3D Terrain a gimmick?

- It's not a "simple" solution.
- It's called a minimap and it's a huge step back coming from a game like FA.
- It's solving a problem that shouldn't exist to begin with.

I don't know what Uber has in mind, I just hope they will show us before the end of the alpha.

Just had a thought as I was reading through this thread. Surely, an alert every time you're attacked would quickly result in desensitization and grow useless. But neither is it acceptable that you would check back to a remote base to only find craters.

How about a buildable tower or other base structure that would send the alert? Just as if your forces were reporting in to you. You would chose where to build it, and even perhaps what alert level to trigger the report (enemy sighting of x# of units, or enemy aggression). And a hot-key to jump to the reporting tower would be incredibly helpful too. And lastly, you should be able to silence or mute the tower's reports to clear the airwaves in the heat of multiple battle fronts.


edit: the more I think about this, the more I really like the idea. Additional thoughts:
-should it be possible to silence the tower with a single surgical strike that it never saw coming?
-possible to custom-name each tower? this might be getting too tricky, donno.

In another thread, I was thinking about radars serving as proximity alert. Together with some sort of AI that controls a platoon (we don't want to micro thousands of units anyway, so we certainly need something like subcommanders controlling platoons in a sensible way), this proximity alert could trigger the local AI to reposition available defending units in a useful way and more or less automatically defend the base.

If PA is going to be that large-scale macro-oriented game I envision it to be, delegating the control of smaller groups of units to AIs is certainly something that makes a lot of sense. Meanwhile, you as the player can think about where to establish new bases, how to distribute your army over the galaxy, and which asteroid to crash into your opponents.

yeah it might just be enough info that you can see that your radar on some other planet is detecting movement.
If there is enemy contact, it could be shown with some flashing symbol or whatever.

green planet = no enemy detected
orange = radar detected enemy
flashing red = enemy contact

At that point you have no clue what is exactly happening, only that there is something going on.
Changing your view to that planet and zooming in would give you more and more detailed information regarding the current situation.

This way you could have some stellar map that shows the planets/asteroids with some sort of status without the details.

Projections in this manner are lossy and inaccurate, and it's not the same thing as having the primary view be a flat map. Also, if Uber decide to have 3D terrain but don't have camera controls that work for it, then points against the camera controls are points against the spherical map, because making spherical terrain isn't going to work. Having one without suitable camera (if such a thing is even possible) is highly problematic.

Also, art is irrelevant if the game cannot be played. Gameplay is first and foremost, always. Else I'd go watch a film.

I think it's not so much about camera as it is about being able to see everything simultaneously. To be honest, I find it quite easy to get used to the camera in PA now, but no being able to see the whole planet is still quite an annoyance.

I don't know what solutions we can come up with, but for the time being I think I'd like some kind of minimap. Preferably moddable, so we can attempt various different map projections and see how they fare.

On the other hand, I think also that this sacrifice paves the way for more interesting gameplay with interplanetary combat. There's even bigger challenges there to present all information clearly.

Some how, i find that this thread seems to reveal some gluteus related agony. I find it a fantastic challenge. If you don't, then maybe you just aren't built towards a larger scale of RTS where you can't see everything, because it's impossible.

I find myself far more twitchy and paranoid playing a grand scale RTS. It's like I actually have to think about and concentrate on the "Big Picture" by zooming out and looking at it, rather than having it neatly packaged in a little box

I'm honestly having a lot more fun.

The game can be played fine with its current controls, even with a wip camera. Don't try and make this a bigger problem than it is.

A winkel triple projection which is standard would work fine, we don't care about geography while talking about a minimap it's well above what we need to solve the issue OP was having.

Compared to everything else, yes it is. Getting it geographically correct isn't necessary, and something the OP could have thought of before talking about redoing the entire game from scratch which is not gonna happen. (luckily)

Come up with something better then? The minimap idea was just the first thing that came up in my mind that would solve his problem, and I would very much so be willing to see some constructive feedback, not posts that say "this sucks, stop everything!".

Huh, this problem should very much so exist. How where you thinking a sphere looked like when you saw the kickstarter video?

The question is if it should be solved, I sure don't have a problem navigating while playing the game, and the only issues I've had are completely camera related.

Above all, playing on a sphere map, is way more FUN than playing on a 2d plane.

No, but I'm not the game designer of PA, and I have better thing to do than doing his job

...Or just unimaginative.

Why do I get the feeling that if they just made Forged Alliance 2, you'd be the first person to jump on that kickstarter thepilot?

Being the maker of Forged Alliance Forever, that would be a stupid statement to say otherwise.

Are you captain Obvious?

I'd be fine with FA2. In fact, that's what a lot of people wanted from SupCom2.

After SC2 I don't blame Uber for wanting to draw more from the TA stock than the SupCom stock, but the simple fact is that SupCom had many excellent features that in hindsight, I think that TA was greatly lacking. Uber have to very carefully choose the features they don't want from SupCom, and "Being able to zoom out and see the whole map at once" is a very bad feature to cut.

That's obviously subjective. I find playing PA to be a massive chore. As in, I mostly stopped playing PA because it was a massive chore.

I am not interested in the challenge of "Move the camera to view this other part of the map". It is not interesting or fun to move the camera (although I gotta admit, I did have fun zooming in and out with SupCom sometimes... wheeeeee). It is purely a mechanical requirement and a better game alleviates this strictly more than a worse game.

Funnily enough I didn't want SupCom 2 or "Forged Alliance 2". I got what I wanted out of the first round... I don't want for more.

Now... playing an RTS on 3D planets? That's new. That is an innovation.

The minimap is as old as dirt and doesn't work accurately for a 3D sphere. It's gone (for now) and I couldn't be happier that UberEnt might be seeking an innovative alternative.

Agreed. Complaints about "not having a full strategic icon map of the planet" are silly even at this point. So you have to rotate the planet. Oh boy :shock: All I have to add is that you are going to have some REAL trouble when the start having more than one planet. Personally, I like the cam/unit controls right now. Pretty easy to do everything but build with just the mouse and my left hand on the arrows. When they add keybinds for buildings even that will be easy. I hope they switch the celestial view bind, and have "," and "." to switch to previous/next planet/moon.

Alpha is alpha. I'm glad they fixed so that selection boxes doesn't select units on the other side of the planet. It made the game so much more playable and enjoyable for me. There are still a lot of improvements ahead.
I knew even beforehand that it were going to be hard to adapt to playing on sphere. Having a very restricted view with little ability to survey forces on the other side of the planet makes it much harder to manage warfare.
You should try playing Achron, a time travel strategy game, to get some perspective.

what about a strategic view mode, the planet would be rendered as a wireframe and you van see units on the other side if the plannet as well.

to get an idea of what i mean look at the attached file

obviously it would display the icons for the units instead of dots, but i threw this together rather quicly

that would be indeed very handy probably.

This is pretty much what I was brainstorming. Good vis.

Y'know, it's not impossible to fix.

Why not have the planet 'unfold' as you zoom out? It would be the perfect combination - you get the immediate 'this is where this part of the map is' along with a strategic map that lets you see everything AND ZOOM BACK IN ANYWHERE.

I mean, some googling and I found this:

http://footage.shutterstock.com/clip-55 ... china.html

Why not do something similar for PA?

The idea being, at fully zoomed out you get a flat map representation.. and as you zoom in it curls around and becomes a planet, and you end up where you were pointing on the flat map representation. This would allow you to zoom out, pick the opposite side of the planet, and zoom back in - no scrolling required