Balancing Shields

What I meant with that was that if the devs make the game in such a way that the best way to kill you opponent is a 10 minute land rush. I would rather the opposing player find a way to hold it off/counter it or even execute his own 10 minute land rush. If the rushes nullify each other, this opens the door for post-10-minute-strategies. It gives a flow to the game and a sense of progression

Lets go with what you're suggesting and see what happens.
If we nerf the 10 minute rush, the 15 minute rush will emerge as a new dominant strategy. We will make countless forum posts about it and complain and cry until it is nerfed and we finally reach the 20 minute mark in the game where your underground shielded units can reach the opponents base and kill him before his 21 minute rush reaches you. Good job! Though I'm sorry to say, but there is someone on the other side of the world that sees your tactic as cheap and wants his nuclear satellites to be a viable tactic. So hes going to make his own threads and complaints until underground units are nerfed. Do you want to live in a game like that?

I hope you know that the original Zerg rush didn't have a 90% chance of winning the game. The rush could be done in so many different ways that you can't possibly quantify that statistic and say that it wins 90% of the time, it's not a die that you roll and it lands on a win or loss. vs what opponent, who executes it? OF COURSE you can take a look at 100 games where one of the players Zerg rushed and see that 90 of the 100 were a win for that player.

I think the problem you were facing here is that people didn't know how to hold off the rush. If the Zerg rush doesn't work in high level play but works in lower leagues, then that means that it's obviously not an unbeatable tactic. So then why does it work in lower level play?
The only answer I can come up with is that people don't know how to counter it. Assuming my reasoning has been reasonable up to here, at this point you are suggesting that we should nerf the Zerg rush because people who don't know how to respond to it are losing? Say we do that, well now you've encouraged eco whoring in higher level play because they know that they need less stuff to hold it off.

In early supcom, the ACUs main cannon projectile was so slow that thee LABs could be micro'd around the ACU until it died. A lot of people saw this as a cheap tactic. But what was wrong with it? People just didn't want to play the game in this way. You could obviously prevent this by keeping a few of your own tanks or even LABs around your commander.

If you google "no such thing as a cheap tactic" You will get lots of material that agrees with me and repeats what I said.
If you google "Cheap tactics" you will find a bunch of kids whining that they didn't get to win the game in their favorite, most explosion concentrated and futuristic way.

The only time something is OP and needs to be nerfed is when it prevents the game from showing off all of it's contents, when it removes the last chance at variety. If OP unit A is built and units B and C still have viable places in gameplay, but unit C is completely countered, don't nerf unit A, buff unit C. The same goes for tactics.

http://day9.tv/d/gilgamesh_v9/what-are-the-op-things/
http://day9.tv/d/n00dle/4-warpgate-rush ... ion=latest

Just one key for switching between underground and normal view.
If you are in underground than you have the undergroundmap.

You can select the underground map when you are in normal if you want but you dont have to. But if they will not do it it will get done as some mod.

The only problem with mods is that even if they done rigth , not many people will play them because everyone wants to do ranked leaguage play with a huge playerpool.

Yes hopefully they add some stealthy things like cloak-generators.

I stayed top 20 (13th being my highest) in the SupCom pre FA ladder by using nothing but cheap tactics...

Was a fun time... for me at least.

Not sure the people I was beating in 4 mins games with my bullshit would have agreed but still.

People need to chill on the whole shield thing, they have said they don't want them so the game will be balanced accordingly, sure some people liked shields I get it, they suited defensive play styles, some peoples game plan hinged on good shield usage. Personally I thought they stagnated the game-play in the mid game and forced you to do little else other than hit it with a giant hammer to pop it, which just turned it into a tech race as soon as someone had got dug in under them. The protection they added vs their cost was just plain dumb. Personally I am glad they are going back to the TA formula of removing them.

It keeps the action and conflict going throughout the game.


When I played game on the ladder things were very short and brutal if you were not laying down factories 1 per minute and having a constant stream of units coming out of each one then you were basically done for. On the 1v1 ladder I did not get to see them very often and I knew when I did I had basically dropped the ball.

