Been playing FFA/Team play a lot this week and after losing I would look around and check out how everyone seems to be playing. I have noticed some rather... unfortunate trends. *Turtling No the Iron fortress style turtling but bases don't tend to spread out much. They remain clumped up under their AA flak and Anti-nuke. As I have noticed and comment on many times, land armies and base expansion are stiffled due to the power of Nukes and Aircraft. *Limited Factories The mass majority of bases include only minimal factories. These few factories are being assisted by a horde of Fabs. This again limiting base expansion greatly due to how much you can assist things to super high levels of production making having multiple factories unnecessary. *Nukes as far as the eye can see As many know, nuke launchers are the end all be all. So much that everyone makes them, makes several of them and assists them to crazy rapid fire levels. *Limited base expansion This is tied into other things I have mentioned but I wanted to bring up other point. The only things I see being expanded are Mex and turret creep. Otherwise the rest of the base is turtled up. This games intention was to have massive bases all over the planet with huge land battles. (unless I am mistaken), It's pretty clear the desired play and whats happening isn't happening. * Lack of T1 Many already know this but it's worth noting. T1 is more or less only used early game. The factories are left to make minimal canon fadder for the T2 forces. T2 outshines T1 so greatly that their is little point to them other then a stepping stone to get to your T2 as fast as possible. *Aircraft Spam Holy Gunship spam and Peries. Some games had almost Zero land forces even in the bases. A number of times large land armies were decimated by Gunships, these land armies even included AA but those AA are quickly picked off and the rest of the gunships tear the army apart. Thoughts?
FFAs will always be about turtling, and no amount of balance can make it better to fight than to let other people kill each other off. In 1v1s played at a high level, you almost never see people sacrifice map control unless the planet is too big and they can rush t2 air or nukes.
I think this is mostly an issue in FFA. For 1v1 and 2v2 map control is everything. (I.e. the key to making nukes not the only important thing)
I agree with your point towards the T1 issue. It has just a little role in the beginning when you can snipe some fabbers with a bomber or harass fabbers with T1 bots. But that phase of the game ends very fast, because the turrets just deny that and everybody will get some air or AA bots to defend. The Gunship-Thing annoyed me in some matches, but I think it is ok. You basically know that it is coming, so you can set up flak or an own T2 air factory (Peregrines) or you go for T2 vehicle with T1 AA bots (the hard gunship-spammers won't have defense against your T2 army and the AA bots rule ) Maybe gunships could be a little more expensive but I don't know. Now that I think of it, there are 2 T1 units of actual late-game use. 1) The AA bot. 2) The scout vehicle (added in your sheller-armies). And they seem to adress the turretproblem: I agree with the others, that non-FFA games include a lot of expansion.
I realize the game isn't complete, no need for that old mantra ( I feel people forget who they have talked to on the forums lol ). These were just some observations from the last week of play. These trends were seen not only in FFA but in team matches as well. Even in team, their is very limited spreading of the bases. Team spreads a bit more then FFA, but it's still no were near what I think this game was intending.
Honestly, I'm sick of the current play of PA. The trend is really bad in my opinion, and if it continues I have every intention of ripping apart the guts of the game when the server is released, and with a couple of other guys from Aus/NZ, just rebalancing the thing immensely. I have no confidence in Uber's vision for the gameplay and the balance. I'm going to cite creative differences.
I recommend watching the match between matiz and cola colin coming up on sunday. We will almost definitely not be seeing turtling, because the best players prefer to take map control. I think the issue isn't so much with balance as it is with games where both sides are happy to sit back and turtle. They would lose to a good player that takes map control, but instead everyone turtles. No amount of balance can fix a game between two sides that just refuse to expand.
Air is very fast and has comparatively few drawbacks compared to land. AA's range is also too small to effectively limit scouting of key areas or to cover large bases. The anti-nuke thing is mostly paranoia, you can usually scout a nuke in time to either stop it or build an anti-nuke. Factories need high efficiency relative to fabbers for their construction in order to balance assisting and promote the building of new factories. Turrets are too cheap, T2 metal and T2 units are too cost effective relative to T1 units. Those are some of the problems in terms of on-planet balance the way I see them right now. On top of that, there is a lack of terrain utility and a lack of strategic options. I just started playing supcom:FA a few days ago against the AI. I'm not looking at the game through rose coloured glasses, I don't have a personal bias for it, but what I found is that the combat is far more in-depth than in PA right now. Well, at least for the stealthy faction. Haven't tried them all yet. Pretty sure my take-away so far is that a more involved information system makes the game far more fun, and that PA has very few 'specialist' units that can lead to interesting strategies in comparison. But this is against the AI, so I don't know how well supcom's system really works against human players. I wouldn't say something like that, at least while the game is still in early access (even if that excuse is a bit overused). They seem to be aware of the orbital problems and other balance issues, even if their approach to these problems in recent tests seem a bit... counter-intuitive. They are only tests after all.
