[Discuss] Total Annihilation's Spirit in Planetary Annihilation - Updated Page #6 05/08/14

Totally.

But guns and cannons have to fire *fast*, because that's how they work, and it's dramatic. An crack in the air, a buff of smoke, and before you can even turn your look, an impact few hundred meters/km away, and a big explosion. That what tanks do. And it's awesome.

Machine gun, on the other hand, fire ridiculously fast, with a buzz and thousands shells flying in the air, and few dozen meters away something is shredded to pieces. Even trees get cut in half.

Laser and Beams should be almost instantaneous, with the latter preparing a visible mass of energy before releasing it. Laser could be balanced adding heating, so that at some point a Laser Turret has to stop firing and cool down, or fuse and break, and be repaired in order to regain a full efficiency.

I think that the cinematic of firing in PA is pretty good already.

The biggest improvement of PA is the addition to planets and spherical maps that are plain awesome. They feel so much better. I also have to admit to like bigger icons as well.

In short, I agree that PA needs lot of improvement, but we would be unfair to say that it isn't a great game already.

Indeed. Copying is the wrong thing to do. Learning what other games did right and applying that is the right thing to do, though.

First and foremost, i fear that unit depth is just going to drown in a sea of units. The jury is still out on whether this is a good or bad thing. While stuff popping up and out is cool, i feel this is a very limited approach.

Terrain features are a difficult beast because of the nature of PA's planets. Procedural planets have already proven to be a truly absurdly difficult thing when it comes to navigation, projectile sim and unit behavior. I think it's just going to be a maze of difficulties in which UBER will get lost.

Metal presence is an endless balance act because of the procedural nature of the game. I fear uber will have to step to a wholly different kind of procedural generation for metal to get the balance anywhere close to where they want it, and even then the procedural nature itself will probably endlessly haunt them.

Power: i've been advocating different kinds of power and more interesting power gameplay from the beginning. even if deeper gameplay is not possible, just having non-cookie cutter power generators across the board is going to be important for (my) immersion. I feel T2 needs to be a "volatile", risky generator. Watching PA, the game feels tame effects-wise too.


Fabricators: i feel this is a slippery slope that has no "fair" ground. i do believe unfolding stuff is good here.

slower particles: i don't think this is necessarily a good thing. The nature of the planet will make this probably even harder on accuracy, while the nature of the sim and armies will only contribute to slower gameplay.

As someone who actually played TA a lot back then, your post makes many strange assumptions. First of all go in to settings and fix the fog of war so you see the map. Nobody played with the map all black. +shootall fixed the messed up firing priorities so your first harass units would shoot at enemy mex. +noshake and + dither where nice too.

The units where both strong and weak as ****, in general the game was a mess balance wise. The way to win was metric fucktons of samsons (t1 anti air tank) because anti air units would shoot at land. Thought their individual dmg was crap, combined they would kill anything that came within their large range. T2 was mostly used for long range artillery, nukes and eco, not so much for units. Except for t2 air. Bombers where, due to a neat little hickup with reloadtimes, extremely good. The same applied to t2 fighters, who micro'd right, given LOS, would wreck any army or pd you had standing.

Some things you post are correct but i fail to see why they would fix anything if they where implemented in PA. Yeah there where more height differences, some units did deploy, eco was different in some ways. You left out the most crucial difference though. In TA you could build resources. So even if the map you play on seem to have little in the way of metal, given some time your income would grow like crazy. Given you knew how to build ofc.

Anyhow, this is just to show you don't know what you are talking about. TA was one game, PA is another. They shouldn't be made the same because that's not what anybody is going for. If you want TA play TA. TA is, and should be, inspiration for PA nothing else.

To give you some image of what TA was like, here's an fairly old video of high level play. More vids on the same channel, the Gods of War vid is very good too.



edit: note that this map is so small you'd go for bbs as game enders. no samson hordes because there's too little room. Guardians (pelters) and flash (the annoying little tanks) are good enough for t1.

Also you would assist factories like crazy, but you had to wall in your engies (fabbers) assisting because otherwise they'd wander into the factory and block it so nothing would get built. Plenty people would hold the F.A.R.K. as one of the main reasons to pick ARM over CORE.

I don't think so to be honest. Imagine if they would come out with a new Doom game and they would say: "it's the spiritual successor to Doom I", it'd feel silly since the two games would have little in common because of how different games are these days. I think that for PA you can't expect the game to have more in common with TA than with the more recent SupCom games.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-total-conversion-annihilation-mod.58540/

Yeah, that's my job!

I did read your post. I happen to disagree with almost all of it. The reason I left a short reply is there is sooo much fail in it, I didn't even want to bother creating a list of all the horrible ideas you have. I personally don't think any of the gameplay choices they have made 'fall short' of Total Annihilation. TA really is not as good as everyone thinks they remember it. I have very recently played it again, and found myself simply wishing I was either playing SupCom or PA instead.

