ACU snipes

Planets are random, which is more important Yeah, but I presume early ACU fights would remain such on some maps, anyway. Because they are fun - i believe that this "mass debris" additions are best thing in FA map design, I hope PA's random generator would be able to scatter similar "rush control" points across the map.

In case of ACU fight, surviving for each 10 seconds more may mean victory. Of course units are important, but ACU is most important unit at that stage (most efficient).

But you do agree that this defensive option could be used as offensive, which is not good, IMO. I believe that sniping could not occur early in game, it's a late-game tactic. And we don't want to prevent all sniping, only dumb.

Right, so it would work against t1 army which is not what we want. We want to block 30x bombers rushing though your superiour air force and AA defences to drop 10 bombs and kill your ACU just because your air fighters and AA AI is dumb and all 150+ ASF attacking single bomber.

Killing ACU using other ACU is fine.
Killing ACU with t1/t2/t3 army is fine.
Killing ACU with navy is fine.
Killing ACU with gunships is fine.
Killing ACU with early/or not early nuke is fine.
Killing ACU with TMs is fine, even perfect.
Killing ACU with telelazer (ninja Cybran jump) is fine too, as enough point defenses will kill ninja before he will even turn to you (or, at least, he won't escape).
Killing ACU with 30x bombers is dumb, and it is almost only option there. But I'm sure that PA will add a plenty more.

Well, why not allow ACU to use some instant teleport-to-base skill which transfers ACU to special beacon. Such ability may have cooldown and can't be used offensively. It could be even integrated into ACU from very beginning - If beacon construction require tier 2 tech, it could not be done early.

Stealth+clock is terrible, cause it turns your ACU into immobile unusable bipedal crap, just staying stuck. Nearest lake would do same trick as well - it's just like it works in SupCom. In PA you may just send your ACU on some far asteroid and no one will ever find him.

Question is - how to prevent dumb sniping without rendering your ACU useless. Stealth+cloak is not solution to that or could be used offensively if too powerful.

I really would not take nuke as doomsday weapon. On big maps your ACU may easily run away from nuke while it is flying towards him. In PA maps would be even bigger. Only nuke that may actually snipe someone is mobile based nuke, but if you got one mobile launcher near enough to your position - it's not sniping anymore.

The cloak doesn't make you immobile, it just costs 5X the power to also move.

And won't be available to the power to support it becomes active, so any early game stuff would still be the same.

The difference between Assassination and supremacy is the amount of targets you need to kill, and a cloak would just let an assassination game play out longer preventing a little mistake.

I don't see how complaining that people need to be better players is an argument against this, its a huge power drain when in use so really the advantage is in the better players court.

Nice on paper, impossible in reality. The commander is a key target. The commander is a single target. The commander is relatively static, yet has to function in a battle that crosses several orders of magnitude. At some point, no number of defenses will keep a comm safe. It could be a hundred bombers. It could be a thousand rushing tanks. It could be a dozen artillery stations. At some point there's nothing you can do but sit back, throw your mouse at the wall and wait to die.

How do you think this thread got to be so long? There is no single set of HP and damage that can cover every level of the game. Other tools are needed. Tools that don't care about raw numbers. Scalable tools, which can take multiple aspects of the game into account. Accomplishing the role successfully is one thing. Whether they should be better or weaker at the role is a matter of tweaking.

Supcom attempted to do this through upgrades. It worked okay, I guess. It had its quirks, like with the ninja ACU or the walking heal glitch. I'm not sure it would work well in PA. After picking all the upgrades, the same problem happens, just a bit later. The game keeps scaling, and the ACU doesn't, and all that matters is getting that sweet number of bombers or asteroid bombs to seal the deal.

I do think, or rather assert, that a commander can provide all his defensive needs off the assembly line, without issue, and still be quite possible to kill at all points in the game. It would be pretty neato, at least. The dependence on infrastructure is key. It makes an exploitable weak point that is expensive and difficult to move across worlds. The former aspect pushes the emphasis towards base sabotage as a means of directly hurting the comm(winning by inches, as it were). The latter part helps to "reset" the commander between planets, so that late game doesn't degrade into duels between unstoppable kill machines.

A shield can certainly be used to repeatedly bash an opponent over the head. Anything can be a weapon, as long as it provides an advantage of some kind.

