For Backers Only: Megabot Experiment

garrisons in particular represent a massive problem, you can put in units to cover any weak points of the units normal armament, or engineers for repairing. All things that are very cool when you are using it but not when used against you.

Also garrisons are better with the much more nimble human infantry, with big robots you are basically duct taping turrets to the unit.

Not a fan
Its weaponry seems to trump everything else... we don't need a King Kong for the bombers to target.

The size is great, but the shoulders seem a bit off- those missile pods (?) look too similar to the shoulder plates.

I don't know. These large units seem like target practice for the enemy to me. If it was a stationary defense system then I would have no objections.

IMO large units are just asking to get focus-fired. Still, I won't mind if they do get added into the game.

Nuetrino

I want to say thank you for this discussion. Like you said it will happen, the question is just how much resources do we want to provide to it and how much right now.

I think that discussing the ramifications of Super Units is good for you, because you don't want to have to rebuild part of your game because it wasn't robust enough for all the big features.

I mean lets face it, your goals are big and you want them to be robust as possible. At the same time, your time frame is finite, and you want a good product. I fully appreciate that, and you should look to yourself to determine what feels 'do-able'. I trust you to make that decision.

With that said, you said this was a TA clone when I bought in, so if this is my Krog then this is my Krog and I am content with only one tier 3 bot at release. I want a Krog and I want the role of the unit to be a Krog. The forum poster with the hot asian babe pic stated the role of the Krog very well.

Ok, with all that said, I like the size.

It looks too me like a King Kryptor with AA.

I like the large number of replies that they want to put their commander inside. Transport capacity could easily allow commander insertion. This also implies that this unit needs to be difficult to destroy: a counter to commander snipe... maybe even have an escape pod :3

I like how one forum member said that he wanted the mega bot to shoot long ranged with the top guns, medium with the shoulder guns and short ranged with the arm guns. I did something similar and was much happier with the overall feel.

If we have a Krogoth, I want BLODs or an equivalent, so we need a Sniper (Orion if you played Uberhack).

I want the Krog to be submersible.


In conclusion, this game will be played over multiple planets. Some people complain that having such a unit would be a game finisher... Guess what people? Only on a single planet.... AND we are going to need to finish our games. SO if the cost is equivalent to other game finishers its not a big problem, especially if there are counters (such as the BLoD wielding Sniper).


The new T2 tank looks like it might have a BLoD. I dunno if you thought about that.

Put special thought into what the highest elevation weapons on the superiomegabot do, because in TA mods with submersible Krogoths, we would poke the head out of the water to snipe things with the Krogoth's own BLoD. This tended to be extremely funny, because of the nature of the BLoD and how submersion removes visibility and ofcourse the rediculous price tag of a Krog to do it.

Side note: please allow robots to be targetable if they are only partially underwater. This was an issue in SupCommander2.

Side note: please make it easy to ground target with ballistics. I am sure you will, but worth mentioning.

P.S. I feel like I might want to start talking about 'balance', so I will start a thread for it. I also feel that strategic depth (the foundation for balance) should drive some of the content development... like I want BLoDs or some equivalent.

Thanks for reading Nuetrino and Steve.

Also, Steve you are doing a great job developing these ideas and units. Sounds like you are having fun. Keep up the good work.

What If: the Krog could fly like a Gundam, but it required constantly pouring a lot of energy into it; like a nuclear plants worth of energy, and if the energy ran out the thing crashed auto wrecking? There could be an entire squadron of these things flying towards and enemy base when energy failure occurs. Maybe they would only take some falling damage.

I really like the style of this mega bot, however something doesn't quite seem as epic about him as the Krogoth. Maybe he just needs to be a bit taller and a bit skinnier to compare? Maybe I should allow my tastes to broaden slightly

So many ways to go about adding super units and what they can do but the hard thing is not to make the t1 & t2 useless.

Size wise it makes a big impression as big bad unit but...
The super units could make a small planet look even smaller but that can easy found out soon the white box only compare to other units not the environments it will be playing on.

I'm more for giant support units eg dropping a fatboy on to planet with a couple of engi to setup defence to quickly to build up a presence to attack the enemies base.

Honestly I think the reason Starcraft has proven to be as popular as it is - is the fact that their isn't any massive super units.

Every game of Supreme Commander/FA/2 was a race of everyone going to super units.

But then I love super units, so I am a little torn.

Just... make it like the krogoth, the game will be long gone before you can get an army of 15+ up, unlike FA...

I think I agree really.

Personally I think that it looks a little too big in comparison to all the other unit.

I prefer the idea of a slightly smaller unit (than in the OP) which is in essence a walking Battleship rather than a Mega unit which can just decimate everything in it's path seemingly without taking a scratch, I've never been a fan of those. Enough combined fire from lower tier units should be able to wear it down. Basically a T3.5 'super heavy' rather than a game changing Uber unit.

I've always preferred hordes of smaller units in a battle to just a few mega units. A unit that size would need a big downside/weakness somewhere in order to be countered effectively.

It is an interesting concept though, and I for one am very glad that uber have shared this with us to gauge our opinion and thoughts.

