Gameplay, Units & Balance

What he said. The only "other guy" that has done much work on this, was me. And almost all working closely with Scathis with whatever few minutes could be grabbed from him. And this sort of thing simply isn't my area of expertise. Doing good balance is a rare skill.

I cannot express in words how glad I am to even get the extra hours he can slip in to help whip the balance and unit roster in to shape. The game we played today (Processing right now up on YouTube, I'll post when it's done), is the most fun game I've played in quite some time.

way to go guys. We where so calm and patient. Then you stormed in like parents claiming we are having a second christmas this year. The office is once again all roudy over PA.

What about removing potent defenses? That's what deters people from building real armies. I'm not suggesting we get rid of them, but remove them to see how people behave, and then reintroduce static-d in such a way that they stimulate player behavior in the right direction.

I'm going to speculate that this is going to be an expensive AoE repair. Because repairing individual units is kind of... negligible? Maybe with the new area commands we'll see something interesting. How will this be any different than current engies? I'm guessing these new units are going to have more survivability and less build options.

How did you guys address the micro issue that seems to come up? If you give us units with a high threat level value so that towers lock on to them, this will only encourage defenders to micro their towers. If you guys give us large units that can physically shield tanks by getting in the way, then that encourages the attacker to micro his army, unless we get formations.

Post Holiday Mayhem, now posted!

10:05, I had chills all over my body.

Should be a TransGate, as in Transport-Gateway.

This all sounds awesome, I can't wait to blow up the pretty new units!

WOW. HUGE update! Love it!

the gate flashing into existence in the end there was fantastic. Great watch for my lunchbreak...Annihilation makes pulled bison sandwich more delicious.

Those are some nice changes, and I look forward to seeing what new units you guys come up with!

One balance change that needs to be made though is with the advanced missile ships vs battleships. A friend and I had a fight the other day where he had destroyers and battleships, and I had destroyers and missile ships, and I annihilated him because I targeted down each of his battleships with each missile ship while retreating from his fleet. The missile ships out-range the battleships; they always hit the battleships, and, they one shot the battleships. He lost about 10 battleships in a matter of seconds. They were then free to support my destroyers.

Given that the missile ships are cheaper than battleships, and are better at bombarding bases given their higher damage and range, there's no point in building battleships at the moment.

Yep.

I like this.
I'd be interested to hear more about the differentiation between Bots and Vehicles.
IRL infantry typically is more "squishy", slower and are more numerous than vehicles.
In TA, kbots mostly followed this as they were slower, had less health and could traverse terrain that vehicles couldn't.
I think cheaper(lower weight), slower bots with better slope tolerance from which you get cheaper DPS for cost and more HP for cost is a good differentiation.

I pretty much agree with what Ledarsi wrote here:https://forums.uberent.com/threads/vehicle-roles-design.42754/
He also describes Armored Personel Carriers, APCs, which could also be described as mechanized infantry.
I think mechanized infantry could be cool for PA. The transport could basically be a mobile factory that is generally faster than bots and allows you to deploy cheap infantry at a forward location and then retreat transports if the enemy is pushing you back.

Anyway. It is just one example of a bot-vehicle differentiation and I can see that some of these design decisions could be a bit harder to implement well while keeping the management of such diverse troops and tactics to a minimum.
Doxes with their high speed could still be kept as a fast raider which generally loses to tanks and light defences as it is currently.

That's awesome. I lost years of my life to modding Generals and have a real passion for how the air combat played. I'm ticked to see some of that team living on in another studio and glad the experience hasn't been lost from the game dev world.

I'd also be interested in seeing the developers intention with sea combat.
If you compare the ships to ground troops they are an order of magnitude larger than basic ground units.
I think this is a good thing. Some people don't.
Personally I really like the ship combat in the TA derivative game NOTA. Ship combat is highly positional as it is largely about outmanoeuvring the enemy so you broadside the enemy ships and pummel them with impunity.
Generally getting out a larger ship with bigger range will give you the edge but an unsupported battleship can easily be swarmed by hovers, bombed by planes or hunted down with submarines. I think that is a good design however as the scale of the engagement keeps growing much more in PA I could see a potential risk that sea battles in PA only comes down to the numbers of battleships that can be produced.
You do have about 5 potential different layers that can interact on sea though.
1. Underwater. Typically in games I have played only torpedoes are usable in this layers but more types of weapons could be introduced. Underwater units can typically only be detected by sonar.
2. Floating units. Can be hit by both underwater weapons and surface weapons. Detected by both sonar and radar.
3. Hover units. Typically can't be hit by torpedoes. Detectable by radar.
4. Air units. Detectable by radar.
5. Orbital units. Detectable by deep space radar?
Then you can even have units that can change layers like surfacing submarines or planes that can travel underwater.
There can actually be a lot of variety on the sea if done right.

Is the video showing tidal/wave action or is that just a post production glitch?

Also what is the blanked out button under energy orders going to be for?

These changes all sound interesting. I'm sure you're working on this, but with a heavier focus on "bigger armies" how do you plan to combat the huge lag spikes we see? I see this a lot playing one or two AI's who build massive armies as a default. I have a killer gaming machine with a EVGA nvidia geforce 780 + 32 gigs of ram + PA is installed on an SSD + (many other things suffice it to say, its a fast rig)... and I see mid to late game most often times 3-6 FPS making it almost unbearable to play.

What are you doing to enhance or make the engine more adept at running things at an even bigger scale?

You might see people building more defenses or large scale events to compensate for these issues.
e.g., I regularly nuke the hell out of the 'parts' of the AI just to reduce lag, but in order to keep playing.

Just saw that.. when I had commander and fabber selected. Probably just a bug in that case. When we run specialized tests like that, we do them in an environment that is not as stringent as our normal mainline environment.

I want to watch the video so bad! Damn you Calculus lecture!

Please confirm - did I actually see Garat take a lift vehicle to the lava planet and lift Scathis's commander up, only to be shot by Scathis's own orbital fighters?