incomplete or disappointing game in any way. The worst part of FA is it’s pathfinding. But the FA gaming community is growing bigger as we speak hence it’s fair to say that that 8 year-old game is still very much alive and has accomplished enough to be looked up to. there’s no reason in my opinion to facepalm everytime you see “well in supcom blablabla…” there is nothing more natural. Now one thing that John Mavor did say is: http://youtu.be/ugz7I8Z1bkI?t=14m7s “the game is not meant to be homeworld 3” which goes in the direction of what you are saying, it is its own game, not a fanservice of sorts which if you’re like me, is a good thing, because like me you probably have experienced all “movie games” or "tv serie games" as a debacle (and by "experienced" I mean wouldn't have touched it with a ten foot pole and game journalists confirmed it would have been hazardous to). That said; do check out homeworld 1 and 2, they are the exact oposite, Homeworld 1 was it's own little revolution and a true pearl. isn’t it obvious?? Zooming out in SupCom felt like a slingshot, do you get that feeling when zooming out now? No. It’s a matter of proportions, the zoom is too restrictive you can neither zoom far in enough nor zoom far out enough and the units are too damn big so it feels like the difference between x1 and x2…. Basically not much, the strat icons make this crazily obvious as when they pop in they are way too big and immediately clip. If you were to turn strat icons off you could still identify units whilst completely zoomed out. It should zoom out to the solar system and why not even to the galaxy so that you can direct your multiple bases. on that note cheers to al!
