Do we need tech levels?

Well, we don't know how PA's tiers work. That makes it rather difficult to accurately say.

The way I would like to see it (which isn't necessarily the way it will be) is that T1 are the stock standard combat units. No frills, no specialisation; just a tank or two, a scout, an AA, an artillery, and a humble engineer. I think T2 should be more specialised (not strictly all of them being specialised, but having the specialised units found there). You have to understand what roles the T1 units are for, and then avoid repeating them.

Yeah thats what I was thinking.

While T1 covers your tank, AA, scout, mobile artillery, and engineer, T2 can go into your limited but strong heavy tanks, AAA deploy-able artillery, mobile radar, mobile tactical missile launchers, and an assortment of other special units.

While their overall roles do kinda overlap, the way they accomplish them make T2 units far fewer in number and much more specialized in role.

While tanks are your front line combat units, heavy tanks make excellent damage sponges.

AA units cover the sky's form mobile threats who don't stick around but AAA deploy-able artillery can cover a static position for a longer period of time, but with ordnance that can't catch the super fast jets.

Scouts can double up as raiding units and are usually cheap enough to be sent on suicide missions for Intel and are extremely fast, but mobile radar while slower is much better at relaying targets for artillery and tracking aircraft.

Mobile shell using artillery are effective fire support units for dealing with massed enemy forces but lacks the damage to deal with defenses in a short amount of time, but mobile missile launchers can quickly decimate even the thickest of defenses but have no AOE and take much longer to reach their target destination, and usually are fired by weaker units.

This way even with slightly overlapping roles, even the basic units are sill just as effective as the advanced ones from being cheaper, quicker over the advanced units overall power and durability.

I agree with tripleomega completely.

I suspect that PA will work a lot like some of the TA balance mods made TA work. (Uberhack, Absolute Annihilation, Twilight) In those mods, tier 1 units were pretty darn useful, even lategame. Tier 2 units expanded your strategic options and battlefield presence quite a bit, but they were just too expensive to be using as your main force.

For example, stumpys (T1 tanks) did great damage, were maneuverable, and moved quickly, so they had a lot of use on the battlefield. Bulldogs (T2 tanks) had great firepower and insane armor. But they were very expensive both in cost and build time, and even if you managed to build a massive army of them somehow, they just weren't as effective as their T1 counterparts, especially since they lacked speed and maneuverability.

The main challenge will be to make sure these tiers still hold as the economy ramps up later in the game, when players start holding multiple worlds with tons of resources.

T1 units should remain useful through endgame by way of unit upgrades. Of course stock T1 units won't compete with end game units ya dingus, try some upgrades! For your health.

Love love love the idea of a dedicated T2 unit factory. Keeps my T1 factories useful, especially since I spent all those resources making my T1 units badass

Don't know if I like the idea of having T1 and T2 engineers. I'm happy to hear it's only 2 tech levels but I'm worried it will still be too complex to appeal to the RTS crowd at large.

I think SupCom2's research tree and uprgades were extremely effective at allowing a commander to specialize in his/her favorite type of warfare. I hope that influences Uber's decisions for PA.

I feel unit upgrades are both a bit too micro'y and non-conducive to readability.

By that I mean you can't look over at an advancing army or squad and know immediately if you are capable of engaging or should flee, as the level of their upgrades is unknown.

I really like the idea of t2 units being specialized supplements, which would effectively upgrade your t1 units in an indirect manner. i.e a t2 scout directing t1 artillery or a t2 ECM platform protecting t1 bots from missiles.

No. Screw upgrades. A unit is a unit is a unit. Let it stay that way.

I would actually be for upgrades on one-off type units, such as your ACU/commander and maybe some higher order units if there are any in the way FA had them. Not sure about having upgrades for factories the way SupCom 2 had them - I didn't mind them, but they weren't the most amazing things ever either.

IMO even the ACU/SCU upgrades were too much.

