Give us Shields! Come on!

The problem with his statement is that he stated as a fact that shields will be in 1.1.

no it's not a fact.

Your wording makes it out that I believed it was fact.

This game its not SCFA and cant be ,plz stop ask things that this game have no power to have it!!!!

you have to get used to what you have now....

confused tatsu is confused.

prove that it can´t have them

Funny how more interesting this thread got when the usual 5 trolls where away

I'm also of the opinion that shields are actually not an option, they are Necessary in a game with multiple planets.

Otherwise things get redundant and the only strategy becomes spamming troops.

Having control over the territory is not even convenient considered that all the structurs in strategic point would get destroyed after 60 sec from the usual average size bubble of troops that is just roaming around randomly.

In regards to the comparison with starcraft as Banaman pointed out, I also agree that considered a single planet PA is way more straight forward and less interesting... and this is weird because starcraft is by itself a soft strategy game.

We paid to be part of te developing process by playing alpha and beta, stop telling us we can't have opinions and we can't fight against developers decisions.
Not including shields is just crazy, bubble spammer and starcraft players will always be against, but unluky they are also the type of users that will spam the most this forum trying to kill our attempt to have a decent discussion by repeating themself over and over.

In my opinion we have here a great chance to make a great game.... we need to fight to have this happens, telling our opinion and making changes even if a decision is taken... because come on...not including shields is the easier way.

I would like to have an answer by one of the developer about this:

1- How complicate would be for you to introduce them?
2- If it is too complicate, is it because of a not so complete physics engine (bullets trajectory?)
3- Wasn't a better idea to make the game actually funny to be played on a single planet before going galactic? I mean after a while the game is still heavily bugged, is not possible to use mountains (this kills 20% of strategy). Animations and projectile trajectory are bulky or not pleasant to be seen. The absence of shields heavily impacts world control. Is impossible to balance well the amount of metal. There is a limited number of units too similar one to the other. Artillery even after a lot of patches are still heavily unbalanced and without shields the mobile artillery just wipes out any army by making you follow them or destroyes too easily any building.
Holkins are just totally OP, by doing turret spamming is crazy easy to kill anything... again because there are no shields to counteract.. and attacking is often impossible unless willing to wait to make a bubble large enougb... uber boring.
Space colonization makes still no sense and is only increasing exponentially the possibility of a stalled game.

We got that you are forcing us to play with tons of metal just to cover up at the total unbalance and mentioned problems and laking aspects of the game. But come on how long is this gonna last?

How stupid you think people are? Giving you 2M euro (for an RTS), before seeing the game... buying then even more copies, to get then bullshited with a sand box where the only thing you can do is bubbling troops around?

Start considering us old players with respect... because what we say can be worth to be listened.

hey friend i understand your frustration at the attempts to shut down conversations about shields by some active members of the community. however don't take it personally. this project was always more about developing the tech to making RTS on this scale possible than making a "great game". I'm sure UBER and all the backers *want* at great game but first and foremost UBER is building a game engine to allow for future games to be developed that can truly take advantage of the this revolutionary way of playing RTS games.

I will continue to fight for shields but i am not expecting them on release. they will be in the next game or maybe in the first few mods im sure of it.

chill out buddy, relax guy.

While I agree with most of this, you could have worded it a lot better I feel.

If not area shields - there could be some mileage in personal shield upgrades for key units, structures or an upgrade style system where armor is improved. Or some form of orbital wall...

Seen a few multi games now decided because orbital cannons happen to come across the commander and in 2-3 shots it's game over. That's even occured on fairly heavily fortified bases because there's enough orbitals to take the flak and just one or two needs to survive.

1. Calling people trolls doesn't help anyone.

2. Your opinion is your own, but your reasoning is incorrect.

Shields do not prevent people from spamming troops. Ergo, not having shields does not make people spam troops.

3. Counter them with the appropriate units.

4. How is PA more straightforward and (therefore) less interesting than Starcraft? Starcraft can do things PA can't do. PA can do a lot of things SC can't do.

