3D Terrain a gimmick?

If innovating means losing the core features which make a good RTS, then hell no.
Bringing another dimention to the RTS genre means new challenges, and this is one of them. You can't just say it does not matter, it's the nature of the game. We've never been explictly told than moving to spheres meant losing critical features.
We can apply your statement to anything that is changed by spheres and just say : it's the nature of the game. will this make a good game ? I don't think so.

Spheres means additional challenges. possibly difficult to solve. And this is why this is something which must be considered at the very beginning of game design. Simply saying that it does not matter, or that it's the nature of the game is the lazy attitude.

well there are two sides to that discussion... though strategic zoom has been "invented" and been used by several games (not only SupCom, but also some other games e.g. RUSE), there are still far more RTS and RTT with the standard camera. Now is that because the developers are lazy? Or is that, because the standard camera has advantages? Or is that because they think, its better to have the "player skill" to decide wheter the player will notice everything or not.

i dont know the answer tbh

Or because their games focus on a very small group of units and little skirmishes and that seing the whole map doesn't make much sense ?

After reading thru the last few pages of this, I have a question for the "we want to see 100% of the battlefield" folks:

What happens when multiple planets are involved? I get the impression that everyone's forgetting that there will be multiple battlefields, since it never seems to be mentioned.

How do you handle unwrapping, or whatever, in a celestial/galactic view situation?

Once zoom momentum is added, it won't be nearly as painful to zoom in and out. Assuming zoom momentum is added.

It's not necessarily about seeing 100% of the battlefield : It's about seeing 100% of what's covered by the radars you have put in place. Which does not mean 100% of the planet. Only what's covered by radars. You put radars to increase your battlefield visibility and to anticipate. if i put radars or if i scoot and i have to turn around the planet in order to see what's happening then this is adding extra gameplay complexity which does not bring anything to strategy. With flatmaps, one can zoom in and out by simply using mouse wheel.
If no strategic zoom is implemented then there's a minimap. I've never seen a RTS without minimap in which you had to scroll horizontally/vertically in order to see what's covered by radars.

Especially because there can be multiple planets means that we need even more this ability to see what's covered by our radars without having to turn around the planet.
Otherwise, let's remove radars because they are useless.

By the way i've never said Uber dev are lazy. I simply say that innovation in RTS possibly means new challenges in order to keep the game playable. Simply ignoring this can lead to gameplay being broken. Showing the hidden face of the planet where your radards cover a part of the battlefield is a real challenge.

Saying it's not necessary is simply about ignoring gameplay fundamentals.

PA is all about innovation in terms of tech. Hopefully this will not be at the expense of gameplay.

Nanolathe, normally I agree with your thoughts, but I think your brain fell out your ear on this one. That, or you're just trolling this thread for laughs.

It's a simple concept. Players have a limited amount of time to interact with the game. By the nature of the complexity of the game, the number of actions required is greater than the time you have - the entire game is a balancing act where the player decides which actions deserve his time.

Therefore, the ultimate goal of the game is to increase the number of valuable actions the player can accomplish in a set amount of time - the more valuable actions the player can achieve, the more complex the game can become without overwhelming the player. Considering that PA is making the battlefield even more complex than any other RTS, it's extremely important to reduce the amount of 'waste' actions.

RTS games are not a trial of player's ability to overcome the UI. Supcom improved on TA, and strategic zoom was hailed as a BIG part of that improvement. It gives the player the ability to quickly view the entire battlefield in a user-chosen level of zoom, and even more important, it replaced the navigation of old (scroll the sides, click on minimap) with a simple two-stroke scroll out, scroll in. This reduced the amount of waste time

It reduces the time spent on navigating and viewing the battlefield, and thereby frees up very valuable player time resources.

If you want to argue otherwise, please explain why you think that PA players need LESS time to do things on the battlefield than a Supcom player.

I guess the answer is quite easy : blind FanBoy :|

I really want to do a detailed analysis on this one, but instead, I'll say...

To acquire more metal, a PA player must select a Fabber, hold down shift, click on the metal extractor button, and then click on metal spots. If his enemy has metal points that he wants, he can bomb those extractors and set up an outpost, attack it directly after creating a diversion, or just shell it with artillery if he's feeling lazy.

To acquire more mass, a SupCom player must find an unupgraded mex, click on the upgrade button, find and reroute engineers to assist, probably queue up some storage rings, and then remember to upgrade the next mex when he's done with that one. That or he could fight tooth and nail for a pair of mass points his enemy is standing on, with 5 T2 shields, a small mixed-tech army and enough T2 PD to pancake a GC. And even then once he takes those mass points his hard-won mass will most likely be sniped with a T2 Tactical Missile Launcher, thus rendering it moot because of its ridiculous price.

Thus a PA player spends far less time on eco, and can divert more to situational awareness (that's an important one), unit micro/macromanagement, expansion bases and production management.

You probably don't.

That's the whole point : Multiple planets will probably be a big challenge (anyone who already play a 1v1 on a big 4v4 map on FA can imagine the feeling), so having a instant view on a whole planet can be an immense and necessary helper for that task.

Because the maps are currently silly and have way too many mass points.

Wait that you need to replace your T1 with T2 with the current interface

Also, you are biased with supcom : while it's true you can spend that much time on eco on a team game, it's really not true on a contested 1v1.

