The scouting problem

When in doubt, resort to ad hominem attacks? I don't think I want to discuss this topic anymore with you Arachnis.

I stand by my previous comment; ' Good ' players should not be measured by their ability to micromanage handfuls of units. Likewise they should also not be measured by how well they manage their economy (that is not macromanagement in any terms other than Starcraft)

Good players in Planetary Annihilation should be measured by their ability to formulate and enact large scale strategic decisions effectively and efficiently.

When you lose it should be because you have been out thought, not out played.

Micro is not equivalent to military tactics. Micro is not being the overarching intelligence behind the military, but the player becoming the intelligence of individual units and giving them an unreasonable amount of instruction, which is replacing their training and common sense.

It wasn't ment to attack you, rather than to elaborate my poimt. And I said that strategy and macro should be and always will be the focus of this game. Again you just glazed over it. But micro can and will always be able to give you an edge in combat.

And I'm 100% sure that it will stay this way. Because the game is just built up like that.

And if you don't want to discuss this any more, then just stop posting...

Predicting a result for a single game when the result is binary(win/loss) is flawed.
You need a series of games for that and even then the result might not reflect the "true" players skill.

It depends on the design of the rating system. If you just have simple system which gives you more points if you defeat a higher ranked player and less if you defeat a lower ranked player, the rating between 2 players will settle on 2 different levels dependent on the win/lose rate.

If everybody play everybody else you could still win the tournament even though you lose some games or a few sets if you have the highest win ratio. Everybody playing everybody is not always realistic though.
In an elimination tournament you might not win the tournament if you lose a game or set.
Technically the "best" player might not always win the world championship.
Although it depends on how you define best.
World championships are usually what we define as being the best but someone could still be lucky and win it from a higher skilled contestant.

Err... but this is really off-topic.

I may have been confused about what thread I was in... thought we were in ELO vs True SKill.


I apologise.

.....Boom HeadshoT! BOOOMMMM....

this is all that comes to mind whilst reading this thread

dont you know you scout faster if you're carrying a knife?

Sooooo... back to the original topic... I personally like the whole randomness of scouting. You have to make a judgement call on what to do each game: Eco hard or go for a quick unit rush. If you let the player know which is the better option for sure based on even rough distance to the enemy it removes the whole mechanic from the game. The whole point is deciding if you want to do something risky with a ^ quick unit rush/eco hard. Which can either buy you the game or break it, the third option being a balance of the two, to give yourself a chance if the enemy is close equal to that if the enemy is far. Also players may decide to scout earlier or later, with more planes or fewer... all depending on how much eco they are willing to invest, what risks if any they have decided to take and how they have decided to play that particular game in general. The mechanic is very complex and it would be saddening to see it leave.

Scouting... if my opponent is miles away on a large planet who cares if I don't find him for a few minutes. The only problem I have is when he is found by my scout is finding that spot where the scout died.

I'm sure notifications will help, but some kind of glowing out line of newly discovered enemy buildings even if I don't have them in radar might help. Basically some better visual cue of "I saw enemies here" which disappears once you have radar coverage

arachnis man, I don't think you are discussing this, you are debating this. That means you are not listening to peoples responses, you are simply waiting for your turn to speak. We aren't discussing philosophy in general, we are discussing the approach PA is taking to RTS and it's different (and IMHO better) in many ways to traditional RTS games. PA is no doubt focused completely on macro and is only moving in that direction. Just as the stats on units will not stay the same from beta to release, so too will the level of micro required change as new tools are added to assist the macro game in PA. Regardless of how you feel about it, that's the direction this game is going because that's the scale of this game. Not zoomed in on some Warcraft 3 hero farming NPCs, but solar systems of bases and armies. That's the kind of game-play this game caters to. No one will ever tell you you can't micro, but if micro was a 100% waste of time in this game the Developers have done exactly what they set out to do in the beginning.

Good idea. Using what the game currently has, just set an air factory by itself with either patrol points after your first scout to continue scouting by itself whenever a scout plane is built, or an area command over the previously scouted location to patrol whenever area patrol is added.

Then you just have to remember to occasionally build 1-3 scouts from that air factory every so often. They just kind of do their own thing.

You can already see permament memories in fog of war if you saw structures before a unit died. You see dark fog of war, but with enemy structures in the dark area. As far as that goes, the game has notifications, and it definitely needs "first contact" to be part of the notifications, as well as when you click a notification you snap to location (in this case your scout).

It's "more important" in the sense that if your macro is wrong, micro won't save you, but macro is not where your focus is supposed to be.

AOE, C&C, Starcraft -- these were all games where your focus, as a player, was meant to be on issuing detailed combat instructions to your units. "You 10 attack this and this and this and this. You 8 attack this and this and this and this..." That was your major time sink.

PA, TA and, oh, maybe Battle for Middle Earth 2 are the opposite. Your focus, as a player, is meant to be on higher level strategy. That's where you spend most of your time. If you spend most of your time issuing detailed orders to individual units then I hope you enjoy playing on small maps because that's all you'll ever be good at.

Being better at Macro in Starcraftian terms is having better economy management, base management and production/upgrade management.

Macro in Starcraft has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the micro management of your resources and base, rather than your units. It's micro, but of a different sort.

I disagree that Macro, when defined this way, should be PA's focus. In fact PA should actively avoid it if at all possible.

It would help if PA was more automated where all that "numbers game" stuff did itself for you. As in the unit's not moving in dumb ways without you babying them, and the expansion not taking heavy amounts of clicking and time.

Besides "clicking intensity" not being a real factor of skill to decide matches, the real determinant of factors should be things like "was the enemy able to snipe your first t2 or nukes with bombers" or "were you able to hold back the enemy's large land army" or "did you see far enough ahead that the enemy had went for early t2 that you can react to the weak economy and snipe it" or "did you build spread out far enough to avoid nuke damage or did you spread out too far and are having trouble holding attacks". That kind of thing. Not "who had clicked more times in the same period of time" deciding which set of units beat each other or which player has better economy.

This is the one part of scouting that bothers me. And I know that:

Where I could see improvement is when you zoom out, you should be able to see the building icons and player color for each structure that you found. That way it's easier to find where the buildings you scouted are, without having to crawl over the map with a microscope till you find where your scout plane was destroyed by the missile tower.