Ground combat is 1 dimensional. Can we get a megabot already?

(I'm sorry, I had to...)

Honestly, my final word is, as long as I continue playing as I do now, and while doing such your megabot in no way pisses me off, and I am not easily pissed off, yesterday I had a whole moon of mine carpet bombed with nuclear missiles and shook hands with the enemy, then the megabot is ok.

If the megabot pisses me off because I can not stop him like a blob of ants (and ants sometimes get in and sometimes don't, fair enough), then I will lead the petition to get it removed.

Generally, it doesn't need to start in the game in the first place. You are petitioning to have it added, and if added and sucks I will petition to get it removed. Why can't it be I petition to keep it out, and afterwards if you can make a "good megabot mod", you can petition to have it added? Honestly, it could go either way, but meh.

My problem with leaving it to a mod stems from my ignorance of how PA will handle mods to be honest. There doesn't seem to be any word from them on it as far as I can tell. If I make a game with my megabot mod enabled, will those without it not be able to play? If, by enabling any mod, vanilla players are restricted or hindered from joining or seeing my games then mod implementation of PA has failed IMHO and whatever I wanted the mod for will have to be in vanilla for it to get played. For me, the more I can get in the actual game without requiring a mod the more chance I have of seeing it get played with until i know for sure that mods won't fracture the player base of PA.

X-post from the unit ideas thread for added visibility. How about this?:

Name: Totally not a Krogoth
Role: Siegebreaker
Usage: This unit is used to establish beach heads on enemy worlds where there is no allied presence. Can't only be transported via teleport because it is physically too massive to carry on an interstellar transport and would not survive re-entry on most worlds.
Weapons: rapid fire, low damage, wide splash ground weapons and basic anti air capability (maybe basic anti orbital and anti-nuke as well).
Defenses: Buckets of health
Cost: Lots
Strong against: Large groups of tightly packed Ground / Naval / Structure units and bombers
Weak against: widely spaced Ground / Naval / Structure units, artillery, mass air units and orbital lasers

Basically this unit is strong vs large groups but easily dealt with on it's own or without other units as support, forcing players to diversify their ground army to other units besides this 1. Say it's weapon does 1/5 the damage needed to kill an ant but it has the splash area to hit 20 at a time if they are clumped. That means if they send a blob straight at this unit alone it will all die to 5 hits, but if they send 1 at a time or surround it they will still only die after 5 hits each. That makes it great at attacking a turtled base that has been left alone to stockpile, but not good to use in a more prolonged, tactical fight without support. Mass air would also be a problem for this unit to deal with alone. Good for defending the gate you make on enemy planets against raiding squads until you get an established base. Maybe if it's cost is crazy you can add an anti-nuke launcher and mini-umbrella on it to give it all the utility needed for establishing new bases when nukes and orbital swarms are prevalent and giving basic ground armies some defense against those things when these guys are sprinkled in. Also good for the front line of assaults to soften the enemy for the waves behind it and to soak the artillery fire on the way there.

I do think there is a place for a beachhead unit. On first glance, the only real change I would make to that is to have it be unable to do anything on the planet it starts on. Give it a krogoth gantry that is more like a nuke launcher in PA, so that when it finishes it sits there on top of a rocket, ready to launch. When you pick a spot on another planet, it launches and flies there on a one way trip. Antinukes need to shoot it down on its way in, or it will just be sent to land on top of a commander. This keeps the megabot focused on opening up routes of attack on other planets, while keeping it out of normal combat.

Big guns and HP do not make a unit epic. Important game defining roles make a unit epic. Very few experimental units across TA and Supcom 1||2 qualified.

Some super roles were neat gimmicks. A submersible aircraft carrier avoids all the hazards of air travel, for example. A mobile factory or lethal tractor beam are pretty nifty indeed. But most of them were dull. A "10 times larger assault bot" is not epic. A "land ship with naval guns" is not epic. A "giant space laser" is not epic. To put it simply...

If you can accomplish the same goal with multiple smaller units, then it does not have an epic role.

Siegebreaking is a role. It cannot be filled by smaller units, they die too fast.

idk the as-yet-unmodelled-untextured-and-no-effects flamethrower tank seemed like a good siegebreaker in the recent dev streams.

It very well can be filled by smaller units, as a units size does not determine it's role or stats.

I never claimed the Megabot had to be physically big but as someone else pointed out as a general rule its best to give units with more hit points a bigger model to reflect that. I know nothing of the new units, so maybe this is a role that has been filled. Who knows?