I disagree quite strongly with the ideas Uber have represented on this forum about how the rush-econboom dynamic should be balanced, as well as the interactions between tech-one and tech-two. I have no problem with the fact that it's an iterative process. However, I disagree with the direction that they have been taking, as well as comments that have filtered down to me from the live-streams. I am therefore very happy to say something like that. I prefer to think of turtling as fortifying, where you protect what you have. Although "the best players" expand like heck, you also see that they protect the core of their economy. Very loosely, there are 3 places your resources can go in most strategy games - economy, offence, and defence. Then there's two additional places, research and intelligence. In PA, for quite some time, it has been very easy to invalidate a great amount of offensive spending by a smaller and well placed investment in defensive spending. Hence my belief that turtles do have a monopoly. I agree with the overall sentiment that giving up map control is bad. However, the "turtle" strategy relies on having very good intelligence (which is gained by building metal extractor watch towers everywhere). As a winning strategy, they have to be able to subvert an opponents superior economy in some way.
They do a lot of fighting around the map to take out expansions, but I do agree that lasers are a little too cheap. You can still beat lasers with pelters if you don't have t2 yet though. As for your definition of turtle, I strongly disagree. These top players defend their expansions, but they still expand. A traditional turtle sacrifices map control in exchange for defences, which will never work. Turtling in PA is really just useful for delaying on one front while you make gains somewhere else. Maybe the real problem is that it is really hard to play well and the game favors turtling if you can't manage such a large base.
A traditional turtle cannot win in most strategy games, so it is not a viable strategy. The only games they can win in are games where resources run out. The problem here is very simple. None of the three strategies are exclusive. You cannot econ boom exclusively, because then you have no defence and no offence. You cannot build offensively exclusively, because then you have no economy. And you have no defence when you send your offence on attack. You cannot build defensively exclusively, because then you have no economy and no offence. How do you respond to your opponents offensive play? If you have sufficient area under control, you can just ignore the problem and rely on depth in defence. However, sooner or later you get pushed back to a thin red line. And at that point, you have to play defensively. Defensive play is inescapable. If you don't defend, you don't have a counter to your opponents offence, and you lose. So yes, the top players defend and they expand. Because they have to defend. Otherwise they'll lose. It's about managing expansion and consolidation. Traditionally, turtles consolidate. The problem in PA is that they consolidate when they don't need to. The difference between an expansionist and a turtle should be that a turtle consolidates what they have, while an expansionist continues to expand. The expansionist however can get very easily steamrolled, while the turtle cannot.
That nuke trend is the one that irritates me the most. The solution to it should probably not be the amount of time or resources it takes to make each nuke, but the amount of nukes it takes before the planet gets engulfed into a nuclear winter. Nuclear winter would limit the vision of the players on that planet with ashes and what not, gradually disappear as time passes by. Bad for both the receivers and nuke spitters. Even with the amount of anti-nukes, it would force players to turtle and cower into their bases.
I remember a game (not the name of the game however >.<, but maybe a "Age Of...") where they used a hard limit for nukes. You could use a certain number (not sure if configurable), let's says 5, and if a 6th nuke is used, it's an automatic game over for everybody due to general armageddon. Like said mattdaman354, it could maybe implemented in a way : if more than x nukes explode on a given planet, the planet get destroyed/break appart/start to self destruct... Edit : Typos from hell...
That could be interesting... Certainly would remove nuke spam unless someone intentionally wanted to destroy the planet.
If that avenue were to be taken I would prefer a soft limit approach, e.g. every nuke raises the radiation level on the planet. From a certain threshold onwards nukes create a global damage over time effect, increasing linearly with additional nukes. Radiation could be made to dissipate slowly over time. This way a prolonged nuke conflict would turn the planet into a nuclear wasteland inhospitable to everything besides perhaps orbital units. Would allow for interesting twists like someone disabling all his own anti-nukes shortly before a huge nuke volley comes in to punish an overaggressive enemy. Slow return to pre-wasteland levels of radiation would make going back on deserted planets to build small but sustainable bases an interesting choice - who would hide in nuclear hell?
I like that a lot !! When radiation levels increase areas of the planet would start changing colors, in those area perhaps things would start taking automatic damage. As the radiation spread it would spread the damage areas across more and more of the planet until you couldn't be anywhere on the planet without taking constant damage. After time with no more nukes, the radiation levels would start dropping and the spread would dissipate allowing you to start to build on the planet again. This would mean, generally it would be the person that isn't doing so well that would use nukes, not the person that would winning. ( Imagine that... it would be more like real life warfare *shrug* ). Sign me up for this mod
