Why don't we start directly in T2?

We don't need something arbitrary as "technology".
We need strategies. A good strategy game is about strategy.

I should have a large number of different tools (~ units) at my disposal and choose to produce them and deploy them where I believe them to be useful...therefore choosing my strategy.

In a truly balanced strategy game, all strategies are equally viable (depending on the situation, of course).
That's what is fun. Choosing a strategy that your opponent did not foresee (making intel an important part of the game) or cannot counter because he didn't react properly, while deploying other tools to prevent your opponent from doing too much damage with the tools he chose himself.

This is what would create a game that is interesting and fun throughout the whole match. It's always like a game of chess that's about outwitting your opponent (and balancing your limited resources between increasing your resource output, creating assault forces and countering your opponent's strategy).

A tech tree simply adds another layer to the game.
An unnecessary complexity that's not needed if the core gameplay is done right.
It allows one player to gain an advantage through means other than choosing a better strategy. It allows one player who survived long enough to reach a better technology to defeat his opponent even though is actual strategy might have been inferior.
I am always disappointed when I see one player win most engagements and then be defeated because his opponent got some better units.

There is no strategy to building better units. You simply do it.
You might argue that there is strategy to getting those units faster but that's not what PA should be.
We don't need another game that's about ploughing through a tech tree or getting to "Advanced" or "Tier 2" faster.

We need a game that's about choosing the right strategy to fight your opponent and deploying it in the most efficient way.
This shouldn't be compromised by "tech" or "tiers" again.
The whole concept of "Tiers" is inappropriate. We shouldn't think about building "Tier 1" and "Tier 1.5" (Orbital...) and then "Tier 2". We should think about balancing air and ground forces. We should think about where the weak spots in our opponent's defense are and exploit them. We should think about adding an orbital element to our strategy. We should think about building raiding forces to circumvent our opponent's defences and destroy his economy. We should think about building a force to crack that base. We should think about trying to prevent our own units from having an unpleasant encounter with one of their respective counters. Etc.

According to PA's lore the commanders only use the "best" units. And this makes sense.
But even if this wasn't in the lore it wouldn't make sense for factions to always start with "good" units and then suddenly build "better" units (starting with only the "good" units again in the next battle).

Of course there will be progression throughout a match.
As the different factions gain more territory and contest each other's territory, their resource income will slowly grow (NOT have HUGE sudden bumps when reaching a new tech level). This allows them to kick up their production and more units will roll out of their factories and they might start to employ a few different strategies at once (but NOT ALL at once).
Instead of the skirmishes between a few dozen units at the beginning we now have large battles between hundreds of units spanning across a whole solar system. Like in the game most of us imagined this would be.

That would be AWESOME.
Because commanding 200 properly balanced Ants /Pounders/UTC-8s/Alleged Tanks /Unit Cannons is more AWESOME than commanding 20 Levellers.

And I bought this game because I was told we were shooting for AWESOME.

I still did not lose hope. I trust people at Uber being quite smart, and competent. So, since I really do not get what they are doing, likely I miss the big picture.

Unfortunately, this doesn't change the fact that the game is moving away from what I would like to play, and if someone will bring a new balance in the form of the mod, specially if in a direction that I would enjoy playing, I will be happy to help and give a try.

How can I like this post 20 more times?

Please Uber, stop the development of the Unit Cannon, and implement multiple likes on the Forum.

Technology offers strategies within the game.

I'll take Sins as an example - Sins has two types of research for units. There's research that upgrades your units, and research that allows you to build units that have more roles.

If Uber were to implement a change where everything was made much more cheap to obtain, Planetary Annihilation would not offer deep strategies. You see your opponent building XXXX unit, you build the unit that naturally counters it. The game just becomes about proper application of counters. By making some units require more resources to make available, the game actually has strategic choice about where to allocate resources. Will I need Advanced air? Or not.

You currently see the AI making these mistakes. If you spawn in close proximity, it tries to tech and builds a whole load of stuff that you never give it an opportunity to use, because you simply send 50 ants through its powerfield.

In PA's current balance, there aren't really T1 units that can deal with T2. However, after the change, that will occur, because T2 units are going to become a lot less cost effective.




As for the lore argument -

it makes perfect sense for the commander to build cheap, rough and ready units. His opposite number is taking his time building an absolutely perfect factory, whose nanolathes are supremely accurate.

The commander instead focuses on quantity over quality, and overwhelms his opposite number with a large number of cheap knockoffs that none the less, do their job.

