Air, Orbital and Nukes Vs. Land, Naval and Big Guns - What is the core of PA?

A well thought out post EB, though pointless nonetheless.

The devs have already stated that there will be options for turning units on and off at the start of a game. If you feel a game is unbalanced, then turn the unit(s) off. Also, the mod community will no doubt address issues that they perceive as unbalanced.

There is no point complaining until the game is released, then it will show the full scope of Uber's vision...untill then, it is pointless as it isn't finished yet

As I already posted, uber has specifically asked for feedback, that's why the beta is being run (along with bug hunting). Ultimately you are right that people will mod the game to fix unbalances, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't attempt to get uber to adopt the change first (so that it affects everybody), especially if it is something that improves gameplay.

Edit: If you wait for them to already release the game before you complain, its kinda too late. Especially if its a core issue. If I were making a game, and everybody sat silent about something that was wrong until I finished, and then they told me how horrible it was, I'd be pretty upset they didn't tell me sooner.

I really wish people who discourage discussion would be discouraged to discuss.

Edit:
Huehuehue

This post is meh.

The main thing that's going on here is you're expecting the balance of a finished game for a game that doesn't even have half of its unit roster.

Hang in there. There's lots to be added to the game

SupCom was a finished game and air was imbalanced in that (compared with how it dominated land/naval).

And this isn't SupCom.

PA has a long way to go.

At what point do we stop saying PA has a long way to go and start saying PA only has a short way to go?

Gunships/

It's fantastic to observe the number of people hanging out in this forum who DON'T want to discuss the game that the forum's sole purpose is to discuss. Anyway, Nice post, and I actually agree with your complaints EB, even though I'm not sure about the solutions. I don't think making air, and especially orbital into mainly recon is going to improve the game much, but making them interact more with ground and naval rather than making combat on the surface obsolete is something that I consider very important, even in late game. As for game enders, we can't avoid them (nor do we want to) in a game that's all about blowing up planets, however I would prefer the game enders to come a lot later in the game, than seems to be the case now

Build fighters problem solved, if this thread was made 2 months ago I would recognize the problem, but in all the games I'm playing these last two weeks it is tank spam ftw, won my last three games by having 30 factories pumping out tanks. Didn't matter if they nuked me as I would just rebuild everything in a minute, always have umberella coverage if I see they go for orbital so to not worry about weapon satallites.

I'm not complaining though, I love C&C and RA and tank spam was hellafun back then and it is hellafun now

If you have nothing constructive to say, why are you even on the forums?
You don't wait for a to be built house before you tell someone you want a completely different layout. Taking a sledgehammer to the final game is not going to fix everything.

The simple problem here EB, is your post has come at the wrong time. You join the ranks of many, MANY other posters who think the game has balance issues; probably because it does.

(There are already tons of balance threads btw).

You rightly say in your original post you know this is beta, and many thing are subject to change. Your arguments are almost totally based on game balance, but how can we discuss balance issues when so much of the game is still to change?

Using your house analogy its like you're trying to get the feng shui of the furniture in the rooms right before you even know where all the rooms are going to go, and to compound matters someone else is building the house and your not privy to all the plans.

I haven't actually seen one argument you've put forwards which needs to be fixed before we have all the unit roster and game mechanics in the game. The potential solutions are hardly 'taking a sledgehammer to the final game' either.

That said, while I don't agree with all your ideas, you do have some valid points. Perhaps if you still feel like they are an issue once we have the rest of the unit roster/mechanics in, then would be a good time to revive this thread or put your ideas into a dev lead thread which I am SURE will crop up once they feel like we have reached the balance stage. I haven't seen Uber engage with any of the balance threads (even the big balance discussion) and I think that is simply because they don't feel the game has reached a point where balance has become a priority yet.

As Brian said before; "Hang in there. There's lots to be added to the game yet."

And hey, look on the bright side - at least your major complaints are potentially transient (there is most certainly going to be a time in the future where game balance becomes a very high priority for the dev team and you will get your chance to say your piece); my major complaint is scale and I think we both know how screwed I am there .

If your house is built on a swamp it doesn't help how much you will reinforce the walls later when the foundations sink. There really are lots of balance issues that cannot be solved by fine tuning the mechanics. However, I don't see the whole problem here.

SupCom wasn't all about spamming air. You needed to spam air defences, but after that you had many strategic and tactical options to use. Overwhelming the enemy air defence was one of them but not the only one. Defensive air was always cheaper than offensive air so if you knew to expect an air offense you could defend against it succesfully while still having resources to use on your own counter-attack with different units.

Balance isssues and unit rosters are the key here, not the existence of air units. What I would personally want is a balance and mix for a true combined arms warfare where it is not about air vs tank vs bots vs sea type paper-rock-scissors game but about building effective combat units with combined firepower. That makes a whole lot deeper level of tactics and strategy, and it is way more "realistic" as well.

A lot of these issues have to do with planet size.

I used to run GW table top games, and people rarely understood how much table sizes affected the game. A 50% increase could make a great game extremely boring. The issue was that a lot of units were not relevant at a particular scale.