What's staying what way? PA isn't out yet. If Uber has said 'No Unit Upgrades' please send me the link.

Building the same tank after an hour of gameplay isn't fun or rewarding. That concept may not have a ton of traction in this forum of SupCom and TA fans, but it's proven many times over in the genre and to ignore it would be a mistake.

I think this is only strengthened with 2 tech levels - you need more substance to evolve through in each tier. What good are boring units in the genre's most creative environment?

Upgrading the same units with the same upgrades game after game isn't fun or rewarding either.

With two tiers of units, upgrades muddy the waters and blur the lines between where a T1 unit is useful and where a T2 unit is useful. This makes balancing even more difficult, and leaves open a great possibility that multiple units will fulfill the exact same role.

If you have multiple units fulfilling the same role, then smart players will always choose the more effective option. Which means that a unit type becomes completely neglected, and was a waste of developer resources to make in the first place.

Everyone should stop assuming the devs are starting with FA as a base and then adding or removing elements from it. You are very narrow minded if you think there is one set of mechanics which make a good game.

There is no divine list of good and bad mechanics, the inclusion of which determines how good a game is. Instead mechanics are good or bad (and even then subjectively) based on the context they are placed in. There are mechanics core to some games which would ruin other games if that mechanic was added.

This makes discussion rather difficult because the context of the mechanic has to be explained. Anyone who, without context, claims that tech levels are a requirement for a good game is an idiot. There are plenty of games without tech levels which are generally regarded as good and I am sure that for all people there exists a game which that person likes. You can't just condemn a game if it lacks tech levels.

Nobody here is quite doing that, they all present some context even if you have to read between the lines to find it. Unfortunately this is a very inaccurate way of conveying your point so people end up arguing about mechanics within different contexts and getting nowhere. We can't get much further than agreeing whether it could be a good mechanic and vaguely map out the space which it would be good in. This is the best case and only occurs if everything is reasonable.

This tends to occur all over the forums.

My main point here is that the devs have said there are two tech levels. Without the rest of the game as context there is no point arguing against this. The rest of the game can be still implemented such that this was a good or bad choice. Two tech levels will neither make the game good or bad, it is one mechanic.

I find it funny you've done this to a post about FA mechanics, not one of the many similar zerok posts ;p

Regardless, There are some mechanics which are just bad in every context.

Maybe I'm biased but the ZK posts aren't as unreasonable as some of the FA ones. Nobody is arguing against tech levels by saying "adding tech levels to ZK would ruin it". They point out that a good game can be made without tech levels, that they are not a requirement for the genre. But now I'll just assume that a counter example exists so you don't have to bother posting it.

Sure there are many mechanics which everyone here thinks should not be included, that is easy to see. Although in general there are a lot of weird games out there which someone must have thought was a good idea.

I think quite a few StarCraft, CoH, DoW, and SupCom2 players would disagree with you. Plus, when does anyone have the ability to get ALL the upgrades? In most games you choose based on situation or macro strategy.

And never did I say I wanted upgrades to make certain units match or do other roles. I don't know why that's automatically assumed.

To relate to OP:
With 2 tech levels (confirmed by Uber atm), I would like to see unit upgrades to extend the usability of each tech level. Without upgrades, I have a hard time seeing T1 units being interesting and fun to use late game.

I also don't want to see T2 units end up dumbed down so that they can be overwhelmed by a swarm of cheap, stock, early game T1 units. How else can T2 units be balanced if not being curbed in relation to weak early game units? This seems really, really bland.

Here:
I think the relationship between t1 units and the minor experimentals in SupCom2 was great (FatBoy II, Megalith II, Urchinow) and is a great example of how unit upgrades can work alongside t2 units. When dreaming up mechanics for PA, I think that's a great start.

Googlefrog, I wasn't actually disputing the point of your post. Except that I do think there are some mechanics which are bad for any game, ever. The idea that every mechanic is equally valid in some specific circumstance is wrong.