Translation: "I use cheap tactics myself and see nothing wrong with it"

Good, we don't want them here anyways

I'm getting mixed messages here. You say shields stalled the midgame yet you almost never saw them. I admit I wasn't top 20 but I was fairly competetent and when we played teamgames the "tech rushing" side would consistently face defeat. Supcom made very sure that the classic turtling approach was heavily penalized and not a very effective strateg. This is different from TA however in which turtling was WAY more prominent, generating turtle stalemates even in larger team matches on any map that was bigger than the range of a bertha. Now ironically unmodded TA is the one without shields ( all the mods ended up getting them ), but why do people turtle better / more effectively here?

The truth is, shields have nothing to do with the actual effectiveness of turtling in the large sense. You can always have it balanced by having artillery that can outrange the largest of point defenses and then tweaking its values.

How do you, specifically you, define cheap tactics? Of course I use cheap tactics, they are so much fun, especially when you're losing. Having a fraction of the map and sniping the enemy with 2 TMLs is so exiting and rewarding! I try to play the game best I can and try to improve.

Cheap tactics are necessary, because they keep opponents in check. If there were no cheap tactics or rushes then every game would devolve into eco whoring. Do you want to live in a game like that?

Yes, now go back to starcraft

You didn't even answer my question. I can't even progress the conversation. I not 100% sure I'm right in my way of thinking. I'm trying my hardest to understand your point of view and give it legitimacy, but you're just dismissing me.

Does anyone agree with my point of view?

Quite frankly, you're not worth the effort typing out a well formulated answer because judging from your previous comments ( the micro, the focus on rush tactics, etc. ) this game is ( thankfully ) not made for you or people like you

Why you're even here baffles me

I'll try anyways: A cheap tactic is a tactic in which the expected outcome stands in no relation to the amount of effort ( skill ) or risk involved. Zerg rushing someone before they eventually balanced it was a cheap effort because it netted you a 100% win unless the opponent KNEW it was coming. There was no ifs involved.
More closer to home, in supcom, strat bomber comsnipes are a cheap tactic, because of a design oversight ( t3 AA does no splash damage ), there literally is no counter against this. Even more back, t1 transport suicide rush in TA is a cheap tactic, again, if you don't know it's coming you have a very high chance of winning the game in 2 minutes flat ( namely, if you didn't IMMEDIATELY went for anti air ) while you yourself risk absolutely nothing. you can execute this with the press of literally 2 buttons. Similar but differently would be if you instead of trying to suicide the enemy commander you just suicide your own one. In the middle of the game this is a valid tactic because it has a high risk of failing and a great drawback, but if you pull it off it nets you a free nuke that isn't disabled by anti nukes. What makes it cheap if you do it within the first 3 minutes of a match, where you need a VERY specific setup to survive it

If it's easy to use and nets far greater results than alternative strategies or tactics, it's cheap and needs to be balanced, so it's either harder to pull off, or gives worse results
The zerg rush was addressed
The supcom one wasn't because the devs exploded ( Mods fixed it somewhat, to varying degree of success )
The TA one wasn't fixed afaik in the vanilla game but pretty much every mod that I know of literally removed the ability to do so, or atleast had a checkbox to disallow it, both cases that is

Oh boy! This thread has devolved to arguments over "gentleman's agreements" and "fairness".

If you do not like rushing, play with a no rush timer. There is no purpose in telling players they can't have fun and/or win until X minutes in a game.

Also, rushing has absolutely nothing to do with shields, unless you want to somehow integrate it into the Commander's standard equipment.

Where did you get that? I hate micro just as much as the next guy. I don't think you should be required to focus that majority of your attention to micro in a strategy game. I've played TA when I was a kid and loved it. I anticipated SC, and bought a new computer just so I could run it. I still play SC:FA on FAF, in team games and the 1v1 ladder. Lastly, I backed this game, and I don't expect the devs to cater to my tastes.

Okay, that's pretty much what cheese was in SC2. It is much easier to execute a 4gate than to hold one. Yet if you scouted it, depending on how early, it was super easy. Then if the 4gater knew that it was scouted, he could switch to eco production and eventually out eco his opponent, who built combat units and didn't use them. It's all a fine balance that comes down to player skill, eventually.

