Risk vs Reward

What brian said above. By infinite, we mean it takes a hundred or more fabbers and still won't use all of 20 adv extractors. If advanced extractors produced half of what they do, having 20 of them and you still might run out of build power.

Which means, you don't have the metal to nuke every minute, or do so and build units. At least then, one could win by using a cheap army to beat a nuke before its built, because metal is limited in how fast you can nuke.

Also would control t2 units, because t2 units would cost too much to make in effective numbers, compared to t1 hoarde which you can make quite a lot with just t1 metal. Having an army of gil-es built would be slower than 3 ant factories, you might not be able to afford it and anti air units so it would no longer be go-to, or you would have to more strategically use less gil-es and more aa to accomplish the same job instead of using whatever you want because you have infinite metal.

The commander's role is mostly to stop your opponent from marching two bots into your base, killing all your fabs, then killing your factories, then killing everything else.

He achieves that role.

Maybe a long UC cool down will change stuff, maybe it won't. But I don't think the commander should always be able to beat T1. The commander should always be threatened by large armies, and you should always be defending your commander against large armies with well placed defences or an army of your own.

Right. I never liked that mechanic in any game.

Yeah Im not fan of having aT1 army be incapable of killing a commander.

But id also like to prevent my army from balling up so much and being such a AOE target.

Mmm.... true. . .

Here's a thought - if the commander was so powerful compared to basic vehicles, why didn't a basic vehicle "evolve" which had longer range?

20 Adv. Extractors, with a basic extractor underneath, gives you 35*20 = 700 metal income.
100 t1 fabbers give you 1000 metal spent.

1000 metal spent per second gives you a nuke every 32 seconds, easily. To get a nuke every 60 seconds, you only need 534 metal to be spent on the nuke, which is a fairly low income in this game.

It's a problem with the assisting mechanic. It would be solved if you gave nukes a cooldown (not a roll-off time - that would be very annoying having to launch a nuke 5 minutes before you needed it)

An army of Gil-Es costs you 36 metal per second, the 3 ant factories cost you 45 metal per second. The issue is that 5 Gil-Es are so much better than 4 Ants. IT doesn't have anything to do with the infinite economy of which you speak, it's simply that Gil-Es have too much bang for your buck compared to the basic units.

It doesn't have to be a rush. If the game ender requires a well, if not excessively, developed infrastructure to build and support, it is just a natural development of the game.

As an example (and you'll probably want to lynch me for using this example), in Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance you'd have to have a well developed economy for the game enders to be a viable option and in only rare cases was there a rush for that strategy. It was more a go-to option once either a stale-mate developed or you could otherwise afford to go for it.

It's a balance thing.

Basic units seem to be nothing more then a "dont send your com into my base at minute 1" and nothing more.

T2 stuff seems the exact opposite, mindless lethal pokes.

No offense, but no.

It would be solved if a 400 metal economy was a competitive t2 economy, all else balanced around that. Or if the cost of the nukes were balanced around having a 700 metal economy.

I had a discussion with someone earlier. They pointed out a 70 metal economy in TA was a great economy. Costs were lower, but t2 costs were much higher. We don't need that exactly, lets redesign this game if it were TA and a 50 metal economy was a great economy and t2 game-ending toys would build in 4 minutes if you literally spend 40 metal on it.

Also, I have always agreed gil-e need nerf, that is no secret, I say it all the time, and I have always used them myself. I just think I'd still use them if they weren't able to just walk through the center of an enemy base never meeting 1 bit of resistance. Right now, they just walk through the center, everything dies before it even sees them. The enemy, they just see their base disappearing, and would only know why if they had radar.

Its not so much the range, as there is a lot to consider:

WARNING, SOUND STARTS IMMEDIATELY!



The first like 27 seconds shows that even against a commander who one shot kills my bots, even the most basic of units can and should still post a credible threat to your commander, if not in one single burst attack when compared to a nuke, but in the ability to stack up considerable DPS that even with the ubercannon, is hard to push back without support.

That's the ways supcom did it, less aoe and more of a high damage weapon that can kill most units immediately, as compared to it's normal cannon that while powerful, is slow firing.

And while id love to see how we can recapture the awe-inspiring weapon of TA, the balance of it might prove more tricky.

You need to fight off a blob, whilst not actually annihilating it outright every-time.

Yep, and the issue isn't that the commander one shots bots. The issue is that the commander one shots 20 bots. It is insanely difficult to stack up that considerable DPS against the commander.


What I meant is, if the ubercannon is so powerful at a given range, why didn't a longer range cheap weapon evolve?

Those TA values aren't relevant because this isn't TA.

A nuke in PA costs 12 minutes to build, unassisted. The "70 metal economy" from TA is equivalent to a 350 metal income in PA, from 50 t1 mex. A 350 metal economy is small in PA, and is still enough to be pumping out a nuke every 100 seconds, never mind every 240.

Is it now? Says who?

I'd argue that it's best to make the commander's role fun and not just an anti-rush mechanic.

It's not an anti-rush mechanic. It's an anti-cheap loss mechanic..

I'd argue that the commander forcing a game to take 3 times longer than it would is not a fun mechanic. You don't want a multiplayer community where people say "you can't possibly win from here, delete your comm, because it will take me 15 minutes to win and you'll lose anyway"

//Sorry - Off topic stuff.

So uh... did the topic switch to commanders?

uh, so FA balanced worked so well than. Almost perfect... How about we just copy and pace everything from FA to PA here on our cool rounded planets and publish it lol? we would even have 4 factions instead of 1 and it would be EPIC!!

You say FA was perfect, I disagree.

I say there's lots of balance issues with FA.

My main frustration with FA is similar to my frustration with PA's current balance – the tech race and invalidation of unit types.

I also love the idea of having only one faction. Less balance issues and puts everyone on equal playing fields. Makes the game more about strategic unit movement.

nano would argue the same but for TA, that everything was perfect so save time copy paste. Others would argue zero k, and sadly id agree with them most.

id argue take TA and copy it here borrowing from any useful zero-k feature like fabber stripes and area and line and drawn and spaced commands and unit roles and such.

then again, id argue stay the PA course, keep the macro scale, keep developing unit roles few at a time, and balance the numbers for this game sometime. Its just economy scale and unit strengths.

The thing about copy and pasting a game is you run into Call of Duty Syndrome. It's the exact same thing over and over with updated graphics. Gets old.

PA does have the benefit of spheres and multiple planets.

I don't mind striking off into a new direction, as long as it is done successfully. Uber has a bunch of skilled people and can definitely pull it off. I'm just pretty concerned about their proposed directions... :-/

Good grief. I feel grossly misrepresented. I do not advocate just copy-pasting numbers from TA, as they just wouldn't function for a game of this scale... and I certainly don't want to copy over the many mistakes TA made.

Please Trophy, I can speak for myself. Don't put words in my mouth.

Technically more like just derailed into "arguing" over "things someone said," since meta's original point has already been covered to death in 10+ pages. Forums lack "finality" so this inevitably happens.

A friend and I were talking about this and a super-unit like the Marv from C&C or equivalent would be great in PA as PA is all about super destructive power and things like that. From a specific factory this unit could be created and it would be very powerful and do high damage. The only problem with having this in PA is could you stop this unit with nukes and why wouldn't you just build nukes to kill their Com? When the Com dies all unit's die. That's the problem with having a unit more powerful than the Com. It may be better but it will always be less important.

Megabots/super units have been discussed to death and won't be present in the game, at least not for the release.