Since I never weighed in on the unit itself:

I think the hip guns are weird, and it could use a few less missile hatches (it has chest missiles, back missiles, shoulder mounted and direct shoulder missiles, ...), but I love it otherwise and am fully in favor.

I was thinking that a super-unit could be a walking base defense-ish thing.

Something that can take a few steps, and then needs to stop for a period of time.

That way, its like a slightly moving base.

It also makes it's balance simple, should cost as much as a moving base should, and it's strengths and weaknesses are the same as that of a player base.

It would require small units to defend and function too, as well as being countered best by other small units and not by another super-bot. Thus the use of the first tier units being guranteed throughout game.

While superbots are very cool I always liked the concept of the fatboy. This gigantic treaded block of guns that acted as a mobile firebase. Whether it should double as a factory or not I am indifferent to but I always preferred the look/design of the fatboy over the bots (like the King Kriptor).

Oh, and in my unprofessional opinion the fatboy 2 was a step in the wrong direction. That thing was a glass cannon.

I like the scale of it but It seems impractical unless you have a giant Rocket to propel it from planet to planet. Also the one misgiving I have about Uber units is the ones that can run through a defensive line like tissue paper. I liked the ones in supcom which were just tougher and bigger but not invincible to attack.

I'm broadly in agreement with this to try and avoid the perceived problems with experimental spam. Superunits that only serve to enhance the abilities of regular units but are fairly useless by themselves seem like a perfect solution.

Does anyone remember the awesome 20 tanks transporter from the Supcom 1 intro video? I was always disappointed that unit never made it into the game.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about:


This type of unit would be the perfect type of superunit IMHO. massive, impressive and gives your regular troops an enormous bonus, but can't be used in isolation.

Sadly the video doesn't show how the top row of tanks are offloaded, but I imagine it would work something like the battle droid transport offloading in the Battle of Naboo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qZJ85MdS-g (03:05 minutes in)

I remember starting up SupCom and was sad that something that awesome didn't make it in. The UEF transports just weren't the same, and besides that style of transport scaled horribly (just gluing stuff onto the bottom by the time you got to t3 ;_.

Thats exactly what i mean by talking about interaction between units

The size seems ok, big enough for the 'cool' factor, not too big to be silly.
You chose a size that would still be able to walk out the factory, this has the benefit that factorybuilt units can be put on repeat build, not this should be viable for a super unit, and you also don`t need engineer swarms or gantries.

The way you built an experimental in supcom with just engineers takes away from the cool factor of a factory.
Also never liked gantries, their uses are too limited, only being able to produce those 1 or 2 units in supcom2 yet taking up massive space, really disliked that.

Comparing it to the battleship and the commander I think this is a good size, but the bots in front of it are very much dwarfed.
I`d suggest having upping the size of the biggest "normal" bots to be commander size.

As for functions I was thinking about this, the UEF had the Fatboy mobile factory, that big shielded battleship tank that could spit out units.
How about you flip that around and make this a giant engineer, a big slow sturdy with staying power, that can put up some turrets/shields/walls to fortify it`s current position.
But not being able to spit out units so you still have to support it.

I`d like to have at least one super unit to be more on the support side than the assault side, doesn`t HAVE to be a bot by the way.
This unit would need air service pads, several nanolathe hardpoints to build structures and repair nearby land units, and maybe a shield, maybe.
Some decent but not perfect anti-air, so it is still useful for it to put down AA turrets, and maybe it can do without ground to ground weapons.
I allways wanted to have a big unit slowly crawl towards the enemy base leaving a trail of forgotten but functioning turrets behind it.
RTS needs more random structures around the battlefield, they make for fun things to blow up.

I'm a fan of the size of that super-bot, but I'm not really a fan of that design. Bipedal units that size just don't make sense. I'd rather see a quadruped.

For example, a highly specialized sniper cannon. It would be a large quadrupedal bot that deal immense damage, but only enough for a two-shot kill of a commander, primarily designed for bringing down other super units The weaknesses? It must deploy to fire, has a long reload time, and no anti-air, as well as being direct fire, so you must have a straight line from it to the target.

This means that you have to think hard about how you will use it, whether to weaken a commander or other super unit before an attack, or to attempt to kill the commander by sniping a volatile structure while the commander walks by.

This (but not this example in particular) would be the ideal archetype for a super-unit. Expensive and specialized, and very good at it's specialization, but it sucks at everything else.

The size is okay for me.

(I didn't read all of the past 30 pages, srsly I stopped visiting at March,13 and this comes into the forum -.-*)

I don't how much you guys talked about the functionality here since this whitebox is just out the size. But now that I'm already talking about the super-duper(-uber) units i will drop my two cents:

They should either only passive support you and your army (like the 20 units transporter earlier). Or you have limitations in the mobility:
-like you build a base for this unit, which shoots it to another planet where it has to be until dissembled, destroyed etc.
-and/or The unit cant take every path on a planet.

I know that is all special and the easier the better. But this points would be my wishes IF it comes to uber-units. I wouldn't be mad if I ad to wait for an expansion (specialized on uber-units?).

P.S.: If everyone would call them uber-units we would have "uu" as shortcut