Balancing Shields

For the record, I'd like shields to be in as well, but I'll leave it to Uber to decide. It's not a big deal to me. And I'm saying this as possibly the most turtle-ish player in existence. I love building awesome bases and am very OCD about the placement of my buildings. There's a reason I rarely play online...

I just realized this doesn't matter, at least to me. Shields will never see the light of day in 1v1 ladder play. I only had a qualm with cephel because of his silly "cheap tactics" statement, that was the sole reason I posted in this thread.

This though, are you real right now? Radar doesn't replace scouting, even team games. If you are not willing to accept that as axiom, I'm not even going to respond.

Planetary Annihilation is designed for larger games with more people, not for 'one versus one'. That, and I intensely dislike anything that mentions 'ladder' or 'ranked' or whatever. It's a game. Not a competition. Not a sport. A game.

But that's besides the point.

radar replaces early warning methods in other games, which is usually accomplished by proxy scout units. as for going into the enemy base and seeing what they're up to - no it does not, i don't think cephel meant that though.

Precisely. Due to the scale of TA ( mapsize mainly ) a replacement for say "defensive" scouting was needed. The radar perfectly accomplishes this. As for offensive scouting, ESPECIALLY once radar jammers are up, you have to do it the old fashioned way, which was widely in use in TA

Well I really understand however you'll probably be let down as through 2 livetreams Jon Mavor manifested his hopes the game could become an E-sports, though of course this is not his primary ambition.

EDIT: Shields FTW!

Mhm, perhaps we're using a different definition of 'E-sports'? But someone (neutrino, perhaps?) mentioned that the game would be balanced around two to four players; not one versus one per se, as most RTS'es do.

see that's the thing, it would be much better that way, I personally much prefer 2 v 2, 3 v 3 and my all time favorite : 4 v 4 (<3), but I also enjoy 5 v 5 and 6 v 6, 2 v 2 v 2 v 2 v 2 v 2, and ect... my least favorite being 1 v 1. i'm currently signed up in a faf tourney where the matches are sometimes 2 v 3 or 2 v 4.

I'd just like to point out, for the big events and the like, it's going to be huge 40 player games. Not this small stuff the rest of you are mentioning. or at least that's according to the interview found http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/15/plane ... terview/2/ whether that has since been updated or not I'm unsure of currently. Another one is http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01 ... ihilation/ about how these games are going to be crazy huge. Or at least have that capacity. Where you end up with games lasting days, or "tens of hours" with people playing the game in shifts. So, as far as competitive gameplay is concerned, it's quite possible that it's going to be completely different from either TA, Sup Com, or SC 1/2. Though I am aware that they will have options for smaller 20 minute games, which may be what the competitive stuff ends up using, I'm rather unsure on the matter.

Anyways, back on the topic of shields. I've only played around 4 games in the alpha so far, and I've gotta say, just about everything in this game is really easy to kill. Nothing lives for long. Turrets can defend against really large waves, simply because the enemies can't actually fire at the turrets before they are destroyed. Meanwhile, if you send in enough units that you can fire just a couple shots, the turret is destroyed and you just steamroll through the rest of the base. Of course, this assumes that there are no units nearby protecting the base. However, even if you have units nearby its really a matter of which unit fires first, most unit battles I've seen, have that as a deciding factor. I can attack a larger group of units from behind and end up killing twice as many units as I have, simply because each thing takes one or two shots to kill. Or I can have it happen to me for the same reason. I think each unit/building should have a shield simply to keep an enemy from sending in a wave of air units, and destroying a good chunk of your base simply because they found you with their aircraft first. Even if you have AA covering your entire base, it doesn't deal enough damage to stop this from occurring, at least as of current build from what I've found. Though again haven't played too many games, and never exactly been the greatest of players, so if there is a way to counter or stop this that I haven't noticed yet, please tell me.

Though honestly, this could be covered just as easily by simply giving things less damage, or more hp. If a battle is decided in seconds it doesn't really give a lot of room for defensive strategies. Its just going to be a matter of who notices the enemy force first and gets off those first few shot, that just seems wrong to me.

