Experimentals What WOuld You want to see!!!

Agree that there only needs to be 1 mega unit.

Maybe a few smaller scale experimental-type units (about 10th or 20th cost of Krogoth) wouldn't go amiss.

I love experimentals and also understand way they can ruin whole game. So imo its on devs to try or decide. There is no way we can imagine their total impact on gameplay in PA. Just useless. I will prefer If there will be T3 with bigger gap between T2-T3 they can count as experimetal-like units. Little bigger, scary, overpriced, significantly less powerful then standard experimentals. Just to bring feel of something bigger on battlefield, something bad-*** you can build...

You mean like a 3rd tier of units that make T1 and maybe even T2 obsolete. Which is exactly what the devs don't want.

No just in power like 4-5 T2 units nothing more. And mutch less cost effective.

Not the intention, if you read the earlier postings that one was based off of they specifically mentioned the small experimentals to be implemented in manners to not make T1 or T2 obsolete. The idea is T1 is generalized units, T2 is specialized to a not detrimental point and Experimentals are so hyper specialized that they have detriments. These specializations could be in different areas also to make them more distinct.

If investment cost is the only way you balance experimentals compared to T1 and T2 then you will make T1 or T2 obsolete or no one will use them. If you want everything used, you need to give them a clear role to fill that no one else does. Then it becomes a question of is that role relevant to the players play style.

I thought more about this. The way I'd really want to see "experimentals" done is that each T2 factory (e.g. kbot, vehicle, hover, naval, hopefully many more) can be upgraded. Once the upgrade is constructed the factory can then build one or two really expensive units related to that factory. A tiny bit like T3 in Supcom.

Or maybe an alternative system instead of factory upgrades. Either way the large units should be built by the T2 factories and should be related to the theme of the factory.

I don't want to see a dedicated gantry just to build massive units, or if there is one, it should exist in addition to the above factory upgrades and should build just 1-2 Krogoth style mega-units.

Yeah I agree an experimental unit should be a game ender. You crank out an experimental and type "Well I just harvested ONE MILLION MASS! Good Game bro." then you send in the laser death spider to mess up their base. It's kind of like the "Economic Victory" in a 4x strategy game but with more fire.

I'd have 4 experimentals in the game, one for each layer. An awesome land experimental, air experimental, naval experimental, and orbital experimental unit. Give it ridiculous mass requirements to build and an incredibly high energy upkeep, but make it awesome enough to tear up everything in it's path.

One massive unit coming on the board to put an end to a stagnant match is great. But seeing the conga line of endless giant robots in Supreme Commander was annoying.

Totally agree, although not sure about massive air or orbital units.

Land and water mega-units would be fine though, so long as we also get some moderately stompy units in the T2 facs. Similar kind of idea to sumo/goliath/krow from TA level or a bit bigger (maybe up to dante/catapult/scorpion from ZK, I can't think of a TA comparison to those).

A unit that excells at Surgical Strikes, I would dig that

how about a Massive experimental transport one that can carry a small/medium army group of level1 and/or level two units to a location somewhere for those awesome flanking manouvres

Note: not my own idea but i saw it pretty good implented in a FA mod

edit: i also like the orbital drop idea of a sort of orbital construction facillity using drop pods

Too much experimental negativity in this thread.

I have never heard anyone say that the experimentals in FA were counter to fun, until this thread.

I really like the Fatboy. Building units right outside your enemies base under water is pretty cool. I really like the Krogoth, especially in Uber Hack because it was submersible. Submersibility is actually pretty important and adds strategic depth (pun intended).

One of the biggest problems in FA was that there were no BLoD units, so there was no serious draw back to building big or go home approach.

BloDs in TA did massive damage with a long range and a very low rate of fire. Ussually a BLoD does overkill damage on a Tier 2 unit. Against an ultra heavy Tier 2 the BLoD might leave a unit within an inch of it's life. The most powerful of all BLoDs was the Annihilator Cannon. The Annihilator was a static defense that could give large battleships the hurt.

I think that requiring an energy upkeep or mass upkeep on large units would ruin them. Having a large cost and decent counters is a fair trade off already.

Neither the Fatboy nor the Krogoth were great examples of experimentals. They were both just big chunks of long-range DPS with no weaknesses but air.

The concept of the Fatboy was fine, as a land battleship that's also a mobile support unit, but it had the DPS of six battleships, so you didn't have to use it like one. Making its cannons indirect fire, upping the range to three kilometers and cutting its DPS to "only" double that of a battleship (and then balancing whatever cost is appropriate for that, possibly increasing its support abilities) would make it more interesting than its FA implementation.

And the Krogoth wasn't even intended to be a good unit. It was a boss unit for the expansion pack that happened to be buildable in multiplayer. It was a giant pile of numbers without any interesting abilities that justified its power. The general principle is that if experimentals are to exist at all, they should not be hugely powerful collections of weapons that you just throw at enemy lines, like the Soul Ripper or the Galactic Colossus.

The Monkeylord was what experimentals should be like. It had insane dps within a short range, but you needed to employ its stealth and amphibious properties if you wanted to use it effectively so it actually took skill to use. Getting a Monkeylord within range of something you wanted to lazor was a moderate challenge. Throw one at a good player without thinking and you'll watch all that mass go down to a tenth of its cost in tactical missiles.

