ACU snipes

What if they just give the commander some nice AA and a laser that shoots down tac missiles? Would that work? Obviously both measures could be overwhelmed, but it would help with cheesy snipes.

I agree with the AA, but an anti-tac missile might be a little far, without upgrades that is.

I would still prefer a well armored commander with a D-Gun over the weaker SupCom overcharge.

To prevent early raiding from winning the game, and to prevent quick attacks from killing him.

I imagine the anti-tac measure being the sort of thing with a long cooldown. One tactical missile? No problem. Two tactical missiles? Problem.

I don't remember 1 tac missile killing an ACU anyway, so why bother?

Because you never fire just the 1.

so now I fire 3 instead of 2. So what?

This topic seems to have drifted towards a major concern with the commander. It is a single, finite unit, which is under threat from a virtually unlimited number of enemies. What sort of combat power should it have? What sort of defenses should it have available?

Gigantic combat prowess will make the commander a huge factor in battles. With him the tide can be turned, but he will likely die and end the game. But what if the battle gets larger? At some point, the combat power of a Comm is going to be overshadowed. It may be early. It may be mid game. It may be late game against asteroids and planet eaters. At some point, it becomes obvious that the Commander can't rely on his own power to survive.

The best defenses are the ones that scale with the game. Things like a single point defense gun are kind of pointless. The enemy will just send more units. However, other things can be very effective regardless of enemy numbers.

So here's a list of things that can work:
- Simply moving fast is a great way to avoid all sorts of trouble.
- Cloaking is great because no number of units can kill something they can't find.
- Leaving the planet all together is a great solution to being outnumbered, and is the only surefire defense against a planet killer. Making it difficult for non-commander units to follow will help even more.

Defenses that scale with infrastructure would also be effective:
- The TotalA D-Gun was a super weapon that needed a good chunk of infrastructure to work.
- The TotalA cloak was a default option that didn't work well without fusion power.
- A comm shield that runs off the local energy grid is effectively getting upgraded with every generator and storage facility.
- A specialty teleporter could bring anti-nukes from anywhere on the planet straight to the commander, giving virtually unlimited anti-nuke potential.
These sort of things have the added benefit of moving combat away from the Commander and toward bases. In this case it's a good idea to snipe power planets and anti-nukes no matter where they are, before hitting the Comm.

The commander is looking pretty survivable now, isn't it? It didn't even need 50 billion HP to work.

The most obvious defense are the thousands of robots, factories, and guns at your disposal. Everything you build is a potential bodyguard for the commander, so use it!

It's great idea, but problem with "sniping" is that it occurs without obtaining full-scale advantage over your enemy. It's like "you lost ground, you lost sea and you almost lost air - few minutes more and your air would be overwhelmed too, but you make a 50 strategic bombers and send them and all your remaining air force on enemy commander. They all will die, but who cares if you'll win anyway?"

A huge army is cool, but it is some limit what this huge army could stop before shooting single bullet. In supcom you may spam T2 AA and T3/T2 AA turrents, which are very effective against masses of slow air, like bombers, but you'll also need a shields, as you'll need to survive a lot of bombs from first pass. Shields will protect you against first pass and there would be second pass you have enough AA. But you can't have enough AA to prevent first pass.

Without shields or HP boost your only option is to hide, which is two-fold. If you hide within a protection ring, than you could be discovered by other player just by looking at most protected positions. If you hide yourself outside of all protection, you could be discovered by other player's random scouts (and then it's even easier to destroy).

And, in any case, it doesn't make a problem "ACU became a liability, without much use". I'd rather see an option that makes your ACU more visible, but more protected (in terms of HP/shield) and more useful for end-game.

Scale with infrastructure is a perfect idea. Actually, why not merge your idea of advanced teleport that may teleport anti-nukes with my idea of Command Hub? Let's say that you may deploy a complex Quantum Gates Network, that is capable of moving units and projectiles between worlds you control, but to operate such complex thing you need to plug your ACU in? The bigger network you have - more protection you get (shield power-up + obvious ability to fast-pull forces and protection within ACU reach). But more visible and important your central hub is. And, of course, you may always unplug your ACU and hide it (to run away from planet-killer, for example).

