Garat and I have had a small conversation about the need for metal points. He made a great point, that metal points are needed to balance the game between "turtle-ers" and "agressive" players. I bresume "balance" means tuning the game so that a "turtle" would beat an "aggressive" 50% of the time if they were equally skilled players. Wow, that would be a hard task to make all the judgement calls about what skill levels a player has and to make that balance. That is why we as gamers love these guys who make great games. We couldn't do it, although I've been a very successful software engineer for 20 years. What I'm afraid of is that the balancing is too early. In that last major change "bases" can not withstand a T2 tank. They used to be able to. And I think they should again. Here's why: I don't think of PA as a single planet game. I think of it as a multi planet game. I think of it as starting 10 players or teams on 10 different planets and fighting it out across those planets. Bases will have to be tough likethe early versions of the game to handle the load of another planet being dropped on it. Breaches to a planets defences should be TOUGH. Think D-Day as to the amount of effort it should be required to get even a beach-head on an enemy planet. Because we don't yet have multiple planets, the game is being tweaked at the one planet level like TA. I just think we should hold off on tweaking until we see the ramifications of launching massive waves of invading tanks, planes, and bots from one world to another.
The game has barely any balance at the moment. Balancing has to take place over a long period with lots of tweaks through playtesting. And I really don't think a turtler should ever have an advantage over an aggressive player. "I can play SimCity for 30 minutes and then slowly pelt you with lobbers and catapults - how fun for us both!"
This man has the wisdom, the gods SPEAK through him. But seriously now, a turtle should never, ever, ever ever ever beat an aggressive player in any situation no matter what, unless the objective is explicitly defense (which is almost never the case in an open war). This is because, first of all, turtling==static gameplay==BOARING. Second of all, because an aggressive player has superior resource income to a turtler (aggro player has more metal spots, therefore has increased capacity to expand in all areas). If I ever beat a turtle through aggression (I have yet to loose to a turtle), I usually rub it in their faces by killing them with nothing but Catapults and other long-range shenanigans. Or Fireflies
"Ever" is a long word. If an aggressive player isn't taking the initiative, out-expanding a turtler's economy, and drowning them in hoards of units, then they aren't really doing a good job with their chosen play-style. A poor aggressive player should loose to a well-played turtle, just as a poor turtle should loose to a well played aggressive style. I would like to see a game with no inherent bias towards one preferred strategy or the other. Otherwise, all the interesting choices that are possible collapse in service of the never-ending rush.
This is sorta implied, the same way a drunken pro can easily loose to a determined newb. The success of the strategy, in the end, depends on how much income a player has and how efficiently they use those resources. If the turtler is using Pelters and laser turrets and air support super aggressively, they'll get the upper hand with metal and will wind the game.
The better player should win and not the choice to rush or turtle. Ta always was about building big bases, defenses and having turtle wars. The transition from early rush and territory fighting over to a huge war for every hill if the players are equal is what i expect.
I think this discussion is silly. Replace turtle with 'small number of mass points' and aggressive with 'a large number of mass points' in the above posts to see why. More mass, same weapons, same skill = win. Thats is the way it should be for an exciting game with a bit of dynamism. Your units actually move and attack rather than just sitting there for 90% of the game.
Pretty much this. Also just to add, but whenever someone tries to describe to me what a "Good Turtle" player, to my ears it always seems like they're just describe a slower paced aggressive-type that might not expand too quickly but instead do aggressive raiding. So I don't get the uproar over the idea that a more aggressively paced game wouldn't actively support a purely defensive playstyle. Mike
Although I agree that the concept of a victorious turtler and a common turtler are often not represented properly in forum discussions, I think the concept of more mass = win is an oversimplification. Not only does it not represent how games actually play, but it also is a very poor concept to balance the game around. It implies that as soon as 51% of the available metal points are taken, the game is already decided. I would personally find a more fluid system to be more interesting, which rewards adaptive players. The key is the concept of efficiency. A turret will typically have a higher DPS than an equal value of units. Thus, a wise turtler knows that in an engagement of units vs turrets, turrets are more efficient. If the aggressive player wishes to destroy the turrets without great losses, they must bring expensive and fragile artillery, which is ripe for an aerial counter attack. If they want to bypass the turret, then the turtler knows they have deterred an attacker from assaulting key areas. Thus, a wise, and well played turtle strategy can defeat a larger expenditure of units for a smaller expenditure of metal. They can use the time this buys to come up with something more interesting, such as a com-snipe, a nuke, a surprise raid against an undefended opponent, or 500 million tonnes of rock travelling at Mach 40. If you want a game that's interesting to both play and watch, then the equation isn't It's: More mass vs higher efficiency = could go either way.
