Title isn't really descriptive enough. Basically, I jumped on the bandwagon way to late and didn't hear about PA until recently. So I missed the kick starter. My question is. Is it possible for me to upgrade my $250 cosmic edition to the $1000 custom commander level from the kick-start, or is it too late to do so. In all fairness I suppose it is to late, but worth the ask. Thankyou - TGSlasher, Supreme Commander of the Asgard Fleet (Thor retired :geek
TG I asked about this on Facebook as well and got a response. Below is the reply. William, as much as we would love to let you throw money at us, we already are committed to building almost 100 custom commanders, which was more demand than we expected. That said, I can see a time after ship where we would possibly work with people to build custom commanders that would be officially supported by Uber. But up until launch, we are at capacity, sadly. Very much appreciate the enthusiasm though! On the likely chance I forget, please email us at info@uberent.com around or after launch, because this is something I'd like to follow up on! Marc S. Producer
Right now, no, there is no way to do this. Our docket is pretty full up until launch. However, I've had an idea I've been mulling, but I need to talk to Neturino tomorrow before I can elaborate. I'll share more details then if he doesn't point out all the flaws in the idea. Nanolathe asked about this too, and it's been something I've been thinking about possible options for.
I'd love to see a 'group buy' type option for commanders.. get a clan together to fund the building of a clan ACU....
I thought as much. The after launch thing sounds promising, will be waiting till then. Wish I had of found out about PA sooner was a big fan of TA and Supcom FA. Most hours ever spent at my computer were playing these 2 games.
You guys are apparently all made of money :shock: Whilst I would love nothing more than to have a shiny commander of my own, to love him and pet him and call him George, there was no way I could justify $1000 out of my budget during the KS, and the same is pretty much true now. Get it down to ~$100 after launch, e.g. with us actually making the models and forwarding them to an Uber approval process, and you may as well charge my card now and put me in the queue just behind these guys above :mrgreen:
IMO? I think the guys who paid the $1K should get access to ALL the custom commanders in addition to their own custom spec. Then sell the rest as DLC, or have cheevos, or have random drops, or something like that. It's pretty much hats! :lol:
We're not made out of money, but we do work for a living. If you had played TA when you were 12, and then spring at 15, and then **** your pants to learn about SC while in college. Then at 27 while working full time someone says, hey you know that game you love, I will build you your own commander for 1K. You might think hmm this just might be worth it. As far as cost goes, the price they are offering is rather generous. First off you have to have an employee to do this, and his time cost a lot of money. Lets assume a rather conservative wage for our modeler/texture artist/animator, I would bet he is somewhere around 50K a year. His hourly wage would be near 24 dollars per hour. I'm willing to bet that they set a budget for each customer's commander in terms of time spent on each one. Something on the order of 10 hours for the project, you have to model it and go back and forth, then texture it, back and forth, then animate it. That would likely put the cost in overhead at 250 dollars per com. Now you need to consider the fact that there time could be spent doing something else that would add more value to the game over all which they would make money off of multiple time and thus you have to incentivize the business to even take the time to do this. A small business is always concerned with how to best use their time to maximize profit. So they are not likely to see them do all of this work for a one time deal for peanuts.
I bought TA when it came out; I was in my mid-20s at the time (yes, I am old :lol: ) I don't earn a bad salary, but I honestly could not afford $1000+ in one hit with my current commitments. Hell, if I had a big enough savings account at the time, I'd have pledged $10k so I could have the commander, a unit named after me and get to personally shake neutrino and the team by the hand at the lunch invitational, for making such awesome games I'd probably have embarrased myself by doing a "we're not worthy" at the Uber offices though, so I likely dodged a bullet there TBH :mrgreen: Edit: also I was expecting that I'd be doing the unit design / texturing work, and submitting it to Uber in an approvals process (after release) for that meagre cost. I'm not naïve enough to think a hundred bux would cover their design time for something like this
$1000 might sound expensive but it also gets you more than just a custom commander. In comparison the going rate for us to hire a respectable game art group or art contractor to build a commander would be far more than that, and generally we would still have to do all the concept work before we hand it to them. Having them do the design and build it would cost even more. I can't give you real numbers, but for comparison the amount paid to contractors for just doing a new skin (just the textures, no new model, no extra effects, not even an updated character portrait) for another popular game with a fairly simple visual style is around 4x what we're asking for. Making games is expensive. And yes, the game is also allows customization so people will be able to build their own at some point to use in custom games.
Except we both know that unit you download off the internet, and one you pay a professional development company for are not likely to be of equal quality.
Not likely, no, but... if you happened to be a professional 3d artist, you might be able to make some high quality custom commanders and sell them via the UberNet store.. At least, that's how I'm thinking it'll work. How many times that will happen, who knows. Perhaps the backers will get an option to sell *their* commander too.
I believe saving 1 week of pay to have a commander with a sword would be well worth the $1000. Not to mention the time that goes in. As ticklemeelmo said previously, the artist, modeller and texture guy works with you to build the commander then has to build / animate / texture then make sure it works in game + testing to makes sure it doesn't teleport to the other side of the planet (didn't see that bug at all guys ). The time that this / these members use could be put toward making the game come out earlier. E.g. 100 commanders to build, they take (example) 30 mins consultation time, 1 hour to implement and an additional 30 minutes to test. That's 2 hours total (again this is an example). That's 200 hours of time that those team members can't spend working on the game (just in case you didn't read the last 2: example only). I fully understand why I can't upgrade my pack atm, but I do like that it may be possible later on. Don't forget to take into consideration that the $1000 isn't just the commander, but it is every kick start level below as well. While $1000 is a lot to pay for a game, if I think it is worth it, then I will put money towards it. Already put a fair few bucks into Planetside 2, Warframe (founder max level), GW2 (2 copies + 1 collectors edition) and have been considering get a few copies (about 10) of GOG's TA that works on win 7. Getting into the costs and business ideas of Uberent is going off topic. Having a sword on the commander would be epic
sorry to be off topic but... does anyone know where a guy like me (a person with TA from gog.com) could play TA with other people?
In the past I used to play on gamespy. I would also hit up the tauniverse.com forums. Also you could play Balanced Annihilation on spring that is still active. Also Forged Alliance Forever is where most of the ta descendants hang out. You could probably go into the lobby and ask if someone wants to play TA. The only times I have played TA multiplayer in the last half decade have been at LAN parties.
At tauniverse(dot)com, check the forums. You should be able to get orientation regarding that. I THINK TA players are usually found at GameRanger. :?:
