Do we need tech levels?

Sorry for posting my options again.

No the nuke is not like an upgrade of TML. It might be in supcom2.
The nuke is meant to be really expensive and require a lot of resources to get. You should not be able to get it in 20mins at the same time as pumping out loads of tanks and air.. :s
You can still rush with the nuke for example if you’re on a team and you go purely eco and then switch to make nothing but the nuke.
And nuke defence should be cheaper to get of oc.

But that distinction between T2 (let’s say a T2 turret or a TML defence) and a nuke must be made? The same goes for the big berther and other huge artillery you can’t just lump that sort of stuff in the T2 category. It’s wrong!! Not only are one set much faster to make (say 2mins compared to 30mins) but the first is also radically cheaper.
If you put them both in T2 new players are going to be like "wtf, I can make this t2 stuff but this other t2 stuff is 100x as expensive) that would be confusing as hell?

I wonder how clear of an idea some of you guys in the forums have when it comes to the eco required to build this type of stuff. In Sup com or TA.

The game you're looking for is elsewhere. Everything that isn't a Commander is a mook. Factories need no individual value or personality beyond their ability to make stuff. The only reason to upgrade a factory's production is to consolidate the unit count, which doesn't matter for this type of game. Just build more factories.

A tech tree really has two purposes:
1) To keep the early game sane
2) limit the spam of big, potentially cheesy units in the late game (nukes and arty come to mind).

TA and Supcom took care of the first thing. The tree had tiers, but if you had the resources it was very fast to reach the endgame. The second item was taken care of by energy. The biggest things demanded infrastructure that was expensive, fragile, and volatile. It slows down access to the big things and adds a very necessary risk to them. Big energy items were very much an unwritten T3 in that they were clearly impossible to set up at the T2 level. They may even be available to T1 factories, but they wouldn't be truly usable without high level energy.

So, what might a tech tree look like? The devs said 2 major tiers, so it'd be most like TotalA. There may be a few tweaks given the galactic scale of the game. So it may for example look like:

Code:

T1
- Light ground, light air, light naval
T2
- Heavy ground, heavy air, heavy naval. Deep submersibles, light Space(?), light Orbital, planet thrusters(?)
Big energy units (Aka. T3)
- Specialty units(jammer, sniper, raider, etc.), Artillery, Teleporters, Nukes, heavy orbital, planet killers, commander toys, makers

Thats what I mean (aka T3) is always there. It should just be called T3 because it’s that much more than T2. Simple.

TA style of units for completely different from SupCom's.

TA had a huge number of units per race, scattered though two tiers (normal and advanced). Most of special-case units are in "advanced" tier and everything else is in "normal" tier.

I.e. if you are fighting on only "normal" tier level, than outcome of the battle is mostly about numbers - who has more raw firepower of matching type. But if you are using "advanced" tier as well (note that nobody uses only "advanced" level) than battle outcome is more about how good you control/group your special units around normal units.

Supcom has absolutely different ideology. It has "low-level" tier, "middle-level" and "super-level" tiers. Each tier has almost the same unit types: "anti-ground (tanks), anti-structure (artillery), anti-air (AA), engineer" and number of additional tier-specific units like shields and stealth. In FA it became more that one unit per type or hybrid units, but it's the same ideology.

SupCom is designed around idea that T1 is, like, in magnitude, cheaper and weaker as T2 and T2 is in magnitude weaker than T3. It was also de-facto designed around idea that T1 is for early game rush, T2 is generic force and T3 is ultra-units making a breakdown.

T2 was almost instantly invalidating any T1 unit, but T3 units was not always invalidating T2 units (like AA or shields, or stealth, or missile artillery for most races - there was no T3 AA).

They key difference is about that in TA you need both tiers in almost any game and "advanced" tier is where you do your strategic/tactical choices. In SupCom you may end game on T1 or T2, even prior going to T3. As tier switching is expensive, strategic/tactical choice was about "spam T1/T2 units or try to rush to T3".

If your enemy decided to rush to T3 and you failed to spam him on T1/T2 - your forces would be invalided very fast, but you managed to press him and destory his eco - he is defenseless against your armies.

In other words, SupCom is about numbers and "tech against count" strategy. TA is about numbers and about player control skill. That's why I say TA is more like StarCraft - player control means here more than in SupCom. In SupCom control is also important, but not as crucial as in TA.

And in the end, SupCom doen't required to have 75 different units per race, it is fine with ~15 different unit types per race, which means less to know about game to master it - less StarCraftish way again.

That's why I believe in three tiers (maybe better balanced between each other) with almost same unit types - it's more about strategy than micro-skills.

P.S. And yes, all this "labs", "researches" and other things are weird and illogical - why the hell I need to research same things in each battle? Tiers or "advanced factories" are only logical way to separate unit production. They also only increasing amount of info per race to know, which is also bad way.

Teching that would give you better units with the same unit roles actually work similarly to the researching that would update your units, and TA don't have that, so it seems to me that SupCom is more Crafts or AOE-like in term of this, TA is more like westwood era C&C.
Anyway, all those models are really old, and there is nothing exclusive about them, "tech for more options" is as old as the RTS genre itself (by the way, TA is older than starcraft), and "tech against count" can be seen in some old RTS games like warzone 2100.

I would propose that UBER trial some methods and return the results, because different circumstances breed different requirements.

I like most if not all of RTS games released in the past decade, and the ways they 'tech up' are all very interesting.

So we will have to see, is my opinion.

What? No way. It's very lazy design. "Oh look, here's a unit that's basically a PeeWee, except it has an extra zero for all its numbers so it's better." What strategy does that add to a game, exactly?

The devs have no shortage of real, unique unit ideas to play around with. There are all sorts of potential terrain obstacles, all sorts of world archetypes necessitating their own specialty robots, and all sorts of ways to blow planets up. There's no need to go full "Final Fantasy dev" and make palette swap units.

This is true, The game is going to be very different from anything before and may require unique features.
How much time there will be for uber to play around with units and tech levels I am not so sure. The impression seems to be they will make the game then we can finish it by modding it. Sort of like what FA was to vanilla when they realised what needed to be changed.

Tier 2 units should be powerful, expensive, and specialized, but I really hope they don't just render Tier 1 units obsolete the way they did in SupCom. I don't want units that are just better versions of each other.

Meh...tiers aren't logical either. Why can't a Commander build the high-end stuff that T2 engies can? He doesn't have the blueprint but can build a unit who does? The only 'logical' way to do a tech tree IMO is to have resources that aren't available until you build the tools to harvest them. Example: I cut down wood to melt copper to make a pick to harvest iron to build an oil well. That would be logical. But this is Planetary Annihilation. Awesomeness has no need of logic.

I am getting slightly tired of people saying T3 makes T2 redundant and T2 makes T1 redundant.
It’s not true it’s just a concept that a lot of people have latched onto.

There are loads of examples why this is not true but I will give a few. If the enemy has captured a corner of a map and you want to take it back you can either make some T3 land units and transport them across (expensive and time consuming) or you could make 3 land factory’s and have a constant stream of T1 units to the corner. Both tactics have their advantages and disadvantages but at no point is T1 redundant, even at late game when considering attention, cost, build time.
Also If you have some expensive units i.e. T3 and exps if you surround them with cheap T1 land and T2 flack you have a lot of cannon fodder there which half of the enemy’s defence will shoot at until the player targets the required units.
T3 units cannot control the same amount of area as a lot (hundreds) of T1 due to movement speed and unit numbers. So you could control a larger areas and stop the opponent from using mass extractors if you have a lot of T1 compared to T3.
Lets not forget about T2 mobile shields and artillery (missiles) they have their part to play when destroying defences mid game that T3 does not have. If your opponent does not have enough tmd the missiles will overrun shields. So even if one player has T3 units and is defending the opponent can still cripple a base with missiles.
T3 planes are amazing but mid game before T3 is reached is a perfect time for a T2 plane rush to snipe the commander. Admittedly this will not work in the later stage of the game but the unit has its time and place that can mean later game is not reached because T2 just kicked your ***.
And let’s not forget T2 torpedo bombers. Never obsolete.

