[Discuss] Total Annihilation's Spirit in Planetary Annihilation - Updated Page #6 05/08/14

This reminds me of an idea for elliptical or oval planets in pa ;D

no need to be rude. TA had you playing on different "planets" and they were flat. So did Supcom 1 & 2

You've misread the tone. Let me try again.

Were you expecting pyramids?

Planets are by definition, round

... And you say he had so much fail? Factories were assisted by as much as possible in most situations. Air fabbers rarely used for assisting unless you are using the multi reclaim hack.

...fml. Sort out the phone browser. Stupid logging me out and losing my whole post.

Basically what I was getting at was that TA has such a huge learning curve.
This makes it a hard game for beginners and extremely rewarding for those willing to learn. Online play being close to impossible for beginners due to the egos of the top TA players.

A mixture between wrecks, the economy system, the skills and the micro all being what makes be love TA.
Many won't be present in PA and possibly the wreck system as in TA won't work well on a planet map. That's the major difference.

i can't help but wonder who else voted option #3

Imo ta:spring balanced annihilation mod is probably a better example of what pa could be. It keeps lots of the good from ta, even expanding the terrain effects and so on. However it also scales up the game a bit, and speeds things up in general.

It also has the advantages of the spring engines much better ui- spring is the only game to do formations properly (using the custom formations tool you can form units up however you want).

Anyone curious should download spring rts, as its free.

There's also the zero k mod which has allot of very different ideas.

PA is PA, and TA is TA.

Saying that we should copy from TA is flawed. We should take inspiration from that game, certainly, however as @nanolathe and others have said the scope and scale of PA makes implementation trickier on a number of levels.

Do not copy from TA. TA is not perfect. We should be looking for perfect solutions, or as close to perfect as possible. Flat-out copying a mechanic from an earlier game without considering any consequences of implementation is naive, and also simply a band-aid that won't fix the core issue(s) that PA is experiencing.

I don't think anyone is after a copy paste solution here. What is being suggested is to acknowledge what ta did well, and consider a similar implementation of those features in pa.

We're not on about copying the units, these are fundamental mechanics like terrain variation and effects on unit movement and weapons. The feel our units eg having more health overall would make them last longer in combat. The same as ta would be too strong for pa imo, but at the moment they're far to weak.

Mixing the economy up a bit would also go a long way to making maps more interesting- eg providing tidal and wind power as options depending on planet conditions, as well as varying metal output to potentially create areas worth contesting.

Finally I'd like to see more variation in weapons. Spring added shock type weapons that send units flying- epic to watch. Ad to that the huge mix of different classes of lasers, lightning guns, emg and plasma shells from ta besides missiles and things were more varied compared to pa. In fairness I think the art team are probably working on allot of the effects so that last point may be a non issue.

That's the point @cdrkf, we have acknowledged that TA did some things very well and had unique mechanics that defined it. The point is that scaling up those mechanics to multi-planet gameplay, which itself necessitates a whole slew of other mechanics that the player needs to digest and understand, whilst also keeping the same "feel" that TA had isn't practical.

TA is fundamentally a different experience to PA. Replicating those mechanics won't necessarily give PA a TA feel... it'll more than likely clog the gameplay up with a hundred-and-one extra problems that Uber, and I can't stress this point enough to you all, does not have the time, money or manpower to realise in an effective, balanced way.

That is ultimately what we have, as a community, that Uber lacks. Modders will add all these "lost" mechanics back in, many of them without the concerns of money, resource or time restraints. I know I'm certainly fired up to start coding in more energy solutions other than the "Magic Box" we have now... but Uber don't have the luxury of faffing about for months on multiple mechanics that many people may not desire, nor use.

Uber are giving us this game when it releases... almost literally! They are handing over the ability for us to run our own servers, with our own scripting, with our own multitude of mods, tweaks, overhauls, total conversions and everything inbetween.

I never thought I'd be the person to be saying this to you all but, mellow out.

Yea my main immersion issue is that a lot of it feels bland. E.G building a King Kriptor in Supcom 2, i mean those guns make you go "OMFG" with every shot. It feels godawefuly powerful. Watching a red laser cross the battlefield before a Monkeylord comes into view is just awe-inspiring. this is much more interesting than a laser bolt like now, when you're not even sure if it's a T1 or T2 turret.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to complain about pa- I'm very impressed with what uber have done with it so far. I also appreciate that their man power and resources are limited.

My point was not to complain, just to point out that there are things that ta did that could realistically be added into pa at some point.

I don't expect ask this over night, or even by release (as ta and spring hace evolved literally over years to get to where they are now).

It was more if a retort to the rather unhelpful attitude of 'this isn't ta' as I can't see disregarding everything it did so well as helpful.

What is important to note, though, is that it isn't TA.

That is a very important point that people need to realise. That statement does not mean we can't look at TA for inspiration. That statement does not mean that TA wasn't a great game.

So please, don't take it as such.

The "feel" of TA, as I see it, has a lot to do with it's intro, and how the game actually lives this out:

"What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides, now crippled beyond repair. The remnants of their armies continue to battle on ravaged planets; their hatred fueled by over four thousand years of total war. This is a fight to the death. For each side the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other."

