comparison to TA, supcom, supcom 2, starcraft 2 and the rest

Fragile gameplay increases the severity of even small mistakes and decreases the time you have to react to things.
The need for force firing only occurs when units have a very large amount of health/time to be killed, or when individual unit importance is high. I don't want units to all have massive HP, but they should last more than a hit or two as they do currently (and a single artillery shell shouldn't destroy dozens of units).

Considering that you produce hundreds of units in a medium length game of PA, losing a bunch isn't that big of a deal.

I'm fine with single artillery shells destroying dozens of light units although I would like to see the introduction of some heavy and slow units.

That's a very simplistic way of looking at the problem - it's hard to produce units when you've lost the game. Imagine trying to learn chess when you can only take a few seconds per turn. It's neither easy to get better nor fun for the player trying to learn.

It matters relatively less in comparison to other RTS games. But I made the experience, that the more skill players have, the more importance every single unit gets.

RTS is almost always like that. You can't take all the time you want to actually watch the action. Well actually with chronocam you can but anyway RTS is mostly about predicting the outcome of your engagements and planning to gain the upper hand in those engagements and I don't see how you can actually gain that skill without actually practicing at the game and learn it.

It's interesting to see a whole page and a half of comments about microing units in combat. That's not really what I was referring to when I started this thread. I understand that it adds APM to the game. I think Godde is right about predicting the outcome of engagements in place of trying to constantly micro them. At least its alot more fun to play that way. The main issues I was posting about are that you need to manage a whole bunch of things at once when you are expanding to and attacking other planets. That is where alot of the APM required comes into play. It's also why I dont try to micro every battle. If I did I would never get anything done. I hope the devs continue to streamline the game and reduce the APM required. It will improve the game alot. It will result in more strategy and tactics in each game. That is what the S stands for in RTS. Right now there is still too much APM required to crank out a million units and buildings while blasting planets with asteroids and nukes, and defending your bases. The last patch helped reduce APM some and I hope it continues that way.

Typically you call this multitasking though.

In my original post I used the word micro once referring to a specific thing, but then edited it after some confusion to just leave it as APM like I had used in all the other sentences. APM includes every action youre taking in the game. That wouldnt really be mutitasking, but mutitasking is part of APM.

I don't see how you can avoid it though. There will always be ways to crudely out-micro your opponent if he is not watching the fight at all, and if the scale of the map is large enough you can always force more engagements maybe.

question is... how can you make the macro be so important that micro isn't the winning factor at all anymore? (such as is the case in TA and FA.)

I never put those words in your mouth.

In current state, it is perfectly possible to overcommit your forces. It's not sensible to retreat your forces once they have already engaged the enemy. That's the point of the rearguard. They engage the enemy so the rest of your forces don't have to and can continue running away.

That's what retreat means, you don't commit your forces, but instead you retreat them. That's what maneuver means, you don't commit your forces in this location, instead you move them somewhere else and commit them elsewhere. That's what reinforcing means - you are reinforcing a battle that you are already committed to.

Quite frankly, you can retreat/maneuver etc. in PA. You just have to do it much much earlier, before you commit your forces to the attack. Which is much closer to the way actual militaries work. You can't tell your infantry in a sniper's killzone to "retreat over here", because if they have to break cover to do so they die.




The splash damage thing is a separate issue, which is that artillery doesn't actually do splash damage, it just does AOE damage, and most of the other difficulties in maneuvering ultimately comes down to units being too slow compared to what their engagement ranges are.

It's utterly sensible to do so; far better to lose some of your force than all, where possible. Gallipoli, Dunkirk and many, many others; according to this view, they should have stayed where they were and let themselves be destroyed instead because retreats during battles are not sensible? This is trivial to see in any case - few battles result in the utter annihilation of one side, as would occur if retreats don't happen.

Retreating and maneuvering are just as applicable during combat.

You can't do this in PA. You can make your army larger prior to committing but good luck getting more units involved in a battle already taking place before it's over. You have seconds to do so. There's no time to reinforce.

And that is ridiculously limiting, and makes combat in PA just a thing to watch resolve itself, as it's over to fast to participate in. Why shouldn't you be able to retreat, maneuver and reinforce during combat?

No it's not, not at all. A squad pinned down by a sniper has little bearing on the way larger battles are fought.
Pick any of the famous large battles and you'll probably see evidence of all three things - retreat, maneuvering and reinforcement happening during the battle.

At Gallipoli, they weren't actually engaged in battle during the evacuation (which is why the ruses worked -the Turks didn't want to charge into rifle fire), and at Dunkirk, the defensive perimeter was 11km away from the port area. The tanks/machine guns didn't follow the troops all the way to the evacuation, so the "retreating troops" weren't actually under fire.

The retreating troops were not committed to battle.

The troops who were fighting the rearguard action were committed to battle, did not retreat and did not get evacuated. They became POWs.

I consider a front line trench "in combat". In Gallipoli's case, the subterfuge simply replaced the usual need for a rearguard.

The rearguard at Dunkirk was a subset of the fighting force - the remainder retreated from combat (leaving the rearguard to continue fighting) and were evacuated. This retreat to Dunkirk is described as "Falling back by degrees", or leapfrogging. This involves the rearguard retreating from combat to set up another rearguard behind the one immediately to their rear; also known as a fighting withdrawal, a standard tactic. Also worth noting is about a third to a half of the french rearguard were also evacuated.



Rearguards actions such as these aren't possible if they can't hold up an enemy force - certainly not possible in PA - as you can destroy an army as fast as you can move through it.

Historical analogies aside, you haven't explained why this removal of strategy from combat is a good thing. Bearing in mind that it doesn't replace pre-combat strategy, I'm failing to see the downside.

I'm not saying that the strategy in combat is removed.

I'm saying "the remainder retreated from combat"

Gallipoli is the same state as in PA. Because people don't do very well after they take a bullet, particularly if they develop an infection, especially before the discovery of antibiotics.

The soldiers of WWI actually have *less* survivability than the units of PA.

But that is the current state of combat in PA. Once it's entered, it's over too fast to have any further impact or influence. There is no strategy because you can't do anything. It's entirely decided before it's entered. Why is this better?

I'm really not sure what you mean here. If anything Total Annihilation would be closer to trench warfare than PA.

Their average life expectancy in the trenches was 6 weeks. PA units are lucky to live 6 seconds.

Please give examples of rearguard actions in TA and SupCom. There aren't really any unless you use the terrain to your advantage which you can do in PA as well.

If you mean that wrecks created artificial chokepoints then that is true. However if you have enough firepower to delay the enemies advance through those artificial chokepoints it is better to commit all of your forces to defending the chokepoints as the enemy will sustain even heavier casualties when they try to pass.
The only case when you would retreat partially and leave some units behind is if you have some slow expensive units like artillery and you know that the enemy will eventually overcome your defending force but then it is more a question of unit diversity than at the rate at which units die off.

now that's a bold statement. there is choke points andddd ...that's it and choke points are the least interesting of all strategic terrain use. and still they barely feel like they're making a difference at all. state one other type of terrain you can use?

I totaly agreed with you.

All planets mexes showld be off about 80% there are just too many, seems we are play with cheats like x3 res_
With few mexes game could get moore fun and moore tatic option since you have to fight and think much moore to get the mexes.

Right now ppl play simcity since they now they got enouth near base not need look for moore..

A planet cant have moore then 16/20 mexes.
16 mexes its the good thing to do, to grab players to all field and fight...
Iff Uber try make a test with only 20 mexes on a planet ,they will instatly notice the awsome diference on gameplay.

Also its obvius with this the balace between power/mass have to change,but its really easy to swap......

If you want that then you can use the mex sliders to reduce the metal to nearly nothing. This game is meant to have 1000's of units, not be small scale micro fests with a couple dozen units like Starcraft.

I like having hundreds of units in many groups at my disposal. I consider that to be strategy as I macromanage many large groups of large units, picking lines of attacks and weak points and utilising unit composition with formations without worrying about the tactical micro of the engagements each group gets into.