Final Kickstart Goal

The Kickstart goals represent not just ways to get more of our money, but also expansion of the over all scope of the game.

I have given some though to what would be most popular, most motivating more kickstarts and most awesome for me to offer as a suggestion for the final kickstart goal.

My suggestion is: Lots of awesome Mega Units

Currently, we are promised maybe some Mega Units (experimentals). Obviously, there have been some rediculously high creativity already on this forum about what people might want in terms of mega units. A friend of mine said he wants a mega wurm bot that passes through the core of the planet. Possibly such a unit could produce a lot of mass and energy from it's activities. That's an example. Giant solar lenses that can blast planets with their focused energy have also been proposed. Some people might want their Krogoth to flying in low orbit like a gundam. Some might want their krogoth to be able to fire weapons into low orbit. Some people might want mega super transport, factory, firebases that can go from planet to planet.

I believe John said there is only big and really big in this game.

Mega Units.. hm.. I actually cant imagine a real bigger goal than galactic wars map, but I am looking forward to get hyped

I would love to see some easter eggs in single player, like a hulk which jumps from one to another planet and destroy units randomly

Are you really proposing that PA have a Galactus or Unicron feature? Have you ever tried playing against Galactus in Hero Clix? It's not very fun.

What about something smaller like the UFO or Giant Robots in Supreme Commander? Would that be adequate? Does it have to be something as insanely epic like a planet eating space worm?

"Awesome" units?

Very bad suggestion to focus on the "big" units in any way. This is the attitude that royally screwed up SupCom 2. They are pieces on a game board, and are actually the least interesting and most problematic ones to balance, due to their high cost and few numbers.

Big units are boring, and completely preset by their numbers. Smaller units let you customize your forces with considerable detail by selecting what to build, in what quantity, and where to put it. An experimental is completely defined by its stat parameters, and occupies only one location, with one large pool of HP (with no defeat in detail possible).

Nobody gets super excited about how powerful the queen is in chess.

So... more customizability? I like that... Anything that allows different playstyles. How about giving to each building an ability to build an unique commander upgrade? I do not know if they could stack, under what conditions etc. But it seems nice to have the shipyard adding a fast swim or torpedoes upgrade, while the airport some hovering...
Never mind - it is just me babbling.

Like, one fully costumizeable mega unit per player (that you would costumize before the game starts) would be fun IMO, I don't know about balance, and competetive play though...

I am so confused by the way you guys are thinking about this game. Oh gawd HUGE ROBOT MEGA UNIT SO COOOOL! That stuff is boring as hell, and will ruin PA like it did SupCom 2 if you guys don't grow a brain.

Let us imagine that you can "customize" this "unit" by building a whole bunch of little units, and then merging them into this big unit during the game.

Now just forget the difficult and computationally expensive "merging" part and look at the ARMY you just made out of lots of little pieces as if it were itself one unit. Which has the powers and traits of all its sub-components, and which loses effectiveness as it takes damage, and can be "repaired" by replenishing its stockpile of units. And which can be "upgraded" by switching out some of its components for better ones, or just add more units to the army. More importantly, you can even split this unit into smaller units, and cover more ground, or maneuver or modify in all sorts of ways according to your play style.

Isn't that way more interesting than having one really, really big unit that just does what it has been programmed to do by the devs? And is exactly the same every single time it is built?

Simple change- instead of having one customizable mega unit, you have a customizable ARMY which acts like a mega unit.

Not saying I disagree with you, but this kind of unwarranted hostility ruins forum communities.

My apologies, but there are literally thousands of people unknowingly attempting to ruin RTS games with suggestions like the above requests for mega units. Absolutely no thought behind the request, or its implications. These very players will pick up a game, play it for a while, get bored, and put it down, still never understanding the fundamental problems their massed suggestions introduced into the game, and why it caused them and others to become bored with the game so quickly.

I feel a strong rebuff is necessary.

A very different kind of thinking goes into creating games like TA or Brood War, that are still being played a decade after their release because they are strategically interesting, and have a high capacity for player skill, expression, and development of detailed personal play styles.

I feel no love for mega-units.

I came for the armies, and I will stay for the epic battles.

However, I did not come here to watch two massive robots smack each other around.

I think having some mega units are great, they add 'flavour', make a nice focal point in battles, and there is a degree of psychological warfare to them, but agree they must be treated with care.

So rebut them with well thought out arguments and leave the insults, explicit or implied, out of it.

If i had to guess, I'd say shields. Unfortunately

For a new stretch goal, i just want MORE

More of everything they have showed me so far: awesome planetary battles.

So final stretch: MORE PLANETARY ANNIHILATION

I personally would love a dynamic galactic war where players could come and go. A server (probably player side) would have a player limit and those players units would be destroyed when they leave making room for other players, but the buildings could remain as salvage etc. Basically have an entire galaxy at war with constantly changing opponents, not to mention the ability to make alliances. Of course the entire galaxy would eventually be destroyed but that's kind of the point.

Unless this is already included in galactic war in which I have no clue what more I could want.

Put more trust in Mavor, Steve, the Uber Team and the Alpha team. Honestly, you don't know what you are talking about. How many of your ideas were included in the final product of Brood War? I had plenty of suggestions that were taken and some that were rejected that were relooked at and implemented over a year later because it was the best solution available. Blizzard isn't flawless.

