So right now we have T1 and T2... No wait, that is not right. It's Basic and Advanced. But that still boils down to T1 and T2 because Advanced sounds like it is way better than Basic and is a tech level above basic. From what I gather this is not the intent of the devs. So instead of Basic and Advanced, why not go with Light, Medium, and Heavy? Lt/Med/Hvy by no means imply that one is better than the other, but rather hint at what the unit's stats are. IE: Lt units are fast low damage units (scouts). Hvy units are slow but do lots of damage (Advance tanks and arty units). And Med units are an even mix of speed and damage.
because thats not the way its designed to work. there is nothing indicating that an advanced unit must be slow, or fast or anything else for that matter. advanced units are just more specialised. the current t2 units slammer/leveller are not good examples of the devs thinking (as i understand it) as they are just beefier versions with the same capabilities of the basic units.
General Purpose (GP) and Specialised (Spec) might be better labels. But really, they're just labels. On an aside note, I personally like the large/small split. I don't think there needs to be any technological difference between tiers of units. It's wasteful to build a giant factory if all you're going to do is build little units out of it.
That is why the giant factory would be for Hvy units that have abilities that only heavy units can handle. Like long range artillery.
that would be actually the most logical solution, based on size relation between units and structures and the economic requirements. I would fit nicely as "what you see is what you get" and not some arbitrarily chosen distinction just for balance reasons.
The larger building is mostly to make them easy to recognise. You could just justify it (for lore) with "The units they make are more technicaly advanced and therefore needs more tools/equipment/processingpower/whatever nanolathe factories use beside nanolathe to make stuff and therefore are a bigger size then basic factories".
The reason the terms basic and advanced are used as opposed to tiers or light/heavy is because it's not going to be a matter of unit stats. The idea is that basic units will fill a basic role, hence the name, where advanced units have features that help them to fill more specialized roles. Many areas of the game don't work like this yet, but one unit that is designed like this is the sheller artillery tank, which is a specialized advanced unit, as opposed to the more general ant.
Why does it matter what you call it? The devs call it basic and advanced, the majority of us call it tiered, they both mean the same thing, so why would it ever matter? everyone understands what you mean when you call it either.
But "Basic & Advanced" dont realy mean the same thing as "Tier 1 & Tier 2". Since advanced units arent supposed to be more powerfull version of basic units (instead specialized units) they would be parallel tiers in a tier system, not tier one and two. (At least in my humble opinion, i admit that theres room for different interpetion of a tier system. But why use the tier term if they dont mean the same thing as in other games? It might needlessly confuse any new PA player).
It's usually better if light units are high damage and fast with little HP, heavy units low damage, slow and high HP and medium in the middle. Heavy units need to feel "heavy", you get that with slow speed and survivability. High DPS is well suited for fast units, because that's what raiders need. It's good synergy. In almost any RTS, fast and cheap raiding units have good DPS to reward raiding efforts. Dynamic gameplay is good. Obviously I'm talking about DPS for cost, as quite clearly a heavy that costs 10x more than a light unit will need to have more DPS than that light unit, but not 10x or not even 5x. And as heavys already get loads of HP, there's no point in making them too all-round by also giving them highest DPS. That's just making them too general and too strong. Units that are too all-round tend to be boring, because you can't emphasize their strengths. You can't give a heavy tank lots of HP if you also wanna give it lots of DPS without upping the cost too much.
What they're called doesn't really matter, how they behave does. Currently, they do behave exactly like T1 / T2, and Advanced units are a straight upgrade from Basic. I think (and hope) that this will change as more units are introduced.
Tiers has nothing to do with the individual units. Tiers imply that you have a structure of buildings, or units, that you have to follow to hit certain units. Advanced is Tier 2 because you need a factory to build a basic engineer, which is then used to build an advanced factory. I guess it boils down to the difficulty of getting certain units (time/resource wise), with tiers being defined as units with similar difficulty. Its not as simple as tier 2 just being a straight upgrade from tier 1.
Posting this just as a good reference to what UBER stands by for their tier system which I think makes a ton of sense. Skip to 44:45 for an answer to Tiers and what they mean at least to uber at least.
I wouldn't mind if they changed advanced factories to be the same build space, but t1 is bland while t2 has tons of pipes and circuits. T2 factories can be same size as now, just same build space as t1 and the rest the space as bulk cosmetic knicknacks. Ask for t2, t1 is all purpose army bulk, and t2 is nothing you can use by itself but a few in a group of t1 adds power or range. T2 is meant to not replace t1, t1 is used all game, to use t2 units only would fall flat because you cannot fight ants with artillery point blank and you can not even fluidly move levelers around the field so ants on the way to the base can just drive around levelers.
This is probably the route that uber is going down by adding that single fire laser tower, i bet it will kill a dox in one hit, but not an ant, meaning it's the 'anti dox' or anti raiding tower.
They could just change it to Basic, Enhanced, and Advanced. And obviously the next tier probably will be better than the last.
