Current state of metagame.

I'm always glad to be proven wrong for I will learn something new

In terms of vanguard drop I'm referring more to the astreaus based drop than in air transports (the latter is much more countereable).

There are lots of silly unintended tactics that get worked out by intelligent players, in Spring for example the combination of being able to first person units + aircraft being able to fly off the edge of the map was used to circumvent defences in allot of games, although it was usually agreed in a match that such moves were against the spirit of it and in the end the devs removed that capability.

My question to you is simple- why do you play the game? Personally I enjoy RTS games, in particular the TA style game for the pace, the minor details that effect battles, and the tactics involved in large scale conflicts. TA and Spring had this in spades- it's very engaging fighting tooth and nail with opposing forces, securing wreckage, testing for weak spots in defensive lines. I've also played you enough times in Spring to know you like large scale combat as well. So my question then is *why* go for the kill via an exploit?

The only reasons I can think of:
1: There are no viable standard ways to win
2: The *only* thing that matters to you is your ladder rank

If the above are true *this* is what turns people off the game. I play at a reasonable level and I was a competitive player in TA and Spring (won a few tourneys). Those games gave you lots of options for interesting and different tactics without having to find a way to break the game. Personally I think that once the game is properly balanced this wont be an issue anyway.

The point I was making though is that *defeating a player economically, or by more efficient use of resources leading to a military advantage that allows you to kill your opponent isn't a 'snipe' and is fair game*.

Interesting post elodea, however there are some critical factors that is important to the current balance analysis that you missed.

Peregrine combat is anti-slippery slope. The player with more Peregrines will usually take more losses than the player with fewer Peregrines. This means that even if you are behind in Peregrines you can actively fight for air dominance by sending small groups of Peregrines against larger groups of Peregrines and still make cost.
Air transports, Pelicans, are extremely vulnerable. They are killed by a single anti-air missile. A single Stinger poses a serious threat to Pelicans and even stray missiles circling around can seriously jeopardize the whole drop.
Commanders themselves are actually pretty good at dealing with Vanguards if you have some space to manouver and enough energy to continousely use the Ubercannon against the incoming Vanguards.

The thing with snipers efficiency against Shellers is that their effectiveness decreases the more dense the combat gets. The more Shellers shells that fly in the air, the harder it is to dodge them with Sniper bots. Add some Vanguards or spam infront of the Shellers and the Gil-Es have to sustain the fire from the Shellers for even a longer duration.
If you go t2 vehicle first and t2 air second you also have the opportunity to drop Vanguards which you don't have if you go t2 bots first. That is the reason why I usually go t2 air or t2 vehicles first.

If i have more peregrines than someone else. All i need to do is trade 1 for 1... Having more peregrines doesn't force you to trade inefficiently in one big go, although there's no reason why you wouldn't if it still resulted in sufficient peregrine numbers after.

Peregrines and fireflies tank all of the damage. If your drop fails and all your pelicans die, it is always an execution problem. If commanders try and run away with dgun, you don't need to send all ~4 vanguards after him. killing energy or facs is about the same effect.

As for t2 bots first, i think you misunderstand . The point is to start applying constant pressure from the first gil-e before vanguard drop timings. Before anything gets 'dense'. Keep trading and buffering with t1 bots and you win via attrition if they even try and go t2 air at the same time. Shellers are completely avoidable at the early timings that really matter.

There really isn't as much synergy between vanguards and shellers either. Vanguard range is too short to force overlap on sniper bots.

*You definitely have more experience with PA than me though, so hey i could be wrong. All i know is having played a few 1v1's against early shellers with early gil-e seemed to work pretty well.

It feels like a lot of people in this community have become too used to rapid patching, so they're also used to us declaring after a week "this is the meta" and then settling down until the next patch changes it. But that hasn't been the case with this patch, it has been out a while and the meta a month ago when we first tried it is quite different to the meta now a month later. What started with "rush T2 for completion by 5min" has changed to a 6-7min. The T1 turrets prevent T1 mobile unit usage has become early T1 harass. The rush T2 eco and boom in a small space has become rapid expansion and proxy bases. As little T1 as possible has become multiple T1 production facilities early.

The game we play with this patch now is not the game we played with this patch a month ago, and it feels like some players took their ball home pretty early and don't have enough experience with this patch.

While I don't agree with everything matiz says (and I'll tackle that in a minute), I first want to say I find the idea that this build has limited our options absolutely laughable. Going back in time, we had:

• Commander rush
• Dox horde into Kestrels
• Dox horde into Hornets
• Dox horde into Slammers with expand or die mentality. And ******* pelters.
  
