Another approach to Extreme-Scale Units (more inside)

It might not directly apply, but the idea is still the same "Hey they pandered to that guy's for fun idea, why not mine?" is guaranteed to happen, it's part of why people like TotalBiscuit don't do requests or shout-outs.

But you ignored the rest of my post, do you not agree that having a better game in-directly makes for a funner game?

Mike

I... think I agree with knight. For once. While I love extreme scale units and would be delighted to see some big ol' units just a roarin' around and tearing stuff up, if that's not what PA does I wouldn't think it was a great tragedy if they didn't add them. I mean in this game we have the scale of ramming planets into one another, so chances are we'll see some bots of larger varities... But if not and that's what you are hellbent on getting you can always just play Sup Com (sorry but that's really all there is at that point)

Well, I'm not trying to say there shouldn't ever be Large, experimental type units, merely that including them "for fun" is not the way to get them in.

Mike

Indeed. Find a weapon or device that can't be small, probably due to some game breaking issue. The only other solution is to make it large. Presto, you have a large experimental unit.

Example 1: Big artillery. Arty attacks bases from long range, and does not care about bot battles.. By definition it can't be small, therefore it has to be large. EZPZ.

To be frank, that's not Uber's problem. They're the game developers, they get to decide what goes in the game, and boo-hoo if they don't make everything everyone asks for.

I agree, and the path to better IMO is through a bit more variety in scale. The precise reason the whole planet system structure is being taken is so that players have more variety in scale, and so I hope it's applied to units.

Bottom line, there will most definitely be mods for this sort of thing if nothing else. But I can hope that Uber will give it an official treatment and not ignore it because "it won't fit for srs bznss games".

The problem with experimental super units is that the unit is doing the work, not the player. An experimental like a Monkeylord or a Galactic Colossus is always what the developers designed it to be. A really good player can't do more with it than a really weak player- it just does what the devs programmed it to. It shoots, it takes a lot of hits to kill, etc.

An equivalent amount of resources spent on smaller units can play in vastly different ways. They can be spread across a map, they can be built, changed, or saved individually rather than being a single massive expenditure. They can be destroyed individually, weakening your army by their loss, where a single unit with a mass of HP remains 100% effective until its HP reaches zero. It just sits there shooting away and taking lots of damage with not much happening until it's dead.

Big units that are efficient to use are also bad because they just shrink the effective scale of the game. If both players are using extremely large units, their size and power is irrelevant. They just sit there shooting one another until one of them dies. And there's much less opportunity for player choice and expression. Imagine Monkeylord vs Monkeylord-someone wins. End of story. It'll probably take a while, but there's nothing interesting going in with that fight. It's basically the same as two little bots fighting, but if the players are using smaller bots they have a lot more options, and make a lot more interesting decisions with a greater number of more fungible units. And the amount of economy required to start treating Monkeylords as numerous, fungible units is so high you're really just needlessly delaying the game by having them, when you could just have little bots be the bulk of the game.

Big fights with large armies of smaller units have lots of different ways they could go, depending on which units the players chose, where they are on the board, and with less deterministic outcomes of fights with lots of variables. And, dealing damage to this type of army has a lasting effect, whereas just damaging a Monkeylord is irrelevant; its weapons are fine, and it can be repaired.

A really weak player probably sends monkeylord to its doom towards well defended areas, whereas good players knows where to strike with it an when to strike with it. It's all about small decisions. They determine who is good and who isn't.

Experimentals and smaller units both have their advantages and disadvantages. Like you said, smaller units can be spread across a map whereas experimentals are good when you must focus all your firepower and strength in one place.

How rare is totally equal monkeylord vs monkeylord fight, where both monkeylords have full hp and there is nothing else attacking them? I don't think that happens pretty often, unless testing stuff in a sandbox game. Unless you're playing some kind of experimental war mode, what you said is invalid. There is always smaller units to shoot, to compare sizes etc.

You don't usually just damage a monkeylord. Either you destroy it or it destroys you. Damaged monkeylord has to retreat to be repaired and it costs resources, just like building new smaller units to an army. Sure their weapons stay fine, that's one of their advantages, but armies of small units have their own advantages, so I don't see the problem here.

Leaving out the uber-scale units gives a good mission for the seasoned mod developers.

I think I should clarify. I don't have an issue with huge units existing. I do have a problem with efficient uber units.

Uber units, or super units, or experimentals, or whatever you want to call them should actually be extraordinarily bad for how much they cost. The Krogoth, for example, was a really, really bad unit. Obviously a Krogoth is strong, but adding together the HP and damage of its metal cost in smaller assets, the Krogoth was actually very, very weak.

Terrible players won't care- they'll make 100 Krogoths and have a blast because big robots, yay. But players who want to make strategic decisions will prefer the more interesting smaller units, and as far as they are concerned the Krogoth doesn't exist.

Most of your post essentially makes my argument for me. A monkeylord is either alive or dead. An army has a huge variety of possible compositions, distributions, and current states. Two armies can fight for a while and retreat, both sides bloodied. Armies can be split, armies can be reinforced, or weakened by damaging them. Armies have a plethora of complex behavior because of their many members that creates interesting player decisions.

You say monkeylords have to determine where to engage? So does an army. Every aspect relevant to a monkeylord is equally represented for even a single individual unit, as well as an army. But you can engage with an army in a variety of ways, build a slightly different army, give different units different orders, etc. etc.

