ACU snipes

Commander cannot move, build or shoot whilst stealthed or cloaked. Any land unit coming within a certain range discovers him. Probably a specialised type of plane can also discover him.

But that doesn't change the fact that most of this thread is scrubs being scrubby. Learn to play properly!

*incredulous look* when did they start distributing alpha copies? I must know how they solved this problem!!!

I must agree. I've never had any problems with protecting my ACU. And usually I never even try to protect it. It's just in the middle of my base. Sometimes it's even outside the shields and I'm just "Nah, no one's gonna snipe it anyway".

And moving it to water will prevent 99% of the ACU snipes anyways.

My enemy's tend to be quite tenacious in the pursuit of my commander.

And I do the same, give no quarter, as no quarter will be given.

Besides when the enemy does come to kill your commander, would it not be good to have a back up option?

Or you know, we could go all SC2 on the game and give him an escape pod.

Back up option? I just do awesome micromanagement and avoid all the bullets. Or simply: RUN! We don't want things to get too easy now don't we?

If they really succeed at sniping my commander, which is unlikely, then I just admit that I should've taken better care of it. Maybe I didn't scout enough because I didn't see it coming.

I don't think scouting is an excuse for anything in a game of this size, and considering how easy radar is to set up.

But perhaps there is a better way to present this, the cloaking will helps noobs not bee so nooby and will give advanced players an advanced tool for their commander to conduct secret op's missions (And all of the other crazy stuff that the pro's get away with).

Because stomping on bad players is funner when they have a chance to not die in 30 seconds.

Its not like this will disadvantage good players, because they can adapt, and bad players can ease into the learning curve better.

Its a win win in my books, so I don't get why its a bad idea.

Because you are trying to remove strategic depth. We prefer to have more strategic options (in other words, more ways to win or lose) rather than fewer.

How is that fewer?

If you mean by preventing a alert player from losing by allowing him to drain energy into saving his commander, won't that be more game play styles and options?

And with the charge up, cool down time I suggested it would be prevent people from being completely safe.

*facedesk*

I didn't even know that this was about cloaks, I don't have anything against cloaking commanders. It is going to be a late game thing anyway. I was just saying that protecting your ACU is one of the least problems in this game.

Anyway, I'm going to sleep now.

Well have a good night sir.

And when you wake up you can continue the discussion around ideas that will give commanders a shield without actually giving them a shield.

What about burst protection? If damage over time exceeds a certain amount, the commander instead drains mass reserves or something to ignore the damage. Would be capped. This way it's a built-in safeguard against lol30bombersnipe but not against catching out an undefended commander, at least with the right numbers.

Could be cool as a kind of mass-repair system, but this might be a little powerful.

Would the commander lose some capability while this effect is in place?

And wouldn't this completely crash your economy?

Your goal is to dramatically reduce ACU sniping. The detail of the proposal is irrelevant, by making one of the ways to win/lose significantly more difficult you are effectively removing that strategic option from all but the most extreme scenarios. It's no longer a threat you have to worry about, or a strategy for you to consider.

It has enough levers to tweak to make it not too broken I think (mass drain rate, minimum activation cap, maximum damage cap).

That's also an option. Maybe he's immobile or can't build or something.

Depends on drain rate. And I feel like that's vaguely reasonable given the strength of what it's giving you. Maybe it could be turned off, IDK.

Consider my burst protection option. Let's say the numbers are such that it blocks instant-snipes by cheese like bomber spam but not somewhat sustained fire from gunships or tanks or such. Now you have options; do you invest in bomber spam to lock down the commander and drain his economy? or do you go gunships and look for a kill, but it takes time? Bombers can still keep more interesting properties for raiding and such without breaking the game when it comes to commanders.

We don't want to reduce all ACU sniping, we want to reduce LOLURDEADINSTANTLY.

I maintain this is a case of "I'm bad at situation awareness please make it so I don't have to worry about it so much." Supremacy or annihilation game modes solve this 'problem' beautifully so there's no need to mess with assassination mode like this, just flick the switch when you start the game!

The TA commander could move under cloak. It cost 5 times the energy for the privelage.

For reference, the stationary cloak cost 200 energy, while the moving cloak cost 1000. It's a substantial difference, so much so that moving under cloak was not possible for the early game.

There already is a metal-based option to absorb damage. Build units. Built turrets. A metal based ability would not be useful because metal is something you NEVER want to stockpile.

Energy is much better suited to the task. It's safe(r) to stockpile, it has a clear initial cost, and the eco stalling is only temporary. It's also scalable, while metal is a pretty fixed resource.

For a barrier, try one that consumes 1 energy to stop 1 damage, using supcom1 units as a baseline(and get rid of all other shields). A handful of units at any tier can match the generator's output in terms of raw DPS. So a commander is well protected against little raids, but is still mowed down by a moderate sized army.

The key purpose of a comm shield is that it's meant to scale with the conflict. It's no more and no less than what it needs to be. Early game, when the field is full of peewees and flash tanks, the barrier has no energy and gives virtually no protection. Late game, when strategic bombers and asteroids are flying about, the barrier is backed by half a dozen fusion plants. Underneath every layer of protection the commander remains a glass cannon, and he's not so awesome when those fusion plants cease to function.