• Ant horde into levellers with expand or die mentality. And ******* pelters.

Right now there's a level of combined arms going on that I haven't seen in the game before. I raid with Dox, I expand, I proxy, I use lasers to defend, I use pelters to attack, catapults can define the battlefield at a risk of your investment achieve nothing, I raid bases with GIL-E, I make frontal assaults with Shellers, I support with Levellers, I drop with Vanguards, I harass with Hummingbirds, I raid with Kestrels, I dominate with Peregrines, I counter with Stingers, I finish them with nukes which I stop with anti-nukes or expansion.

Which patch before had that diversity of play? None of them, that's which.

Misconception number 1: Turrets are overpowered.

Yes they are, but not in the way we thought originally. It's not that you secure the map with them, it's that they eliminate army positioning in the early game. See that Ant swarm on radar? Pop up a turret and you just won the battle. It's too easy to reactively place turrets, thus removing their disadvantage which should be that they're stationary.

Misconception number 2: T1 is useless.

Not useless, but definitely under-utilised. You use the Dox, the Stinger and the Skitter. But the Spinner is a waste of space, the Ant is rendered irrelevant by turrets, the Inferno doesn't have the HP to do its job. I think we have Combat Bots or something.

I think this primarily ties into issue 1 though, turrets are too good to really let T1 be more than a minor element of the game when really it needs to play a larger part to allow for greater diversity of play.

Misconception number 3: Vanguard is overpowered.

A tricky one for sure. I guess the concern is that a successful drop is so powerful that it's pretty much always worth the risk because you don't need to put that much metal into it. God help us when players get good at co-ordinating multiple drops simultaneously.

Less an issue with the Vanguard than it is with the Pelican I think.

Biggest misconception: This patch is strategically dull.

Yeah, that I don't agree with at all. It doesn't have the mass T1 armies, but there's a hell of a lot going on in a game these days. T1 needs to come back as a larger part of the game, but I think Uber are heading in the right direction.

There is nothing broken in this patch.

Can't fully agree with you there, the T1/laser balance remains a real problem in my eyes. I suspect walls are an issue that we don't fully understand yet because the primary T2 fighting units, the Sheller and GIL-E don't give a **** about walls.

I think the Sheller needs to be examined more closely. It snowballs hugely and is difficult to stop when it does. Should players be using the Holkins more? I don't have the numbers here to say.

I definitely think some people have given up way too easily though.

I'm sorry, but I know that I don't suck in this game. Yes, there might be different strategies, but they're not deep enough imo. I don't really know how to explain this properly. I just feel that there's definitely more strategy in other games, and that in PA, I feel like the later I get into a game, the more mandatory choices I have to make.

I share the opinion of clopse, that it seems like Uber wants to create a pure makro game, which I just can't enjoy. At least not with the current balance. I don't want to play Sim City... You can win in many ways, true. But some of these ways are more efficient than others, and I feel like being forced into the more efficient ways, which leaves me no room of experimenting with my own style.

That is just my opinion. I'm not expecting you to share it. And if you enjoy this game as it is, then I congratulate you. But don't expect me to enjoy it, too. This game, with the current balance, the current strategic depth, is not a game that I fancy, nor enjoy. Don't expect me to change my opinion, purely because someone might disagree with it.

Greetings

Very much this- I've been having allot of fun with this patch. To be honest the issue with turrets is more Turrets + walls (as without walls you can swarm a group of turrets with t1 quite easily.

Also I agree the vanguard as a ground unit is fine- it's just a bit too strong against the commander / too easy to transport there so it either needs to be harder to transport or balanced so the commander has a chance against at least 1.

Some of the proposed balanced changes in the play test might change this for the better- it will be interesting to see.

Currently transports don't need to land their cargo, they just teleport to the ground.

So that in it's self will nerf vanguard drops.

Also the Astraeus Vanguard drop is clearly powerful because of a bug, so that'll sort itself out naturally soon enough. Frankly, doing anything orbital is hard enough already because Deep Space Radar is ridiculously powerful and accessible.

Well I think we both agree that it should be fixed. Sending the Vanguard instantly from the transport to the ground is easily identified as an exploit. However is Pelican instant unload also an exploit or an intended feature? I hope for the earlier and wish that they would slow down the unload transport and make the transport actually physically unload the unit rather than teleporting it to the ground. However I can't make the transport unload any slower so I am going to use the current "exploit" and base my balance analysis on this behaviour because that is the game/balance that is given to me.

