Balancing Shields

I'll point out that just because people like shields, that doesn't mean that they are required.

You say we aren't giving points against, but they aren't set to appear in PA.

So what are your points for including them?

If it's anything like how it worked in Supcom2, not that well. An umbrella shield makes the fateful assumption that every attack from above is some kind of artillery weapon that needs to be blocked. That's not really true. Attacks could be coming from gunships, mobile weapons, turrets, or just about anything on a hill. And it still does not offer adequate protection from focused fire, which is the real hazard from above.

There are better ways to deal with airborne threats. Try them first.

I want shields, they are so pretty!

That is true enough.

If you want to counter artillery, there can be multiple solutions, that are not shields. For instance:
Make large projectiles detectable by radar. Also make them targetable and destroyable by specific type of turret, or one of existing ones. Something like long-ranged, but quite weak laser thingy.
Done. You have your artillery counter, we have original building type, that can work in interesting ways outside of this exact role.

I think bubble like shields just won't fit on planetary annihilations current graphical style. I also didn't like their appereance on supreme commander much, they are just too unrealistic to my taste...

TA came out before SCBW. I think the reason you saw this happen was because TA did not have a very big following. While there was talent, the metagame didn't shift fast enough to resemble what we see today.

Then who should it cater to? You realize that there is no campaign? To replace that, Uber decided to make the galactic war, which centered around competitive play, maybe not tournament, but at least 1v1 ladder. Are you really expecting this game to be an AI stomper, something you play when you just want to bash a dumb AI? Or do you want this game to be a sandbox, like minecraft?
This game is going to be built to suit competitive play, it's just not going to focus on heavy micro mechanics and screen snapping.

Like I said above. Then what is this game supposed to be if not that?
Regardless of what this game ends up being, it's going to have a metagame and it's going to be competitive in one way or another. I will try to play it and adapt.

I backed this game because I wanted to see a competitive RTS without a restricting UI and a streaming economy, and it looks like I'm going to get it.
Watch the next 40 seconds of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... 4hY#t=130s

I wasn't praising them, I just mentioned one of their roles in SC:FA. I don't mind shields in that game. The only time they are a problem is in 4v4 no nuke thermo games, and I never play those.

Is that how you play? You build a shield in anticipation of enemy arty, and only when you notice that the shield is taking damage you decided to scout for the arty and deal with it? It's easy to see how you don't like competition.

In a game with fog of war, visual scouting will always be king. The only player that will lose to a stealthed/shielded firebase is a bad one that doesn't scout. We've already established that the devs are not going to balance this game in such a way as to cater to people that refuse to adapt.
Harass centered playstyles will always beat a playstyle that tries to safely expand. If harass execution requires 3 clicks, and a response required to nullify that harass requires 5 clicks, that's two click that the harassing player is closer to victory. Likewise, given equal economies, you can't have overwhelming defenses at all points in your base and prospected expansions, you just won't have enough mass.

You seem to be very concerned with stopping your opponent instead of doing something to your opponent.

That's never going to happen, there will ALWAYS be the simplest, most efficient tactic that will win the game unless acknowledged by the opposing player, and people will consider it cheap because they do not want to adapt.

That's a mighty normative statement there. Have any reasoning why it should be like this? The devs chose what kind of game they want to make and then people that like that type of game buy it. You've already bought the game. The only time you have a say in how a game is built is when you are the dev yourself, or you are making the decision to buy or not buy a game. While the former is the only way to influence a game in production, the latter only affects games that will be made in the future.
While you may come back at me by quoting Uber and their efforts to have the community involved, Uber will listen to the community, not individuals.

To be honest, this is the comeback most people get when they hear that their favorite feature will not be in the game. The problem with this is that people either overlook or are not vocal about the idea that only a small amount of mods will enter competitive play, if any. While you can play the modded game with your friends, the ladder will remain vanilla.

There is a problem with this though. Because a dedicated artillery counter has to have an assigned cost. If it is too cheap, you can just build one and forget about opposing artillery the rest of the game. This makes arty useless. If it costs as much or even slightly less than arty, after you build it, all you have is useless arty defense, while your opponent has arty that can shoot outside the defenders radius. You are better off building your own arty to kill his arty. This makes arty defense useless.
The best counter to an expensive immobile unit is scouting.

What about hovering artillery? What about siphoning mass from an extractor 81km away, behind the enemy base? What about all the technology that doesn't exist yet or even have theoretic background? Why did you even play that game? Aside from having familiar unit models, that game was not realistic.

I don't mind if shields are in or out of the game. I'm just uncomfortable with the suggestion of "no cheap tactics".

You are exactly right. Everyone will have tactics others consider "cheap". There's nothing to be done about this.

You realize that competetive does not mean "player versus player", right? You're rambling about stuff nobody mentioned, when I say PA shouldn't be a competetive game then I mainly mean it shouldn't become an eSport. I like to play against good opponents, but competetive play is something COMPLETELY different

And gladly the devs agree with this, with the almost 100% exclusion of micro intensive tasks and a wider focus on actual strategy. So no, if you're looking for a competetive game, you're looking in the wrong place

Never confuse this again

Edit: Funny you mentioned 1v1 so much, because PA, a game with multiple planets, which is one of the core features, can never be designed for 1v1 combat. 1v1 will be possible, but the game is designed with bigger player numbers in mind. This becomes even more apparent when you realize that the first gamemode ever to be released was 4players FFA/team match/that other mode i forgot on a single planet. 1v1 matches would propably have to be on a single planet that's pretty small, might be okay, but still not the core aspect of the game.

