Current state of metagame.

Shellers are massively overpowered anyway.
Either you have inaccurate, high damage and aoe mobile artillery, or you have accurate, low damage, mobile artillery.

Combining high accuracy with high damage and aoe in one mobile unit is overkill imo.
It's not a siege unit, like the Holkins is for example, but rather a counter to everything else on the ground.

It HAS EVERYTHING to do with small mistakes.

For example -

My strategy - t1 pressure around the map, t2 Bots going up around minute 9 or 10, then adding orbital and some more t2 facs afterward.
In this patch, you go t2 air, get it up by 6:15, pump out 6 gunships and 3 fighters, and you can shut down my expansions before I get T2. There is literally nothing I can do.

My other strategy because i got mad:
T2 air rush. You scout my t2 Air rush and are FORCED to go t2 air. You cannot go t2 vehicles. You cannot go t2 bots. You might be able to get away with spamming t1AA everywhere - but you'd have to be incredibly dumb to let that hurt your attacks.

in other words, you don't have a choice. By going t2 air first, you set the pace of the game immediately. The other team has to match you. You can predict them now - which, imho, gives the match to you anyway.

Now, as for small mistakes - I leave a clump of 4 mex undefended, you bomber snipe the engineer who was idling, and proceed to destroy the entire mex cluster with doxen. That is a small mistake. Building t2 vehicles instead of air and losing because of it is not a mistake - that's a strategy. It's not viable right now. It needs to be. That's what brian is referring to.

So are gil-e. The problem is just killing anything in a large perimeter, from a safe distance few if anything can attack back.

Nothing balance can't fix. Give me the game in it's current state, watch me edit configs with new numbers. Afterwards, you COULD complain about my balance, but I bet it would definitely at the very least favor gil-e, peregrine, kestrel, hornets, levelers, vanguards, shellers, turrets, walls, and t2 mex and pgens less. At the very least, some people would appreciate that.

I always feel like GIL-Es are weak when going up against units, but strong against turrets and bases. It makes them a really interesting unit.

You need at least 5 Gil-Es, or ~2.5k metal to destroy 5 other Gil-Es simultaneously and if both sides have radar it will likely be mutual annihilation. You need only one sheller, or 575 metal to destroy 5 Gil-Es simultaneously and even if both sides have radar you won't lose the sheller.

I don't get all the gil-e hate. It doesn't have AoE, it has a very slow firing rate and it deals overkill most of the time. I've never seen them used nearly as effectively as shellers, which require far less micro as well. They're definitely more balanced.

1) Mentions shellers killing many many things without dying
2) Mentions gil-e killing many many things without dying
3) Mentions shellers killing Gil-e
4) Doesn't matter, both still kill everything else in large radiuses.

If you want to be more detailed:
5) A Kestrel can kill an army of gil-e and shellers, by itself.
6) A Kestrel, sheller, or gil-e, often aren't found in a vacuum. However, all 3 are serverely messed up.
7) Obviously, a laundry list of things are messed up and need fixed in this game lol.

Essentially the deal with Gil-Es is that if escorted by stingers and massed they can only be killed by shellers. Everything else they instakill or can outrange and kill via attrition if micro'd. If you go T2 vehicles but build levelers and/or vanguards, then they'll micro the Gil-Es and kill them. If you go T2 bots but don't make as many Gil-Es as they do or make slammers instead, they'll massacre you. If you go T2 air and they have stingers, then you've got no chance of getting more than a couple of hits in. They only have one counter as long as they're escorted properly and are micro'd.

If they get near a com then that com is dead unless they have more kestrels than you have stingers or a pelican with peregrines, which is another issue with them. Com tries to uber them? Too bad, they outrange it and have more speed than it does. Com tries to run away? Too bad, they have more speed than it does. Com tries to hop in a pelican? Hello fighter snipe!

I still find them broken, when you can just quickly swipe across an entire base with them without losing any numbers, tearing through mexes and pgens and factorys and turrets alike, and the enemy just sees buildings disappearing, nothing else.

Varying degrees of broken? Maybe. Is this thread about what is most broken? No, just that broken has in fact occured ingame somewhere.

The problem is the only option is to build the bigger army. You guys rarely attack before 10 mins. This is not fun ,1 dox of bomber is not considered proper attacking. It's just an annoyance. To say t1 is balanced because 1 dox can be a pain in the *** is a bold statement.

I can build just as good as many of the current meta players but it is just super boring. I spend more time playing sim city and less time doing the fun stuff. There isn't even much fun stuff other than drops as most units just cancel each other out without needing any assistance. Yeah it's fun getting "big" for a few games but the novelty wears off. I know über wants a more macro orientated game so maybe this type of game isn't for me. Hopefully there would be a mod that want a more TA style of game.

That's what I mean with t1 could be a bit better at attacking directly.
However I do consider even 1 dox killing 1 engineer an attack and depending on time and place losing one engineer can be quite painful. (Losing 1 engineer out of 1 engineers next to that nice expansion spot...)

Oh gosh I hate starcraft 2. (click fest) You can make the argument with sc2 whoever clicks the fastest wins the game. PA in MY OPINION is a way better game. In SC2 you have to keep making level cap buildings to make units. ( and all you get is 200 units) At first I didn't like the patch but now I've adapted and know how to use all the units from T1 to T2 effectively. Orbital still needs a little work and I wish the developers would make it easier to identify the orbital play. I currently use the anchors but when I'm in a system of 8 planets it would be nice when at a certain point at looking at the screen you can see the name of the planet above it. So you actually know exactly where your at when scrolling through planets.

