From alpha to release. Surprised impressions.

So i was an alpha backer, and i enjoyed the first alpha and struggled through the bugginess and glitches with you all (well, not really, i mostly played against AI). Then around late beta i stopped playing, mainly due to personal stuff (who knew moving to Another continent would disrupt gameplay).

Long story short, finally got my Steam account access back (as soon as you try to login to a previously european steam and/or email account, but now from china, their warning flags whistle and they force you to go through constant account verification back and forth).

After playing my very first game of the release version of PA, i was seriously surprised.
Much improved preformance.
Much improved Visuals.
A vastly better UI and sound assets (like the way the robots not have some personality, something i Always missed from TA).
Not to mention the new nuke effect which came as a nice surprise as the AI ambushed my commander with the army he had WITHDRAWN from my defensive turret line. Never seen an AI in an RTS game withdraw from an attack Before, never. Literally never. They either attack all in and hope for the best, or they just macro more and try later.

Seriously impressed with the AI. It was god awful in alpha, it was meh in beta. Its great now, finally an RTS with, no. Wait. Finally a GAME (any game, any genre) with AI that actually does NEW things that mimic intelligence. Even in a new AAA good game such as Shadow of Mordor, you still essentially have the same old "target player, run towards player, attack, Dodge, attack, Dodge, repeat until Death" behavior.

Its just refreshing to finally see some AI work being done where they do Something different, something at all. Even if it results in mistakes from time to time, its far better than an on-rails AI that just bashes its forehead against the wall.
Its like ragdoll physics in games. Even if they glitch out sometimes (Red Dead Redemption, lol), its still far more enjoyable to the gameplay than constant identical pre-canned animations.

Thank you Uber, for more progress being made from late beta to release, than alpha to beta. Honestly, in my opinion.
And please, for the love of optimus prime, add a Chinese server, the Australian one is still a bit too far away.

That's Sorian for you.

Indeed his AI may be quite evil.

does amazon have Chinese locations on servers?.. just checked Beijing coming soon. wonder how PA would do in the Chinese RTS market.

I've already seen a couple Chinese players, it's pretty cool to see them.

AI is great indeed!
It even helps you when you ally with it. Alias I walked my commander unprotected across the planet and the AI send an army to support / protect it. It also attacks when you attack, so the AI notices you send an army and it will try to help you by also sending an army.

Correct me if I am wrong ofcourse, it really looked like it atleast

No clue, I think PA would do quite well here. The city i live in is quite close to South Korea though, so its mostly about the Starcraft and Kimchi

remy i must test that, didnt play a game with allied AIs yet.
At what AI level does it start to cheat btw? And if not, will they add such a level?
Was always fun in SupCom to do a mad 6v1 compstomp against an overpowered eco and turtle AI.
Sadly at some point the ai always ran into trouble no matter how big eco advantage it had.

The Ai never cheats, but you can edit the ai or your economy multiplier to the right of your name when you're in a games lobby, it's set to 1 by default.

Just tagging @sorian so he sees this

This is only true for skirmish, in Galactic War it will receive bonuses later into the campaign, or immediately if you're on Absurd.