Experimental Units

It's not even accurate. Supcom becomes unplayable due to performance issues more than anything else.

He greatly overestimates the usefulness of experimental at least in FA, T3 air make light work of them and t1 ground made for the majority of combat.

Many players not present on this forum stoped playing Supcom for this reason. However they have remarkable memories of Ta.

Given the megabot render, I think they'll test to be sure that huge mobile units can navigate the game world, but probably won't include one in the stock unit list. Just leaving it technically open to modders.

Please keep the discussion free of personal attacks!

I think this is the best option really.
Making and balancing experimental units takes a long time that could be spent on other features. Modders can easily make an experimental unit pack but it would be hard for them to add something to the game engine.

so In making experimental units a mod only thing we will have 18% of players playing regular PA and the other 82% playing mods with experimentals. Why would we build the core game to accommodate such a small (albeit vocal) group when simple lobby options would keep them happy and keep the whole player base mostly playing the same version? Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face... I don't think anyone here sees this game overcoming Starcraft as the #1 e-sport in Korea, I urge Uber to consider fun 1st, and professional e-sport "athletes" second. The only argument anyone has here against it is balance and they are thinking of FA. PA != FA and balance is a totally fluid variable. There is no reason everyone can't be happy with experimentals

There's plenty of reasons to dislike experimentals which have nothing to do with e-sports.

And frankly, having them always leads to a certain game balance (if we're talking about super-unit experimentals) that just can't be avoided as it is inheritent in their design.

And as a lover of tank warfare, no sort of experimental will make me ever happy. :evil:

This guy knows what he is talking about +1

I'm sorry, but the poll didn't ask how are you going to play PA. It asked should the game have experimentals.

How many of the people that want experimentals will still happily play without them? That's a question you can't answer. You simply can't say that 82% of the player base will be playing with mods.

Don't make daft assertions like that.

You're right. Although he can't possibly know that - it doesn't detract from his overall argument. Why not include something that such a vast majority of players want? Especially when it will be simple enough to provide a feature (which has been talked about a lot on the forums) where by players can exclude units/unit types they dislike from games. There you go, everyone is happy.

And so what if the "pros" feel like experimentals have been done badly in Sup Com or FA. As I have been told before, Sup Com/FA =/= PA. At the end of the day, players enjoy using experimentals (or at least I do) and I feel they should be in the core game.

As developers stated this game is based primarly on total annihilation. They did't want it to be based on Supcom or Supcom FA and even if , then in very small degree.

In TA there were no experimentals.

When it comes to procentage more than 18% of PA potential players dislike experimentals. For many people that appreciated Ta , got dissapointed with experimentals in Supcom, they were not active on the Supcom forums and did't research anything with Supcom on internet. They did't have a chance to hear about PA, but when the game will be released they will get to know Pa. They will not admire experimentals.

Another question is how many players can be happy without them not how
many like them.

I personally would be unhappy without them. I don't want PA to be a simple, flavorless remake of TA with slightly better graphics and a map distributed across multiple planets. There's no rule that says a game has to be completely boring and without any dynamic gameplay in order for it to be a useful platform for e-sports; that said, I think it's folly to attempt to design a game specifically for e-sports, when the vast majority of players are not going to participate in said e-sports, they just want to have fun.

I played more than enough of the original Total Annihilation when it was released. I then played Total Annihilation again and again and again with Supcom, FA, and Supcom 2, and my favorite game out of the four was FA, with the original Supcom a close second. Removing interesting elements from Supcom is the wrong approach in this paying alpha tester's opinion; if anything, this game should expand upon Supcom and make even more interesting and new mechanics.

But then, I originally envisioned this game as being closer to a real-time 4X strategy game along the lines of Sins of A Solar Empire, but with primarily terrestrial combat instead of space ships. Later on I realized that the development vision for it is more along the lines of Starcraft or the original TA, where nothing is special and everything is generic and sandboxy, with no flavoring whatsoever. I'm hugely disappointed by this direction and hope that they can make a game that accommodates those of us who want more content rather than making this an APM clickfest designed as an outlet for Korean e-sport players' hyperactive caffeine rush.

I didn't pay 90 dollars for them to develop an e-sport that I'm not going to play. And it would be a serious waste of opportunity to innovate, if the development team merely takes the original TA and changes it so that it has better graphics, a symphonic soundtrack, and a map that's split across multiple planets. I mean, that's like re-making Quake and just adding one new gun and nothing else. Surely the developers are more imaginative than that?

You certainly are quixotic.

The vast majority of e-sport features are good, because they ALSO make a good game. That's how a game gets to become an e-sport.

took the words out of my mouth +1 this should be the primary design philosophy behind experimental. enormous, expensive, SUPPORT units that lose on their own by some mechanic or another being countered by land air and or orbital attacks. they should have a niche, do it well, and do every thing else very badly for the price (can still be strong but not for the cost of the unit). it keeps the great visual focus on the battlefield that i think the proponents of experimental want and preserve the gameplay and balance that those against are looking for.

Too bad the Krogoth Ruins your argument faster than he can ruin your base! There is precedent for Experimental Units in Ta, SupCom, FA and SupCom2. There is no justification strong enough to keep them out of PA as well!

Seconding this. The reason "Experimental Units" aren't used IRL is because they are not feasible units. They represent large, glaring targets that might as well be engineered to look like a gigantic bull's eye from all angles. They do precisely the same in RTSes, especially of both teams have matched skill and forces; the moment one team spots the other building experimentals, they will most likely set aside resources to construct anti-experimental weapons (read: High-tech air units). And an anti-experimental weapon is, 99% of the time, more cost-effective than the experimental, and is still useful after the engagement.

Anyways, the only time you would ever see an Experimental in SupCom is in the event that either one team is obviously winning the ecowar, and the game is skewed heavily in their favor, or both teams have set up impenetrable defensive lines that are just begging to be smashed. Both of these things promote poor gameplay, which is the reason experimentals are looked down upon. If a game is designed around accommodating them, it's a poor game.

Niche experimentals on the other hand are pretty freaking cool. The kind of experimentals that you can live without, but are excellent when used properly. The Fatboy was a good example of this, even if its weakness to T3 air was utterly nullified by the fact that SupCom had hilariously unbalanced aerospace gameplay. I would like to see more niche experimentals like this, especially the kind that relate to orbital gameplay.

The issue with niche experimentals is that the role they fill is most often just as easily filled by a normal unit. Morties were essentially the Fatboys of TA, able to rain hell from a distance and extremely vulnerable to gunships, and they worked about as well as a Fatboy en masse.

I don't recall a crogoth in the original game. The game had expansions, but they were fan made. These expansions had many different units and structures like experimentals, hovercraft. Shields were implemented for the first time.

Just curious but how does ta play with all the added experimentals from sup com and the Shields? On one hand there are good arguments for and against exp. I hated the race to exp in supcom and liked how ta was more about using your regular units and creating strategy around that. But then again you can always create servers that disable them if it's that big a deal

Actually the Krogoth wasn't part of a fan-made expansion, it was part of the Core Contingency DLC released by Cavedog. I personally never used him because he was really, REALLY easy to kill.