Final Kickstart Goal

You know, if you want to convince people here you might want cut back on the supcom 2 references. We know you like it, you even mention it in your sig. But the general consensus is that it was a terrible game filled with horrible ideas which killed all the best bits of the earlier games in an attempt to make it more appealing to mainstream gamers who were never going to play it over starcraft anyway. So any argument based on supcom 2 is seriously unlikely to win people over.

If people are close-minded enough to shun an idea because of it's source than I'm not sure why I should be wanting to convince them...

If you tried that with any minor experimental save maybe the Aeon direct assault one, you were bad at using them and should feel bad.

And as I said, Experimentals were a tradeoff of direct stats (less cost efficient for total health and damage output) in exchange for intangibles like range/aoe less effective/special features.

Please look past the "omg it was supcom 2 so everything sucked" blinders for 2 seconds and see the actual mechanical design they were trying to achieve.

off topic but the guy above me has the best sig ever

The point is that most of us think supcom 2 is a bad game. Therefore when you say 'hey guys, let's do this thing like supcom 2 did!' the normal reaction is 'oh god, that game sucked, why would we want to use ideas from it?' It weakens your argument as you now have to justify that this bit of supcom 2 was actually good to a crowd whose oppinions vary from mild dislike to outright hatred. Whereas if you use an example from TA, supcom, or FA there's a much better chance people will instead think 'oh yeah, that did work well'.

In this case I'm actually closer to your position than ledarsi's. I don't agree that experimentals are universally bad. I think the best argument against them is actually the dev time they cost, and because of that I'm happy with Uber's current plans (there will be some, but not a huge number).

As I said; in this specific instance, TA didn't have (many?) experimentals and supcom/FA's experimentals were screwed up in their own way (either super OP and pointless to build normal stuff if you can get to them, or just flat out useless). And as no other RTS afaik ever did an experimental-like set of units...

And in general, people here are way too eager to sweep the baby out with the bathwater, especially where a certain sequel that changed a lot of stuff is concerned.

The reason why we are dismissive of SupCom 2 is that that game's fundamental design is based upon two systems that will not be in PA, and should be avoided in every TA successor from here on out. Firstly, research points. Ridiculously bad idea, totally absent from PA, which SupCom 2 depended upon to a massive extent. Secondly, the purchase economy. PA will use a flow economy.

Both of these things completely taint anything you might draw from SupCom 2 to import into PA. They simply will not work.

But those are peripheral at best to the SupCom 2 implementation of experimentals; at worst they become minor annoyances to figuring out what numbers to change to balane.

I never played supcom 2 due to the research points, buy economy, and more focus on the micro than macro. While I like certain games like that and think that they are ok Supcom nor TA were games that were like this and not a game we were looking for. I personally don't like starcraft however love the CnC series but once again this is not what PA, TA, nor supcom are about.

I also don't believe that experimentals in Supcom nor the semi ones in TA ( nukes, krogath) were that unbalanced save the satellites(annoying and have to beat the enemy to kill). The problem with them in Supcom was simply that on larger maps, the time it takes you to reach your opponent they have already gotten 2 tech levels on you and its nearly suicide to attack with anything other than a full t3 fleet or multiple experimentals. When you play supcom on 20km or smaller maps I have found that experimentals normally arn't fielded as the high chance of the enemy killing it and hence the massive loss in economy was too great and it was a better strategy to get a t1 or t2 army.

This is where you are wrong. It is actually not possible to do this. Consider that the Fatboy II in SupCom 2 costs 600 mass. Now consider that in SupCom 2, one goddamn mass extractor costs 200 mass. Does this sound broken yet?

Do you recall how much a Fatboy cost in FA? 24,600 mass. And a mass extractor is 36.

There is no way to balance that. None. As far as balance is concerned, in SupCom 2, the Fatboy 2 is just a regular unit. Hell, a Mongoose bot in FA costs more relatively than the Fatboy II does in SupCom 2.

So wait, your argument consists of "because it was broken in one direction for SupCom 2 and in the other for SC1/FA, it cannot be balanced by any means"?

No. I am saying that the type of balance that was present in SupCom 2 resulted from locking tech behind research, and as a result of the purchase economy.

