Disappointed with game direction

Reminds me of Half-Life 2. When testing the new level layouts, they realized they had to make crude environments out of grey and orange boxes, because otherwise the testers kept ragging on the placeholder assets instead of testing the gameplay as they were supposed to.

About mapping. Seriously. Why WOULDN'T you use a zoomed out second window?

You are basically asking the devs to make the second zoomed out planet view window appear for you by default. Which I'm sure they will actually do it continuously bothered like this about it. I wouldn't mind if they did to even further newbie friendly the game up, but sometimes i feel like devs need to build player competence into the game because the players aren't bringing any themselves.

I hope the players enjoy the default second window zoomed out planet view map, and don't feel very proud of themselves for needing it meanwhile.

Siigari +1.
Off your first post you have all reason .
Finally someone could say what really shows the game at this point .
We are already in beta and usually at this stage the games already show the major potensial end .
Only missing two months ( which I think is too early to launch the game , it showld be between March and July, as all going walk all stressed to launch the game and will lose a lot of quality , as in many titles that fail due to deadlines that aims ) you are right , and that is exactly the feeling of many of us at this time .
Being already in 2013 and have so mutch information and technology available ,that we have already in many years !
What i also do not understand and do not like .
1 -I do not like the style of the graphics. (ok its beta i think on and will be awsome)
2 -Planet always spinning round , round , round ( agreed we most times ,completely confused , we feel lost )
3 - Where is the UI ? (agreed very poor the interface , reminiscent of the icons of games for mobile)
4 - Where is the map , the maps do not have much to do with rts games .( the idea off editor planets, showld also inclued plane maps to who like )
5 -One faction ? (agreed I can not understand too.)
6 -Aircraft feel clunky , vehicles bump each other around , I think the final version will be better +1
7 - Explosions are more smoke than fire +1( its beta i think on and will be awsome)
8 - rips and roars of the explosions and effects +1( its beta i think on and will be good)
9- Navigating the map is a pain When It Should be easy +1 ( exactly )

Many things here will be fix ( i think) others i dont really dont now iff will be diferent, remenber that are not gamers who are make the game,so they dont think or feel like us.

(I think we should have a manual game by the way).

This its just another few gamers (me) that are bit desapointed .
I think you guys will keep show us ,that gamers like me are rong like its been this last days.
Keep the good work.

Just have to say when the sun hits ground and shows units,its amazing ,never saw that on any other rts game well done.

The style of the graphics will not change.
They are the best style Uber could have found for this game, in my opinion. For three simple reasons:
- It looks good. Come on guys, nobody can say that it is bad. It is not bad, you might not like the style, but the quality isn't bad so far. It's okay for the beta and after post-progressing effects it will be great!
- It's simple and fits to the game. I find that a more realistic style ala SupCom would look completly out of place in this game. We have planets that are a few hundred meters in diameter and perhaps a few kilometer away from eachother. If we would have a realistic graphic style then those distances and sizes would look out of place. But right now the graphic style and the scale of this game work together nicely.
- It's cheap. Yeah, that's a really good reason, too. It's cheap for uber to make and cheap on a computer to run because you don't need a high-end machine to run it. How are you going to render 1000+ units per planet otherwise?

And let's not forget that cheap, relatively simple and low-fidelity stock units means modders will have an easier time making units of comparable quality. TA models were relatively simple 3D models, and as a result there were literally thousands of 3rd party units created. The biggest bottleneck with TA was actually the engine's limited unit and weapon IDs.

I havent pay 80 euros for a cheap interface and engine game,actualy i never pay so mutch for any game...
Even GTA 5, i will pay 49.99 euros for pc
But dont confuse, i like the game just feel its not what i thought .

What part of BETA don't you understand also don't compare GTA 5 to this game... Look at how much it cost to develop GTA 5 and how long in development that game was in... If Uber had millions then probably the game would have gone a different direction with maybe a better game engine... Just keep supporting Uber anyway you can especially the games and maybe one day they will have the funds to produce a better RTS game down the road with a better game engine... Which other company is producing RTS games at this scale? the new Command and Conquer generals is a joke compared to this game... You are confined in a very small box with limited units to use... Yes you have commanders but each commander has his own set of limited unites you are able to deploy or use in each match instead of giving you access to all the units for that faction... For now I don't mind one faction and maybe in the future they can release an expansion with another faction and with additional improvements to every aspect of the game...

You're not a technical person, don't make demands unless you provide the blueprints that it is possible.

It's perfectly possible, it's just completely pointless in this case. low-fi artstyles are godly for their own sakes. More detail is not always better.

I don't remember who or what was the post, but the PA tanks has more poly than the supcom one. So it's really not a technical issue.

