Buildings - and, in fact, units as well - are too large relative to the planet sizes. If one puts an Advanced Naval Factory in an ocean, for instance, this factory looks to be kilometer-long and takes up most of the sea. The same goes for buildings on land. It is not only an aesthetic problem, it is a gameplay problem as well: There is so much mass available that if one attempts to build enough factories to actually make use of all this mass there actually isn't enough room and one will end up covering the entire planet in buildings. Please consider reducing the footprint sizes of the units and buildings - it would give a much more 'epic' feel to the game, a field in which SupCom with its immense map sizes currently leaves PA far behind, even if it's PA that takes place across an entire solar system.
Although I agree with this, and I do think all land based factories should have their sized reduced (Units never take up more then a tiny fraction of that pad!) aswell as everything naval (And faster!), I'd like to point out that currently metal is just too plentiful, so it's near impossible to use it all up anyway.
PA doesn't aim for realistic. It aims for awesome. Balancing the economy has not yet even been started (as it was mentioned in last friday's livecasts), though I don't agree that it would not be possible to consume all the metal production that you can get from a planet. You just need to build more fabbers to assists the projects. I've had a factory producing fabbers to assists an orbital factory producing orbital fabbers to assits an orbital fabber building orbital lasers. It takes some time to build enough build power to use over two thousand metal per second, but it's possible.
I think the issue is less about awesomeness and more about clunkyness of having all the unit producing structures too large that they take up too much space for gameplay reasons.
but how small are the planets you are making? the optimizations lately have allowed for me to have 5-6 ai play on 1200 sized planets with lots of room to breath. When unfolded, this would be a much larger map than any Supcom map.
This has already been a very, very intensely discussed topic here. You could read more about it than you ever wanted to. A number of people (and maybe some forum member named tatsujb) have brought this to Uber's attention, and for the time being, things are probably going to stay the way they are. Main reasons as I understand it: The larger planets, which are still relatively small, eat a crazy amount of RAM. This means for the time being, planet sizes won't be getting much larger than the mid-1000's most likely. At that size, if you wanted to increase the size of mountains/plateaus/etc, they stick out a huge amount from the planet and look cartoonish. I don't know why, but making all the factories and units smaller and leaving the planet size as is has the same RAM chewing effect, so it will probably be a bit before the scale you're looking for is introduced into the game. Again, this is just my understanding; I haven't even read that entire thread (it's long as you can see), so I'm probably wrong about a few things.
"Awesome" is indeed what it's all about. Currently, the building footprints make PA un-awesome and un-epic. Reducing the size of buildings would make the game feel more like SupCom where you are on this really mind-bogglingly large battlefield (but even more awesome since you now have an entire solar system to play around in, making things even bigger). Currently, PA feels like you're in the sandbox in the backyard. Edit: Polaris, thanks for the link, I did search for the topic but came up empty.
There has been a long long long discussion topic on this. Everything must boil down to gameplay. If we make everything too small, then it'll take units forever to get from point A to point B. Also consider that we'll be getting much much much larger planets in the future. So the main thing is rather simple. Our current planets are EXTREMELY small compared to what we will be able to play on. Let's wait. Uber has a grand plan.
How big is that planet in your sig Brian? 3,000+? I'd be pretty happy with a big planet being that size (with a decent number of players of course).
I'm pretty sure it is 3,000+ on my sig. And keep in mind that planets grow exponentially. So a 3,000 radius planet has more than 3 times the playable space of a 1,000 radius planet. I see the arguments for both sides regarding unit sizes. I think it's a little too early to tell.
I think the building sizes, are fine but I wouldn't mind the unit sizes being reduced by a bit. I think it would add scale to buildings , instead of having a few bots that are the same size as the factory. Would make them look like power houses, instead of a launch pad with a green squirter. Also I mean it already takes forever for units to move on larger planets (1000 radius 1v1) so in either case (current size or small units) I personally think some kind of multi unit transport is needed.
I actually like size of the structures, few could be even up-sized, like SSX orbital laser could be twice as big - most powerful orbital unit and its smaller than advanced radar and is easily overshadowed by fighters and anchors ! Also true is that metal it too plentiful in later game (I don't remember to had metal shortage at all), default metal spots output should be reduced... maybe commander could hold more metal by default, so it would not impact much during first minutes of the game.