This evokes three key gameplay related things: Desperation, limited resources and a long-running fight (there are other non-gameplay related aspects, such as aesthetics, but these are not really applicable unless you actually want PA to be a direct clone, which is not what this is about). Let's look at how these are portrayed in-game:

• Desperation: This is somewhat tied in with long running, and refers to the fact that you could be "stubborn" on the defensive, and by doing so gain a strategic advantage (eg., a delaying action). Excepting initial rushes, and account for some broken units (you don't need to translate broken balance in PA, obviously ) it was rare to have a single force come through your base and wipe it out quickly. This has everything to do with unit HP to DPS ratios. When things die quickly, there's no staying power, so fights because a race to the tipping point of reaching critical mass: not enough units, the fight is over quickly, and you've lost. Enough units, the fight is over quickly, and you've won. There can't be any feeling of desperation when the difference between winning and losing is so small, and the reason it's so small is simply because the fragile nature of units amplifies any difference in relative army strengths.
• Limited Resources: This was done better before the TA expansion introduced moho metal-makers, but having limited access to resources (metal planets excluded) amplified the desperate nature of the fight as losing things mattered far more.
• Long-running fight: The lore of TA states the war has been going for 4000 years. From games I've played, some of which went for the better part of a day, it's conceivable that this is true (given battlefields in real life are much larger etc, etc.). At the very least, it didn't feel false. Compare this to the "infinite" war in Supreme Commander, which I could never take seriously - the game was all about escalation of power, and the later in the game it got, the more fragile people's positions became as the size of the threats increased rapidly. With such escalation, how could the war go on for so long?

This isn't to say TA got these all right, but I believe they are key components of the overall feel of the game.
So if the goal was to translate these into PA, how would it go? I'm confident straight off that the first two pose little problem when it comes to translating to a larger scale game. That isn't to say they don't need some adjusting, but there's no intrinsic issue with applying them to larger scales. The third is more interesting, in that planet smashing effectively equals the same kind of escalation as seen in Supreme Commander. You'd need to make this much more difficult and/or rare in order to make it feel like a long fight. Is that possible or even needed? Not really. As long as the lore of PA fits the gameplay, and doesn't scream "fake", this is the most bendable.

excellent post, excellent post.

I don't personally believe that Uber have strayed so far from TA's original feel by chance. The pace, the surplus of resources and the breakneck-speed battles? All of these things are intentional changes due to (in my opinion) the expanded scope of the battlefield and the desire for matches to not last excessively long. The scalability of matches needs to be addressed and 40 player matches can't really last for a week like they might if TA's pace was adhered to strictly.

Sorry for playing devil's advocate here... but I just don't see what other options Uber has, given the constraints they're under.

Why the hell are you all replying this ?

@eroticburrito, as everybody here, agrees that PA is not a clone of TA.

This doesn't mean you can't discuss of adding or not some TA features in the game.

The Kickstarter campaign trailer, contains many reference from TA.
The game has already many elements freely inspired from TA ans Sup. Com. (and probably more from TA but I'm not a Sup. Com. expert).

eroticburrito took a lot of times, to detail some elements he regrets from TA. Please, just discuss on each points, if you think it is a good idea or not.
If the TA term is really disturbing you, you can re-read the post by replacing, "In TA you could ..." by "What if in PA you can..."

That being said...

I shall agree with this one. It's planned to be improved but due to limitation of procedural generation I'm afraid it will stay far away from TA.
Mountains where only some bots can go through or forest that slowing down vehicle but are destructible, etc. is definitively a miss at the moment.

For other point, I generally prefer PA.

I'm a big fan of TA and still playing it... but I'm definitively not in love with random on power incomes. (not a fan of all the random in TA, like maps with random damage).
It's harder to manage correctly your economy in TA because your energy consumption is not only dependant of what builders are used but also on what is being built.
PA has done a great work on this point.

You really should play with "+shootall". I still wondering why it wasn't active by default and why it wasn't in configuration UI.

Actual PA pathfinding and unit formation is also a great improvement from what it's done in TA.
TA pathfinding is really bad mainly due to technical limitation (and then has been improved a bit in unofficial TA patches)

I don't think you understand. Adding TA features wholesale is not something that should be done.

"why the hell" are you even being aggressive? Can you not tolerate an opposing viewpoint?

Well the other option is that they do implement it. But my guess is that in the cost/benefit analysis, it ended up on the wrong side of the axe.

actually he's right. Just about everyone here has stated that directly copying features is a bad idea, you're just echoing it pointlessly.

Sadly I have to agree with this. What you (@eroticburrito ) are describing is another game altogether. PA may be a spiritual successor to TA but it is not a remake. A lot of the ideas you expressed are cool but I can't see them fitting inside PA. Most notable the slow build up you describe would not work in PA unless you want to see first orbital/multi planet battles happen at 30-45 minute mark. The other thing is that you are describing a game with lost more micro - again not doable once you are battling on an entire planet, let alone multiple planets.

I like some other ideas, like terrain height, factories without assisting and multiple economy building, but not most of what oyu are suggesting.

Your idea its wellcome ,problem is that PA its not on TA or SCFA world its other kind game with only few similar options ,its kind indie game PA