Monkeylords... don't do any of this. Its behavior is totally immutable. You can't do anything with one except let its big numbers kill stuff for you. They either survive, or die. Just like one little bot fighting one little bot; except these bigger bots are just very, very expensive. They're just.... boring. The only thing they have going for them is big numbers of HP and damage, as well as perhaps flashy graphics. They are just terrible in terms of gameplay. At least until you have so much economy that they become small units, and you can make so many of them that army dynamics come back. That takes hours, however, and it seems pointless to not just cut directly to the chase.

Long story short, when there's a big army and an experimental the player should go "oh that's a big army." What they should NOT say is "oh my, there's an experimental..." and a bunch of unimportant army.

One of the reason really big units are boring is because they have the same dimension of orders as smaller ones. One possibly way to change that (but I'm not sure if it'd work, and my instinct says "no") is to allow really big units to perform multiple orders at once. A combination of weapons and special powers that can each be given targets. A simple example would be giving targeting orders for the large gun, setting priority targets for the smaller cannons, and then adding in things like a smoke launcher, orbital strike targeting beacon, and other stuff.
Likewise, allowing enemy units to target specific systems to take them out, while other systems keep working. So the defender can try to take out the main gun, or the orbital strike system, or the engines, or whatever.

But I would think this might be better suited towards a different type of game. (One that focusses more on big units.)

I think that the game play should be hectic enough to keep the game from getting state. I just don't the idea of an ultimate unit, as I think that your army composition should be a big part of you strategy. It is quantity over size form me.

One of the things an extreme-scale unit might do, is deal properly with massive AOE armies. Since it can only be hit once, it does something that no amount of units will be able to do; not be pulverized by mass explosions.

Which is the exact reason it has to be worse in cost efficiency along some dimension (damage or health) or its not trading anything off and that's not really a good idea.

You guys still arguing numbers? Damn it, that doesn't solve anything. Expis are a problem because of numbers! The scaling doesn't lie. Lots of long range firepower dominates ground. A limited selection of hard counters forces few solutions. Giant HP sponges can continue to deal full damage long after most other things are dead. It's literally Problem City.

You need real counters beyond "use more units derp" or "use the 1 theater it doesn't obliterate lol". If big units exist, there need to be weapons designed to kill big units. That's how war works.

A fairly large tank already has that distinction, when compared against tiny scouts. There's no need to emphasize it even more.

Big units are going to be extremely weak against hard hitting, overkill weapons. In TA, the d-gun was an instant kill against everything, and the Annihilator featured huge damage spikes. Supcom's only answer was the TML, which wasn't terribly effective against anything that moved (it's no wonder expis were a pain to deal with!). These kind of weapons will shred huge units like their armor was tissue paper, but will be completely worthless against little targets.

People keep talking about experimentals like they're going to be a repeat of SupCom units. But that is not the only option, especially since the tier system is going to be different in PA.

T1 is general purpose units, T2 will be specialized, not necessarily better. If we have experimentals, they should follow a similar model I think, they are "extra specialized", they can only do one thing well, T2 units can do 2 or 3 things well, and T1 will function better on a cost scale at things those units are not good at. These things could be stat to cost ratios, or it could be army roles. The key point is that there should not be experimentals to fill out all the roles, and same with T2, this way you end up with a mix of T1, T2 and experimental units.

Also, experimentals could just be limited to odd roles unique to themselves, like a flying carrier that is just the flying carrier.

I've said this before, but I think the best-designed experimental in FA is the Fatboy - it's massively powerful if used correctly but has glaring weaknesses and can be killed in a variety of ways.

I would not be opposed to a unit with the same basic profile appearing in PA, but not the point-and-shoot assault exps (MonkeyLord, Galactic Collosus, Ythotha), and I'm undecided but veering towards no on the air exps (CZAR & Soul Ripper).

In other words, less like the standard supcom1 experimental, more like the supcom2 minor experimentals that is designed not to replace your army but compliment it.

As for Air Experimentals, I personally think we should not have any of them that can attack ground themselves, but are better at clearing the skies. Basically a flying battleship that provides good anti-air support.

+1 to both of these.

An experimental air-to-ground bomber type thing would have to be EXTREMELY slow (and very killable) to balance it. One which can clear the skies, however, would be sweet. Just as long as its armour is paper-thin when it comes to being destroyed by ground-based units or something...

FA didn't have well designed experimentals. If I had to choose I'd go with Atlantis. Even though FA sea battles were terrible, the Atlantis could hide an aircraft swarm in the water, which was pretty neat.

Supcom2 was hit+miss with expis. Generally, the minor expis were awful. They were bigger units, with bigger guns, yada yada boring. They were basically units you could get from an advanced factory, with nothing else remarkable about them. Things got interesting with the major experimentals. There were physics guns, unit cannons, flying factories, teleporters and all sorts of wacky hijincks going on. Some were OP, some could have used buffs or tweaks, but they did things that normal units can't do. That's exactly the sort of stuff that defines an experimental.

The unit gun found its way into PA, and you know what? It's an expi, and it's nothing short of awesome.

You really don't think the Fatboy was good? The way it was used (plus its massive shield) meant it was actually viable to TML it, you can easily kill it with air, you can swarm it with T3 bots (or T2 at a push) and kill it, and it has a full build menu which means that there is a massive combination of tactics you can implement using it.

Compare the Megalith, which is basically a Fatboy that trades utility for HP.

As for the Atlantis, it's only necessary because the UEF have no T3 sub, and its air factory abilities are massively underused so although it's a great idea in theory to suddenly surface and unleash 150 strat bombers, it never happens in a real game.