In a purchase economy, units become increasingly difficult to afford as their cost increases, because you have to pay the entire sum upfront. Even 600 is a lot of mass to save up before you can even start building a project, and you have to wait the entire build time before you get any return on your investment. Having a 20,000 mass unit is totally infeasible with a purchase economy.

Furthermore, the Fatboy was locked behind research, which requires an upfront investment before you can start building them at all. You buy research stations, and wait a considerable amount of time, and you unlock your Fatboy. This upfront cost means the Fatboy has to be strong and cheap in order to be worth building, otherwise you wouldn't bother to research it. And because it is strong and cheap, once you have researched it, you should construct as many as you possibly can, resources and mandatory other production permitting.

In order to have units that function like the Fatboy II in SupCom 2, it would need to be priced much more comparably to the Fatboy in FA, because it is not locked behind research, and you can build using a flow economy.

The unit as it exists in SupCom 2 is flatly absurd, and is completely impossible to import as is.

Where did i ever ask for "as-is"? Virtually nothing can be pulled from any predecessor as-is.

OK, so to take a step back. What exactly about experimentals in SupCom 2 can be meaningfully translated into a non-research, flow economy game?

There we go!

The concept of a high value unit which trades stats for intangibles like range, special features, and AoE resistance (single unit to be hit by the AoE over a bunch of little ones).

I suppose that it depends what exactly you mean by experimentals
Do we want super powerful 'game busters' or smaller 'scale-tippers'?

I'd personally rather see fights with hundreds of bots, but being able to invest in a few more powerful units would also be nice. Just not too many, or too strong (So that you could still build a decent sized force)

Those are not intangible. At all. Range and large amounts of HP are very direct balance considerations. And I am telling you that you cannot have a unit that has that kind of range and HP advantage without making it cost to match.

By intangibles, I'm talking about things which change how a unit is used over things that make a unit better at it's role. (yes, monkeying with stats en masse changes roles, but that's beside the point)

The role of a unit is defined by its stats, not independently of its stats, and then some set of "intangibles" make it better at its role. Having lots of range, high cost, and relatively low HP makes you a long range support unit, a role which the Fatboy and Monkeylord fall into by default due to the short range and low HP of all the little units in that entire game. This is a case of such poor unit design and such limited unit options that it's hard to differentiate a unit's role from things that it just happens to be the only unit remotely close to being able to do.

Because SupCom 2 doesn't contain any real mobile artillery (the units called "artillery" are really short range splash damage fighters) and no fire support units, and no siege units, then the one unit for each race that just happens to most closely approximate each of those roles is pressed into service in all of them. For our discussion, this is the Fatboy, its "experimental" status notwithstanding, due to its extremely low resource cost, coupled with its ridiculous range and firepower. It has become a normal unit that fills practically every role that requires range.

So when you say "things that determine how a unit is used" what you mean is its stats.

Now, to make a counterpoint to your argument in favor of experimentals, I would say that the relevant information about "experimentals" in SupCom 2 is the fact that their stats differ so greatly from the common units, which are all basically the same.

We don't actually need experimentals to get wide variation in capabilities. And, more importantly, we don't need hugely expensive units either. Common units, suitably differentiated, are far more interesting than having one giant experimental that represents the entirety of your fire support assets, or anti-air, or whatever other nonsense where you have an experimental delivering a large quantity. An army of units can deliver the same amount of utility, and does it in a more interesting way.

Imagine the Demolisher artillery unit had a range like it does in FA as a T3 artillery vehicle- suddenly you don't need the Fatboy any more. Suddenly the Fatboy's "intangibles" are present on a unit that isn't even an experimental, available for a fraction of the cost. The unit's role has completely changed, just by extending its range.

I propose that having all the small units in the game be so well differentiated will allow you to create mixed armies, and distribute units at various points on a map, with differing compositions in various places. You don't have to buy a whole Fatboy to have any long range footprint whatsoever, if you only want one or two small long range guns. And you can commit a whole army of them if you so choose, and split them up or reassemble the group later. Fatboys can't do this. You have much more control over the quantity and distribution with smaller units, but the bigger units do not necessarily provide anything you cannot get more efficiently from a small, specialized unit.

The point of an experimental is to provide tradeoffs and abilities that can't be put on a regular unit without making balancing a horrid nightmare (see super-long range, unit magnet anything, anti-air shields, most teleportation like tech)

It's also to provide coolness, which no one seems that interested in keeping