The immobile protective barrier was tried with the Supcom2 hunker. It was a pretty lousy ability. The commander has to keep moving or he dies. There's no amount of life that can justify being a sitting duck.

Being unable to build is already inherent from the simple act of getting shot, so it doesn't need to be enforced.

Uhm. What? The details pretty much determine if an idea does the thing that it tries to do. If the details and the vision don't line up, then it's back to the drawing board. If you don't like the vision that's fine, but that's no reason to go discounting all ideas.

Any kind of shield, energy based or whatever is not good idea, IMO.

Consider Setons's front - it's a hard ACU fight in the very beginning of the game and sometimes it ends with one or both ACU go boom. And now consider it with that option turned on. Back players may sacrifice a little energy/mass to build mass/energy storages/generators and give them to their front when times are hard. And he got instant protection. If everyone do this, than everyone is stalling due to all resources are consumed into front's fight. If someone doesn't do this, his ACU is vastly underprotected and go boom with 90%.

Burst shield (i.e. it consumes a bullet dmg if it's too much, like more than 1K - protection against bombers) is better option, but it's hard to implement properly, as "projectile" is somewhat strange term. And it couldn't based on DPS as it will more likely block dozen t1 army rather then one T3 bomber.

I'd rather see just some conventional personal shield that require power to operate, that have known capacity and scales with economics (like it could be upgraded infinte times, each upgrade costs 2x times more than previous, including maintain costs). It won't tamper with low-game, but will be additional protection in the end-game. You may invest into it and get your ACU protected against 30x bombers (but not protected against 60x bombers, but this probably too much =)) or you may just hide.

I still like that idea with quantum gates network that allow you to shoot though gates (and move forces though), but which require ACU plugged into some special building to be operational. This building has some HP (more than ACU's) and got more with each quantum gate linked in.

If you got empire with dozen bases each with quantum gate - you can't be sniped, but as you lose this bases and gates - you are more vulnerable to snipping. You think that this removes some strategic options? Make some kind of Black Sun (quantum gate network killer/disruptor) - enable it and enemy ACU is unprotected, his forces is scattered around the universe and you may either destroy his bases (if you lurked all forces to one base just prior) or snipe network hub with ACU plugged in.

But constructing such disruptor should take time and hard to hide. So sniping ACU in late game is something like nuke rush in early game. Expensive, tricky and nothing compared to 30x bombers snipe.

Uh. Planets are round. The days of Seton's will be long gone.

Interesting point about resource sharing. It would be the quickest way to give direct support to an allied commander. Is that good or bad? It's hard to say. Surviving is only a survival strategy. A comm still needs strong unit support to get things done, and generators are units just like anything else. I guess players will find the mix between units and energy that gives the best results. If things get boxed in too hard, then something may have to change. But it doesn't look like that from here.

The economic stalling isn't a big deal because you can't spend what you don't have. The streaming economy gets dibs, while commander abilities use the surplus. Early game an energy sucking shield would take away chances to use the d-gun, or cloak. It's inherently expensive to use, and it could be placing defenses in jeopardy as well. Mass storage won't be used.

Sins of a Solar Empire had "corn starch" shields. When incoming damage increases, damage mitigation increases as well. It was used to dampen the effect between focus fire vs. everyone shooting everywhere. It placed HP on a curve where more HP got better returns on survival. It also helped light skirmishes play out more quickly. Healing became extremely powerful, since it allowed units more time at max defense.

Would it do the job? I dunno, maybe. You gotta be careful about giving things to a unit for free, especially the most important one in the game. This sort of mechanic would really favor a front line commander surrounded by a dozen engies. It doesn't really do anything that can't already be accomplished with a healthy chunk of flat HP.

If a huge amount of pain is inbound, the big concern shouldn't be how much damage your comm can take. The main focus should be "How can I get away?" The purpose of the commander's defensive suite is to give the extra time and tools to make that possible, nothing more.

So in theory, at least:
- D-gun is effective against raiders and small numbers of early game units.
- Energy storage is an effective defense against mid level damage and siege weapons, when the d-gun can't do it all.
- Stealth+cloak is the best defense against air and sniping in general. Can't kill what you can't see.
- The only real defense against a doomsday weapon is to GTFO. A gate network/teleport/special transport would do this quite well.
- Personal Anti-nukes are okay, but you'll most likely be depending on local antinuke facilities. Being able to directly use those missiles would be gravy.

Why a commander needs extra methods to protect himself when he has the best war machines? If you do not want to die, just do not allow others can kill you. I mean, I believe that we do not need any extra hyper shield or hunker to provisionally hide yourself from imminent death, that make the game unnecessarily long and boring. Probably excluding interplanetary annihilator laser like weapon will be enough.

In starship troopers movie, the brain bug had armies to use and ability to kill unarmed men but she could not win the war since she captured by human. I think that commanders in PA should be like the brain bug, not Gundam.