I think combat needs to feel more structured and deliberate, and to accomplish this, I think the firing rate of units needs to go down, the damage per shot to go up, and health of units to go significantly up. Why? Well currently it feels like armies are made of paper, but have flamethrowers, its just a cluster of machine gun-like cannons shredding each other. The ability to control your units is non-existent since they die too quickly. Units have ridiculous amounts of overkill and the turrets pivot too fast to allow for any real tactics beyond ramming your blob into theirs. Tactics; slower firing units with each shot being more punishing allows for tactics, like in these examples. http://i.imgur.com/VysZyVC.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ZwZnugt.jpg http://i.imgur.com/ys1oU4P.jpg I think, combined with refined formations and units aiming at radar blips and units in the visual range of allied units, would make combat feel more visceral, and less mindless. Thoughts?
This is something that's been talked about broadly a few times already on the forum. My feeling is that combat should feel more like TA's. What was really cool about TA was that you had proper frontlines where units often didnt die instantly due to greater resilience, wreckage and not super-accurate/super fast fire. Although some tier 1's did die easily it was balanced so the weak tier 1's were faster than say the rocket bots who were tougher. This combination and having a base meant you had a feeling of being protected where the frontline was something that moved gradually in games. Even when you had really tanky and powerful units however they were balanced by being really, really slow and it didnt make T1 units any less useful. Im sure they will balance combat etc. but it's the creation of proper warzones in contested areas that made TA so awesome with missles and rockets flying everywhere. This is in contrast to something like StarCraft where battles are over in around 3 seconds usually. I suppose I really appreciate TA's almost 'lazy' approach to actually destroying other units in order to create a better atmosphere of conflict. Total Annihilation Edit: Also if the ground units were a little bit slower that would be decent I reckon.
turroflux, my thoughts are that you are a genius and have exactly put the finger on what can make battles so interesting, yes I would like for radar to deliver a much more obvious advantage than it currently does, as most people don't even have to bother and can fight just about as well without any radar.
+1 well argued, turroflux. These are great ideas, and the images illustrate some great concepts for making combat more interesting I'm mainly waiting for the AI/pathfinding to improve so that the tanks move more realistically instead of mushing together into a blob and sliding around :lol: joys of alpha!
Alpha priority is game functionality, once we get to Beta balance will play the biggest role so I encourage you not to throw away those ideas, but right now they're not doing much good.
This is a well presented idea and I do believe these sort of ideas will be implemented Late Alpha/Early Beta.
While that is true, game devs work on different things, not everyone involved in the planetary infrastructure are involved in combat development. I think the fundamentals of combat does belong in alpha, and if anything requires more fine tuning then anything else.
Thing is, if Alpha has to ensure functionality and that doesn't work then nothing else will. Besides, they're already balancing whatever feels right at the time and its gonna take a bit more time to see any major improvements in combat and balance, thus right now pitching ideas the devs may have considered a while ago wont get much attention. Lets not forget they're the TA crew, they knew what to do long before we even started playing.
The devs aren't looking for input for the code, and these forums are not for bugs, glitches or any malfunction. They look to these forums for game play changes and development, its pointless to ask for them to finish the core coding of the game before anything else, Uber know exactly where they need to go to get the infrastructure in place, but base combat philosophy and design discussion is needed at all levels of development, from kickstarter to post game release, and this is the designated place for it.
Another +1 from me. I think I mentioned this a couple of times in other threads that I want to see combat much more like TA. I'm sure this will eventually be taken into account once balancing starts - I think they're just trying to get things working at this stage.