5. You can fight all you want. It doesn't make you right.

6. Balance concerns and trying to complain that single-planet gameplay isn't enjoyable isn't related to shields.

Unless you think shields make things more enjoyable. How do defensive tactics make games more enjoyable? How do you implement shields but reduce turtling? How do you keep walls and turrets relevant if shields are effective?

Well I really thought it was about making a good game, I'm not willing to pay for having people experimenting or developing an engine for future games

Turtling has never been a winning tactic, balance is not necessary unless you do crazy strong shields. What happens when you turtle is that you close yourself using only few primary metal mines for resources. This makes impossible to defend against player that control a vast majority of map. For example in SupComFA you get the other players smashing you with multiple nukes... long range artillery, a lot of T3 troops or experimentals.
In PA would be even less necessary to balance, think how stupid would be to turtl over your spwning point when the other players owns the rest of the planet plus two more... or where they can actually kill your turtling by crashing a moon over you!
Balancing and turtling for sure are not a problem, to stay safe a first implementation would include weak shields.
Here I'm talking only about non cumulative bubble shields!

Defensive tacticts would make the game more enjoyable because then there will be defensive tactics! Give shields.
To now the game is only super boring because the only thing to do is making huge bubbles of troops fast enought to avoid the game from getting stalled by people campering on other planets or moons.
A game is made of attacking and defending, if the only defence is building few turrets, no shaping of the base, then there is no strategy in defence and the attack is only based on troop bubbles.

It is necessary to prevent snipering, the way things are I kill people without them realizing what happens, everybody gets frustrated often.

As it is, since the developers introuced a massive amount of metal, the only thing to do is create bubbles, this heavily affects lagging in later games, with 30% of games actually crashing.

The main problem of this game is bubbles of troops. They look wird, not to scale, have muddy animations, choosing wrong path and making the game too havy to be playable by 10 people. Which is weird because I played games at SupCom with 8000 troops on screen without any problem.

Although I am not a dev, I can tell you that it isn't an issue of how hard it is to implement. And nobody can make a realistic estimate as they don't know how many speedbumbs they will hit along the way.

The idea that Uber should focus on finishing part of the game while missing big features is silly. Its like decorating a newly build hows before the pluming and wiring is installed. If that were to happen you would have to go back and spend a lot of time revisiting everything.

As for the idea that people who disagree with you are trolls, its a little silly and hurts the points you are making.

There are other (better) ways to prevent sniping.

Mainly, giving the Commander a cloak, which is a confirmed addition.

Eventually the Commander will be able to cloak, using up a lot of energy. So it won't be possible to find the Commander until you win the war of attrition by destroying bases and power plants.

If you think that's all the game is, you don't understand PA gameplay. Unit movement is a lot more important than the size of your force.

No strategy in defense? Again, I don't think you fully understand how this game operates.

The best way to defend your base is to be constantly attacking your opponent. This keeps them reacting rather than attacking.

That laser defense tower behind a shield will do nothing to destroy your opponent's base or Commander. You'll notice that all of the top players rarely build defensive structures and opt for unit instead. The only way to win is to attack. The only way to attack is with units.

The game has turtling. You can turtle over entire planets. That's why we have multi-system gameplay. That's why we don't have shields (because it would make turtling far too effective for the cost invested). That's why we can smash planets with other planets (well, that and Amazing Coolness™).

The game has defensive options. That's what walls are. That's what regular turrets are. That's what the advanced catapult-of-doom turrets are.

However, as other people have said (this thread is moving places fast ) PA is not a defensive game. War is not a defensive game (not since World War 1, to be precise, and that was mainly due to logistics and morale, both of which aren't so much of a problem on robot-covered deathworlds in PA). War is an offensive game, that you can counter by skillfully using defensive options in order to maximise your offensive ability.