SC didn't really need BLoDs to as a stationary anti-experimental defence, since it had TMLs, which would make a real mess of any experimental that strayed within range, even air experimentals could go down if you knew your stuff.

But mentioning BLoDs does give me the idea of the PA equivalent of this thing. An "experimental destroyer" tank with the damage to down experimentals relatively quickly and for less cost, but not the armour to stand up to a straight up fight with one. The charge time of the weapons would also make them a poor choice for most other combat roles, as they would waste most of their DPS on overkill (and their limited forward fire arc and slow turing rate means trying to peg ACUs with them will probably end up with it running up to it and D-gunning it in the face.). TA had something like this in the Penetrator, but I never learned how to use Penetrators properly, so I don't know if they were any good. If they were supposed to be for sniping Krogoths, the Spider kind-of rendered them obsolete, but the concept is something that deserves consideration.

I hope they put experimentals in. I really enjoyed them in supcom. There is alot of hate on the board for experimentals, but i think they add alot of fun and flavor to the game.

Normaly NO i dont want big experimental units in this AWESOME Game.

But IF i would like to see some Mechwarrior robots.

I don't know what the motivation behind this topic is really. If we ask hard enough and get enough response then the Devs might change their mind and include experimentals?

Unlikely IMO but I can't blame you for trying.

They have said that there will be big units, just not experimentals. I'm all for that personally. I think experimentals can be a bit of dodgy ground. People have already talked here about poor design and implementation.

It was always my opinion that if you were to have an experimental unit then it's basically a prototype. I take this only from the word "experimental" as in a unit who's design has not been completed. Therefore it shouldn't have been something that was mass-produced so players should have been limited in the number they could build. That would have made them much more valuable and changed the dynamic completely. As opposed to rapidly churning out GCs to throw at your enemy's front line.

Anyway, I digress. I think in essence some larger units that fulfil a special role in the game are important to the flow of the game. I present to you as an example; the "can" and it's equivalent the "sumo", as being a great premise for a non-experimental unit that had the ability to take and deal massive damage in a balanced manner. These units had obvious weaknesses that could be exploited and that is what made them great units.

I personally would like to see the Devs concentrate more on units like this that are diverse and colourful than massive, over powered experimental units that will just be spammed late game.

We can take experimentals in the game even if they have a hard limit like 10 experimental units. In addition you can set the Number of experimental units to 0 if you dont like or to 5000000.... if you like to spam your game with it.

All this thread tells me is that there needs to be a mod that adds experimental units.

Hmmmm yeah, I guess there's likely be plenty of mods as people love experimentals.

I don't think it helps to keep on about them in a sense that they might get into the game because I really think the Devs are against the idea. Plus they do have a point.

If one doesn't exist already, I'd like to see a topic about the different kinds of unit types, past and present, that people would like to see the Devs take inspiration from for PA.

I've already mentioned the can and the sumo (in SC the Cybren had the brick), the crock and the triton. I've seen people talking about the doomsday machine too. I've talked about the annihilator in other posts. These were all great units.

The problem of Experimentals replacing normal units is a legitimate one. However removing them completely because of it would be silly. You just have to design well thought out experimentals with support roles that do things normal units can't and thus don't replace them. Also require them to be built individually outside of factories.

Some Examples:
-Mobile Factories
-Slow Medium Range Walkers
-Long Range Air
-Omni-Terrain hover tank.
-Heavy Cannon Bot with slow RoF and no splash.
-Crawler with heavy splash but low damage.
-Megatanks with heavy armor, and stun but low damage.
-Flying Fortresses that have high armor.

Just give every experimental a niche and weaknesses that require back up from normal units. The game would still benefit greatly by having larger super units towering over the rest of your army.

I have known about this just a couple of hours.
I posted these in another PA forum bit I got a link to this so I will just re-post it

I agree that I don't want to see many expermentals. I remmeber in Supreme Commander, once you got expermentals, all of your "normal" units became more or less useless.
I still want to use basic units in my armies even after getting expermentals.

What I got in mind was that you could build some kind of laser emitter on asteroids, then use rocket engines to move them around.
One laser should be very dangerous.
But if you have 3 or 5 of these lasers, you can concetrate all of your lasers into one single beam (death star?) and if you're lucky (or unlucky) you destroy the entire planet.
In game game mechanics I would say it could be dangerous for you as well since planet remains might hit your lasers or perhaps your seconday base you have one an asteroid nearby.
Since this laser is very powerful, dangerous and expensive I thought maybe it would need a extra resource. Like gas from gas giants. Refiend gas to channel the energy particles in. Of course you could build smaller version of this weapon, like base defence or unit upgrade or anything. Maybe you must need special focusing lences for the laser to channel trough. These lences could be made by some rare crystal found on asteroids.

Another idea I got is to have some kind of expermental resource generator which harvests matter from a star.
An orbital harvest installation which drains the matter of a star and generates almost unlimited resources.
But since a star is very very hot and has a strong gravity, you should have a strong shield generator or something protecting it or it might be destroyed during the construction process.

My final idea for now is to have the ability to make star into a singularity, turning it into a black hole.
The enemy plane and all asteroids nearby will be sucked into it.
But once the black hole has been created, it should be there forever and move around as it see fits.
It might remove your enemy planet quick but if you're unluckt, it might find its way to your base as well.
Forcing you to escape or face your atoms being pulled apart into millions of microscopic particles and sucked into a tiny black dot in space.