The Vanguard Newsletter - Issue 2

Good point. Very hot, and frequent topic, on the forums that hasn't been addressed.

And there many many more suggestions rather than just kicking a player, which is one of the frequently rejected ideas.

There's a big issue with throwaway commanders in the army game type. Should be a topic that Uber is made aware of and discussed.

Nah, not at all. Our main focus is making a fun and awesome game. Period.

Well don't leave us hanging!

I've said this before and I'll say it again - PA is the first game I've enjoyed watching people play it. At first it was to improve my own play style, but now I'm also entertained by it.

I think it could be a serious contender in the eSports arena but there is still a lot of work to get it there

I think, watching games, it's always mezmorizing. It isn't like other RTS games where the base looks similar, it looks more like a Conway's Game of Life pattern. Being so varied in shape and intriguing in growth, it's the human flaw in it that makes it sort of interesting, decisions to do one thing or another and what speed to focus on what and what time to do what.

Playing it is more fun really. As a player, the other day, I watched a game decided on a commander flying up on an astraeus and after fighters bit into him it survived with 1/10th hp. The land army that game was eventually shifted, but two commanders were killed in snipes and that commander would have never survived had he been on planet before his army turned it around.

It is interesting seeing the "what if" scenarios. What if that commander's astraeus got shot down? That would have been an entirely different game and outcome.

EDIT: This is what I always imagine the nanomachines look like in the nanolathe.

I thought it would go from fun and awesome to strictly competitive play. So I was trying to get some clarification.

The way it was phrased it sounded like PA's focus was going to shift to mainly about competitiveness. Personally I found that StarCrafts II focus on e-sports decrease some of the fun of the previous ones. Like its focus on artificially high APM and maps having to be perfectly equal also having to constantly babysit units isn't fun. Perfectly equal maps take out the unknown element from strategy.

Wasn't sure what he meant. I did not mean that and they're not mutually exclusive.

The way it was phrased it sounded like PA's focus was going to shift to mainly about competitiveness. Personally I found that StarCrafts II focus on e-sports decrease some of the fun of the previous ones. Like its focus on artificially high APM and maps having to be perfectly equal also having to constantly babysit units isn't fun. Perfectly equal maps take out the unknown element from strategy.[/quote]

Okay, I agree, I hope PA doesn't go down that path, but judging from how much they are working to make the UI actually "user friendly" I'm sure they are heading down the right path already.

They're never going to take away the random maps we have now. they might make them more fair, but we won't lose them. It is possible that we could get symmetric maps as well as what we have now. You can always just not use those.

As far as APM goes, the idea that artificially high APM requirements and competitiveness go together is something that has always confused me. Most people that want to play PA competitively would rather have high APM not be a strict requirement. You will obviously do better if you can click faster, but you start to get diminishing returns at some point as your apm goes up.

Don't worry: We won't be seeing arbitrary 12 unit at a time caps for selecting units like in SC1. Making PA competitive means making the game fair and providing tools for the community to organize events, not restricting the ui.

I dont know why Uber went Beta when they still have {CORE} elements of the game to add.
Unless the definition of Alpha and Beta have changed, Alpha was about adding core features in, it is essentially "Unfinished" Beta however is just simply testing the game and hammering down the small issues and balance changes needed to "Finalize" the product.
It is coming along fine, and big updates every couple of months or so is pretty cool. More Streams as always =D

Please refer to Kerbal Space Program, Starbound, and Minecraft, to compare terminology of Alpha, Beta, Release, and Post-Release Support.

Those games use it accurately to what it is here. With alpha, beta, release, and post release support.

I still can't believe people still compare beta to the closed beta of a AAA publisher game. Where the game is finished 4 months before release but they want to leak gameplay videos of beta. *cough*ghost*cough* *cough*battlefield*cough*. Those betas are finished products held for a trial period of time, a reasonable definition sure but not the only one, while their alpha only ends when the entire game is done and there is literally no room to add anything after that ends. God forbid then you have their DLC, which they started making and sometimes I suspect finished pre-release.

Terminology aside, compare it to it's peers, indie games.

Thanks for all the information
Looking forward to the new launcher and more hooks/things for modding.

What you should take from this is Uber's intention to add features that help the competitive scene to grow. Things like proper spectating, ladders, named maps, mirrored maps.

To be clear: we don't view fun and awesome and competitiveness as mutually exclusive things.

And, yeah, liquius nailed it: the high-level competitive scene -- or eSports, if you will -- require certain support and features to grow. That's not our focus at the moment, you know? We're still building this game! And nailing its balance.

okay

I always felt, you can't play something competitively if it isn't a well built game, so that should come first. After that, with the level of modding this game will have, its mundane to put competitive features into it afterwards.

What I consider at this point, is that it is pretty neat it has bare engine functions that are exquisite for competitive games, such as chronocam and adjustable UI and so many hotkeys and so many open hooks to information. Most people worry that the game will allow too much information, yet if the server is so open you can mod good anticheat into it like a block for cheating information or a log of what information their client does collect, one would know in a competitive game if rules were followed.

I hope you are right, it's really a core feature that gave soul to Total annihilation combats.

When we started talking about wreckage and reclaim, they said they had barely started on it. That means you should expect it to be very different from how it is now.

Alliance will be like Team Mode from FA, where you have your own army and can only control yours, but also share vision and radar with your allies.

And Friendly fire is turned off, ofc. If your comm dies, you lose your army and are eliminated. Suddenly, commanders become your most important commodity.

Emphasis on AWESOME.

Im fully aware of what alliances are
Did you read what i posted before that?

My critic is about the violation of the general representation of the commander in teamarmygames