Risk vs Reward

Imagine I eliminated advanced factories and instead created a new factory that can be built by basic fabricators, let's call it the Meta factory. It costs 1,000,000 metal to produce. The Meta factory fabricates at 1,000 metal per second and uses 100,000 energy. You can build a new Meta fabricator for only 100,000 metal. Once you have the truly awesome Meta fabricator, it fabricates at 750 metal per second and uses 75,000 energy. It can build metal extractors that produce 250 metal per second for only 7,500 metal, and similarly good energy plants. For another 50,000,000 metal it can build a giant "I WIN" unit that has one attack that kills all enemies everywhere.

Clearly the gap between the power of the "I WIN" unit vs the basic units is super strong, and by definition makes them irrelevant. Also, the economic power of Meta tier dwarfs that of basic tier as well.

What do you do about this balance change? Do you try and rush to the Meta tier as quickly as possible? What does that mean? Does it mean that you need to expand in the basic tier and try to take over as much territory as you can so you have the best possible chance to afford it? If you rush it, do you think you will get killed by basic tier units while you try to build it?

Once you build your Meta factory, how will you afford to run it to build the fabricator? And then how can you afford to run the fabricator on your basic economy? Will you use the Meta tier economy to build a neverending horde of basic tier units and try to win that way, or will you then continue your rush to the "I WIN" unit? Or will you pepper your opponents with a seemingly endless supply of rhetorical questions?

Does you plan change if the Meta fabricator can make a unit cannon?

I would rush a bunch of sniper units of some kind, wait for them to be nearly done the meta factory, destroy it and watch them rage quit.

I see what you are trying to do here. You are missing our arguments. There already is a set of "I win buttons" and those are halley moons. These are not a problem, however, because they RELY on small units to get. That is interesting. Having I Win buttons that depend only on economic factors are much, much less interesting.

As for using this "risk/reward" argument for justifying unit obsolescence, you are missing the point of arguing against unit obsolescence. It isn't about whether or not basic can be used to win, it is about whether or not all units are valid throughout the game. This is no justification. It is calculus. It is pre-defined gameplay. It is anti-strategy.

#NoUnitObsolescence2014

...

This is one reason why i prefer the Supcom/FAF way of doing things. Going from one tier to the next is a gradual process, not just a 'oh looks like im suddenly Tier 2, better start making Tier 2 eco'.

All things equal, people will go for the safer option vs the risky option if both have equivalent utility.

I... Im not *exactly* sure what you are asking. I sorta see it, but not quite. I feel like you are trying to take the current difference in power between basic vs advanced and make it hypothetically massive to give a better picture of what that power difference actually means, but, well, its a hard question.

To make this transition less jarring:

decrease cost of advanced factories - leave cost of advanced units alone, or increase them a bit
decrease advanced factory build power
Increase metal cost of advanced mex
decrease advanced mex production.


The idea here is that you can go for early advanced, but you'll have to take it slow as the basic economy can only support so much advanced stuff. The basic units will have a dps to cost advantage. Once the game progresses into big bases with econ generating planets, it will become more important to have high dps per unit area, where advanced would excel at, and basic units would be relegated to the role of raiders/flankers for use where punching through nasty numbers of units/defenses is less of an issue (invasions of poorly defended planets for example).

The risk/reward will still be the usual balance of econ/tech/strategic position etc. however the line will be blurred between distinct strategies, and what strategy is employed can rapidly change.

There is other ways to introduce risk/reward without the massive economic jumps though.

For example, because metal points are limited, there is a risk/reward to having mildly expensive T2 extractors that only add a small amount of metal income, rather than very expensive extractors that add a lot - they pay off in the long run, but there is an initial risk in diverting resources to build them.

The real problem is T2 units that are better versions of T1 units, and T2 economy that is massively better than T1. These are the drivers of rushing to T2. Remove or address these, and the problem solves itself much more neatly. Raising the barrier to entry but leaving the drivers may delay the transition, but it will still occur, and now has the downside of introducing a massive economic power gap between those at T1 and those at T2.

That heavily depends on how easy it is to defend your expansions.
Assuming the current balance would just be changed to have that meta tier I am sure it would not change actually that much. Perfect play would try to expand aggressively while attacking your opponent to prevent them from expanding. Looking at the numbers I'd say the price of your meta tier is too high for most 1v1 to be a reasonable choice, most games end before any player even has made 1 million metal. Like it takes 30 minutes before a player has made 1 million metal overall.
For meta tech to be a reasonable choice from a player's point of view the game must have reached a state were falling behind 1 million metal in units is acceptable because the overall amount of units in the field is so big that 1 million is only a not that big % of it. So very unlikely to be of any real use.

It depends on how easily I can defend with turrets against hordes of t1 units before the factory is finished.