Mavor promised that this team is going to work on T3 type stuff last and we aren't going to focus on it. A new stretch goal is not going to change that. However, we have already been promised Kenetic Energy Weapons and something akin to Death Stars. There will be a Noah style unit launching devise. Take a breath and realize you are among friends. This is going to be a big army TA style game. Once we have a solid core tier 1 we can build a solid tier 2. Once we have that we can do our best to provide as many victory options and strategies as possible.

All that said, I don't see how mega units are any different from navies. It's a legitimate stretch goal. Zero K has mega units. TA has Krogoth. Supreme Commander has a lot of different mega bots. If we don't have a Sorian style magnetron I will be a little sad.

Nobody is flawless- that isn't the point. My point is there is a huge difference between the mindset of wanting to make a game that is "cool" that has a lot of "cool" stuff in it, and wanting to make a game that is strategically interesting.

Players see things like giant worms eating planet cores, or giant robots destroying entire armies, or flying aircraft carriers, and those things are cool. However, putting in things like "mega units" is destructive to making the game strategically interesting, as there will be fewer pieces, with the literal design of the piece being far more consequential than its use by the player. Two different players with one Monkeylord have limited ways to differentiate their play, compared to if they had a comparable army of small units, which die a lot, and are constructed en masse.

Virtually all the suggestions you will get are for things that are "cool" which are very superficial. It's like having flashy graphics and sound effects- they will draw people in to play the game, however if there is no gameplay underneath that, they will get bored. Once you've seen all the graphics, and heard all the SFX, it simply becomes repetitive, no matter how high quality. The same is true for mega units- once you've seen them enough times, that's pretty much all there is. How many times do you have to see a Cybranasaurus Rex before you are just bored by it? It's just a combat unit that costs a lot and has a flashy bio.

Now, if you're EA, you have this down to a science. People get bored of your game, you release a newer one, which people buy. They get bored of it at precisely the time the game is designed to become boring, and you release another title for those players to buy. This is pretty far down the slippery slope of gimmicky game design, but it's a rabbit hole PA should not enter.

RTS games must focus on gameplay, not having individual units or mechanics that define the game, because then the definition of the game's parameters has more impact on the way it plays than the player does. Games where an observer can tell players apart by the way they move their units, and the thinking behind those moves, and where those players could play the game over differently and make different moves with the same tools. Where using the same 'boring' units all over again, but using them in a different way, produces an entirely new game.

Gameplay is fundamentally different from "cool" gimmicks, because the same gameplay mechanics, if interesting, literally never get old due to the variability of the games they produce. Consider all the extremely old board games. They are superficially not very interesting. However, relatively simple mechanics, such as how a knight moves in chess, or how pieces can be captured in Go, produces almost infinitely variable games.

The number of possible, interestingly different chess games is astronomical. The number of units that can be implemented in a feasible budget for game design is actually quite limited. I suppose if it were possible to put an astronomical number of different unit graphics or gimmicky "cool" weapons or abilities, then that would be sustainable to keep the game interesting. However, that is completely unrealistic because of the amount of work required to deliver each small piece of content.

RTS games need to try to leverage the chess gameplay variability to have replay value. And in a strategy game, the player should be the primary determining factor for the way the game plays. An emphasis on "mega units" damages gameplay, because their 'interesting-ness' is created by the developers, at the expense of player choice, action, and interaction, and this damages the long-term viability of the title. At the end of the day, how many types of huge, ultra-expensive, ultra-powerful combat units do you really need? Really only one, a la TA.

In closing, I would like to point out that the units remembered most from TA are not the biggest units, but the smallest; the Peewee, and the Flash. That is not an accident.

I whole heartedly agree with this statement. Especially that last paragraph! Thank you!

I'm sorry for the harshness, but anyone who doesn't like experimentals can stuff it. There's always too much of a good thing, but experimentals are cool AND add more strategic gameplay when done right (as much as nukes or [insert endgame weapon here] do, but with the advantage of not being quite as binary).

And SupCom 2 was experimentals done right. Minor experimentals were value-adds to your army, mini batallion leaders if you will; capable of dishing out the pain with minimal management effort (about as much as any other long range weapon). Notably balanced to be less cost-efficient in resources when direct health/damage was compared, but made up for it in intangible stats (range, aoe resistance due to the fact it's one unit, etc.). These were arguably the best designed units, since they were powerful but not so powerful that they could be given major weaknesses for you to target.

Major experimentals were centerpieces of your army, offering absurd amounts of firepower and/or high defensive attributes. You can do a lot of cool stuff on an experimental that just doesn't fit as a normal unit or structure (see Aegis shield generator, Bomb Bouncer anti-air/artillery shield, Pulinsmash/Magnetron unit magnet)

Yes, there were a lot of no rush games or ones on large maps that ended up being experimental wars. That didn't make experimentals de-facto "bad".

SupCom 2 was such a trainwreck from start to finish, that it actually becomes extremely difficult to single out any particular aspect and criticize it in isolation. Any discussion of experimental units will inevitably degenerate into a discussion about research artificially deflating the cost of assets, and non-continuous economy requiring upfront purchases, lowering the ceiling for how much units can feasibly cost... This deserves its own thread.

But, suffice to say, that the only reasons why experimentals "worked" the way they did in SupCom 2 is because that game is so fantastically broken in fifteen different ways that having few, simple A-move units with huge amounts of damage and HP actually was not as big a problem from a gameplay perspective as many of the other glaring issues.