Com sniping and nuking work against the turtler as your aiming for a small square as opposed to half the map. If you have penned your com into a small square I can find and bomb him from the air a lot quicker than if I have to search the entire map for him, add to that that AA is much more effective in depth. This is why L1 mex should be much easier to kill than they currently are.
If you ask me, a good turtler should be able to beat a bad aggressive player. A good turtler versus a good aggressive player should be in a slight disadvantage. But in the end those are just tactics. If you pick the tactic of being a turtler, it shouldn't immediately mean that you're going to lose if your opponent is aggressive. There should always be alternatives to everything. Make every tactic reasonably equal to each other with some counters within the build orders and movement orders. Basically if a turtler builds everything to counter the aggressive player on time and knows whats he doing, he wins. If not, he probably loses.
I disagree the economics of turtling just don't work as everything a good turtler can do a good aggressive player can do with more of the map, more space and more resources. I don't think just don't think turtling is a competitive strategy. Although I do realise we are heading rapidly towards the old semantic argument of just what exactly do you mean by a turtler.
Not necessarily. In order to overcome the turtler, the aggressive player needs to spend yet more resources. They CAN spend it on nukes, KEW's or com-snipes, but to do so they will have to spend less on units. If they do that, then they give the turtle breathing space to reinforce their position with their more efficient defences, work towards a game ending strategy, or come out of their shell and start raiding back an opponent who doesn't have defences set up because they have spent all their income throwing it at the enemy. If the enemy reinforces their position (with their superiorly efficient defences), then the aggressor must spend even more to overcome them, along whatever line of attack they are choosing. This creates a natural balance. The winner of this, is the first person to do something clever that the other guy didn't see coming. And that's what a strategy game should be about.
To reiterate what others have said, it seems that the term "turtle" is being associated with "this is my 5% of the map, you can have the rest without interference". This needs to be clarified. I may not have been an amazing sup com player, but my favorite strategy of all was to bunker up at choke points and launch raids with fast units (either t1 bombers or ghetto gunships, usually). The idea being that although I'm only going to have my 30 - 40% of the map, you are going to have a bad time trying to hold the remaining 60 - 70% of the map while I'm running up my econ to build some kind of superweapon. Obviously players with superior micro would stop that in a hot second. However, it really shined in team games where I didn't have to micro much. So long as I focused on defense and econ, someone on my side or behind me was going to be raiding, someone else was going to handle air support, etc. TL;DR: I think turtling is a viable strategy, provided you don't just give your opponent the entire map.
Turtling is easy enough to do in SupCom, with their shields and long-range T2 PDs. Turtling in PA, as far as my experience goes, always results in a loss.
This is all fine but if its a metal planet then most theories on who should win in a match of turtlers vs aggroers goes out the window.
Opinion. I agree turtle should work as a strategy, but no better than aggressive. Also, it would require a balance of turtle and aggressive to be doing the best. If turtle is useless, people are just going to build a handful of production bases and flood units every game. Oh, you built more units faster, how fun for us both. It should be strategy, it already is against the turtle because planets ha ve no corner and can be completely destroyed, it should be about who sees what coming and prepares well enough while sneaking in his own attack.
Well said all of you. Well, except the people who said a turtle can never win. Garat's statement to me was that the PA devs want to balance between turtles and agressive players meaning turtles would have to win some percentage of the time or by definition there would be no balance. Efficient metal use wins. That said, the discusion did not get to the current building strength (= base strength) vs unit strength AND how that should play out when we are fighting across planets/moon/asteroids. Someone did say that balancing takes time and that is my point, the game is being tweaked too soon. Wait until you can lob tanks and aircraft across interplanetary space before you reduce or increase building strength. As it is the new requirement (I know it was always planned) of requireing metal points has severly unbalanced the game. I've had moon games where the two drop points for my team have had a total of three metal points next to them and the drop points of the other team started in a field of metal points. Something Garat also said they could fix (the unbalanced distribution of metal).
Metal maps were a stretch goal of the Kickstarter campaign which passed along with: - Gas Giants - Water Planets - Lava Planets
