Risk vs Reward

It's going to take more than that, you've have to at the very least rebalanced what's left to even out the power curve a bit between Basic and Advanced as well.

Mike

Thinking out loud here but has anyone noticed this t1 group doesn't have ANY mobile artillery unit? The only thing that comes close are naval ships and their role is so limited I wonder if anyone uses them. I have this bet that if I build nothing but laser defenses and a wall to guard a pelter or two there wouldn't be any ground t1 that could penetrate it- short of maybe building a pelter to hit the lasers. Throw in some air fabbers to patrol the area and even attrition damage wouldn't work. The lack of a t1 artillery unit makes things very hard to siege.

Yes. It does. It's been a repetitive problem. Partially fixed by the nerf of pelters.

I think there's some room for a unit with that kind of a role...

Uber has - they are doing crazy experiments with the idea of Dox as grenadiers.

Random thoughts:

Commanders ought to almost always beat T1. T1 ought to almost always beat T2. T2 ought to almost always beat Commanders.

Commander > T1 > T2 > Commander

But where do buildings fit in there? Are that T1/T2, or are they just Buildings?

If we consider buildings on their own, then the RPS-triangle becomes a RPSX-square. Which isn't fun, because you pick opposite corners of the square and build them in equal measure.

I think you might need to make it a prime-number of things... like, say, five. Maybe even the unholy pentagram of Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock.

I think you've got something here. I think that buildings should fall in with the commander. So t1 is your defence and main fighting force and t2 is your bunker/commander buster. Really the commander is a moving building .

That sounds overly simplified. We wouldn't need more than 5-10 units in the game if that were true. I still support the idea where basic is all purpose, bread and butter generalist, Advanced is specialist and therefore dependent on basic, but deadly if used that way and buildings are well balanced so they can't stop ungodly amount of units but a significant investment into fortification should still lead to hard to breach bases.

I can only think of fifteen different kinds of units, not including orbital.

Fighter
Bomber
Gunship
Transport

Artillery
Tank
Damage Sponge

Gunner
Sniper
Suicide

Battleship
Missile ship

Fabricator
Scout
AA

Play some SMNC. There are different flavors of things.

Construction Fabricator
Combat Fabricator
Burst Damage Low DPS
Steady Damage Overkill Shot Cannon
No Overkill Slightly Lower Damage Hitscan Laser
High Arc Normal Range
High Arc Long Range
Hitscan Long Range
Point Blank Range High DPS
No Weapon Walking Wall
High Vision
High Speed
Mobile Radar
Anti Air Long Range High Damage Low DPS
Anti Air Short Range Low Damage Multitarget Medium DPS
Low Damage Splash Bomber
High Damage Single Target Bomber
Short Range High DPS Fighter
Long Range Low DPS Fighter
Steady DPS Gunship
Med-Speed Single Cannon Single AA Missile Boat
Slow Triple Cannon Ship
Fast Fabricator Boat
Slow Combat Fabricator Ship
Really Slow Triple Long-Cannon Ship
Really Slow Long Missile Land/Air Ship
Amphibious Attack Bot/Multiterrain Vehicle
Suicide High Damage High AOE
Planet Traveling Fighter
Planet Traveling Bomber

Don't blow this off just because it is very different, but I think this could be a solution.
To solve the if B is better than A people will only build B problem, I try to look to the real world to figure out why every device made is not as good as the best in the field.

I think it comes down to the idea that there are only a limited number of exceptional people that can produce the best of anything. I definitely don't want to keep track of fabbers and factories and keep track of experience (but that is a possible solution). So how about increasing the costs of creating T2 factory (perhaps Fabbers too?) depending on the size of the number of available T1 factories. The idea is that you need a large pool of common workers in order to train up enough of them to occupy the best factories. If you don't have a large pool of workers to pull from you have to pay a penalty based on the difference between the current ratio of T2 factories to T1 factories against optimal ratio (decided by the players as a game option).

While it does not seem to mesh well with the idea of robots which should all be at the same level, that is what good writers are for... perhaps they all have positronic brains.

Hopefully the game designers can leave enough hooks in the game engine to allow modders a chance to alter gameplay in this manner even if they don't adopt it.

JesterOC

In the real world, there is also a cost, so by definition making the best will require more resources.

In this game all resources are infinite. its actually a huge problem.

I could easily see them being forced to make resources limited, that would also encourage fighting, and abandoning planets.

I still dont see how galactic war will work with infinite resources, because after you got the first few planets, its just a grind and kinda pointless, because you have unlimited resources.

So sooner rather than later i suspect, uber like it or not, will be forced to add finite resources or some serious diminishing returns. Something needs to give.

And to be fair, if there is resources enough on one planet to feed 4-8 players for a one hour war, thats pretty good. There is something awesome about draining resources, and seeing a planet end up dried and ruined, then moving on. So it will turn into like dark grey or maybe desert.

Unlimited resources aren't a problem as long as you have the so called "game-enders" or game edning mechanics. Think nukes, but more potent. Stuff like that, that costs a lot but if you let the enemy get to it, it's an almost guarenteed loss.

"Infinite Resources" is one of the core concepts of this game (because it is vital for the Streaming Economy to work the way we want it to).

They were no problem in TA, they were no problem in SupCom and Spring RTS.
Because those games are balanced around the resources being infinite.