That's not a problem. That's called "winning".

Rest assured, there will be a total annihilation mode for the masochist-OCD crowd.

The TotalA Commander, as a weapon, was designed to be an all purpose teleporting "Army in a can". It had become unquestionably the most effective means of warfare possible, such it wrapped up a thousand year war and trashed an entire galaxy shortly after their creation.

Nice lore, huh? Well, it gives nice gameplay too. You see, it implies that Commanders are the most important and efficient means to conquer new worlds. That automatically places them in the spotlight as the most important unit in the game. A Comm conquers worlds by building everything it needs to conquer them; the unit's overall combat power is irrelevant for the role. Instead, the important thing is to give them adequate tools to stay alive and hold(or fold) their ground, when the galaxy is literally dying around them.

The ability to travel between worlds can very much be a defining feature that few other units can achieve. Because of this ACUs will never be a forgotten resource.

I feel you misunderstand, we don't want someone being able to kill our commander who is in our base without winning the battle to get there.

If they fight their way to the commander or he is caught out of position then that's cool, but to avoid the enemy with a bunch of gunships and win the game in a 30's attack is just a poor excuse for a game.

Assassination is fun when you don't get killed by a kamikaze attack, and if you find that fun then whats the point?

Yes, that particular situation is far from the wanted ideal. It's still a 'Snipe', but goes against the intended spirit of the mechanic. The idea behind the assassination Game mode is to give players more options to complete the game, much like a full stealth play-through of MGS or other stealth games. Possibly to allow a 'worse' or 'losing' player to still make a comeback by exploiting a weakness like an out-of place Comm or a gap in defenses.

Mike

The only way that could happen is through your own sloppiness.

You mean a poor excuse for a base defense, leaving your most valuable asset exposed like that. The idea is to move your units between the attacker and their objective.

(Of course the reason you're picking gunships in your example and not tanks, is because gunships bypass the normal pathing issues that allow you to block an approaching enemy, but that's a different problem. And one that should probably be dealt with, but that doesn't neccesarily have to do with commander sniping)

The battle to get to your commander is something you have to actively go out and do.

I don't consider a giant fight that slowly bulldozes your defence to be a snipe. I consider that to be a boring old vanilla flavour kill.

A snipe would be if "I looked at you defence, saw that you didn't have anything defending your coast, and snuck in some submersible tanks."

I disagree, it might take me twenty minutes to manipulate you into a position when my gunships can kill you.

Another reason for using gunships in that example is that most equivalent level AA cant even kill them fast enough to count anyway.

We just have to find the line between an effective assassination and preventing a player from losing to a early raiding party.

TA's commander did this with a one of a kind cloaking device to hide, and a 1 hit-1 kill D-Gun to deal with any ground foe.


To put forward a suggestion if I may, make the commanders main gun (Not the Giant Powerful Gun) able to target bot air and ground targets effectively with the shooting at air units being a short ranged but powerful attack, possibly allowing the commander to down basic aircraft in a single shot, but no AOE.

This way commanders are safe from early air and ground while not being immune to them, coupled with a upgrade system that includes thing like the cloak and other counter-intelligence devices I feel like the commander would provide a balanced foe in any assassination game.

This game has advanced far enough for air? Cloak, sit still, and wait for the gunships to fly away or die. No snipe, no problem.

I told ya, man. I told ya about cloak! It solves, like, half the issues in this thread.

Well that was an example from SupCom, TA for me ended up locking enemy commanders in prisons made of their dead base and comrades, with thousands of tanks just spinning in circles because they don't know what to do.
Good times.

"But I don't WANNA lose to my enemy!!" <--- The essence of this thread.

FIFY

This is correct.