As a side note:
There is a large amount of risk in failing to win with a 4gate, you lose. So it doesn't fit your definition of cheap tactics. Likewise, if you've surely lost the righteous land battle in FA and your opponent is just building up enough force to steamroll you, you can snipe his com with 2-3 TMLs and win the game, when clearly you lost. In this case, there is no risk, because you already lost, and even less skill is required to execute.

I wasn't playing Starcraft competitively then, but I'm willing to bet that the Zerg rush was nerfed because it was suppressing game content from being used at the highest levels of play, or it was not part of the devs' idea of they wanted the game to be played.

This is also relevant to what I wanted to mention in my previous post, but forgot.
Since PA only has one race, anything cheap your opponent can do, you can do too. In a lot of cases, you can nullify each others efforts and be back at square one, except with an infrastructure and an economy that opens the door for more advanced strategies.

I disagree. I doubt it was design oversight.
You can still kill T3 bombers with ASF, if you scout them, or even have radar and recognize the all too familiar grey line of triangles.
Likewise, shields helped with this. They were really good at dealing with overkill damage. Lastly, you could go underwater, if possible.

While strategies that pigeon hole an opponent into a few, or worse, one choice, are bad for gameplay, they can still be competitive. It's up to the devs to decide what kind of game they want to make and "balance update" the game in that direction.

To me, it sounds like you highly dislike having to play by the metagame to win. Unless the metagame is dictated by you.

Why are you so concerned with governing what your opponent is doing? Why not change what you are doing to put you ahead?

I think T3 bombers didn't get nerfed because the devs exploded, but because that was their intention.

While we may disagree on if the TA transport tactic was cheap, overpowered, or undesirable. Vanilla TA is still, to this day played competitively. I also remember Jon Mavor himself saying that they put a lot of work into making that happen(transports having the ability to pick up hostile units, including commanders). The devs intended for the game to work like that.

I think we may be miscommunicating here, because it sounds like you are thinking about team game settings, while I am mostly concerned with the 1v1 ladder.

Lastly, if you take anything out of what I say, please let it be this. Please don't dismiss my entire post if you disagree with one sentence. I've obviously put some thought and time into this.

I'm not quoting anything because I'd get too long

Your problem is, you can only think of games in a tournament / competetive sort of way, tossing around words like "metagame" and "1v1", etc. Part of what made TA and Supcom so attractive was the stark contrast to traditional competetive RTS's in which strategy ( in the scale and intuitive sense ) played a bigger role than muscle memory, build orders and rock paper scissors balance. I'm not saying that PA should be completely disregarding competetive play, but it shouldn't solely cater for it. What you might see as "okay", like the transport rushes in TA, even and especially if both sides can do it, might narrow gameplay down to a very few select "competetive" choices ( high level TA play had a very specific build order to make sure you can't be stolen by the enemy, while combomb rushing never had any definite counter to begin with ). Again, if this is your prefered sort of gameplay, playing the meta and playing very competetively, there are other games out there that do this much better than TA/Supcom/PA, because they're DESIGNED for this sort of stuff.

And this is really the key point. TA roughly came out at the same time as Starcraft; while the latter was quickly being adapted and streamlined for competetive ( tournament ) play *cough* flying drones *cough*, TA stayed true to its formula, putting gameplay variety before the "meta". This is evident in the ridiculous amounts of units, and one of the key plus points TA has over Supcom, in which they reduced the amount of units to the ones "that you need" ( eg. only one builder which is amphibious, as opposed to the different builder types each with advantages and disadvantages in TA ).

Leaving cheap tactics in just because it fits the "meta" is not something PA should do. There is a time and a game for making everything tournament ready, this is not one of them.

In short, PA should never become a mainly competetive game, people want a spiritual sequel to Supcom and TA, not Starcraft 3: Planets edition.

And yes, GPG went bankrupt before they could finish the supcom franchise.

