comparison to TA, supcom, supcom 2, starcraft 2 and the rest

I have played basically every decent RTS released. PA requires far far more APM than any other RTS or any other game I've played if you want to win. Right now the game needs to be changed to have less metal deposits and less fast energy production. If you think the game is fine and doesn't need less micro, then try playing against a very good micro player with alot of planets. You will see that you cant keep up with the micro they do and it will decide who wins the game, unless they make a big mistake. I love the concept of PA as far as how it originates from the TA series of games which I have loved. It requires far too much micro compared to all those games and any other game ive played to be competitive for people who are not on stimulants. Keep working at it DEVs. I respect what you're trying to do and what you've done. It just needs to be toned down some. We are still in beta and there is time to fix this aspect of the game before release. All of the other RTS games I've played are more realistic in terms of APM at the moment. One thing that has been done to improve the APM required alot is when the area build commands were implemented. I think things are moving in the right direction with the latest patch.

thank you. correct.

and also welcome to the forum.
such a thread has already been made, if you're curious head on over here : https://forums.uberent.com/threads/its-just-too-massive.55725/ I voiced my personal take on the matter, and if you look up some of my old posts like some on the radar blips thread for example you'll see I am firmly opposed to how bad a micro fest PA currently is and am trying to find ways to counteract this.

I would say that TA/SupCom and PA can and will always have micro that you CAN do, but you might not always have the time to do so.

I think this is not actually a gameplay issue. For games on a single planet it is just about right, if at all the early economy can be painfully slow and hard to get right.

The multi planet issue currently still is non existent in competitive 1v1, because so far nobody has figured out how to get an advantage via orbital play. Spamming t2 bots and t2 bombers is just so much more effective at winning, so it stays on 1 planet, which plays fine. All the people I play with 1v1 so far have not complained about "it needs to much apm", playing at maybe 100 to 150 apm. Which is pretty reasonable for competitive play.

However I can see that with the current UI the amount of work a player need to do to control multiple armies on multiple planets gets problematic.
But that cannot be fixed by reducing the economic growth. You would just delay the multi planet game, making the early and mid game painfully slow.

So reducing the amount of stuff a player can build is not the right way to go about this. We need a far better UI and I don't mean just a bit of polish, I mean completely new features that are build especially for this kind of multi planet play. Don't ask me how a perfect UI would look though. But I think Uber knows this very well I think, so I am sure good helpers in the UI will be found.

that's not even really a problem, that's the easy part. The hard part is having to be mrs. perfect mom and be everywhere at once (on a single planet, switching between planets is easy, being there at every face of the sphere, not so much) as you try to hold the hands of your 10 thousand kids.
You shouldn't have to do that!

being there and click-spamming the living begesus out of your mouse so that the engagement goes from potential 100% casualties on your side 0% on enemy side to the exact opposite.

....for every single damn encounter of every single second.

Units in Sup Com can take care of themselves, sure the outcome of the battle is a bit different if you use this or that small micro trick (which btw most of the time involves 3-4 move orders max), but in the end you generally don't freak out at every engagement because you intervening won't change it that much. Your job is determining whether to fight the engagement or retreat. each could potentially only take a single click.

In PA you can't even "retreat" there isn't even such a thing, by the first second of and encounter you've already lost half of your force. No way you're ever going to say : " right, I think now's the IDEAL time to show them my flank and then my hind-quarters, what's the risk?"

Well if you win a fight, but don't have enough forces to push into a base.

You are unlikely to continue to sit waiting enemy artillery firing range if you can help it.

I agree that PA uses a ton of APM, but I'm not sure Micro is the right word for it. Starcraft and Company of Heros have several manually activated abilities on their units and are designed so that the player who's personal attention is on a single firefight will win even if they are grossly out numbered. Placing individual grenades, rockets, activating stims, etc... that's a brand of micro that PA has managed to avoid entirely.

PA demands a huge attention span and a rapid APM, but I'm not sure I'd call it "micro". Nearly all of our clicking is (or can be) large scale commands. We have many tools, such as area commands, persistent orders, and looped build ques to help. I would like to see even more tools the enable us making macro orders, but I also think we have it better than any RTS to come before.

PA and FA are pretty close to each other in terms of unit control apm by now.
In fact I think currently PA 1v1s put a load on me that can be compared to a middle sized FA game. Completely okay.

in RTS lingo 'micro' gets the point across perfectly.

no, to me the two feel completely different. There is definitely no way you can leave a unit on a move order and hope that he'll get the approximate desired effect in PA.
Sure there's tons of micro in FA, it's just the level you have in PA is literally from another world.
I feel something's wrong when I face PA thinking : "I'll need a red bull for this" whereas in FA it was "I'll need to put on my thinking cap for this".