See, this is exactly what I don't want to happen. BTW, how is this megabot NOT one dimensional? This is BY DEFINITION one dimensional. As you move to the right in size and cost, damage and health increase.

1 Dimensional.

A multi-dimensional approach would be having units that support other units, not replace them.

balance/unit patch is out. It will fix every thing ... I hope

Asteroids are siege breakers, are they not? It's utterly lethal and unblockable(different from uncounterable), everything you need from a siege breaker.

A unit that shoots other units in battle qualifies as 90% of everything in any game ever. Why is this big unit any different from using a lot of smaller units? (Hint: a secondary power like going nuclear and dropping independently from orbit would help)

So I guess I was wrong when I liked those units.

Why (mobile land) experimentals indeed add depth:

Firstly, one cannot replace many in a game where battlefront is 360 degrees and teleporters and unit cannons exists. Right now only thing that matters is quantity. All the individual mobile land units don't really matter that much. If there were experimentals also quality would matter more. With expensive unit you will have to build it long time until you get rewards, which is risky. Building smaller units gives you reward for your costs almost instantly, which means losing an army is never very risky, your factories are bumping new units all the time to replace the fallen ones. But it is damn risky to wait 10+ minutes (or whatever minutes depending on the size and power of that thing) building an experimental if your opponent is building small units all the time. And you definitely don't want to lose this giant for a stupid reason. Risk vs reward decision.

(Oh yeah I'm only talking about land battles, which imo should be the main thing anyway.)

You can trust radar less with experimentals. Is that one blib tank or giant bot? Is one of those blips giant? Is your opponent making an experimental from a gantry right now?
Do I have enough defenses for such thing? Omg I'm scared. That's what experimentals do, they make the game more scarier.

Land battles aren't all about spamming factories anymore.

Also note that most of the experimental's problems could be solved with unassistable (or weakly assistable), expensive (and probably low hp) gantry. Also note that there is no veterancy in this game.

And you should be happy knowing that your enemy actually sends his "monster" towards you and you can actually return fire, unlike with nukes etc long range stuff.

I for one would like to see "Mega" units similar to those in supcom. I have always loved the larger more powerful extremely costly units as a strategic option when playing. That being said, I honestly do not see the problem people have with them. I was able to stop 20+ of these with defenses and/or armies. Granted I used mods that added in defenses that could deal with them but I could stop them. I say that as long as there are a few ways to stop them put them in. You could always make super units fill the role of base/planet/heavy defense cracking units aka siege bots.

A question: what was the total resource cost of the experimentals that you faced, and what was the total resource cost of your defence?

The Bolded section more or less makes your entire argument void.

Mike

You guys know its not just as simple as looking up the units stats and changing the line;
Role=Seigebot

If you make a megabot and its good at lots of roles because of any number of reasons resulting from high stats, Then people will spam it and play with little or nothing else but what is needed to keep these megabots alive.

I believe really people just want to see large giant robots walking around the surface of the planet, and that's fine.
But the meta people, those who wish to preserve the fun and balance to the game see obvious problems with such units that came from the last generation of TA style game megabots.

The larger units don't always have to be more powerful, sometimes they should be more vulnerable and demand the protection of stronger clusters of T1 and T2, Imagine a large unit that could carry small units under its belly and travel larger distances quicker protecting the units it carries until they can be dropped off and used. Maybe the larger unit is never intended to survive but instead in a reverse to normal thinking, is used to protect the smaller ones so they can get close?

I would hope you guys take your time as much as i'd love to have the finial release atm you guys have done a great job with content and i see nothing but great ideas in this series.

im extremely content with out "experimentals" just mass spammed and walked"or spawned" into your base little to no effort.

If for some reason the pages are turned and Megabots "experimentals" get put in the game maybe there will be extreme limits like 1 per factory " more in storage" but only 1 out in the field at a time per factory and only 2 allowed in field at a time per planet "no exceptions" not a solo unit so not completely over scaled like SupCom 1-2 but there for support like maybe a healing mist or aura to boost armor, maybe deflects specific types of fire for up to 2 shots per unit once every 20 seconds amongst many many other things.

But as i said im very happy with the game and not looking forward to completely over scaled units the more units we have to choose from the better i think we all are better off as a community in public games or Clan Vs Clan if things stay neutral and not Megabot spam.