Worried PA playerbase is going to self destruct

The alpha isn't that micro intensive, you can still move swaths of units back and forth and take a two blobs of units via way points to attack both sides of an opponents base while you go around focusing on building more stuff (or spelling out your name in walls, what ever takes your fancy).

Too much automation can be a bad thing, an opinion of mine which does agree with your point, but with my magic predicting hat on I don't think we are going to see crazy level of automation. I won't bet on units spontaneously deciding to attack or fab spontaneously deciding to build. I want my units to follow orders so I can play out that little god like ego trip that makes the game fun. You get to a point with too much automation where your just watching the AI play. It should be my orders not what the game thinks the best orders for the meare.

Now more of a smarter interface and unit behaviour that allow you to implement your orders for the units more effectively I'm in favour of, but that's a middle ground and for me won't change the game play massively it will just let me manage a bigger battle more effectively.

+1

Finally someone who's opinion isn't "let my base build itself".

If you think the opinion of the 'automation will be required' crowd is to let the base build itself, you've missed the point entirely.


If you want an example to make it really clear how much of a challenge multiple battlefields will be, go ahead and try play two games of Supreme Commander at the same time.

Once you think through the implications of that, it becomes obvious that even with the fairly high level of automation polish (base templates, factory queues, patrols, etc etc) in Supcom, each copy of the game requires your full attention and there is none left for another battlefield. PA as a game will need an additional layer of automation - something along the lines of, if not more involved, than the original premise of the 'Sub Commanders' in Supcom. (they were meant to 'manage' your base at one point)

+1

I don't want the game to play itself. I am strongly in favor of automated defense and manual offense. I want to build my base, and I want to spend a lot of time getting it right, and I want to be able to go off and build more bases without having to babysit the one I just build.

Because you can't see the whole battlefield at once, it won't be possible to manage things the way you can in Supreme Commander, and no amount of quirky, suboptimal mini-maps and splitscreens will fix that. Instead, Uber will have to remove the need to be constantly watching the entire battlefield - I should only need to watch my established bases when they're under serious attack.

Perhaps things will play out differently when we get to play it but I still don't buy the argument.

Take the play two games of supcom side by side argument, to me this is is no different to playing one supcom game on a map with an impenetrable wall down the middle when you get given a commander on one side of the wall and a construction unit on the other side.

The topology will be a little more complex but the idea seems the same to me.

I agree though that you won't be able to concentrate on everything but picking where you do concentrate is where a level of skill comes in.

Agreed it's going to come down to a matter of balancing your attention and focus and being able to quickly hop from planet to planet. Remember if your playing against humans they have the same issue as you they'll be trying to deal with multiple planets as well. If your playing against several humans each on a different planet that'll be harder but still not too different from playing against multiple players in other RTS except if they're all on diff planets it'd effectively be like playing against a team of players with a very spread out base or lots of mini/forward bases instead of one main base. In which case you really should expect to get your arse handed too you unless you econ and ability is alot better than all of the other players.

How ever in a multi-planet Player vs AI game things could get interesting the AI's ability to simultaneously (as far as a human is concerned) manage several planets should make for some very interesting/difficult battles.

Personally I'm hoping PA will achieve the same amount of UI unit management polish that FA:Forever has, including some great ideas from Zero-K as well.

Then, on top of that, a brand new, never before seen system to take that fine grained control and give it the power to give broad high level orders - Forget selecting each factory in your base and managing their queues, you should be able to select your *base* and manage its queue. Stop worrying about rebuilding after an attack, just assign some fabbers to rebuild and the system takes care of the rest. Be able to assign a set of fabbers to 'construct power' and paint an area, and they build a perfectly spaced grid of power gens for you.

And so on.

That's why I believe it's well within Uber's ability to make these systems, it's just that the gameplay is going to shift especially in larger planets to interacting with the game through the high level system, not the standard 'micro-level' interface we have now.

I agree on this point, but very little of the rest of your post. Paying attention to a planet should obviously give you a distinct advantage on that planet - honestly, even if that were a bad mechanic, there wouldn't be a way to prevent it.

But players have to be given the option to not pay attention to every single thing. I'm not talking about auto base-building... I'm talking about well-structured alerts for offscreen attacks, automatic base repair by patrolling engis, and carefully balanced defensive structures that are hard to get through without a serious attacking force. In my opinion, that's all you need to keep it fun.

The point I'm trying to make is that the design focus of the game is going to shift. Right now Uber is basically making Total Annihilation on a round battlefield, just to test out their technology. Pretty soon it's going to become a game of its own with different design principles, and when that happens, we're going to have a rift in the community, where half of us just want Spherical Annihilation back, and half of us want to move forward.

I definitely +1 this, it is within the current level of technology, I hope it is within the current level of budget

Re: Worried PA is going to self destruct

/thread (imo)

Actually this would make sense. If you select your base and give a move order, all units incapable of moving are deslected, and mobile units+factories set a move order there. If you order an attack, all attack-capable units rally and then attack. With the entire base selected, all standardized construction queues are shown, with 2-3 bars for factories and 2-3 bars for Fabbers.

I like the way you think. UNIVERSE, THIS MAN NEEDS A MEDAL.

Wow, I'm a little astonished to see so much support for this idea - even though it's definitely going in the right direction, you're all failing to think like a programmer and see the key problem with the idea:

What's a "base"? Is it a cluster of buildings? What if there's one building a little bit further from the main chunk, is it its own "base"? What happens if two bases get so big that they merge together? What happens if the buildings connecting two "bases" get destroyed?

If you try and automate these sorts of things based on heuristics, the system is going to make some wrong assumption at the worst possible time and ruin your whole game.

This is the only effective way of managing bases over planets. The only question is will it be fun and comparable to the genre that this game currently has? It might disgust the ta/supcom lovers but bring more new people, or it might satisfy everyone and be a global hit.

My body is ready for anything!

Well, if I were a programmer, I would consider let players designate their "bases". How to base: Drag box over base, then hold down B and press a number key. Your base is now designated 'BASE X' in strategic/stellar view. From stellar view you can select a base and access its orders and queues.

You could overwrite bases too, so once you have expanded all over a planet and annihilated your first enemies, Bases 1, 3, 5 and 6 all become Base 1.

It's like control groups, but on an epic scale. A scale I actually care to use for anything but specops task groups lol.

Also, let's not forget that determining if entities are part of a group or not is a mature question in computer science. There are a lot if different ways it can be implemented efficiently. Furthermore, some of the features that the devs have suggested they want to include (and have already started to include) really do need some sort of unit grouping framework. At the moment AA towers will spread their fire to minimise overkill. This means they need some concept of a group, otherwise how would they coordinate their fire? Of course, with overkill, target selection can be the primary group distinguisher. However it means that part of the framework is already there for different types of grouping, whether player designated, or by the AI based on shared proximity.

And finally, theres a really silly assumption that a lot of the anti-AI folks tend to make. THey think of that one time that an AI companion in a game got in the way, and irritated them, both for impeding their progress, and breaking their suspension of dis belief. This is not an appropriate critique of RTS AI, because they tend to be useful far often than they are not. Do you remember raging that one time a unit opened fire on an enemy unit when it wasn't meant to? Put it in perspective. Would you rather rage every single time that the units just sat their like lemons and didn't fire back?

AI doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than no AI at all.

I think AA just "marks" enemy units, and if a unit is "marked", its priority is reduced in the eyes of all AA turrets. No grouping involved. It's kinda like how Aircraft would all travel in the same little compact blob in TA, then when they land they check to see if one of their buddies has landed there first.

Complex behavior through rudementary AI, one of the time where keeping it simple is easy in computer science.