Since no one did an RTS with complete planets before, my arguments will most likely not be accepted. But lets try.
First we have Total War RomII, judging just the visuals this game kicks PA around everywhere. It handles huge armies with thousands of warriors, each consiberably more detailed than a tank in PA. The environment looks much better too. And look at the detail on individual units when you zoom in on them.
So huge ammounts of units that still look good can be and are already done. Thats no blueprint, that can be bought for some dollars.

Then we proceeed to the next showcase, Unreal 4. Just look at the techdemo, seriously look at it. This is not an RTS, of course. But then, if we can render such stuff today then I highly doubt that better graphics are not possible in PA.
Or how about star citizen. Thats how games should look in 2014.

Its an artstyle chosen for simplicity and relative ease of creation. Thats a design decission, not a technical one.

There is one problem with this:

size.

the scale of PA is such that even minecraftian graphics are a massive drain on the system. In fact, this is why Minecraft's graphics suck so bad too: because of the massive amount of art and data loaded at any given moment, any kind of graphics is MUCH higher than something like Total War where the rest of the game is frozen in time while a single, dedicated battlefield loads.

While PA makes a tank roll forward, it also has planets spin around a star, around eachother, having hundreds of units find paths along a custom, spherical surface, each with headlights, a global illumination changing, tens of thousands of trees loaded in the sim, simulation projectiles and probably a ton of stuff happening at the same time.

There's a reason why PA is for current-gen hardware at minimum. Pushing Crysis-levels of graphics (which is possible) would require playing this on one of Google's datacenters, not on your home PC.

Generally, i never saw a problem with simple geometric shapes for units. They are sharp, in color being a color you can name, orange not burnt sunset mohito, and shapes, cubes instead of round curved rolled surfaces.

It doesn't look like earth graphics because you couldn't play this game on kerbal space program. Travel time would be days, not almost a minute. Travel to another planet around a sun would be a few days. This is severely scaled. The movement and size makes sense, if human beings were tall enough to see eye to eye with the top of the atomesphere.

The UI has tons of suggestions. Infinite build. Giving orders to a factory to give orders to units not even built. Orbital is supposed to be controlled on a different layer, making them select easier.

Besides this, modders are already doing work on ui, models, and new units and themes.

I disagree, they are going to make the game look pretty but right now the game is just bare bones.
I posted something like this; here you go https://forums.uberent.com/threads/lighting-and-shadows-in-pa.52440/

Most of that stuff isn't difficult to run, except the pathfinding, tree sims and massive amounts of ballistic calculations. Planetary orbits might seem impressive but it's just ellipses and simple equations.

Yes PA takes place at a much higher scale than most anything before. But games handled massive scale long before, fading out details that are further away and forgetting about things not seen are basic strategies to counter the performance problems. Zoomed out - load low res textures and simplified meshes. Zoomed in, bring on the goods.

Planets spinning around doesnt matter much, there is only one light source to consider, the sun.
Pathfinding doesnt bother the GPU either, not even the CPU as this is should be done server side.
Headlights, well thats an issue. Huge ammount of light sources but either switch them off if your rig cant handle it or simplify - for example: dont compute shadows and reflections for them - should bring an fps or two.
Global illumination changing, well, thats one light source of constant output.
Trees in the sim - another load put mainly on the CPU. GPU just places static models, Id expect.
Projectile sim - definately a major CPU task. In huge battles Im sure the GPU has a fair share of work to do with rendering that too but for everything but the absolute lowest end I honestly dont expect a problem there.

So, most load is on the CPU. And when I see how little of my outdated i7 920 PA uses, there as to be lots and lots of headroom on current CPUs.

Then why can I run it with 30fps on medium level stuff from yesteryear, even with the game lacking a good deal of optimizations?
And whenever something runs on a HD3000, its hardware requirements are far from high. Actually this is going to be the WoW of RTSs, running on next to every machine out there. Just not on maxed settings but thats a users choice. And I would like having a real "Uber" option that requires the best of the best one can get in 2014 or 15 to run smoothly.
Realistically, Im happy if it looks like the desert biome art. As said, nothing spectacular but ok.

And I love this design decision. :U Come on, Rome II-like graphics would just look out of place in PA.

Why would it look out of place? Would look awesome if the graphics were up to that standard.

Urgh, this entire solar system thing isnt really that big, is it. TA had maps far larger than some of the current worlds, on todays hardware Im fairly certain we can cope with more. The whole solar system thing doesnt make it bigger than anything we have seen before. Its just a different way of displaying a map, the orbits cant tax much.

Because then we would have small (compared to RL sizes) planets with realistic plants and machines (which would look very awkward) instead of small planets with simple designed machines that fit in.

Ah, yeah - your right it would when youput it like that