Some things can easily be considered an exploit and be mutually avoided by the players if agreed to before the match but this quickly gets annoying when you play several different players or tournaments with different rules. You can have a no nuke game or no rush game if you want and this will most likely alter the balance of the game but having to arbitrarily limit yourself from 'cheap' strategies, exploits and bugs quickly gets annoying when your opponent isn't following the same set of rules. Instead of having to enforce the rules in my mind and restrict myself, I prefer that the game enforces the rules for me so that I am free to explore the game.

Are you sure that it actually is an exploit or just a self-imposed rule because you want the game to play in a certain way? What if this exploit actually increases the strategic depth of the game? What if it makes more strategies available?
Read this post about the t2 kbot Pelican in Total Annihilation:

http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=33452

Hm. An interesting question: Is finding a dominant strategy, breaking the game or were the game broken from the first instance? We want the game to be balanced with a multitude of viable options. If we find that there is only a few or one dominant strategies then we can consider the game to be broken but on the other hand if we find counter strategies then the game is no longer broken. How do we know if the balance is broken or not?

Thanks for the response, I don't view dropping a vanguard in itself an exploit if done using the air transport (although I agree it should unload ideally) as the t2 transport can be easily shot down. Dropping from orbital is an exploit though as its cheaper to get an orbital factory + an astreaus + 1 vanguard than it is to get a t2 air factory + pelican *and* it bypasses all the air defences totally. Obviously in a big game with orbital it isn't a problem as you'd have fighters but its an easy one to miss in a single planet game. Either way I also think balance wise the commander should be able to defend itself from any single unit (so a slower firing, higher power lower AOE Uber cannon would go a long way towards sorting that- whilst also making it possible to swarm him with mass t1).

Perhaps 'broken' isn't an appropriate term to use in this context. I actually don't think the current build is that bad (certainly not to the level some do)- it's possible to have some really fun games and there are a variety of different ways to approach it. I do however feel the current build could stand to be mixed up a bit more. I also think that if one strategy becomes dominant- if it's possible to find an optimum build overall, then it needs to be changed (although that isn't something you can be sure of quickly- as you say it's possible to find counters).

Now that doesn't preclude there being an optimum build to achieve 'X' (e.g. fastest build to nuke, quickest to get t2 fighters etc), although builds like that are highly related to specific circumstances (a bit like some of the rush builds you see in the BA DSD games on spring). The key is though that choosing a very focused tactic like that is a big risk- and there are a number of scenarios where it can fail (so in the BA DSD example, if a tech player rushes nuke they are very vulnerable to being bombed for example, or that the opposing team might get anti nuke up before you can use it).

I'm genuinely looking forward to the new patch- as the (proposed) large increase in cost of t2 factories will expand the t1 game a bit more and make combinations like Vanguard + Pells that bit harder to get quickly.

Just because the metagame has changed doesn't mean that there's more strategy.
If people harass with T1 units in the beginning, instead of building T1 laser towers, then that only means that T1 units can be efficient early game, and that T1 laser turrets might not be op. Does it mean that there's more strategy, more options? No.

It means that harassing with T1 early game is probably the way to go. That doesn't sound like strategy and planning to me, but rather something that you SHOULD be doing to play efficient. That's a huge difference.

Strategic depth means that you have options, and that every choice you make is because you're following a plan to get an advantage over your opponent. If harassing with T1 in the early game becomes mandatory, and the best way to get an advantage over your opponent; in other words, if you give your enemy an advantage if you DON'T do it, then it becomes mandatory, and strategic depth has not been increased.

Having options means that you have a choice of whether to harass with T1 units in the early game or not, and that you have good alternatives instead of doing that. Atm there doesn't seem to be that many options. Harassing with T1 units seems like a good idea, period. Building T2 units, when your enemy has T2 units is mandatory, as are many other things in the game.

The game revolves around sniping the enemy commander. Strategy is the way of getting an advantage over your opponent, in order to be able to do so. And at the moment, it seems like there's only one way of playing, which would be the one you described (T1 early harass, proxy factories and so on).

If the top players use the same, or nearly the same strategies, then that is a clear sign of the game lacking strategic depth. I'm not going to be happy, until every time I see a match between top players, both are acting quite differently from one another. It's boring to see two players trying to compete with the same strategies. And that's not what a RTS should look like.