That's why it's not free. It was never meant to be. The cost is quite apparent and demands extra infrastructure for steady use. That automatically means the comm is sacrificing some tank production and making a bigger target at home for his own safety on the field. It's a tradeoff, not a flat bonus, and it will have its sweet spot just like any other tradeoff.

Oh yeah, I forgot that one. It was mentioned earlier as some kind of "recall" (or WC3 town portal) device. I see it more as a "get off of screwed planet free" card. Doesn't really work if there's nowhere to run.

This topic has been covered quite thoroughly. Please read over a bit more thoroughly. TLDR: Use the TotalA cloak. Easy to reveal, expensive to maintain, and more expensive to move. Then add stealth. It's not some kind of cheesy Dark Templar rush.

And it should not - if you have nowhere to run, than you are screwed anyway. Well, right, this is intended to be some kind of "Get me out of here!!" button, but to restrict it to only-defensive usage (to prevent ACU rushing into the battle knowing that there is always a way to get into safety) it should have additional restrictions. There is three: 1. beacons has radius (so you can;t jump off-world, only to rocket launcher if you are lucky), 2. You can't choose destination beacon - it's nearest one (so you need to walk half-way to other beacon, if you want jump to it), 3. this feature has a cooldown (like 1 minute - to prevent instant jumps while self-destructing beacons). That way you can't ninja-jump across your bases avoiding any forces that is thrown at you. But it will protect you against first pass of bombers. If you are not screwed anyway it's more that enough to kill all this spam and get into safety.

Efficient use of this technique will require some skill and provision from defender - beacon placement is important. And it still could be tricked - if you got one bomber party flying into ACU forcing it to panic and jump away, and second (bigger) party flying to the nearest beacon. This will add some skill to lol30bombers snipping and it won't be so dumb.

I generally like this idea (not because I suggested it - it's not something new, really), cause it's not OP, works at any game phase and prevents all dumb sniping, And it almost doesn't affect any other sniping techniques as they mostly depend only being stealthy.

My phrase contains option about both versions. TA styled cloak+stealth (with energy drain and inability to do anything) is useless as it makes your ACU useless. If you can't build or assists, only move - it's the same thing as hiding in lake. If it allows you to build or fight - it would be used offensively.

My point about stealth/cloak is "You don't need additional tools to hide your ACU, as you already have a plenty and they work pretty well". Question is about how to protect ACU against dumb snipping without hiding and shields.

Initial argument: I don't like the way my com got sniped in SupCom/FA/TA, make PA work differently.

So it's pretty disingenuous of you to claim that me telling you to learn to play must be talking about an unreleased game, rather than the three games this thread has been basing its points around.

Sand levels may have reached critical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm5We9q00Lg

Aye, but such an option is unnecessary at every game phase. The comm is already pretty survivable early game. The myriad of other options are good enough to cover mid game scenarios. However, none of them are viable against having an entire planet blown up. For this problem, the only solution other than flying up and pushing the asteroid away superman style, is to cut your losses and GTFO.

"Dumb" is very subjective here. So far, you seem to have defined "dumb sniping" as any form of losing that makes you feel bad. I really don't care if a snipe is cheesy or not. Arguing over what terms of losing might be "acceptable" or "gentlemanly" is kind of silly in a game about galactic scale collateral damage. Snipes are going to happen. They're the easiest way to accomplish the game objective. That much is unavoidable.

If you want to avoid sniping, then the commander needs tools that prevent sniping. Being able to hold ground against minor forces is good. Being able to endure various forms of bombardment is also good. An effective solution is to avoid being a target in the first place, and the best solution is to be nowhere near trouble at all. After all, if Commanders weren't such slippery bastards, then this war would have ended long before the galaxy did. :roll:

I did forget one thing, and I'm surprised no one else has mentioned it yet:
DECOY COMMANDERS.
If there's anything that's effective at obscuring the real target, it's playing a game of galactic Where's Waldo. This might be more maddening than any other option, because now there's a chance for any snipe to be a complete waste of time. There could be a dozen potential targets on a dozen different worlds, and no way to commit to every single front, and even if one is killed 5 more pop up everywhere else. "What do you mean it's not the real one? Da hell with this, I'm blowing everything up."

Except the third post on page 1, you mean?

In TA the commander and decoy commander's health was hidden from the opponent. I think that SupCom's method was arguably better (i.e. health being visible to all).

