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

My point is that it is the same in TA and SupCom. Unless you use a chokepoint you can't really get an advantage from staging "rearguard delay actions" where you retreat part of your army.

...actually you.... can. I dunno where you get that from. do you play FA? setons in particular?

Sup com not so much (since everything had crazy DPS), but the higher survivability of units in TA means you can leave some of your force to continue a fight while retreating the rest back to a more defensible position. That's a massive advantage.

I disagree Godde, I have done rearguard type retreats in ZK and they look like they are applicable everywhere. Say you have an army which consists of some short range dangerous units (riots) to fend of speedy units and some long ranged skirmisher units. In a battle with other skirmisher units your riots will mostly sit nearby guarding against raiders. If you want to retreat your skirmisher then leaving a few riots behind prevents your opponents skirmishers from chasing because if they enter riot range they will die.

Well give examples of that then. That is exactly what I am asking for. I did play FA and leaving units behind were rarely, if ever, a useful way to slow the enemy down. Units in FA can fire on the move so if I leave units behind, the enemy can just push on and kill them on the move without slowing down.

I disagree. Like in SupCom, the enemy can just swarm your defenders and kill them quickly with little to no slowdown unless there is a chokepoint in the terrain or caused by the wrecks. Give an example of in what kind of situation it would be favourable to stage a rearguard without chokepoints.

Notice that there is something very important in Zero-K for this to be relevant. Unit diversity. You have accurate, high DPS units with splash damage(most cases anyway), Riots. This makes them hard to swarm and it takes time for skirmishers, that are usually inaccurate and/or have low DPS, to kill the riots. Just trying to run by them to reach the retreating units, will incur major losses.
Notice that the time to kill doesn't have so much to do with it as unit diversity itself.

On topic, couldn't you... divide your army up? That usually slows enemy chasing of them. Maybe even consider conjoining them and dodging all to one side to juke them.

Generally, that doesn't work in PA because armies are either big and/or set up via player to be wide-waved, or they are heading to a base-dive and moving your units allows your base to burn.

Although, I have dived to the side, let the enemy get to my base defenses, and then dove back in to thin out my own casualties.

There are a lot of options I suppose, depending on situation, basically.

Zaphod wrote: 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.

Lowering the amount of mexs on planets, would not result in the game being about 2 dozen units like you said SC2 is. It would simply mean, that if you want to have 1000s of units on a planet at a time, then you need to expand to other planets. Also, those planets would be more manageable in terms of the amount of APM required to control alot of planets at once. Why even have mulitple planets as a part of the game, if you cant effectively manage your units and construction on all those planets at the same time? The game needs to be more manageable. It is currently too ambitious, simply because it requires too many APM to control all of it effectively. That will change if they can successfully lower the APM requirements, by doing things like I just reccomended. I can build 10 planets at the same time, but not nearly fast enough. Another player who is faster than me with APM will beat me in that scenario, unless he has a poor understanding of strategy.

But it isn't, you're thinking about it wrong. No plan survives contact with the enemy. If you're leaving your retreating/maneuvering to *after* your plans have been botched up by the enemy, then yes, you let your enemy decided when they wanted to engage you, they had the initiative, and they won. It's called "the element of surprise"

That was my whole point about the commander retreat. If you leave retreating your commander until after he's in a position he can't retreat from, you've left it too late.

What I mean is that a human being can survive one bullet impact to a non-vital part of its body. So actually a human being is less survivable than a PA unit.

Soldiers in trenches are "in combat", correct? But they aren't actually shooting at the enemy, and they aren't actually taking damage. Plus, they are outside the direct line of sight of nearby enemies (which is why the Gallipoli evacuation was so successful). For all intents and purposes, they are outside of firing range, in the fog of war.


And your argument about life expectancy is invalid. Soldiers in trenches weren't being shot at. PA units that aren't being shot at survive until the server disconnects.

You're right, "No plan survives contact with the enemy". That's why it's important to be able to modify them on the fly.

If you want a game where people only ever attack when they are 100% sure of victory, the current balance is how to do it. It's just so happens to be a good way to make for an ultimately boring game about total unit numbers more than anything else. Once again, the combat itself becomes irrelevant, because it's decided beforehand and there's no strategy to it. I have more tanks then you? Sweet, I've won this battle.