What doesn't make sense is that advanced units perform the same role, better. Because don't forget, lore wise some commander is going to land on a world where a hostile commander is already leading an advanced.

This latter reason is why SupComs war was an infinite war. From what I understand of the game mechanics, any commander landing on a world with a standing army of tech3 units is going to be kicked back into radioactive dust

I did not intend to say that "advanced" shouldn't exist at all.
What I want to address is, that there should not be a sense of "technological progression", as in building better units to replace the old ones (and to be frank, it seems like Uber is implementing exactly that for the most part).

Building a different, "advanced" factory that offers even more, specialized tools that excel in certain situations but cannot be used effectively without support from the basic units is an idea I would support.

What worries me, is that this idea does not seem to be pursued consequently enough (I don't know whether that's proper English). Most advanced units are simply better replacements for the basic units.

Not even in the new balance experiments do I see any kind of strong attempt to push T2 units into more specialized roles. They are still simply replacements. Instead, Uber tries to delay their appearance to make "T1 more viable" and makes what should be a simple enhancement to your abilities and a fluid part of the flow of the game a huge step and probably one of the most important decisions in a match by giving you access to 10 times the resources once you reach "T2".
The way they talk about unit balance makes it sound like T1 units are supposed to work against T1 defenses and T2 units are supposed to work against T2 defenses...but they will also work even better against T1 defenses. Meaning that in the end, T2 has completely replaced T1, as T1 defenses and T1 units will become rather useless.

As for the lore argument:
It would indeed make sense to produce a lot of cheap units first and then the highly specialized units later on.
But if the advanced units are straight upgrades (like right now) then it doesn't make sense to produce cheap units first. Because a few strong units (that are worth their cost) will always defeat many weaker units of the same kind (that are worth the same cost) because the weaker units will get weaker more quickly (their firepower decreases as some of them die....strong units keep their full firepower for a longer time because they can take more damage till they are killed).

Edit: To make it clear: Although I write mostly about units my largest concern is actually the HUGE jump in the economy between T1 and T2 as that puts too much importance on the "transition" (this shouldn't be a transition but an addition).
You expressed concerns about the "snowballing effect", as some call it, as well, so I don't think we need to argue about that.

cool, we're on the same page

It's not. The correct word is on the tip of my tongue :/ Pursued effectively? Pursued confidently?

I absolutely agree with that sentiment. As I posted in the thread, I think that some advanced units that are just better are acceptable, if the advanced unit and the basic unit are differentiated enough (I use the example from 58772, if Levellers were to have the same range, then they would be equal to 7 Pounders in metal cost, have greater damage against single targets, have less health, and perform better against splash damage units, more poorly against focus fire. And 7 pounders can focus fire down a Leveller. I think that's acceptable differentiation because it's giving those 2 units roles that are distinct from one another - the pounder is strong in groups on the front line, while the Leveller is strong individually behind enemy lines)

Lore: Unit wise, I disagree. The balance changes to 12:1. So Levellers have to kite for 24 seconds to kill their equivalent cost in Alleged Tanks. That loses them 168 worth of ground. That's a pretty significant distance if it's 168 worth of ground through a Mex patch.

It makes sense to have advanced units that have their equipment that is more refined, as they would still be swarmed by cheap units.

Evidence: If Levellers are in range of Ants, with a metal cost ratio of 7:1 (and the damage/health values of 58772) the Leveller kills all 7 Ants in 7 seconds. The Ants kills the Leveller in 3 seconds. Yet the Leveller is much more cost effective at killing stuff with lots of health, like factories (that have 2000 health - Levellers did 500 damage, 7 Ants did 294 damage)

Back on topic: The fundamental issue is that the Leveller does not have a distinct role compared to the Alleged Tank, and further that a bunch of advanced units are designed to be upgrades, not supplements.

I quite like the idea of the advanced laser tank, I don't think it should be flat out removed or completely changed. I do think that a role could be defined for it without changing the fundamental unit concept all that much.

On economy... Fair enough, I see that point. Personally I think that an elegant solution would be to split that jump up into many smaller steps.

We agree for the most part ! Have a virtual cookie


As for the units:
So we can agree on direct upgrades not being the right way to do advanced units. Instead, every advanced unit should have a distinct role that is not filled by any basic unit, therefore avoiding to make those useless.
I agree that a complete removal is not necessary for most of these units. Many could be made to have a distinct role without too much effort (thus I claimed that this important issue is not too hard to fix...it mostly comes down to defining the right roles and turning those into some balanced numbers in some json files).