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As for shields, now you suddenly praise them? Weird how that works, huh? Glad we agree on something here. Simply put shields are anti harass structures, without them, you constantly have to repair minor damage ( didn't see automatic repair structures yet, and even IF they are coming ), replace dead vehicles, move the wrecks out of the way, and expand ontop of that. Shields provide an important bufferzone between identifying a threat and being able to deal with it. Not only that, they catch stray shots, provide a safe way to expand or make fire bases ( building the shield in a radar cloak zone, then build defenses ), and fortify positions. And fortifying of positions is EXACTLY what this game needs more, seeing how quickly stuff gets destroyed. Seeing as you can planethop units across the solar system, if you don't plaster the entire surface with turrets, you HAVE to have some sort of fortification going on, other RTS solve this with walls, with the curvature or planets and advanced artillery we just need "3d" walls, ergo shields

Wuldn't it be better if door for more advanced strategies would be opened right from the start and all the way through the game?
All playstyles should be balanced against eachother, so we don't need to execute one of them in every single game. And it doesn't matter, if this is early rush, or something in mid- or lategame.

Perhaps it is simply the current view of how shields act is the problem. Most people see shields as simply an extra layer of regenerative health to get through before being able to attack the main buildings which don't regenerate automatically. How I think shields should be used is as some people described: Specifically against long ranged artillery fire or perhaps bombers. Now the problem with the way shields work is they will also block ordinary armies, which hinders gameplay and makes for unexciting games to occur.

I propose we have shields that instead of simply blocking a certain amount of damage before going down are built more to block single shots of any type(save nuclear missiles and KEWs)once.

This could be implemented in a variety of ways such as segmented shields, each segment can only withstand one shot from any weapon, be it a bot laser or artillery shell. This will make it so any armies will easily disable the shield on the first shots but artillery will have difficulty getting passed because only a small portion of the shield goes down.

Another simpler implementation is to make the conventional shield but with extremely low health (perhaps only 1 hp) but fast regen. This would also cause the same effect as mentioned above with slow fire units, which would generally be artillery, not being able to penetrate the area but having fast firing units, which would be conventional armies, being able to easily penetrate the shield.

This allows artillery to truly be used as supressive fire, being able to support an invasion, but not solely conduct one.

The problem with shields is that supporters of them haven't shown yet that they are necessary.

They argue with Supcom, which was balanced with its existing shields thus removing shields from supcom would lead to bad balance (which is obvious).

TA on the other hand handily shows that shields aren't necessary. I haven't yet seen any conclusive arguments why TA would have been better with shields. Remember, PA is aiming to be the spiritual successor to TA, not to Supcom (Supcom also being a spiritual successor, but going in a different direction).

I agree with you. And I would like to add that you can always make or download someone elses mod which adds shields if you feel like you can't play the game without them.

Here's an idea:
If you want a tool that only blocks heavy weapons, you make a tool that can only block heavy weapons!

Shields are a universal solution to a single specific problem. They do not correctly address the problems they are supposed to address, and they mess with everything else in the game at the same time. That's called bad design.

Yeah. No. You are asking the game to be deliberately stripped down and broken just so you don't have to feel bad. That's the most awful suggestion to date.

The zerg rush can be defeated with a safe build order and good scouting. The whole point of a good build order is that it can answer all the possible variants of rush. You do not screw over an entire segment of the gaming community, just because you are incapable of scouting and building a single defense tower.

I would however like to see modders tackle the problem.

I am in favour of seeing how an umbrella shield might work.

Hmmm. I wake up to find my thread has doubled in size. And ignoring the off topic stuff about balancing artillery and gentleman's tactics, there seems to be a pretty strong argument against shields being in PA. Oh well. Thanks for the rather engaging posts, guys. (particularly you igncom1, well argued! )

*starts reading the Wikipedia page on 'force shields'*

What are you on about? He gave not one single argument of why shields need to stay out? Are you blind?

And for people saying you don't need shields because TA didn't have them, I must remind you than every single player modification for TA turned out to include shields, because they IMPROVED gameplay alot. Even when people starting porting and making them on the Spring engine, they still had shields in every last one of them.

That's a lot of people very adept at game design in TA due to having to balance and work on it for so long, who all individually of each other decided that having shields are worth it.

I've yet to see one argument from the no-shield-faction other than "this game that didn't recieve balance updates in over a decade didn't have it, so we must never question the big overlord that decided this and mindlessly follow it without questioning anything".

You are funny.