No there is a difference between feeling bad for losing the match and therefore blaming your bad play on the oponent

and

cheap tactics also known as tactics which are easy to execute and very hard to counter from the enemy(if not early scouted) on the other side.

You know the difference dont act like you dont know them.
Its always the same mentality behind this kind of plays:
Bad or slopy player want to beat better player and try to find gameplay-shortcuts.

Call it intelligent decision making but we both know its not.
Its just finding holes in the gameplaymechanic and abusing them for the compensation of less playerskill.

Its like cornercamping in multiplayer-shooter.
Noboady would say there "corner-camping is a legit playstyle".

I would, camping severely limits your zoning capacity and is predictable as hell. There's nothing cheap or smart about it.

Another thing I noticed it people suggesting "alternative" solutions to balancing artillery or something that would not include shields.

This is obviously complete nonsense, because a shield isn't a straight up counter to artillery, any sort of point defense that can shoot down missiles/projectiles is. You're actually suggesting something way "worse" than a regular shield setup.

Edit: For those against shields: Take a look at the size of this thread. This is obviously a very controversial topic and the devs would be very wise to take a second stance on their shield decision. Judging from their comments on reddit, they didn't even rule them out completely, but just stated they won't be bringing them in in their form from supcom without change. They're looking ( quote ) "for their own spin on this". It is my honest opinion that you can make the shield system work without compromising the spirit of TA as countless others have demonstrated already. On the contrary, in the long term, balance changes with no shields would prove to be detremential to that certain TA feel

Your funny.

People suggest just that, I don't know what's funny about that. People would rather see a straight up "Anti artillery" ( similar to anti nukes ), as opposed to a versatile solution that doesn't straight up RPS counters the artillery per se. TA lived by a very organic balance approach that is unique among most RTS's in which A is good against B not because A gets 50% extra damage against B, but because of an organic synergy between how weapons etc. work.

Flashes are very good in the early game but are countered by medium tanks of both sides, but not because the game gave them arbitrarily definitions on what should counter what, but because the medium tanks can arc over wreckage and the flashes can't. This spritit is very important to keep. Designing definite counters to a problem is always an artificial solution. There was this mod that had heavily fortified CORE heavy laser aircraft that move very slow, but are extremely powerful. Regular AA would not work well against it because they were tough as nails. Turns out a really effective counter was to fire at them in advance with half a dozen berthas. In a regular RTS this would not have been possible, because the artillery would be designed with a clear goal and counter in mind and wouldn't even be able to fire on airbourne units to begin with. What makes TA so great is that you CAN find these intuitive solutions to problems on the fly and this demonstrates great skill if a unique situation arrives and you win by intuition and intelligence, not by memorizing every page in the wiki that has the exact damage numbers and counters listed

So why do you support shields then? You just argued against it, right there.

I argued for them, I argued against dedicated counters, a shield is not a dedicated counter to artillery. An anti nuke is a dedicated counter to nukes. A shield does many things.

Most importantly and I said this from the very beginning, my main gripe is artillery getting too weak. The t1 arty in the game right now has the range of a bathtub, the t2 does a little more but not nearly enough. Artillery right now is weak. TA had strong artillery, Supcom had **** t2 arty and way too strong t3 arty, I want strong artillery back, like in TA. But people will cry if they have NO way to defend against it. Shields are the best solution to this problem, because they solve a bunch of other, similar problems aswell.

I can't put it anymore simple.

IT'S AN ALPHA FOR HEAVENS SAKE!

You are really complaining about the balance of a in-development game?

TA worked fine without shields because the only map crossing artillery was very difficult to mass up, intel was usually limited, and the terrain wasn't supcom flat world.

I'm complaining about a missing feature, which is exactly what an Alpha is about

And if you think that TA artillery was difficult to spam, then you clearly were pretty bad at the game

How so? Ok, I might have been a little rash in talking only about 1v1 ladder, team games/ladders work too. My point still stands.

I directly quoted text that people have posted.
The only way PA can be competitive and not become an eSport is if it is too small to be considered a sport.

Please elaborate.

Where do you get the idea that competitive play means heavy micro? I've explicitly said that I dislike micro. Chess is a competitive game, yet there is 0 micro(okay, the entire game consists of moving units around, but you don't facilitate unit interactions. Only move orders are given)

Sorry

Then players need to scout earlier or more often, or both. Put the outcome of the game in the players hands, not in the devs' patches. If early scouting can't be done, then patch-in early scouting, don't patch-out a "cheap mechanic"
This way, the community will phase out "cheap tactics". As the best players learn to scout properly, scouting an all-in means a free win for the scouting player, while the person executing it has the option of feigning the tactic if he so chooses. This is much better strategic variety than not scouting because you know your opponent can't do anything.

You realize that that solution was probably not even thought of on the fly? Most likely it was conceived in post game analysis. After everyone recognized it as an effective tactic, it become adopted by every other meta-observing player. So after that, people using this tactic were no longer showing problem solving on the fly, great skill, intuition, or intelligence, but only that they read the forums or watched a replay or something similar. How do you build a game around that? While I don't disagree with you, I actually used think that way, this doesn't mean I want this to be a micro heavy game.

(Even if it was conceived on the fly, it only happened once, at which point it become a popular tactic to emulate)

Your arguments getting permanently lost in this enourmous wall of text which you are creating.

Can you please elaborate in 5-10 short and understandable sentences what your standpoints are.Each sentence should include only one topic.