As for the economy:
I am unsure whether we actually need any kind of large increase of income per metal extractor. I understand that players are supposed to have a large economy at the end of the game to be able to pump out many units / build very expensive stuff such as Halleys and nukes. But do we have to increase the cost per metal extractor drastically to achieve this ?
When you look at how the game currently plays out, you can clearly see that most players end up having more metal than they can spend later into the game. Often without significantly upgrading their mexes.
Why is that ? Because Planetary Annihilation does have different maps than most RTS games. Often players start controlling large territories (planets) that are mostly uncontested by other players for a long period of time.
In any large scale encounter in a decently sized solar system this is something that is bound to happen.
And this fact alone leads to players having large economies without the need for drastic upgrades in resource income per mex.
If we increase metal output even more, the problem amplifies and resource income spirals out of control not only for some player's opponents but also for the players themselves.
If we increase the cost of only T2 units to counter this, we have add to another problem:
The incredible "bounciness" of the economy. Some stuff is incredibly cheap, some stuff increadibly expensive. Some stuff gives you LOTS of income, some stuff becomes essentially irrelevant lategame.
It is nearly impossible to run a nicely balanced economy like you try to do in Supreme Commander, because you simply can neither intuitively calculate all of the effects stuff might have nor can you avoid wasting resources if your T1 factories take nearly nothing at all but these 5 T2 engineers suck up 2/3rds of your economy and moved on to build the next T2 powerplant (that is more powerful than all of the T1 powerplants you built).

It is also frustrating when you destroy 5 of your opponents mexes and expect this to have some kind of effect but he doesn't even notice. Because those 5 mexes produced as much metal as half a T2 extractor.
You might argue that this is a huge victory because it prevented him from building T2 extractors there but it is unintuitive and goes to show how unimportant much of the T1 stuff becomes once you reach T2.
You fight over territory but there is no quick way for anybody to take advantages of any kind of victory there.
Instead you destroy things that are meaningless..that's not fun.

There is also another thing that hasn't been considered much, yet:
How is reclaiming stuff (rocks, wreckage and so on) going to fit into all of this ? If rocks give you lots of metal it will ruin the balance in the T1 (or make everything purely energy dependant again). If that old ruin you just converted into raw metal gave you 200 metal you probably wasted more time than you achieved at T2.

Why thank you good sir! I will have it with milk, immediately..

I don't mind partial role overlap, but it should be in favour of the basic units, not the advanced ones.

Oh.... When explained from that perspective, I agree.

forget t2 forget advanced. just call it specialised and remove the thought that it has to be somehow better than normal bot factories. no advanced bot factory no t1 bot factory, no t2 bot factory. just bot factory and specialised bot factory.

Why does this game have different economic tiers again? What would really happen if T2 economy buildings were removed from the game?

Mostly to give a dichotomy between expansion and consolidation. At least that's what it's supposed to do; allow further growth of an economy that physically can't expand any further due to the risks of over-extending or having to wrest control of it from your enemy (which would usually be a Metal-negative proposition in the short term).

Since there's very little in the way of Wreck reclaim, there's very little incentive to perform a Metal-negative action; it puts you behind and gains you nothing beyond land and a very weak metal spot... and your opponent is likely to take advantage of it if he's got any sense.

I think that it could work (the removal of T2 Eco), but the game would have to alter the wreck mechanics pretty substantially to compensate.

If you had no t2 structures or upgrade units, and all roles available from game beginning, every game would last 15 minutes and be rather linear. Not very interesting though.

There needs to be some form of specialization. T2 is one way. Tech types is another, terrain specific units is an example of this. This game does 5 branches and 2 columns pretty much. Which is better than 1 column 1 branch.

I always thought it would be interesting to have chasis as one persistent build branch, and armament as another persistent branch. So, you can put specialization into long range weapons, or shorter range higher damage, or into speed chasis, or into armored chasis...

But its all the same, just interesting divisions of specialization. I mean, that's the point of vehicle factory not building advanced bot factory. And the game isn't highly delved in this area, but it's come a long way, and it has a long way to go.

For instance, they decided fairly recently that bots will be utility infantry and tanks be solid direct combat. They are currently implementing grenadiers as infantry instead of direct fire. This will be the type of division that makes what a person chooses to invest in building so interesting to the outcome.

You'll have to prove that statement with some evidence... or at least show your reasoning because I'm not following that logic off the cliff you've leapt from.

uhm? Remember when you could inferno pelican drop? Also imagine if you could just start by building the exact factory you want or the exact game finishing unit or structure?