Different movement speeds: Simply put this is annoying. I want my army to stay together, not have the weak, fast units always move to the front. This goes for the spider bots and hovercraft and whatnot that moved at different speeds over different terrain.

I extremely dislike the economy system in TA you seem to think is so great. The power/metal gens remove any resource planning / management from the game. It is pointless to build wind energy and geothermal. It doesn't matter there is no metal spots on the maps. You build a few solar arrays, and then jump to fusion reactors, and then begin pumping out metal generators.

Having multiple forms of poor energy generation is meaningless. All the geo, wind, solar, plants do is clog up the system with pointless units no one builds. (why do you think supcom was the first to change this)

Terrain Line of sight. - Just an annoyance and a waste of extra processor calculations that could be better used elsewhere. (this is much more complicated to do with a true 3d engine, than a mock 2d/3d engine)

Ground units move quickly? - obviously you never built a row of berthas. I would usually (annoyingly so) micro my berthas to kill waves of incoming units.

Factories not needing assisting...- This point makes you sound like you haven't played TA. The name of the game was to build around 100 adv fab planes and have them assist your factories. You could pump out waves of units, just as fast as PA.

Bah, I could keep going on, but you clearly have no idea what you are talking about when it comes to creating good game play. (and realism does not necessarily equate to good game play, which a lot of your ideas have a basis in.)

Although I would tentatively agree that all of these things added to the TA experience, I question if they'd work in the same fashion, adding the same experience and feeling, once they've gone through the massive up-scaling that PA is going for.

Ultimately, in the pursuit of scale, one must begin to streamline the mechanics or it'll just be a fustercluck.

I know where you're coming from Mr Burrito, I really do, believe me... but unless some concession is made to scale down the number of units actively engaging, then these features are just there to clog-up the game.

Other than the Economy of course. That I 100% agree on and think that PA's implementation is far from adequate and strays excessively far from the spirit of TA.

haha. obligatory reply. It's getting a little weird around here...



Now if only I could find a video of a planet smashing in to that video.

I feel obliged to remember members of parlament that reinventing the wheel when the wheel has been invented isnt always a good idea.

Dont fix what aint broken grandpa used to say.

Imagine if Ubisoft had been in control of the toilet design, a design and fuctions which has not changed in what? 100years.

Today toilets would be playing music, moving around while you sit on them, make you food. and what not. Toilet is very important, because it shows, when you got something that works you keep that, until you really got something better. Change for changes sake is bad. That is what led to Windows 8, which is now coming back with start menu and windows isnt that amazing.

I remember when they removed resource gathering and base building from an RTS game called Red Alert, that was really awesome.....not.

PA should build on TA, not just change stuff for change sake.

Yea. I agree. Although it's not just scale. The procedural and round planets add another level of difficulty on top of this.

Were you expecting pyramids?

Planets are by definition, round.

Planets are round because of gravitational forces, not by "definition"... whatever that means. I guess you could try to find the derivation of the word. As usual we look to:

Ancient Greek: ἀστὴρ πλανήτης (astēr planētēs), meaning "wandering star"

So nothing about being round at all.

---

Edit: oh, and don't try half-quoting the 2006 definition released by the IAU, as it technically only applies to our solar system.

There seems to be a lot of negativity towards the opening, so I'll just say this. PA is not the first game to change "the formula" as it were, for "the best" and it's not going to be the last. Historically there have been cases where this has led to "better gameplay," "slightly weaker gamplay" or just plain "utterly inferior/unplayable."

Now I'm not saying it's better or worse, but if someone feels it's "inferior" to what's technically an older iteration; especially with how a lot of the devs boast they worked on the older version, then it's silly to smack them down with "this is a terrible idea." To my knowledge the game has had fairly inconsistent playerbase, you can blame it on early access but there have been early access games with fairly large player bases too.

Normally, I tend to find myself either disagreeing with, or confused at the where the point of OP's posts are in general. That's definitely not the case here. I also see a lot of forumers I tend to agree with often with opposite opinions as it were.. which is strange to me. Does the term 'spiritual successor' have more than one meaning, or do you guys just want another SupCom?

Be that as it may, I completely agree that PA seems to fall short of what it could be and most of what you've written. I really liked the true terrain height in TA with real craters and such. It was such a big deal and you had to use that to your advantage. SupCom was utterly disappointing in this aspect. Most map features were flat, useless, did not change gameplay at all, and if you landed your unit on ground that was hardly even slanted, it'd just blow up because they can't climb. Some maps had more TA-like Terrain, but only the dedicated mountain paths. The ground you built your base on wasn't even hilly. Seriously, come on. Terrain in SupCom feels like it was created for battle, and doesn't look natural at all.