A billion flies eat **** too, does that mean everyone should enjoy it?

zordon I agree for practical purposes. I think it's pointless going into further depth with contrived examples which would take us off topic.

To be ensnared further in this thread I will say I personally do not like unit upgrades for the type of game I imagine this being. Unfortunately I do not know "the relationship between t1 units and the minor experimentals in SupCom2" so that comparison will not be helpful for me. I'll try to explain what I think the effects that I don't like are of a unit upgrades mechanics.

If anyone knows SCII at all they will know the idea of a timed push. Basically people push during a small time window in which they have a stronger army. Attacking when your opponent is weak is a rather important part of RTS so I am not against the entire mechanic. I feel that upgrades make the timed push fairly clear cut, push just after your upgrades have completed and before your enemy has completed theirs. For upgrades such as stim and blink your army strength can increase dramatically which creates very stark situations and a larger focus on exact build orders. Army strength is smoother when based on production or access to new tech, you also cannot suddenly have a much stronger army after moving it across the map. This is only for upgrades as implemented in SCII and there are other factors involved, I don't really know how SC2 did them.

I dislike how upgrades scale within team games. Say there is an air upgrade path and a land upgrade path. The optimal way to manage this is for one player to make air and get the air upgrades while the other player covers land. This is unwieldy because the team overall may want to change their resource allocation between air and ground yet there is no easy way to do that.

I'm saying it comes as a natural consequence. Whether you intend for it or not: it just happens.

You make them specialised. Useful at something that no T1 unit is good at doing, but not good at anything else.

If you want to upgrade T1 units: do it. But never ever have an upgrade that makes the unit behave more like a T2 unit. Tell me when you have an upgrade that meets the bill.

Have you considered making those things T2 units? I didn't think there was anything wrong with the role/positioning of those units within Sup2's progression.

Also, none of those units had upgrades.

Googlefrog makes a good point about upgrades and timing pushes. It gives the game artificial strategic positioning.

It's also important to consider that on a planetary scale, upgrades don't make sense. If players start out on different planets, they just may end up upgrading most of their stuff before they even start battle. And why not? There's no risk, as the other player won't be attacking them anytime soon.

But if the game sticks to pure tech levels, the tech levels scale up with the game. If the players are on separate planets, establishing a forward base is just like starting afresh, in a "no upgrade" position.

As to how the game would work with no tiers, like ZK, I don't think that would feel quite right. ZK is a game on a smaller scale, so the single factory focus, with limits imposed by economy make sense. On a planetary scale, I feel that limits imposed by tiering would make more sense, especially lategame. (And in 40 player games.)

Two tiers seems to make sense, as we've already discussed the implementation. (Generic vs Specialized tier), and it provides that tiering limitation. I won't go into it too much.

Three tiers I'm not too crazy about, because now we start to get into what defines a tier. With two tiers, each tier plays a role, so the usefulness of units is retained, no matter what tier they're in. But with three tiers, we have a low, inexpensive tier, a middle, more expensive tier, and a high, most expensive tier. What sets them apart? If we just say unit strength, then we get the problem of units losing relevance lategame. The cost spread is just too wide at this point, so justifying the higher end tiers requires that they eclipse a lower tier. And there's really not any way to break down overall army roles from the two tier "general/specialized" units without essentially putting them in different departments. And different departments is the job of different factories.

For example, kbots and vehicles are both land units, but they have a different playstyle. However, I wouldn't call one a higher tier than the other, justifying a higher tier cost. They each have cheap and expensive units that cover similar parts of the role spectrum. So it makes sense to put them in different factories rather than different tiers.

So overall, it seems to me that a 2 tier system makes the most sense when it comes to providing logistical limitations while keeping units balanced. If someone can provide a good example of a 3 tier system that might work similarly to the proposed 2 tier system, I'd be interested to see it.