At the end of the day on a normal map all pro players will rush constant streams of T1 at you while mixing in less T2 and slightly less T3 because it’s an excellent way to overrun defences and bases.
Lower levels redundant my arse! Seriously I could keep going but I would never stop..
Half the fun comes from having loads of units at your disposal and knowing when and how to use every unit. Just reducing the different numbers of units reduces the depth of the game. If that’s by only having 2 tech levels or only having one faction. They are both bad ideas.

You guys got to stop saying this. Its simply not true.

In theorie you are correct, but via example of SupCom:FA I would disagree.

In the late game entire sets of units are completely pointless.

A game with less units is not neccesarily less deep. I'm pretty sure GO was already mentioned as a retort to this.

Also this point in specific:

Is an argument against dumb AI, not an argument for different tiers. Good AI will know which units to target, making the T1 and T2 "cannon fodder" a useless addition.

Also I feel your point hinges far too much on "but this is how supcom2 did it". This is not supcom2, this is a new game. There's no need to copy what they did.

More unit types == more mess and confusion for newcomers. Most of your "special" units would be very situational and would require additional skill per each unit to master. Which means less strategy, more clicking and more info you need to know before you'll be "middle player".

Variety is good, but to make people choose their style, overvariety is very bad.

Actually, SupCom units are slightly different - flak AA differs from SAM in physics, but mostly it is like that, yes - T3 in like 10x times more powerfull/armored than T2.

ACU can build what T2 engies can. It only need to upgrade it's production module to be able to affect more volume at once and pump more resources per second into production matrix. As this tech is complex and takes space to preserve universality, ACU comes with only most trivial and primitive production tech, allowing to build only most vital low-level structures. Then you may choose to upgrade your offensive capabilities, or your construction capabilities, but not both - it's all logical.

That's quite some fanon, and speculation on new player expectations you pulled out there.

Removing unit options because they might "accidentally take skill to use" is the most terrible thing I've ever read on these forums. You should be ashamed.

The ACU/commander is the most advanced piece of technology around. It single handedly redefined warfare on a galactic level. There's nothing "primitive" about it.

The options initially available to an ACU only matter for balance and some logic reasons. There's no point or possibility of building a nuke launcher when the first goal of a commander is to get resources and factories started right away.

Removing unit options because they require too much skill up-front is perfectly valid game design. Likewise, removing unit options because they require too much skill for the pay-off is perfectly valid.

The learning curve is a very important aspect of game design. Having too many different units, especially early-on, makes the curve too high, which is bad.

I can't help but emphasise how fascinated I am in this insight people claim to have on new player expectations. Please do chime me in.

Wait, what? What the hell are you... oh. You want to play tic-tac-toe. Hahaha, I get it now.

Forgive me for having studied game design. As you are clearly the better man for belittling me with insults as you lack an actual retort, I shall concede my position to your ignorance.

In other words; how about not playing it on the person, but actually coming up with meaningful response that can be discussed? The learning curve is real. It's tested and true game design and if it's too steep, that's a problem for your sales. Because people will be discouraged from playing because the game is too hard to figure out.

You can throw the elitist "they should just spend 100 hours in constant frustration to figure it out" if you want, but the bottom line is that it's going to cost you player. Lots of players.

And just including more stuff for the sake of including more stuff is the easiest way to have too steep a curve for no good reason.

That's why the specialized units would be in the Advanced Tier with the Basic Tier comprising of good all purpose units, this system, if well balanced, should allow players to be fairly competitive with JUST Basic units.

Or at least that's the goal, it will take lots of testing to get it right.

Mike