TA also had many similar issues. A lot of TA maps were designed specifically to compensate for some of those issues. Very large metal maps had high over lapping plateaus which would insulation mobile ground forces from artillery.

Large maps are less likely to encourage early ground war-fare aggression, but provide more resources and encourage the construction of more resilient units like battleships and Krogoths.

I agree that flakk AA might help.

I also think that a commander 'Hunker' command would be very nice.

Keep in mind that larger combat zones reduce the overall impact of nukes to a smaller percentage of enemy forces. Nuetrino has also discussed the need to improve the range of anti-nukes.

Further on balance, Nuetrino has discussed the need to iteratively improve the balance while looking forward to other strategic options as well. He has said that Brian F. is working on new units/strategies. Honestly, some balance changes are extremely easy to implement. Is it possible Uber is waiting for Scathis to get to a resting point with Toy Rush?

A commander ability to 'Cloak' like the original TA could have an immense impact on the flow of late game, because snipes would require destroying a significant amount of enemy energy generation to expose the enemy commander.

I think there are lots of balance problems in PA which need more than 'fine tuning' but I am very sure Uber will do what it takes to ensure that they get sorted; I also don't think there is anything in EB's post that is so bad Uber are going to have trouble fixing it later.

My point was simple; it doesn't look like Uber are even close to being in that phase yet and posts like this are just going to get lost in the depths of the forum. EB has some good points but they should be brought up at the proper time when solutions are more likely to be forth coming.

I think you misunderstood the house analogy too... The units, structures and their balance are the superfluous bits which go inside the house. Its easier to sort them out once its built and you have a full picture of where things could go. The foundations are the game engine itself, and if those huge huge games which started cropping up on the forums are anything to go by, they are rock solid.

For the record guys, I'm not calling for the omission of air, I think it's an intrinsic part of gameplay - the same applies to orbital (though I'm not hot on orbital combat shaping up to be another version of Air - it needs definition and I'm positive Uber will give it that in time; it's a completely new idea to mould, after all).

I concede that we're waiting on many more units, such as mobile T2 AA and Flak - and that if balanced correctly, these may allow a ground army to take out a couple of dozen bombers and actually traverse the map.
However, I had a lot of games ended in SupCom by somebody making 50 T3 bombers and sending them on a suicide run through my T3 AA and shields. Said bombers also made turtling worse, so that your only real counter was "spam more fighters". I'm generalising, I know. But you have to agree that this was the dominant style of play; go Aeon and get those T3 fighters churning out or it's GG. And it's this style of gameplay which is occurring in PA.

Therefore some of these issues are not just balancing tweaks, they have to do with what we define air combat as - do we want easily spammable swarms of air units which can swoop in and destroy commanders, or should air be a marginally more valuable investment, used to make ground and naval assaults more effective?
Cheap swarms reduce the need for cheap land units, making the real combat a numbers game on a featureless grid above the terrain, which detracts from the "Strategic" element in Real Time Strategy. All you are left with is Real Time race to build more fighters.

I'm wary of bunkers - this only encourages further spamming.
A commander cloak smacks a bit of what Uber were trying to avoid when they didn't carry over the commander upgrades from SupCom. Also, as the reconnaissance needed to reveal a cloaked commander would likely be Advanced Orbital Radars (unless somebody can think of even more advanced than 'T5' radar), the problem of orbital fighter spam remains.

I agree that planet size will heavily impact upon the feasibility of air, particularly in smaller planets with a bot blitzkrieg. However it's in larger worlds that I'm concerned the investment of a large navy or army will not be worth it - why assault an entire base with battleships when you can secure yours with a couple of hundred tiny fighters, and then safely churn out bombers to go on suicide runs, all the while nuking any approaching enemy force?

Edit:
Also, on house analogies!
Foundations: Foundations. I agree, the game is shaping up brilliantly and is working really well.
Rooms: Land, Air, Naval, Orbital as general concepts as they function in gameplay, and their order of importance - This is what we are discussing, with some overlap into...
Furniture: Individual units in said rooms.
That said, fortunately we have a fairly open plan house, and rooms interact with each other.

My issue is that air in SupCom, and the Beta as it stands, takes precedence over land and naval by being so cheap and having spammable fighters. It's like putting your sink in the living room.
Bottom Line:
Yes, it's really important for gameplay to have aerial combat, but not at the expensive of the tanks, bots, navy and giant guns which are at the core of gameplay. Look again at those trailers in my OP - where is the combat we like to see?

A well designed unit roster is half the balance of a finished game. Unfortunately this takes a LONG time to figure out and isn't something that can be reasonably slapped on on last minute.

Where is the combat we like to see? In development.

The game isn't finished.

The game still has a long way to go and pretty much everything in your original post can be explained by game balance and beta.

You admitted that you know the game is beta, but then you want the game to behave like it's a completed game.

Just hang in there and wait for the game to be closer to being done.

i thought that this was the whole idea of the catapult, being much smaller missiles with a little splash, that you have to build. If nukes need changing, they need to cost more.

Having watched a 50 player multiplayer map between teams of 5 air isn't balanced it's too weak so ummm we can't say something is OP until we all get the chance to do stupidly big games