That is over-exaggerating a bit, but the point stands - survivability in combat increases the strategic depth of the game. Why is it a good thing to eliminate this?

You're still suggesting that military leaders never thought about maneuvering or retreating once a battle had been engaged. Units constantly maneuvered to gain advantage, and when pressed on a flank, flanks would retreat or be annihilated. All based on the ebb and flow of battle.

That's true either way. There will always be positions you can't retreat from when engaged. It just so happens at the moment that's every position. My point about the commander wasn't to use the commander itself, but to show how a high HP unit has the ability to retreat. Imagine all your tanks were like that (I'm not advocating that level of HP, for the record, this is just for demonstration). Now you quite clearly can retreat from most situations. Yes, you'll take casualties. But it's better strategically than to simply have your force be wiped out for little gain.

That's not what survivability means. Survivability means how long a unit stays alive in combat. Not how many shots it can take. There's a reason I specifically have been using the term survivability instead of "more hp" or "lower damage" because there are many ways to achieve it, including those, plus lower weapon velocities, lower fire rates, firing randomness (more shots miss), presence of weapons or terrain and more.

At the height of the war, 5000 British soldiers were dying per day on the western front when not going over the top. The figure would be lower for Gallipoli as it was a smaller theatre, but would probably be the same relative to the number of troops. I think they'll take exception to you saying they weren't in combat. They were in a highly defensible position, yes, but only those in the very rear could be considered "out of combat".

Do you actually play the current game? Seriously, valid question?

You don't know if your attack will fail because of defences/units you don't know about?

Scout more.

You don't know about conditions outside your control influencing the battle negatively?

Scout more.

All of your complaints are about scenarios that proper planning and preparation will prevent.


The bee I have in my bonnet is that you think that Praetorians, which locks you into combat once you've engaged, is stupid because it makes every engagement predetermined.

What it prevents is you just sprinting your archers into the nearest woodland, because if they find melee troops they will die. It means you actually have to plan for that eventuality in advance.

If the archers had higher survivability, maneuvering would actually become less important. You would just sprint your archers into nearby woodland, they would encounter melee troops, you would kite them out again, fill the melee troops full of arrows and completely invalidate both the ambush and your careless play.

And you argue that system is better.

Correct.
But dead units don't maneuver. Engaged units don't maneuver. If you're "pressed on a flank", you don't retreat the flank, unless your troops are really really disciplined. That retreat turns into a rout, turns into your entire flank collapsing, turns into your entire army being annihilated.

That's why military leaders kept troops in reserve. That's why most of the formations used throughout history were explicitly targeted at preventing being out maneuvered. Military leaders thought "What if *some bad **** happens*, what do I do *then*". They had enough plans to make a new alphabet.

If you actually research most of the famous battles throughout history, there aren't "constant maneuvers". Units maneuver the absolute minimum number of times.

It really isn't. It's only "every position" if you've over committed whatever units you had, because you didn't scout.

It's all very well saying "Yes, I can retreat these tanks that are already in-range of enemy tanks, because I realised that I'm running into a number of tanks that are 3 times my number". But 3x your tanks will just follow your tanks, and because your tanks can't outrun the enemy, they'll still die.

That's not what survivability means. Survivability means how long a unit stays alive in combat. Not how many shots it can take. There's a reason I specifically have been using the term survivability instead of "more hp" or "lower damage" because there are many ways to achieve it, including those, plus lower weapon velocities, lower fire rates, firing randomness (more shots miss), presence of weapons or terrain and more.

KISS. Ignore mustard gas, ignore bacterial infection, ignore drowning, starvation, exposure, dehydration and suicide, artillery, rats, wall collapses and trench raids.


I don't think they would to be honest. We've had a communications melt down.

There are two states of "in combat" - there is "taking damage", and there is "being a threat".

The whole reason that the retreat from Gallipoli was successful was because the ANZACs fooled the Turks into believing they were still in combat. The Turks thought that the opposing trench was full of ANZACs. So the Turks were in combat. They weren't taking damage, but they though they were being a threat to the opposing trench. I stuffed that up.

Essentially in PA, being in a trench means you are out of range of the direct fire weapons.