And sometimes losing that one engineer isn't easily prevented. If the other person did a dox rush and got lucky, the dox will get in your base and be on the opposite side that your com is on when it can start killing your fabbers. That early on in the game, you have no way of knowing where the other guy is other than using the mex exploit or using PAStats, meaning that you can't place your com in a location where he can intercept the oncoming doxes without cheating.

Luck then becomes part of the game. You get lucky and your dox ends up near the enemy base before they get a dox up. You get unlucky and you use your com to build a line of power away from the enemy base. Or the reverse happens. You get unlucky and that raiding dox doesn't encounter the enemy. You get lucky and that com interecepts the dox.

If that 90 metal dox dies without killing anything, small loss. If that dox kills fabbers, then that is a huge setback to your opponent. Risk vs reward is broken there as well.

You can criticize the APM necessary to play Starcraft 2. But the strategic depth is undeniable.
And I wish the same for PA. A metagame where I want to try new combinations and strategies every game. Where I have the feeling that I can do whatever I want, and find my own style and be successful with it. That is not the case.

The metagame in PA is feeling like a one way street atm.

I wouldn't say that. I would say, the odds are usually low. I try to pelter creep early myself, and my odds of proper erection of the structures unharassed are usually low but reliable nonetheless. A lone dox randomly stumbling upon fabbers unprotected, is a little lower.

In that reguard. Pelter creep is higher risk, but higher reward, with terrible yet manageable odds. Generally, risk/reward should be broken if a legitimately skillful move is made. You hit a soft spot, then good job, especially if the spot was so soft that the softest unit was able to hit it.

It's only 'I win' if the opponent has centred most of his structures in one place and not gone for an anti-nuke. Which is more and more likely the further down the skill level we go, and pretty much inevitable in a FFA (mitigated by the fact the nuke may not be pointed at you). Which yes does make it a problem.

I don't know about that, I still use 5 of the non-fabber T1 units from bot, vehicle and air, out of 11 (7 out of 14 if we include naval, but I'd rarely go for all 4 in a single game). I tend to use 5-7 out of 11 in the earlier stages, depending on strategy.

I just spam stingers on area patrol, and tend to avoid going to T2 air until later. But I'm not a high level player, I can't use t2 air effectively anyway.

I see no problem with it, can you elaborate?

In FFA and/or multi-planet battles I agree, orbital does need work. But for the current way people use it on 1v1 single planet systems, it's fun. I also think people should use it later in the game regardless of the strategy they're going for. Presence in orbital would make opponents react to it even if you weren't going for a vanguard drop, it would deny them free reign of orbital themselves, advanced radar satellites are a good source of intel, orbital is safe from everything except orbital. Throw some power up there just for the hell of it, your eco is probably through the roof and you can't spend it all anyway (and it's vulnerable/safe against different things).

Anti-nukes yes, umbrellas? Umbrellas and/or your own orbital counter orbital. Peregrines? Bot aa or peregrines counter peregrines. If you've already chosen to get t2 air, then peregrines are perhaps more obvious, but it's because you're building on a choice you made earlier.

Not every unit has to add variety, overlap is fine. The only thing I think could be removed without changing gameplay at all would be advanced combat fabbers. They are literally triple the health, cost and throughput of normal combat fabbers, and are arguably worse as they can only be in one place at a time. T2 overall is adding a lot of variety; long range units everywhere except air (which also play differently to each other), transports, vanguards, proper air harass with kestrels or less likely hornets. Which are added to the t1 attributes of vision, light harass, aa, and the joker bot aka the boom.

Unit composition seems important. Skitters are useful with just about anything, particularly shellers and gil-e. Stingers (less so spinners) are useful with just about anything. Vanguards alone are easily countered, shellers alone can be reasonably countered. You can't go far wrong if you mix vanguards, levellers, shellers, stingers (or any aa) and skitters (or any intel, radar would probably do if you had reliable power) together. But scouting the enemy can allow you to alter the ratios in your favour, putting the DPS where it counts. No air in sight? No need for stingers then, or maybe just a few just in case. Very few mobile units? Vanguards aren't needed for tanking fire, more shellers would probably be a better use of funds. Lots of T1? Shellers for long range, levellers for close range. T2 vehicles with few or no shellers? Gil-E could work well.

I don't know anything about Starcraft deep strategy, just seen a few casts. However there is strategic depth to PA (I could write a rambling post too). It comes down to balancing economy, map control, harass, defense against harass, setting up the right type of production in the right place, and intel, all the while having an eye on the endgame(s) of choice. It's not as if you can balance it in advance either, the key is in adapting to events as they unfold. Pretty much any RTS in a nutshell.

PA you can win with many different strategies of air, navel, orbital, land. Lets play some friendly games and I will show you many ways of actually winning games and different strategies. You can set up a orbital, you can early dox harrass, you can use bomb bots to harrass , etc etc etc. I've noticed many players that suck in pa just say the game is crap. PA metagame is strong if not better then sc2. Plus pa is still not finished so relax a little bit.

Did I miss a build newer than 63180, that added new things?
EDIT:Because I am confused as heck.

This thread makes me sad.

The factory spam/map control meta that's being pushed lately by better players seems closer to what the game's spirit should be, I'd just rather it be T1 spam instead of T2. I'd like to see T1 broadened in scope and ability, T2 nerfed a bit and specialized, but think the overall meta is headed in the right direction.