Obviously, you could move right onto fabricating your snipe of choice, and toss them at each other. Turns a game of checkers, won't call it a game of chess in it's current state, into a game of rock paper scissors where you throw out your handsign and that's the game, and no 2 out of 3 even unless you tie (both your snipes fall through).

Idk, but even if it is a leap and nobody follows those examples, I would much rather play a game where the first 15 minutes limits me to an allowance of what to build which I must choose the order to unlock them, instead of all acces at once. You get people wadding up large t1 army to smash base with. You get people risking getting t2 early without a developed army. You get people investing into t1 structures (I remember when t1 artillery was it's own flavor in contrast of t2 artillery, as a rush compared to turtle then powerslam). You get a selection of which units you invest in, either levelers and vanguards, or gil-e and advanced repairbots.

Most people making a mod I bet would make more specialized branches of build unlocking, then would make equal-to or less-than the vanilla game's division of build branch. There is a reason for that.

I will also give an example I do know. Red Alert 1, set to tech level 1, where you just get barracks and base units and no units past that, that example actually you usually end up in an unbeatable stalemate because turrets win no matter what, and besides that it is actually fun making different blends of infantry blob and smashing infantry against infantry without any cheesy counterunit nonsense like helicopters ruining your fun. However, it still is very linear. If better balanced or even turrets removed from tech 1 game, you still would end up with very close balanced struggles but only 15 minute games at most and most would feel like the same game replayed over and over.

Heh, if that's your theory, then it' misguided.

The balance you guys all seek was the one from TA/FA, not the current one.

No. I want no tiers. I want everything to be on the same level. Sure, there can be bigger units, but adv should not just be bigger versions of basic. If anything, all of the big units should be the basic ones.

There seems to be a misconception that knowing when to switch tech is some awesome strategic capability. Sure, it takes skill, but it is generally uninteresting. It is an optimization of risk management and reward reaping. I personally had my complaints about FA for this exact reason. I would want to build t1 armies but they would be completely invalidated by the time my enemy got to t2. It wasn't good gameplay. I have never played TA. All I want is for every unit to be valid throughout every match.

You're assuming that "a snipe of your choice" can be completed in 15mins, uninterrupted? Any flavour of snipe? any one of them at all?

Sorry, but you're falling off that cliff by your self.

I'm not saying that I'm going to make a mod that makes everything available at the beginning; I happen to like the 'gated' unlock of specialisation. However, your logic doesn't track for why an open tech structure would only allow 15 minute games with no deviation.

Off hand, I can just point you towards Zero-K and be done with it. Zero-K is proof that your statement makes absolutely no sense.

With tiers, there are always lower tier units that become absolete.
I don't really have a problem with that.
But if a developer does not want that to happen, it is going to need near perfect balance.

If a tier 2 tank unit has 2x the health and 2x the damage of its tier 1 version, its not 2x stronger but 4x stonger.
Asuming range and fire rate remain the same.
So in order to be balanced that unit should cost 4x more.

The problem with the game right now is that your untouchable until tier 2 as the commander and turrets can deal with any tier 1 thread and they are working on that.
(or should be)

I'm fairly certain zero-k is like I described, except for players who perfected playing which can smash each other back and forth avoiding snipes. The vast majority build to pummel enemy base to render commander wide open, or target the commander. Did like decoy commander and other funny role units and being accessed early.

I don't like everything about the teching in the game, but I am pretty sure it functions and argue that it could even be perfect with a level of investment in each tech as well as unique roles.

someone above argued my point, instead of being automatically able to build a counter, you need open the build options, putting a level of commitment in your strategy because to carry it out costs the door fee for opening build options. It could work without them but you would just go-to it, with a high expense being the only limit, which is what zero-k does, which basically leads to setting up expensive strategies while going through each of the cheaper strategies of attack of your choice first just to do damage while you get it up.

zero k is extremely liberal and skillful, only in that rushing expensive leaves you without firepower and building too much firepower leaves you behind in upgrade so you have to do the perfect in between, vut most people would not be able to so simply do that. This games tech system at least leads games to be played with the correct progression of large basic units while slowly adding supplement units to basic armies.

at least that's what PA can do if balanced. Tbh, levelers have the range to use if they were more expensive per what they do, they can line behind ants to layer a line of high dps where the ants and levelers range meets. Cost means using only levelers would never do as much damage as same cost in ants. Its going to get better next update and then they can adjust more from there.

It's going to be far from better. It'll be a restrictive and directed experience with a focus on playing the game the way it's "supposed" to be played.

*shudders*