But PA is not yet balanced, so it doesn't work yet

And metal spot distribution does not work properly yet, either (at least that's what I think about it...I don't know whether there is any kind of sophisticated system behind it but it feels like it's simply a random distribution.)

Except the scale of PA makes game enders extremely easy to get to, no matter the cost.

Late game, it's very easy to stop building everything, or even just some things, and pump it all into nukes or halleys or gunships or whatever. Especially with how much eco T2 produces.

Which is why I advocate for advanced eco to be on par with basic eco. Advanced Metal Extractors should produce 7 or 14 metal and advanced power plants should produce... I dunno, 1,000 or 2,000 energy.

What I was saying is that it's a balance thing, really. The game enders need to be hard to get to, but very effective. That's usually achieved by having high construction, activation, upkeep cost. Whether they decide to set the cost ridiculously high or tone down the metal production values is irrelevant to my point.

That's the thing. PA is supposed to be about a lot of units – not about rushing to get to the special game ending unit.

This is mostly to address the if B is better always Build B. By having a rule like this will even effect infinite resources. Because all parties have infinite resources if Player 1 pays twice as much as Player 2 when buying his best tech he will likely lose the war in the long run.

For instance
Lets say the golden ratio is 4:1 four standard to one advanced.
And the purchase penalty is 100%
Assume the function for the penalty is 1 minus the golden ratio time the inverse of the players ratio, and we ignore negative results.

The purchase price for the factory and all the units it creates is increased up to +100% of the standard unit cost.
If Player 1 has 1 ratio of 4 T1 factories for every T2 factory he pays standard price
If Player 1 has a ratio of 3:1 then he pays 25% more ( .25 = (1-(1/4*3/1)))
If Player 1 has a ratio of 2:1 then he pays 50% more ( .50 = (1-(1/4*2/1)))
If Player 1 has a ratio of 1:1 then he pays 75% more ( .75 = (1-(1/4*1/1)))
If Player 1 has a ratio of 0:1 then he pays 100% more ( 1.0 = (1-(1/4*0/1)))

At some point it will be better to build more T1 factories than T2 factores. This will also force players to take more land if for nothing else the factories.

The resources in this game are not infinite.

I think by infinite, he means that metal extractors and power plants won't ever run out.

Uhhh... wait why is everything just "attack stuff" (mostly). Personally I'm fine with really crazy stuff:

• Ground-to-Orbital defense Ground/Naval
• Amphibious tank
• All-terrain bot
• Mobile Radar
• Air/Ground Enemy-Radar Detection Scout
• Torpedo bombers
• Anti-radar umbrella unit (very small protection)
• Inland torpedo launcher (launches missile that intentionally sinks when it reaches coast)
• Anti-radar dispersion (removes X units near it from radar signature)
• Acceleration based unit (has the ability to accelerate for a short period; think motorcycle like unit)
• Air mine layer \w air mines
• Fabbers with the ability to burrow into the ground
• Drone Aircraft Carrier (automatically builds a cheap version of T1 fighters/bombers; takes only area commands)
• Flying Submarine (ie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_submarine)
• Deployable flak (very very long deploy time)
• Deployable pelter
• Deployable teleporter unit
• Anti-pelter defensive unit
• Early game ability based unit:
  - huge energy cost (1min+ cooldowns per unit)
  - only really viable via mass energy storage
  - [example ability] smoke screen
  - [example] plasma artilary barage (think lethal fireworks)
  - [example] deploys walls (fabbers wouldnt be able to build them)
  - [example] long distance repair (converts unit/building husks back to their original unit/building at 50% hp), cost relative to number of units and their original metal cost; essentially pay energy to get it back
• Adv. ability based unit, flying caster
  - your units are counted as a resource; the more you have the more "compute" resource you have
  - each unit has a cooldown of 1min before its compute is added back to the resource pool
  - all abilities are themed towards "requires absurd computation"
  - [example] de-assembler bomb: target area location at extreme long range, the fabbers at the location are hacked and their nanomachines switched to leathal deassembly, 10 fabbers creates a nuke explosion equivalent in size and damage, 20 is equivalent to two times a nuke in size but damage is the same, 30 is threee times, 40 is four times, etc (can not go past 10 times), works on friendly fabbers too
  - [example] napalm: target an area to create a perpetual fire that lasts 4min, hurts both allied and enemy units
  - [example] misderaction: target an area, units affected will bunch togheter in a group and randomly move around ignoring the players move and attack orders for 3min; the movement and attack patterns on the confused group of units is random but they still will attack enemy units and not attack friendly units
  - [example] mirage: target area to create fake holograms of the units; holograms have slow fixed movement speed (mostly effective with tanks or other slow armies; ineffective on fast aircraft), they take damage relative to the size of the original unit (smaller units take less, larger holograms take more)
  - [example] nuclear preperation; can be on "toggle" wastes a fixed amount of compute every minute, shows nuke landing area and offers ability to change it; nuke will not be denied it will simply land at a random location in a relatively giant area near the original target area
  - [example] absolute recon: consume <insert absurd amount of compute> + 70% of all your compute, reveals all enemy commander by pinging the map; all players see the ping (useful for games on 2000+ radius)
• walking factory (nothing more than that, no guns or anything)
• walking energy plant
• walking metal extractor
• walking teleporter
• completely pointless super expensive giant statue of your current commander
• decoy commander, huge metal cost stationary version of yourself, eat up a lot of energy constantly while it's alive to mimmick your commanders energy signature, is killed by a single nuke