poll: Paper Units

So you're saying babysitting formations against single units should provide a significant advantage. This is the exact opposite of your point.

If you can win a game when there's only a dozen units, why do you care how it plays when there's a hundred?

1 shot per second isn't that slow. A Dox can cover quite a distance in one second.

Which would be nice if there were any beefy units in the game. And your point is complete insanity. You are basically claiming it's easier to do something ten times in a row than it is to do it once. If this is true, I suggest you go into professional gambling with your iterative-probability breaking magic powers and get rich.

They can't be treated separately when they both reference the same number, namely time-to-kill. If a unit can't disengage, it can't run-by, and low time-to-kill means disengaging is impossible. If you have a solution to this, I suggest you post it.

Adding beefier, more expensive units is extremely likely in the future.

However the existing crop of units are extremely inexpensive. It's easy to forget that a mex yields 7 metal. As a result, a Dox (180 metal) is 26 mex ticks. Even a Peewee in TA was more like 40 mex ticks. And the units only start to get really durable at a much higher weight class than the Peewee, such as the Stumpy for about 150 mex ticks. Very durable units like the Goliath are more like 500 mex ticks. The current units are incredibly cheap, and must be squishy in order to have useful DPS properties.

The current units are very inexpensive, and very fragile. This is good. Adding bigger, more expensive, and more durable units is a solid next step. However this approach is completely different from changing the existing units to have more HP. Especially since they will most likely NEED a cost increase in order to justify a large group of such units being so difficult to destroy.

I am 100% against the idea of having such cheap units be more durable. Having huge numbers of cheap, squishy units is fantastic. But I am 100% in favor of adding more expensive units that are much more durable.

That is not what I said. I said you can counter micro with micro. If you micro carefully to stay just outside range to distract my units aim I can counter this by killing the distraction, by spreading out my units so that only one or a few units will aim at your distraction or by retreating so that my units will have more time to aim or simply escape all together.

It is rare that the game is decided when there are only a dozen or so units on both sides. Only when the players start in close proximity to each other and a commander duel is initiated can you expect the game to be decided so early.

The first point you made were:

90% overkill is gross exaggeration and doesn't apply at all between Doxes and Ants. Firstly, Ants take 2 shots to kill a Dox. Secondly, the projectile speed is so fast and units don't preaim currently in PA so the Ants have to be in a concave and already be facing the direction of the incoming Dox. Thirdly, if the shots from the first salvo shouldn't hit any other Doxes then they have to be spread out without entering the range of any other Ants before the first Dox which means that they are unlikely to use the overkill to their advantage as their formation is too sparse and takes too many losses before the Doxes can reach the Ants.

I'd say that overkill management is in most cases futile in PA as the units die too fast and units reload too quickly for the players to be able to manage overkill control even early in the game.

Overkill is actually something that punishes dense formations more as they are more likely absorb stray shots aimed at already dead targets and you can benefit from that by surrounding the enemy or attacking from several angles as you have a larger surface area and can spread out your units more.

Yeah, exactly. It is much harder to keep up kiting if you have to do it for a longer period of time. The thing is, if you want to benefit from kiting you simply have to kite more when units have more health. When there is more room for beneficial micromanagement the need for micromanagement also increases.

Anyway. Kiting is something that I'd prefer to be automated if it should be important in PA.

It is rather simple. You decrease the health of buildings. Now buildings can be destroyed much faster.
The counter to a run-by is basically intercepting and staying in range of the enemy units. I wouldn't like to be forced to manually micro my units to stay in range of every enemy unit as the enemy do run-bys. That sounds like micro hell. Although unit health could probably be increased 30-80% without making the raiding game that much more microintensive. However if you do this you basically change the whole balance of the game. Something that I think is a bit drastic. I'd rather see some beefy units added to the game.
They could even add some fast beefy units made for blitzing that are balanced by an expensive price and low damage output for cost.

So you're saying your so-called intelligent behaviour to reduce micro creates micro? I'm sure I shouldn't have to point out the problem with this logic.

The game is one with exponential growth. Small advantages naturally compound into larger ones as the game moves on. You don't need to score a commander kill to create a situation where you've basically won.

It was an example to show how decreasing unit health does not decrease micro. Stop dragging irrelevant situations in.

Planets aren't infinite in size. Kiting requires giving up ground. I'm sure even you can figure out what the impact of increasing the time it takes to successfully kite is.

If only units in TA had a "roam" option which did exactly what you want fifteen years ago. Oh wait, it did. And decreasing building health opens up a whole new can of worms, since it makes air units kill buildings much faster than they already do, yet you don't want to "change the whole balance of the game". Can you at least be consistent for two consecutive sentences?

It is your micromanagement tactic that require micro. Luckily it can be countered by even less micro especially if units preaim at the closest enemy out of range.

That is why I said "decided". Relying on micro-heavy tactics is only feasible during the right circumstances like if the players start in close proximity. If the players start far away from each other the game is very likely to progress beyond the point at which those micro-heavy tactics will actually "decide" the game.

Well it were a bad example from your part so feel free to come up with a new one that is relevant to PA.

It takes both more micro and more space to kite. I agree with that. I wouldn't mind this is if kiting were automated.

Roam didn't work well for this in TA. Units would only start following the enemy when they are out of range. Because of the acceleration this means even an enemy that have the same speed as the defender will be out of range most of the time if not all of the time. It is possible to make units smarter to stay in range better but you have to design the unit behaviour so that it is intuitive and/or that you can manually toggle it. In many cases you are going to want to intercept the enemy with slower units and if the enemy units have more health you might have to do this several times in a row in order to cut-off the enemy and score a few shots. This is something that is harder to program and conceptualize to the player if it should be automated.

Edit:I'm actually arguing for changing the balance by the introduction of new units. As for making buildings more fragile I think it could work. T1 bombers take way too long to kill mexes, pgens and basically any building but my point is that I don't think you need to shuffle the balance around by a general health buff to all units.