If PA has decoy commanders they should have less health than real commanders (say 10%), so that once attacked they die quickly and the attacker has defeated that particular piece of counter-intel. This would mean that the decoy commanders would have to display a false health reading so that they couldn't be identified by sight alone.

Or just take 10 times the damage from all weapons.

So making it needlessly complex?

Mike

Well he started it.
Edit:What do you propose in order for Decoy commanders to have less health than the commander while health is still visible to the opponent?

We may not be able to see how many hitpoints an enemy unit has, maybe only a health bar showing % health. We don't know yet because that is a UI design decision.

Well in that particular context, I don't know, it might mean we need to modify the system at it's core. I think that Hidden Commander Health(with appropriate visual cues suck as smoke to allow players to make rough estimates) means that just adjusting a Decoys Health to be lower would work.

Mike

I'd like to speak to that. I play League of Legends a lot, and have come to the ultimate conclusion that it kind of sucks in several ways as a solo player's game (ironically, it's the most popular mode and one of the primary focuses). LoL was and is not ever designed to function as one player fighting one other player, and everything that comes with that is "designed" (ganks, other people getting fed and super strong, etc). The end result is a game that, while fair, incredibly overemphasizes consistency and still results in a very unreliable game experience.

Back to my point, which is: Yes, snipes can be fair and designed in, but that doesn't make them fun or interesting. I'd challenge everyone in this thread to seriously (without lying) say that they want the rug pulled out from under them and be forced to lose because they adapted a playstyle they find more fun.

True competition within the bounds of a games entire ruleset is always more interesting than noobscrub nonsense.

So you agree that a quick kill isn't fun.

Games where even the smallest player decisions and mishaps are capable of tipping the balance of power are dynamic and entertaining. Games that are simply determined by the amount of units you push into the grinder got boring quickly.

OK then, that doesn't really make sense to the context of the conversation.

Someone's had their daily dose of Playing To Win, i see.

A kill is a kill. It certainly feels better if it's hard fought, or if the opponent made an obvious game losing mistake. But the fact of the matter is that sniping exists because of this check box in the game lobby:

There's no reason to completely invalidate a strategy (or indeed, an entire game mode) just because you can't be bothered to click a button before starting a match. If you don't want that game mode, don't play it. You are perfectly free to ignore the commander and grind it down to the last man. Problem solved.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm not sold on the decoy commander idea. It's not that it wouldn't be effective, rather that it may prove TOO effective in the long run. Endless comm sightings make each one less special and can completely remove the fun behind a snipe. Let me explain why with two scenarios:

A) With decoys.
You find a commander off world and go there. Upon further inspection, there are 5 commanders. You ruthlessly kill them all. All fake. Another world has commanders, so you go there and kill 10. No dice. A third world has 15, so you go there. Nothing again. Annoyed, you go back to finish the first world and there's 20 more. Well god damn it. Everywhere you turn, there are a dozen more decoys just sitting around.

Mostly, the big factor in hitting the right one is luck. It's a bit like playing the slots. You might hit the jackpot, and that's why you do it. But typically, the house ends up winning.

B) No decoys.
The game has gone on a while, and each team has a set of worlds. For the most part commanders are nowhere to be seen, so things have resorted to a slug match. Then all of a sudden, a scout makes a sighting. Drop everything and warm up the asteroids. It's hunting season. Every resource can be immediately redirected towards the new objective, sometimes at the cost of more tangible gains. The sighting itself becomes an opportunity to change the pace of the game.

One player might frantically chase down the enemy across worlds, creating a cat+mouse game all its own. The defender might take advantage by using well defended positions to win major battles. He might switch things around by flushing out the enemy comm instead. Different styles might crop up as players pursue sightings or use "accidental" discovery to their advantage. More importantly, it doesn't carry the bitter "luck" factor that comes from killing 50 decoys and finally getting the right one.

Look rcix, you can play the game how you want, that's a good thing. You can click the annihilation button and enjoy a game where there's no such thing as a comm snipe. You can even turn off air and nukes and asteroid impacts and play on a map with a massive chokepoint in the middle of it, But what this thread is about isn't that. It's about invalidating a playstyle that certain people disagree with.

The people that I've seen that are typically against commsnipes are those players that don't want an edge of the seat, every split second decision matters, highly competitive game. There are however many of us who've been playing TA and supcom for years who do want that type of game to return, and commander assassination is an important part of the balance and the flavour.