Internal Playtest – Unit Balance Changes, Econ Changes, Combat vs Turrets, Nav Fixes

For my part, I like the idea to make t1 longer useful, I am just thinking that the first one being able to reach t2 (since it is such a hurdle now) has basically won?
But I guess, we will have to see...

When a game like PA with not mutch money on the table you cant keep change the main thoughts off all team .
Its rong and never grab the public attencion.
Even iff players dont agreed they have a strategy to the game they have to keep going to the and right now.
And you say (whow you actualy say that) yes now its too late for changes,many players are already getting tired the game and it isnt yet released!
So focus on main idea and balance the game .
We already told them ower concerns all this time ,iff they listen to us or not well that time has pass ...now its time to released the game and start think in another RTS
They cant stay produce a game e like this 5 years,its already take too long.....

Well, if your economy is raided and crashes, that t2 jump needs paused, the t2 attempt is wasted time, and you must restart. Open weakness to sabotage.

Turrets being wee bit weaker (walls really) would help the raiding being a counter to this.

I think your reading way too much into Ubers responses if you think they are hostile, whereas the general tone of your posts is negative...and I'm pretty sure they got the message three threads ago.... but you know its an experiment so they're going to see how it pans out first not change things immediately because brian said its bad.

No, that's what you do when you're fine-tuning a final balance, subtracting a few hitpoints here, adding some move speed there.

While PA maybe in 'gamma', the unit roster is still in alpha. Units are still being created, fundamentally altered, or removed. There may be units that have functions that you don't intend or don't mean to use, or functions that you do intend which are being overlooked, and if you're looking to answer some very specific questions with your latest changes, it is a valuable luxury to be able to tell people that they should at least try to use knights against spearmen.

So I've seen this a few times now (or replace assumptions with premises if you so wish) and read a lot, from Uber, about trying to change the eco so that building more T2 factories and thus spamming more T2 units becomes a thing.

But then I have to wonder... why do you assume that spamming T2 units is necessary or making the game better? Are you trying to solve a problem that does not exists? Do you assume that players will be happier when they get to produce all the best units all day every day over only having enough resources to selectively produce them for specific maneuvers and having to put more thought into which units they pick?

E.g. for me, the T2 metal extractor wouldn't have to produce any more metal than the T1 extractor. It could just be a little more beefed up compared to the T1. Say it's more expensive, has more hit points and a very basic anti ground & anti air weapon. Weaker than even the single barrel laser tower. It's not capable to stop a raid, but it'll stop that stray dox or firefly, wandering aimlessly about, which right now has all the time in the world to kill a mex, when I forgot or was too lazy to put laser and missile towers next to all of my extractors.

So T2 metal doesn't become an income multiplicator, which makes expansions less important, but just a micro and this time savor. And in places where you don't need it, because you have the towers up already anyway, just build the T1 for less cost.


And I write this, not even knowing if anyone from Uber is still even reading this thread on page 6. Oh well, here's to hoping.

I like that advanced metal extractor ideal.

Yea, I would MUCH rather have a mex that saved me some micro and attention by defending itself. Honestly, id like it if they became fairly powerful defensive structures.

It would also create a sort of flow, where the dynamics of raiding and attacking with units naturally changes as the game progresses. As more and more mex are upgraded, wandering balls of units have to grow larger and larger to cost effectively raid. If they where decent AA as well, it would help restrict the massive mobility advantage that T2 air enjoys over units. Combined arms ftw!

FINALLY, people are starting to come round with this!

I think that one reason they decided to have units have very little health is because it makes meaningful micro rather difficult. Look at vanguards- they warrant far more micro than most other units because they have more health.

Well, we also get some micro utilizing range advantages, but its still relatively limited by low health. That said, I would still like to see how the game plays if you just.. add a zero to everything's health.

I don't think the type of micro that enables is the toxic micro that we are trying to avoid.

I would argue it has the opposite effect. If you don't micro your planes currently, they will die. If they had more HP, you could attack move them into an area or set them to patrol and you'd know they'd live long enough to at least get a few shots off.

The same applies to ground units, if you don't watch where you're sending your tanks, they're liable to waltz into a line of turrets or artillery and die uselessly. You have to micro them. If they had more HP, you could send them off where-ever and know that if they got attacked by something, they'd at least live longer than a few seconds and hopefully get within range to return fire.

@krakanu
Yea, I see your point. I think that we are both right, actually. High health vs damage introduces one type of micro, and low health vs damage introduces another kind.

Though thinking about it, low health does seem to encourage micro in more cases. Dodging a bullet that one-shots a unit makes far more a difference than dodging a shot that does 10% health.

I can't understand the discussion about balance.

We still missing unit's and features.
(they talk about a big spider unit, hover-tanks, unit-cannon, asteroid fields,....... That's all not yet in the game!)

We should be happy that there is some balance at all, because every new unit can/will mess up the whole balance.

So call me crazy but I think we are lucky because they think at balance in this early state.

it works to the opposite thought, micro becomes even better.

I often read beyond what I respond to, though often when a thread generates 10 pages between visits I skim a few things to see where it is going and don't read everything.

As to why we are favoring the ability to spam more units around being selective is that is the style of game we are creating: Large epic armies of many units fighting. This game is the spiritual successor to games like TA and SupCom. SC2 favors a relatively smaller set powerful units where you need to trade off what you build because you will run out of supply. That's not what we're trying to create.

perfect

Then why are there still direct upgrades in the second tier?

You can't say you want to be different from "relatively smaller set(s of?) powerful units" when T2 units directly take the place of T1 units and can be in smaller groups due to their vast amount of power.

That makes no sense.
You can say that the future balance changes will further legitimize T1 units, and to an extent I agree with you, but the problem is they can't permanently legitimize them because direct upgrades are made for the sole purpose of replacing the weaker obsolete units.

You can't have both a game about large, epic, 1000 unit battles and a game where units can be easily replaced, it just doesn't work, this is why so many people have said that T2 should be reserved for specialization, because directly upgrading T1 units just leads to a race to T2, with a couple T1 units thrown around for early game engineer killing.

I agree with that.

Why build 48 Doxen, when you could build 12 Slammers

4 Doxen in 12 different places have 80% of the health of 1 Slammer in 12 places, and 53% of the damage.

I really can't think of many situations where I would prefer to have those Doxen

Is that based on existing costs or the larger T2 costs in this playtest?

Just wanted to point out how ridiculous the icons working is specifically on the point of structures being built having an icon. In this playtest Metabolicall left an unfinished T2 POWER GENERATOR at 99%. oh the humanity!

this is a widely recurring error, and it's all due to the icon being there. If the icon only poped up only when the structure finished, people wouldn't make this mistake.

because SCII had no tiers and a small unit roster you gotta live with the idea that that's the nature of this family of rts with streaming economy : you will invariably have a unit that's better than another otherwise what's even the point of having more than one type of unit in the game? how the hell else are you going the make a grand scale game? how would you justify those big numbers we have in the economy bar? How would you keep it all from being atrociously bland? where's your notion of fun?

cuddles anyone?