Well for now it might be good to have so many mets spots and so easy energy, so you can easier run all balance test "warfare" etc.
But you are 100% right that on later stage Uber should lower number of metals on planet/Moon etc as well as lower energy production or increase cost of energy usage per unit/building, firing guns/ operating mex extractors etc., so it would be harder to set up Uber eco/planetary def and way bigger loose if enemy decide to smash meteo on your Eco planet or just nuke your Eco position (energy production / metal extractions). As at the moment its so easy to run eco on just 1 planet or even moon, it should be more realistic like in TA that would required proper tactics if you owe only 1 planet and uber eco would give you only few planets/moons.
I know we are all in Beta and I know this game is massive and Uber scale but still Economy should be balanced alot the for greater fun.

Yeah, this thread was made, but anyway, I never thought it had too much APM or metal anyway, I remember infinite metal alpha and that was pretty ridiculous.

The metal was reduced once, maybe twice, since then.

However, I wouldn't mind so much the number of metal changed, so much as the metal income stay the same. Basically, lower the number of metal points, then proportionally increase metal income from remaining points, thus keeping income where it is now.

Generally, this sounds like it makes things easier. I just never understood the big issue, a player here unlike starcraft can queue up stuff within the first 5 minutes rapidly, then play real lax by just using queueing as cruise control and focusing on perhaps 1-2 areas of combat production (and 6 factories producing land army is considered a single area of combat, takes no time or APM or anything to automate factories to produce a blob)

Increased energy use on certain things really is a good idea to make them effectually cost something. Right now people spam and it doesn't matter because it doesn't use much power.

Apart from some still existing random path finding issues I don't think there is a difference between move orders in PA or FA. If you move a unit somewhere it will go there. That's it. I can't see how in PA you need to pay more attention. Badly placed move orders kill your units in both games.

no, In PA it's a game changer, in FA it's "oh dear no! meh, you've got more."

I do not agree this has more micro than TA or FA. The whole thing is the more time i can spend on micro because i done with macro, the more i can draw benefits from it, but i don't have to micro everything. Making the distinction between when to do what, when to trace your scout plane or lead your units around, and when to focus on economy and building is a fundamental part of the game.

TA, FA and PA share the trait that no matter how good i get, i can always get better. The games are so well made and hard that i can always improve. The very skill that is being tested is my ability to multi-task. The more i can do at once, the more eco or armies i can build and control, the more i can expand, the more planets i can be on et.c. the better it is for me. There is no cap on this other than what we as players and our machines set, that's exactly what i love about this game. I will always be able to get better.

Changing the scale of economy or amounts of units might change the pace a bit but the way the game is made the person who can be everywhere at once will be the one winning. That's how you play this game. You attack, defend, expand, build and scout all at once. It is hard, it is supposed to be hard, that's why we love it and IMO that's why we have one of the nicest and most intelligent gamer community i ever came across. This game asks a lot and is at the same time very rewarding. That brings a certain crowd, especially to the competitive side.

I'm with colin on this, looking at UI and controls is the way to go. Better overview and better tools to manage as much as possible at the same time, without dumbing down or scripting away the game from us gamers.

TL;DR? In competitive play, the apm will always be as high as it can possibly get.

sending your units into a pointless death is equally bad in both games.

I think multiple views will make multi-planet play much easier and reduce APM. Half my trouble is with the disorientation that comes with switching between planets with a single view, and you have to do it a lot. A second screen showing 4 other views that could be switched to by hotkey (or even used directly on the second screen in their small form) would be ideal for:

• Threat monitoring (aka noticing when an enemy arrives on your planet)
• Surveillance (aka monitoring the solar system or enemy planets with deep space radar)
• Checking all your fabbers are fabbing
  
• Noticing when your Astreus arrives somewhere
• Many other things

A lot of unnecessary context switching is removed and you can concentrate more on the game.

THIS. This x1 billion

now afterwards you get into how in anycase the pro players will always be high apm, and while that is somewhat true. It's not really the case for for FA.
In anycase what's sent through the throughput in that game's connection doesn't even take the surplus clicks that it can't take into account into account so there's already one reason FA is less micro intensive.

and then it's simply a case of gameplay and general control tools available to you. and how bad of a difference microing the units makes in each game.

I believe that a lot of the army micro complaints will be fixed with unit formations. Instead of super clicking your army around (if I'm visualizing it correctly) you should just use the proper formations and counter formations.

Another thing that I've noticed with a lot of the games that I watch is that NOBODY uses proper flanking maneuvers. All armies are sent in a strait line, I use my bots to move to the side of an army while my tanks hit them from the front. It takes 3-4 clicks and devastates any army.

you clearly arnt playing PA. you CAN retreat in this game, and perfectly well, just like any other game. What you have to realise is that anticipation of whether you can win a battle is what allows you to retreat, and that anticipation is a part of a players skill. PA also seems more of a 'fire and forget' with moving armies because PA is on the scale of multiple armies in multiple locations, with armies easily rebuilt.

so PA is less micro-oriented than FA?