I feel like the units lack... "soul"

I don't think looks, or animations or anything other that's cosmetic help with all this the least bit.

What helps their image is results. Just like an employee in real life. Ants and levelers alike go 'POP' like pocorn. what does that say about them? that they're weak. period.

If they fought a man's battle you could look up to them some.

but currently them one-shoting each other is just the sissy fight supreme.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/poll-paper-units.53458/

Creaking houses scare us. Every boat we built is a "she". And at some point in your life you probably have cursed a device for being stupid.

So I agree that units and structures could use some soul as you nicely put it. It doesnt have to be much. Some suble effect could go a long way: The occasional random turret movement. A charge-up glow just before a shot. vehicles tilting slighty when shooting or being shot at. An echo from a large artillery shooting structure. wake trails on ships.

And exactly how does that differ from TA?

(other than the Commanders in TA having relatable, intellectually and morally engaging positions to identify with as diametrically opposed answers to a rather metaphysical philosophical quandary; something the PA Commanders lack.)

The units behave in exactly the same fashion as TA, yet in PA, they lack reason to connect to them on a personal level. They live fast and die young... it's like trying to get attached to an individual mayfly... in a swarm of mayflies.

In a first person shooter, an exactly identical gun can "feel" different if there's a change in sound. If you want to give a particular unit a "soul" then it basically just needs to have very pronounced features such as sounds and shapes. In the command and conquer series, they gave units a soul by allowing each unit to have a couple of one liners that were voiced in.In Red Alert 2 standard infantry would have fairly common sounds, but each of the special units had their own distinct personality.

"Got the plans right here"
"Your mind is clear"
"One way trip"

If you've ever played Red Alert 2 then it should be fairly easy to distinguish what units I am talking about by their one liners alone.

You could do that now with just a small amount of javascript. Modding is cool!

Javascript is for peasants.

Not that I can code at all...

Their art guy is probably too busy making commanders all the time.

The modders will help you learn!

I don't think voice over is really needed. In TA there was some different motor sound for each type/size of units. I find they lack in PA

Maybe, when zoomed out, a dynamic floating "speech bubble/google earth pinhead" zoomed PIP-display focused on one unit, over dense sets of units? Eg, your base is detected as a dense group of units and when you zoom out there's a small PIP box showing a factory, whereas your army gets one showing a random tank/bot among them.

Also, I think it's a bit unfair comparing PA to Dawn Of War which had the pre-existing and very old 40k canon to build off (and of course starcraft did too )

this debate isn't over !

I remember those tesla coils so fondly. Some beams (real beams, though the technical challenges have been discussed) and a few nifty touches like idle animations would be great.

If you are looking for robots with personality and a psycho commander look at this.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_(video_game)
I used to play this for hours as a child and the behavior of the robots was just fantastic.

They are still as fun as always " psychos reporting".

Oh yeah, my GOD. i totally forgot about that game, that game was amazing, different and had units with personality, not just the main characters, but pretty much all the units.

I have that game, very good, very hard, always funny.

I think they do not have personality.

Personality would sell them better. However, expendable tools is all they are. Really, the more expensive and less likely to die, the more a personality it can afford. Which is why the commander, orbital laser, gil-e, and such, have a bit more than the dox, ant, ect.

We are USED to personality. Protoss and Brotherhood of Nod and such. The absence of it here is intentional, these are simple designed weapons and tools, all a dime a dozen, but we are bothered by lack of personality after becoming acostomed to it.

Actually I like clean and simplistic models in PA, you did not pay so much attention to details with minimalistic design, even when turrets recently got more complex models they didn't look much better than simpler old ones.
Also units in this game are just blobs of "tactical view" icons for most of the time, so there is not much to see anyway.

People looking to find the same level of characterization of units that much smaller scale games(and probably higher budget to boot) had within PA are going to have a bad time.

Trying to cram the same level of detail that something like DoW did into PA is just downright doomed to fail hard because it has so much working against it.

Obviously there are things that can improve, things like Better sound effects and visual effects can go a long way to improving a units impact, but at the end of the day trying to do more than that is actually most likely to be detrimental to teh game instead of helpful.

Mike

He is not making a final verdict. He is bringing up valid observations. I am pretty good with the visual aesthetics this far. I would like to see a lot more done on the sound design side of things. What is mentioned about how the defensive turrets in TA had a sound that clearly identified them and added weight to the turrets impact on the experience for the player, is a valid point to bring up.

Mavor in one of the live streams mentioned that he wanted the laser defenses to have the same impact as a Nod Obelisk in C&C. Those towers, when they revved up to shoot, let you know something was definitely going to die.

Most of the units are simply generic in the way they sound. Why not add some variety in the methods of delivery for damage. We have kinetic weapons exclusively from the units. We could change it up in any number of ways. Use kinetic projectiles for the ants. the levellers could have a rocket rail that lets you hear the scraping of the rocket along the rail as it fires, followed by a whoosh of acceleration as it travels to the target and followed by a heavy thud and a sound like crumbling or shattering armor when it hits.

For the Doxes, we could go with short range energy beams that sit on a target for a moment with each shot. For the sniper bots go with a rail gun that kind of makes a vwoop! sound when it fires, and leaves a streak behind that hangs in the air for a moment.

For the artillery units leave it basically the same but lets hear the explosion of the launch followed by the sound of the falling shell, like a mortar as it comes back down, and then a shattering explosion as the crescendo of every shot.

All of these would make every battle more interesting and more engaging as it raged on.

Howard has put a lot of time into the music for the game and he may have ideas like these already in the works. Who knows, we can wait and see.

No, the game is not finished, but that being said, the farther we get into gamma the less time there is left to make changes like these, or any of the other changes that are wanted or needed.

At this point it would seem that development of the final product is getting less flexible than it was 3 months ago. There is reason for additional urgency when making feature and enhancement suggestions because there is always less time to make them than there was yesterday.

We, as a community have become too accustomed to the "It is not finished." way of thinking. We are forgetting that soon it will be. Instead of replying to every suggestion with "It is not finished." we should be shifting to a direct and simple, "Will this be in the release or not?" With a clear question, Uber can give a clear answer, and we can move on either disappointed or elated.

With the huge effort that Uber has put into keeping the player informed about the battlefield with tons of UI features and command management tools (area commands, patrol, and assist) I'm shocked that sound has not been a more integral part of the UI effort.

It may sound silly, but I've always wished the bots would talk with a classic Cylon style Text To Speech voice. If it was true Text To Speech it could be paired with the AI for some really cool, very informative alerts, and all of it still within the character of the game. "Scouts have detected a base belonging to {player name} on {planet name}". With TTS you could use your own custom names and it would handle it like a boss. It would also completely fit the style and lore of robot armies to have a Microsoft Sam styled hard voice.

It has always gotten just a little under my skin that super advanced robots have less lingual capability than R2D2... he could at least accent his beeping whistles with personality and a sense of agency. The flat beep boop noises we have now remind me of office printers more than robots and adds nothing to my sense of immersion.
Planetary annihilation does so many features so well I've been a little surprised that with all the effort to keep the player more aware of the battlefield sound as a UI tool has been nearly completely ignored.

edit: I know my suggestion is a little off topic, but all the talk about sound made me think of it.