Don't get me started on SupCom's Eco... Gods, I would have loved SupCom if it wasn't for the ecowar. And yes, I am biased against SupCom primarily because I have yet to play a fun and competitive game in SupCom. And I've been with FAF since the beginning, as well as getting in some GPG time before the severs were taken down.

And TBH, the best matches in PA (both that I've played and that I've watched) were the ones where we spawned on a planet with abnormally small amounts of metal. It forced players to expand and utilize ever last drop of metal, which is hopefully what the econ will be like in the end.

Anyways, to link this back to 3d terrain, I must say that I find it much less boring to deprive my enemy of his or her resources than upgrade my own resource production. One involves clicking and big explosions and the other involves clicking and nanolathing. The former is easier to do than the latter in PA, which is probably why I find it fun.

Sure, I'll grant you that Supcom's economy got over-complicated. It suffered from exactly the problem we're trying to reduce here - too many 'useless' actions required. It's not the fact that Supcom's economy was complex that made it a pain in the *** - it was more that you had to spend a lot of time fiddling with it instead of planning / fighting a battle.

The core principle of reducing useless actions is one that should be maintained though - through strategic zoom, smart factories, easy economy, and so on.

I do not "troll", Paws, it's not my style.
I may poke and prod at an idea, challenge convention, play devil's advocate or try to stimulate (or suppress) discussions in an attempt to steer it towards a theme or idea I find interesting or exciting; but I do not try to provoke emotional responses from weak willed individuals just for the "Sh!ts and Giggles". That is far too easy.

You don't read enough of Neutrino's posts, Paws.
Nor do a lot of you.

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We are NOT playing with the full suite of tools yet. Jon has specifically stated that he wants to strip out micromanagement on as many levels as possible while still retaining the feel of Total Annihilation.

The amount of time you currently spend moving units around is not indicative of the future. The amount of time you have to oversee and plan strategies is currently limited by your units' inability to perform a myriad of functions, right down to not even having pathfinding that guarantees you won't get stuck in a hole.

There are So. Many. Ways in which your units are acting incorrectly.
There are So. Many. Ways in which you are constantly forced to babysit your base.
There are So. Many. Ways in which we're currently playing that will be rendered insignificant by having smarter units and more complete systems driving them.

You are currently playing a game about babysitting, so I'm not surprised there's an outcry for a better way for you to babysit.

But you're playing the wrong game.. or at least, a mere broken facsimile at this point. If you actually sit down and comb through the posts by the developers you'd glean information beyond the obvious. There are plans. Things are in motion.

Now, normally I tend towards a "wait and see" approach, I don't post in every thread because there are just too many. But this thread has been around for too long with people claiming they need this, or that, without even (seemingly) being aware that the wrench, hammer or multimeter or whatever it is that they're asking for will be rendered obsolete by Uber's Sonic Screwdriver.

Just wait and see.

If I have learnt anything by being on the Uber Forums it's that a thread, this long, with ne'er a Developer Post to be seen, is indicative of one of two things:

1. The thread is lighthearted fun and meaningless in the grand scheme of things
2. The Devs are literally chomping at the bit to tell us something, but have no concrete information to share.

It has happened time and time again.

Now, Jon has been teasing us for too long with snippets, tiny snacks of circumstance, tangentially related information and clues that Uber is working towards something. What that something is, I don't know and, (probably) neither does Jon himself because that's how idea's work. But I can tell you this:

I am more excited by the chance of innovation than the certitude of convention.

I will challenge the norm because quite frankly; the RTS genre has been a stagnant pool of the same trite and tired ideas for TOO LONG.

- Nanolathe

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PS: Fanboi? Not at all. That Jon Mavor has impressed me twice before doesn't mean he'll do it again. But I'm more open to letting someone successful twice, try for a third time.

Yeah, there are so many TA/supcom-like games out there, we really need a huge stepback for PA.

Apart from ETA's and Strat Zoom, SupCom was a step back from TA in every other conceivable way with regards to the end user experience.

And yes. The RTS genre as a whole needs to step back and take a good long, hard look at itself, and see how it's been letting itself go for the past decade.

Not having to **** around to find the right engineer tier (a problem that PA has brought back). Also, not just ETA, but the entire queueing system is very awesome.

It would appear that nobody has any better ideas. If Uber do, we haven't seen them yet, and certainly none of those presented ITT I think would make a useful substitute.

Absolutely I do. Because let me tell you something. Playing PA is about having fun. Is endlessly scrolling the planet to see things fun? No. There are places for challenge, and there are places where the only reasonable approach is for the game to minimize the effort on behalf of the player because it's not fun. After all, why not simply code the game yourself? What's that, you don't have the necessary skills/time/Kickstarter money? Tough, quit crying, learn to enjoy the challenge. Also, the player should command the game by 1-key Joystick. The challenge will be really nice and high. Also, there is absolutely no need for any unit to expose any kind of intelligence or act in any way except the most literal interpretation of the player's orders, because units that shoot at nearby enemies without an explicit order and navigate around obstacles on their own just remove too much challenge from the game.

Because one is a core gameplay mechanic that enables core gameplay to be had, such as surprising your opponent with an unexpected tactic, and the other is an artificial restriction that nobody wants that doesn't enable any gameplay but restricts it.

:| I would have thought that 3d terrain would have been a good new idea for a RTS.

But overall Ill settle for a competent copy of an older RTS with no complaints.