Bubbles of troops can be countered by effective tactics. If they can't, that's not a problem with not having shields. That's a problem with game balance, for Uber to resolve or modders to fix (though at this point I still have faith in Uber to create a solid vanilla experience for those who don't always use mods).

Implementing shields just to fix "bubbles" of troops is a band-aid. It doesn't solve the problem, because you're not perceiving the problem correctly.

we could use directional force-fields as a form of gate for gaps in a wall

I feel like shield are being asked for with reference to SupComm, but this game is a Total Annihilation (TA) successor. I played TA back in the day and it did not have shields, and I would not expect them in PA. If you want to understand this game's theme, please go play some TA, and stop comparing it to SupComm, which it is not meant to emulate.

I do not want a game that centers around shields as a strat. That is definitely not TA. I would say you could turtle a lot harder in TA compared to PA, but that had to do with stronger base defenses: almost indestructible walls that had to be reclaimed (dragons teeth), cheap missile turrets that could fire at land and air, and energy to metal converters that you could build in your base that lessened your reliance on map control.

Large groups of units were definitely needed in TA to attack. Nukes could end games, as well as long range artillery (Big Berthas). TA added units over time that helped against these these attacks that we may see over time here. These were anti-radar bots that made it hard to target artillery, and anti-nuke bots that helped protect you when moving around. Maybe the thing you want though is decoy commanders which you could build to help avoid the commander sniping we are seeing today.

I would recommend you take a look at what was in TA that might make the game more enjoyable for you as opposed to SupComm.

I played TA extensively, supCom was the natural sequel to TA. Shield introduced onyl a good variety in strategies, I barely saw people surviving by turtling in SupCom, thus turtling is not a problem. It is a bigger problem in PA because of the presence of too much metal/ lack of good balance between units / missing experimental.

PA is a deevolution towards a game that is worst implemented compared to TA. It would be stupid to develop a game that forgets about TA sequel (SupCom), deletes all of its improvements and becomes a weird totally unbalanced Frankenstein less enjoyable then TA.

The only smart thing to do was making a clone of SupCom (or lets call SupCom: TA2), thus making a TA3 with the perfection of SupCom and the addition of the galactic layer.

A couple points:

- Uber has said they have not fleshed out the unit roster yet, they are still going to add in a lot more units. This will only happen once they have all the core features in place as that takes much less time than core features.
- Where do you keep getting this info that there are no physics with the bullets? Maybe I haven't seen where it is explicitly stated that there is no physics system but I can see something already happening with physics with an example of using t1 bots vs grenadiers, grenadiers fire over the walls, t1 bots can't. That is physics. Or maybe I am fudged in the head.
- All your crap about calling constructive posters "trolls" needs to stop. Using @brianpurkiss as an example he is easily one of the top 5 most knowledgeable people with regards to PA. He knows his ****, and while I do not always agree with him, I can not fault his knowledge with regards to PA.
- There are always going to be "bubbles" of units, I don't know what supcom you were playing but every single game I had had bubbles of units attacking each other. If you are going to send 3 bricks at me I am going to giggle like a geisha and smack you with my "bubble". Bubbles of units are an intrinsic part of EVERY single RTS. Please show me where people are not using groups of units.

End of the day your attitude stinks. You are just being incredibly antagonistic without adding real meat to your posts.

Ow for F's sake, stop feeding the troll that keeps pointing fingers and blaming everyone, while all the while pretending to be the only sane/normal person in this thread.

Uber's made their stance profoundly clear, they may reconsider it in the future, but if they do, it won't be because some guy is insulting them (and half the community with them).

As for you Bonkers, grow up. Yes you don't always get what you want, yes it's annoying, no it won't kill you, and surprisingly, it's fairly easy to deal with if you don't get worked up about it.
And if you do want to get annoyed, at least be respectfull in your aguments.
Don't behave like some child, throwing a tantrum demanding attention because someone stole your imaginary cookie.

Edit: I respect everyone's right of free speech, which includes being an arse, but this goes both ways. If you are being an arse we can (and often will) call you out on that.