Commander Upgrades

I tried to see if this was a topic, but it didn't appear to be. But I absolutely think that it should be discussed.

IMHO, I love having commander upgrades. I thought they were a bit strange in SupCom 2, but in FA they were amazing assets for your commander. You could up the building speed of the commander so that it didn't fall behind your engineers, upgrade health/shields, add teleporting, and masers (Cybran ACU, anyone?)

I didn't like the fact that in TA the commander couldn't start building advanced structures and so forth. Though I might not have known how.

All in all, I think this is something that should implemented. Thoughts?

This has already been ruled out.

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Darn.

Maybe someday but in general I'm against unit upgrades in the game. I want to see what's happening on the battlefield. You can do that with upgrades but it's more difficult to pull of.

This makes me sad, commander upgrades in FA are a brilliant thing. I can understand general upgrades being ruled out, but what is the reasoning behind no commander upgrades?

Units dont upgrade why should the commander?

One solution is to only allow major chassis upgrades that change the com's appearance totally. For instance a T2 tank factory could turn him into the biggest tank in the game. A T2 shipyard would turn him into an amphibious submarine supercarrier, and so on.

It might also improve the game if the commander is the only one who can build experimentals. Then you have to agonize over whether he should lead from the front or stay behind and make superweapons.

These choices would both increase strategic depth and deliver on the promise that the Com is the King and Queen of the battlefield, not just the King. Keep him useful instead of treating him like an unloved old parent: "Yes dear, now sit under this waterfall for the rest of the game!" :roll:

In general I think it's best if commander abilities are chosen in the game, not in the lobby. The latter option both lowers the depth and adds all sorts of unneccessary balance issues - but I've dealt with that elsewhere

To avoid him becoming a liability and keep him useful. Also to allow new and unexpected strategies.

Define "useful".
True to its name, the Commander has its fighting done by the hordes of robots under its command. It fights by building the horde, and it wins by building more hordes. The best thing it can do is find resources to get more hordes of robots.

The best defense against trouble is a lot of distance. It is not possible to kill something you can't reach, and it is not possible to kill something you can't find. At least, not without a bit of cat and mouse.

That commander doesn't seems interesting to play to me.

That's why you have the rest of your army to play with.

Why having a commander if it doesn't add interesting elements to the game?

edit: I want to make my position clear: the commander should not be a unit on the front line.
Still, I think that it should be able, at great risks, to help in case of emergency or to put a stop to a slippery slope without him dying with 99% chance.

But he does add interesting elements to the game, because you have to protect him. And he will be able help in a case of an emergency, since he will still have his Uber Cannon.

It's just that he won't scale to the point where he can take on small armies, so you'd really rather not have him on the frontlines.

No upgrades please.

What about other upgrades such as the Cybran torpedo upgrade, the teleporter, the personal shield, stealth, cloak, tactical missile launcher etc? Personally I like the gun and engineering upgrades too, but I can see the arguments against them.

I know that this game isn't going to be Forged Alliance v2, but FA would be a much less interesting game without the various commander upgrades and I see no reason not to include some well thought out upgrades in PA.

I said that I don't want him to stay on the front line.
And I agree that he should not be able to take on small armies.
But if you take TA as an example, he can be oneshooted by a lone mobile annihilator with a scout. I don't think it could be counted as a small army.
He can't take 3 Goliath. Ihmo 3 T2 tank doesn't count as small army too.

He'd probably need a few extra hitpoints over the TA commander so he can take a few hits from serious vehicles, but there's no need to make it an upgrade, it could just be a start-game adjustment. All he'd need to take out 3 Goliaths is to be able to move close enough to fire his Ubercannon.

Well, perhaps you're right. I'm not really advocating for upgrade. I just think the commander should be able to better scale to Tech2.
In TA I think he was to strong at T1 and to weak at T2. Simple upgrade in HP would do the trick but I'm sure there are are other ways to do it.

Well based on what we know about the 2 Tier system it should scale better, part of the plan is/should be that T2 units aren't strictly better than T1 like they were in SupCom, instead for PA think of them as specialized, so a particular T2 Tank might do more damage, but it's gun is very frontloaded, so it's easily 'swarmed' by lighter units. Now this means that some T2 units will naturally just be better against the commanders due to thier specialization. You should check out he Do we need Tech Levels thread.

Mike