• If I can easily defend my bse and my expansions with fast to build, low cost, high damage turrets, (read t2 turrets) i'll just spam those everywhere to get area control and mex control. (As we do at this moment)

• If I can't spam t2 turrets everywhere because of a longer build time, higher cost and/or a reduced effectiveness, I'd spam t1 units and build turrets on places where i won't have enough attention of local forces to defend.

Before the actual turret changes and the t2 bomber patch, we weren't rushing t2 because of the viability of t1 units to attack bases. I don't think our current t2 costs are very different from the t1 spam period.


The beta levelers were extremely powerful and yet, we didn't rush t2.

Then the game kinda forces around getting to the next stage of economy, units and of course getting close to the IWinButton.

Strange question.

I think that something like that would be quite nice, however the meta-super-kill-everything-weapon shouldn't kill everything. Instead tone down slightly the price and costs for the meta fabber/factory and make the death weapon deliver a HUGE blow instead of finish the game, since I don't think 1 super expensive weapon should ever just end game. Also if something like this was made, than I don't think there would be a predominant strong strategy. I mean some players may turtle really hard and try to get the death weapon, but even turtle shells break with too much force. As for aggressive players, sometimes they may not be able to crack the shell. As for two aggressive players or two turtles things would get interesting. There are just so many different strats that its hard to tell until you try it out and thats the beauty of PA

Yes, I think you are right Cola_Colin. (Nice job on that best of five King of the Planet, btw). It would be too expensive. Now at the other extreme, I could make the hypothetical Meta tier exactly like the basic tier in every way. Clearly that would have no risk, and no reward, because you would already be building basic tier stuff already. I'm thinking there must be something in between that involves an appropriate amount of risk and an appropriate amount of reward. I guess it's all about searching for the balance point.

why does advanced have to be better than basic? forget advanced. call it specialized and bring it in line with basic units with major debuffs in some areas and major buffs in others. I should not have to go specialized to win, it should be a choice. I should not have use basic to win. I should have a choice.

A much better question, I think, is: Why have this tier in the first place? Why do you need it? It seems that you guys are just taking it as a given that this second tier needs to exist.

Do what you devs claimed you would do during the kickstarter. Make basic well-rounded units while advanced are very specialized.

I hope everybody understands that Meta is using the Meta-Factory as a METAphor for the advanced factory.

That example is supposed to explain how that huge jump from T1 to T2 does not invalidate T1.

But I still see issues and others have pointed those out (and I like(d) them ).

Ok..that was the last useless post for today...

I really like this approach. Some decent range of all-around traditional strategic units in T1 to get things going, then crazier min/maxed stuff in T2 to allow for some really interesting mid-late game unit play (or you could even rush min/max T2 units at your peril).

I think that the optimal balance point is where you need both, T1 units and T2 units in a good mix.
Yes, T2 units should have abilities that T1 units don't, or be able to accomplish certain tasks in a more efficient way, but only building T2 units or T1 units should not trump building T1 and T2 units together.

So I basically agree with your way of going on about things, meta. But at the same time, I want to see T1 as the backbone of your army, which you use to spam, spread out and cover the whole planet with. And T2 should be more pinpoint accuracy, more raw and focussed power, more versatility, but you should pay extra for it.
It should supplement your deeper, lategame tactics and strategies instead of being your answer to everything.

But I think it's quite simple:
To find the right balance point you have to know the desired result. And the desired result in my opinion would be 70% T1 and 30% T2 at average in games.

I'll make an example:

Imagine if the vanguard wasn't just a better inferno, imagine it was more like a moving wall. Without a weapon, but able to protect your armies from all sides. Ofc with more speed and a much decreased cost.

Would people still build infernos? For sure. Maybe they'd be the no 1 unit for drops then.
Would people build vanguards? For sure, because if you don't want to drop then you'll certainly want to build these chunks of metal instead.

Overlapping roles is not what creates variety, in my humble opinion.

Let's all stop calling them t1 and t2. We are only feeding the false pretense that there needs to be 2 tiers!

Basic and advanced!
Make the pledge. Donate $5 to my bank account.

#NoUnitObsolescence2014

Try having a reward of specialized units that give the player more options and a slight econ buff instead.
Even if T2 factories were more expensive and T2 units were not straight-up better than T1 (only specialized), people would still build the T2 factory for tactical options.

Having a single risk/reward set up with such a high difference as "win or lose" is silly. It's why many people hate nukes. It's part of why people are annoyed by the current balance. I honestly can't say I have fun playing PA right now, T1 is useless and I don't like playing sim city. I space out and get too bored to actually focus on the game after about 8 minutes, and it's gotten to the point that I don't think I'm going to play anymore until there's a major balance patch.