So far as the tactical missile launcher goes, how does that even work anyways? I've built that, and the nuke silo. I haven't been able to figure out how to actually make it fire at anything yet. I'm not sure if my games bugging out, it's an incomplete feature currently, or if I'm just an idiot that way. [edit] just figured out how the tactical missile launcher works, and I've gotta say, it's pretty pathetic. Similar cost to the lobber, but significantly reduced range and firing speed. The lobber covers almost a third of the planet, meanwhile the Catapult has a range barely bigger than that of a defense tower. The nuke has a smaller range still. Though haven't figured out how that works yet either.

As far as scouting is concerned, I've found it to be really difficult to do well. These planets aren't particularly easy to navigate and it can get rather confusing. I'm thinking the best way to do it is with a grid pattern of single scout planes and just try and notice when one of your planes go down and your enemy shows up via the zoomed out view, because the lack of a minimap makes keeping track of locations rather difficult, at least for me. If any body has ideas on this, please share.

So far as artillery directly is concerned, I've noticed that the Lobber is very easy to kill, but you have to know its being built to do so, and without constant scouting that can be difficult, especially if the person is actively trying to hide it and puts it somewhere well behind AA turrets so you have to end up committing to an attack in order to see where things are in your opponents base. With all that said, the Lobber is easily capable of taking out a commander in a couple of shots, and the same goes for most if not all buildings. So once one is up you HAVE to take it out quickly or you end up with a large chunk of your base destroyed, and while its easy to destroy a lobber with a lobber, you have to know which radar ping it is. Though it's been a mixed thing so far as to whether or not bases end up being built within range of someone else's lobbers.

Anyways, just my thoughts on the matter. Please let me know if my points are actually completely wrong, and HOW they are wrong assuming they are. Especially if there is newer information available about the structure of multiplayer/competitive games.

I too feel that the game is a little bit too ... extreme I'd say right now. Units have a ROF that's ridiculous, everything dies in two hits. That's pretty cranked up even for TA standards. A lower ROF but keeping the damage the same would definitely help introduce a BIT of strategy beyond "move your blob of units into their blob of units and hope you win"

This is a good thing though. Flanking in TA was very effective and should be here, ESPECIALLY considering the curvature of planets, and with that, no safe corners to hide in.

No, that's a horrible idea, and I say that as one of the most rampant shield defenders out there. Personal forcefields ruined the unit balance in Supcom and favored T3 too much over other units. In TA, having many T1 units was usually prefered than having a few T2 units. Not so much in Supcom, where some of the more powerful T3 units can literally wipe out two dozen t2 or lower units. This in turn made it more favorably to tech rush, more than it should be. Any map that was bigger than say 20x20km, heavily favored t3 rushing, because if you didn't commit fully to an all out zerg, you reached t3 too quickly and too efficiently and any sort of numerical advantage the other side might have gotten is rendered moot. I really prefer t2 units being stronger than their t1 counterparts, but they should not be THIS tough to kill, like they were in supcom comparably. If you tech rushed in TA, you usually died horribly unless you knew very well what you're doing.

To be honest, I feel that most ranges in the game are seriously underdeveloped. I don't know if it just appears to be like that or if it's actually the case, but TA had a much better range distribution, ranging from short ( regular units and point defense ) to long ( siege and artillery units, t2 point defense ), to long long ( siege towers, defensive cannons ), to "this is why i play TA" long ( LRPC's, annihilators, etc. ). In this game it's more like "spitting range" ( literally every unit and all base defenses ) and medium ( t2 static arty, that one arty t2 unit ). I miss the trench warfare really bad

Ah, I've never played the original SupCom. I'm not particularly well acquainted with fixing balancing errors either, just seemed to me an easy way to make surprise attacks not so incredibly damaging by giving the player those few seconds of response time to get their units into proper position, coordinate any air strike response, or if they increase the range on the things eventually, Catapult response, such that flanking doesn't become some insanely powerful thing. Course, I further stated that you could get much the same effect by simply increasing unit health. Decreasing rate of fire just makes that opening volley all the more important, or at least so it seems to me. Though would have to actually see it in action in a variety of circumstances to be sure of the matter of course.

Gotta say, that does seem to be the case. Course, still Alpha, so I'm sure they will make changes, just looking forward to seeing what they are and how they work.