It's a game of finding out who is able to execute the dominant strategy in the best way. Who is harassing better in the early game, who is expanding more, who is having T2 air first/or more of it, who is being able to smash a planet first? And so on. It's a one way street rather than about being creative.

Well if I have ground AA it forces you to send in groups of Peregrines because otherwise your Peregrines will just die one and one to the ground AA.
Actually this is a new rush down strategy that I use if I get the chance. If I see that both me and the enemy is going t2 air first and the enemy have little or no ground AA, I only build Peregrines and send them directly to the enemy t2 air factory. Even if the enemy have more Peregrines than me, I can kill 2-3 enemy Peregrine for every Peregrine I lose plus additional air fabbers which can completely shut off the enemy production of t2 economy while my t2 air fabbers can build up in peace at my base. It also gives me room to mix in some gunships and since I continuously suppress the enemy air production he have no fighters to respond to my gunships. I continue this until the enemy gets sufficient AA and if suppress him for long I might even be able to follow it up with Vanguard drop right next to his base.

I've done this but if my enemy got mobile ground in a buffer zone around the commander then the Pelicans are likely to get destroyed as they pass over the AA and get targeted. Also a single stray missile from a Peregrine can kill several Pelicans so there is a time period where there is lots of missiles flying around in the air and if the enemy got a wide patrol of Peregrines then it is very likely that I will either lose my Pelicans to all the circling missiles or re-enforcing Peregrines.

Well time is working against you. Enemy walls, turrets, mexes, Doxes and Stingers slows you down and makes it hard to reach the Shellers which are quickly building up critical mass to push out and after that the Gil-Es are forced away. It really depends on if you can do critical damage before the Shellers reach critical mass.
Vanguards have synergy with Shellers because the only thing that Shellers need is a shield against incoming fire and they will do fine against Gil-Es.

And the best way to win is to have a more powerful army. But that ignores all the decisions which go into its creation and use.

You don't say "I'll T1 harass" and call it a day. How many units do you harass with? What kind? Where do you put them? When do you stay to destroy something and when do you move on? How much time do you spending handling the raids versus developing your infrastructure? etc. etc.

Like I said, it's about who executes it best rather than about which strategy to use.
And that's what I dislike.

But what do you mean by strategy? Assuming both players know the game well, they can usually scout to get an idea of what they're up against. Building all the right counters to their army isn't really that hard and is something all good players will be expected to do. You can definitely lose due to bad strategy, but it's a lot less likely that you will win through good strategy.

To say a certain unit is broken is a balance judgment, however, balance is reliant not only on the actual statistics, but also on tournament format, conventional strategies and level of play, among other factors. It's very common for players to figure out new ways to utilize various units shortly after release of a game and for the balance to change drastically without developer interference. And as players improve they can learn to hold off timings, implement tactics that are difficult to execute, and so on, all changing the balance.

That's to say, something can be "broken" for beginning players despite being perfectly fine on the level that the OP plays at. Out of courtesy to the developers, we might refrain from calling anything imbalanced at the entry level of play, because there exists a clear path of improvement that might radically change relative power of many strategies. But I think you could still confidently state something to be broken if it's simply very easy to execute and very powerful at a lower level of play. Most of the players in a game will be casuals that won't play more than twenty games, it's important that the game gives a good first impression.

What I mean is, that there are no options as to what you do.

I was watching some games of top players recently, and I noticed that both are using the same freaking strategies. In the end it was only about who executed their strategy best. They were both harassing early with T1, they were both going for T2 eco eventually, they were both going for T2 air eventually, T2 tanks eventually and so on. They both used exactly the same strategies, and in the end it was about who managed their economy and their units better, and who had the better proxy factory placement. That's not what I want this game to be. Because if there's something like an "optimal build", then that's a clear sign for the lack of options.

What I want is to have choices, instead of guidelines that I should follow or lose. Guidelines like: harass early with T1, build T2 eco asap, build T2 air or lose, build T2 ground units or lose, build anti-nukes or lose, colonize other planets or lose... and so on.

That has nothing to do with strategic decisions. It's a direction that the metagame tells you to go, and if you don't follow it you'll be punished severely.

For fun's sake, I just want more options as to how to play the game...

Obviously there is room for balance to improve this, but I've been seeing a lot of people experimenting with early builds that are very different from the currently accepted meta. You're right that this game needs to support different play styles though.

I think one of the big reasons that the top players have only been playing one way is because they only practice against each other. It is very possible that they're just missing some good ideas because they haven't been shown something new yet.

So much talking...