I personally like that units missed in TA because the shots were slow, but that created micro. I don't actually know how to go about adding shots missing without the micro other than having a built-in unit AI specifically for micro only when they're attacking/being attacked, or defending against incoming.

Most everything else in OP's post that other users claimed issue with was simple balance issues or what looks like personal grudges of some kind. I won't go into who's who with what's where, because they know who they are.

To truly enjoy TA, you cannot use high-level slasher spam / bertha fest on 5x5 or 10x10 maps as an example. Maybe an example of high-level play, perhaps, but this is only because of imbalance and efficiency, not from enjoyment. They didn't spam missile tanks and use berthas because it was fun, they did it because it's basically the most efficient way to play.

I question some of the posts here claiming for either efficiency or enjoyment because it seems to me like some of you want the former, not the latter.

Second Bgrmystr2 point that just because TA had some "downsides" doesn't mean copying the good parts involves necessarily copying his problems.

I answered your poll with a solid 'yes' but there are a couple of nuances:

Terrain & environmental effects: HELL YES we need this in PA. I still feel maps are kinda dull every time, and fact more like a smooth surface without any interesting characteristics. Round maps are awesome of course, but they need more...feels. I also liked the advantages of height TA gave you & the effect on combat. That being said, I to have some doubts in if this is possible to code in into PA at this stage of development (I’m not a programmer so I’m just assuming things here)

Economy: Although I feel the metal spamming in PA could be tuned down, I don’t think TA levels of metal are valid without any form of metal generator . I didn’t like those in TA and also don’t fit well in PA imho so only a slight tuning down of metal spots would be nice at this point. Variable amounts of metal/sec per spot would be awesome though, as would a larger role for wreckage as a resource.

And YES. We need more sources of energy like in TA. It wouldn’t be too hard to add a wind/solar/water current strength variable to planets wouldn’t it? This would allow certain times of energy to fare better on one planet then on the other. Specific energy generators could be cheap but variable in energy generation based on the circumstances on the planet, while the current ‘nuclear fission’ would be constant but more expensive (I’m just making this up as I go)

Units: I think the role of the commander in PA is almost the same as in TA and I don’t really have a problem with him/her (I’ve seen the gender discussion thread and playing it save). I also completely agree with the fragile, expensive fabber idea; this would stop the mindless spamming of the poor sods in PA for assisting purposes as well as adding a target for your bots. I do, however, disagree with the ‘though units’ idea. PA is about endless streams of huge armies getting blown to pieces while in TA 50 units was already a considerable force of units.

Unit formations in TA were horrible actually, just like they are atm in PA so I wouldn’t look here for a example of how things should be done.

I’m not going to burn myself on the ‘assisting’ topic, enough has been said about that imho

I do miss my samsons & slashers L I think they would do great in PA, but it would be quite the job to balance them properly. And god YES! I still remember the first time I saw a Hammer lifting its flaps only to start a barrage of projectiles, or the deployment of the merl/diplomats missile, or just wait a minute to see an advanced core engineer fold out its nanolathe ‘cannons’..awesome!

TL-DR: Terrain should indeed be more variable but the impact of this on gameplay could be technically challenging. Economy could really benefit from some TA influences. Although most PA units could learn a thing or two about ‘character’ from TA units, I do prefer the less durable-more desctructable type of units over becoming attached to your Fido.

EDIT: Typo's

We need to be cautious with the "It isn't finished" way of thinking. The time left to make constructive adjustments to the game is all but gone.

This isn't really a new game, it is TA/SupCom -lite.
The only thing original in PA is the maps, with that comes the larger scope.

What exactly would be wrong with copying TA on round maps? I would play that.

You are a negative nancy. Why on Earth did you even play the game? Sounds like you hated it, in fact, why in Earth did you become interested in this?

We definitely need more interesting forms of power, even if they are all basically the same, it adds to the game. Few people like the magic box pgens we have, I'm one of them.

Height is important. We want this to be the ultimate macro game, but with out tactics, it's no fun, and terrain would definitely encourage tactics.

Also, you state that SupCom was the first game to change the energy/metal production, why is that so relavent? Many more have kept it than removed it, clearly or want so bad.

Now I never had Heard Of TA before I saw P'S kickstarter, but I played it a bunch offline and it was awesome. I'm A casual gamer, Make The games fun for us too, not boring, bland and/or too complicated.

I voted "NO" because, TA was TA and PA is PA, I believe PA could be better without having every aspect of TA. Basically TA or PA they both focus on expansion of the base which gains you more productivity and resources. Then you could have more units and kick your opponent's ***. If you want everything same as TA why don't you just play TA.