The Importance of Inaccuracy

Well with micro like that, there is always going to be a little you can do all the time.

An adjustment here, and adjustment there all for the sake of small efficiency improvements, you can really help that its just what people do.

But of course like you said the little things can add up and cause actual major problems that are directly caused by micromanagement.

Leaving units to auto-attack vs assuming direct control (You will feel pain Shepard!) will always give an advantage to the micro guys against the macro guys. So, what do?

I feel like me must embrace the little things that the micros can and will always do (Because auto-doing everything is EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING) while also giving better tools to the macro players for macro stuff, not as deep as say zero-k who tries everything and leaves you with a complex and confusing interface but with enough that macro players can be just as good as micro players in their own ways.

It would be nice if units were innacurate by default, but if there were support units which made other units within there radius accurate. Alternately units within the range of friendly radar would get this benefit.

this whole thread (where it talks about radar) can be answered with this : https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...xed-land-radar-blips.49424/page-2#post-764593

I don't understand whats being argued here as inaccuracy as been a massive factor from TA to supcom and now to PA. It's a need and is a staple for any serious RTS simulation. Yes you can micro all you want in the early game state but if you want to win you need to expand and microing just becomes time consuming at that point (time being the only resource you will run out of). I agree with Ledarsi's point its indeed ''missing'' from the game.

PA, much less so, because of the whole one-hit kill thing, it makes it not really matter.

I wish units had more hp so we could savour the whole "the outcome's different each time" thing.
currently you can actually get a draw with two 100-ant armies.... a draw ! not one tank left standing. wtf?! don't you agree this is lacking compared to FA?

oh and TA didn't have simulated projectiles.

100 ants vs 100 ants should be a draw or very close to it, why not? It will depend on formation, but if they both just directly move into each other the outcome should be predictable and at least very close to a draw.

Also I was under assumption that TA had simulated projectiles.

Generally I agree with ledarsi. Even though my first thought when I read the thread title was "wtf stuff is so inaccurate right now". But that's the missing leading shots. We should get them eventually. Only then we can really rate how accurate stuff actually is.

no, not one tank left standing.... in FA you'd never have that because there was no pop-pop, and the reload times were longer so if two tanks shot at the exact same time (in PA this still works even if the time difference between the two shots is more loose) they couldn't mutually kill each other. also maybe because projectiles where faster.

On the other hand I have seen one bot kill as much
5-10 other bots. Now tell me which is more crazy.

I can remember t1 units killing each other in FA as well. Why would that be impossible? Or bad?

Also 1 t1 bot indeed could kill 5 enemy t1 bots in FA if it were well microed/lucky it got veterancy and veterancy actually made a pretty nice difference for bots, because it gave them a noteable hp regeneration.

In PA 1 bot can kill 5 other bots because the 5 other fail to hit the 1 bot simply due to missing leading shots. That will hopefully be fixed soon.

leading projectiles is a basic feature that like ui features and metal spot placement really should have highest priority right now -.-

"artificial" inacurracy like firing randomness by some degree can come much later, if at all. Why would future robots miss? They can calulate very accurately. Only if the target changes direction they would miss.

Or if the distance travelled through atmosphere is very long, like artillery shells.

I do somewhat agree with the OP.

Another perspective perhaps?

We're starting to see a fair number of smart munitions in our day and age. Artillery shells with GPS guidence as an example. Perhaps have two stages. In TA there was a targeting uplink you needed to fire at targets that were lit up by radar but not within your sight radius. Perhaps such a structure and being highly expensive could upgrade the accuracy of the guns so that they always hit their intended target. Without the uplink, dumb munitions are used and the projectile lands where it lands.

Like someone mentioned a long time ago, micro (or general unit management) based unit balance tend to break down when the scale getting bigger, and this problem might be more serious in PA considering the difficulty of multitasking across multiple spherical battlefields.

Advanced automations can solve this problem to a degree, but Uber clearly don't want them for some reasons,
so I guess they have to restrict the room of micro instead, by keeping the terrains simple, making the projectiles accurate etc.

The reason why they would miss is because they are mass produced cannon fodder. The fabricators sacrifice precision engineering for speed to get units into battle sooner and destroy the enemy sooner.

I don't see why all PA units and buildings should be super advanced and super high tech.

god dammit, now the community wants to take sim projectiles out of PA!

you're on the wrong forum folks! go to blizzard or westwood studios forum and ask for a next title in their franchises, but don't go trying to turn the familly of games that had the solution to their mess into another clone!

They are already using nano-lathing or whatever PA calls it. Complex designs are not anymore difficult to create when you're essentially 3d printing your buildings and units. Also, each building and unit is produced individually so mass production is not really existent.

You know the Saying "Fast Cheap Quality, now pick two"? A similar thing is at work here in PA. Not to mention that 3D printing is far from the magic-bullet of production than you seem to think it is. Despite 3D printers starting to be more widely available the entry level models are still incredibly limited. Even in the high end for any kind of large scale production "Old-Fashioned" methods like injection molding for plastics is still leagues ahead of and kind of 3D printing method.

Mike

Laser towers take the wind out of your sails. Lasers need complex high quality optics to work. Guns however need a tube with rifling to be accurate. At GPS navigation to the shell and it'll hit its target every time. Remember, we've been building rifled weapons for over two centuries.

How do you know? Laser towers don't actually shoot lasers(as we define them) but rather some kind of energy bolt.

Mike

Ok, how do you know the laser tower is an energy bolt and not a laser like it's called? Even if it is an energy bolt, that doesn't change the fact a gun barrel for a projectile weapon will still be one of the easiest items to be fabricated. The microchips needed to operate the robotics would be far more complex than a gun barrel.

A perfect gun barrel doesn't mean perfect accuracy 100% of the time. There are other factors that can't be controlled or predicted. The excuse that its a robot and it can think of all these things just doesn't work.