End-Game Mega Units

Why can't there be large units that SUPPORT smaller ones rather than replace them?

How?

How would large unit support smaller units without dominating smaller units?

Due to the scale of PA, combat is going to be on a massive scale much larger than anything we've ever seen in an RTS. With SupCom, it became easy to spam out Experimental units, completely invalidating Tier 1 and even Tier 2 units. The longer the game goes on, the more the match becomes all about building more experimentals with your opponent.

When there's one unit that does everything and demolishes everything, strategy goes out the window. There is very little strategy involved with sending single giant unit at your opponent's defenses since it can easily destroy anything. Strategy is further lowered when it's possible to make a bunch of such units quickly.

If we didn't make these "mega" units as powerful as SupCom's "experimentals" then they'll be more akin to SupCom's Tech 3 units. Which completely invalidated the first tech tree.

And we run around back into the first issue.

I'm pointing out specific issues with a mega unit. All I've ever gotten in response is "we'll balance it." Except I'm pointing out how it can be balanced.

Can anyone explain how this type of unit wouldn't be invalidating? Again, I'm not talking about balance or OPness. I'm talking about whether these new units completely invalidate less powerful units.

We know what you're talking about.

It's imo rather easy: Give it low hp various high and low range weapons. Heck, I'll just post it here.

But the arc shaped energy wave weapon is probably too hard to code ourselves. So I'll have to think of something differently. I use inbuilt counters. Make them good against slow moving targets, bad against quick moving targets. Slow moving, vulnerable to certain tactics, but good against others. And I think it would work.

Greetings

The Krogoth in TA was not over powered and only one side could make it. Even a couple of spiders could stop the thing in its tracks.
I think all the people going on about "balance" should go play Starcraft.

From earlier in the thread:

Large robots DO NOT need to be massive battle weapons. Mobile factories, walking aircraft carriers, mass-transport types (think Trade Federation ATT from Star Wars Ep. I)...

Don't get me wrong, I don't want some big stompy bot that just destroys everything in it's path. That doesn't add to gameplay. But just saying "No. It is a big robot and thus will be imbalanced--leave them out" is very limited.

I'd love a big dropship as a mega unit.

Hm... I get what you're saying. But I still don't think it'll positively improve gameplay.

Walking factories seem pointless. They can be built easily enough all across the planet and with teleporters you don't even need to spread them out as much.

Currently there's no need for aircraft carriers, let alone walking aircraft carriers, with how air units work. They don't have fuel and don't need a carrier for much of anything. There's been some threads discussing the possibility of aircraft carriers, but I don't think they're needed with how air works. Rebalancing air for the sake of adding carriers would be a mistake.

Mass transports... Uber has mentioned they may end up using single unit transports only. They're going to explore multi-unit transports, but from what they were saying, they may end up only having single unit transports. I wouldn't really quantify multi unit transports as an Experimental or a Tech 3 anyways. I'd support a multi unit transport, but I think Uber is on the right track with single unit transports. We have teleporters for mass amounts of units. And for smaller raids, fast, single unit transports paired with super awesome area commands will make transporting units super fast and easy. It's gonna be awesome.

The only "experimental" unit I think could be valid would be some sort of orbital landing base platform thing. However, that could potentially be very exploitable... so I don't know if it could be properly balanced. Maybe... but it would be difficult. We'll see.

How can people say that a big stompy robot wouldn't add to gameplay?
It would be just epic imo.

Havent we already discussed this

Thank Uber, for that we can mod them in ourselves

But you can start off with teams, and there is nothing saying you cant set up a lobby with multiple teams and have only few players sharing control of those multiple commanders. Currently, that is actually greatly balanced, despite the people complaining about early game commander aggression when you have some to spare, you still have a lot of strategy in managing that commander aggression and if it is worth the commander's death or not.

So it is technically a limit in vanilla PA, which is the exception that proves the rule, as most Commander details are (unsymetrical, "unique", higher detail, only unit with health threshold higher than one hit kills for anything else in the game, game ending when dies)

...game ending when dies. Like, I don't even.... THAT IS THE POINT that you can only build one. That limit enforces the whole damn game rule.

I agree with brian, but not in the way he wants probably. The entire point is not to invalidate the basic units with a very common choice of unit dedication. THAT JUST MEANS, IF super sized robots are put into the game, then they MUST balance well or even weaker against basic unit armies. Possibly make them a structure cracker, although LEVELERS already have that title, levelers could beat the super unit and the super unit could beat structures so the balance is still there.

Here's an idea: a very expensive upgrade that places your commander in a big, powerful mechsuit.

- You only have one commander, so can't be spammed and doesn't replace anything.
- It's expensive, so won't appear too soon and rushing it would mean passing up on a nuke.
- If you lose it, you lose the game, so though powerful, it's a big risk trade off.

I'm not sure how you'd make it work for teamgames with multiple commanders, but I'm sure there's ways to make it work. It's just a suggestion anyhow.

Currently the only unit that can survive off being healed by dedicated fabbers is the commander. Nothing else has the health to withstand an attack from more than a couple units of an even tier at once, and that leads to swarms of units being necessary to attack scarcely defended safe zones.

Adding a megabot, even if it didn't do much damage, would allow for a unit to tank armies. It doesn't even need to be doling out the damage, all it has to do is be a bigass wall that blocks line of sight and can be healed.

I want a unit so big that it can be fired on by aircraft and block artillery. It's weapons don't even need to have enough range to hit the ground itself(lasers, short range missiles, flak, whatever). It just needs to be my moving wall.

The commander is right now the only unit with the role of taking hits in the game, and I want another. Making it a bigass bot just makes it cooler.

+1 on that!

But teleporters aren't invasion tools. They are logistics support at best. If you can get to a planet, build a base and support a teleporter, the invasion is already going pretty damn well.

Given how many options we have (in the queue at least) for moving LOTS of stuff around planets, a cheap single target transport is a-ok for that. For moving around the solar system? Whole different can-o-worms.

I thought that it would fit here too:

yep...
if you think:
The Kroghot is OP, but is a game-end unit
The GC, MK, FatBoy are not OP

They are OP when you can use them exclusively.

And most of not all of the experimental from SupCom and even TA applied.

They become omni units, even the ones who can't shoot at planes can just usually ignore them, or even just require a very light sprinkling of fighters to tie you up long enough.

And frankly and unit that is a 100X bigger doesn't really fit in a game where you have 1000's of units, its like the Thor to the marine.

When really if the Thor was just twice as big, it would fit in with the precived size of technology.


So rather then a mega unit with a death beam, why not just a simple tank, with a death beam?

Why do you think that there's only one way in designing them? Why does everybody come with the same argument?

"It's bad if they make basic units obsolete, SupCom showed that they're bad."

Nobody wants experimentals like in SupCom back. Nobody wants to design them in a way that you can win games by only building mega-units.

There is no attribute attached to mega-units just by calling them "mega". It doesn't define their hitpoints, their weapons, nor other stats. It only defines that the model is probably bigger than that of other units. That's all.

People project too much into the word "mega" and seem to automatically compare it to "experimental" units in SupCom. Please, just stop doing that. Because we don't want SupCom experimentals when we advocate mega-units.

Then don't use the word 'Mega' to replace 'Experimental', because that all you are saying, that mega units are just a different flavour of experimental and so they are ok because you choose to use a different word.

HOW are they ok, in what way? and how it that any different to what we already have in units? and how does it not look really stupid when I have 50 of them?