Gameplay, Units & Balance

Hi All!

There's some rather large changes to the gameplay of Planetary Annihilation that I'm working on and I wanted to give everyone a heads up. I'm looking to get the game to a good foundation of balance, strategy, and gameplay that we can build on.

Things are very much in flux, so this is a generalization, not set in stone.

Combat Units: We are looking to shorten the build times of all combat units. Especially advanced combat units. We're seeing a lot of late game play focused around super weapons and rarely around armies. We're hoping to get a good mix of the two. We want to make sure we deliver on the 'huge battle' experience throughout the game.

Artillery: Be prepared for artillery structures to go back to artillery. They should be good against static defenses and armies, not mobile armies. Laser defenses should be the main structures for base defense. Artillery will start firing on higher arcs, allowing mobile units to dodge incoming rounds.

Bots vs Vehicles: This is another radical departure from what we currently have. Some units will shift in their role and we'll be adding more units. The goal here is to differentiate the roles of Bots and Vehicles. Vehicles will mostly remain in their current role as heavy armored, power houses of war. Bots are going to shift towards more infantry roles. Things like: the Artillery Bot turning into more of a direct fire, single shot bot, much like a sniper, not good against structures but very good against single units. We'll be adding Combat Fabber Bots to fill the role of a 'medic' and repair nearby Bots and Vehicles. We'll also be adding some vehicles to fill the need for a front line high-armor unit for soaking up the damage that will happen more as bigger armies collide and armies are forced to clash with front-line base defenses.

Teleporters: Teleporters are going to help with making army clashes happen more. We've teased a teleporter screen shot. We've gotten them working and are focusing on balancing them. Since some of our planets are so big, we want to make it so you can put a forward base near an enemy base and get your army there quickly. You will also be able to send your army from planet to planet via these teleporters.

Orbital: This is where the biggest shift is going to happen. The Orbital Launcher is moving from advanced to basic. It'll be buildable via the basic fabbers. The idea here is to shift the multi-planet gameplay to earlier in the game. Now, most of the orbital satellites will remain advanced and be built by a new Orbital Fabber. The launcher itself only contains some basic orbital units.

There's more but these are the highlights!

This is coming "Soon".

first

Nice cant wait for it

Sounds good to me

I'll probably be streaming a playtest of an early experimental version of this today.

I love it !!!

They are everywere, its the end!

These all sound great!

I know we're all looking forward to improved balance, so this is very exciting!

I've said this a few times around the forum, but I want to say it again. I really hope the plan is still for the advanced units to be very specialized while basic units are general-purpose. Advanced doesn't even have to be all around stronger than basic, because all each unit needs to do exceptionally well is its single purpose. Will ants still be useful once you make levelers build faster? Levelers are currently better in every way than an ant. What would happen to the gameplay if you gave them less range and a slower turret turn speed, but let them be a lot more powerful than ants?

^ that's epic, and also very scary.

That is how I thought it should be going.

^ this will really help turtle people (and everyone else in general) Also it will really help in interplanetary game play.

This next update will change a lot of strategies and add some more really good ones.

Keep up the Awesome work Uber!

On a serious note, like John said, these changes are very exciting. Our internal matches with variations on these changes have been some of the more intense we've ever played.

So exciting!

Really liking the sound of this, however i feel having the orbital being basic before a better ui could lead to a number of problems. I'm assuming there will be a basic transport? Will this be allowed pick up the commander?

What better idea to vet out those UI problems than diving right in at full speed?

A basic transport is coming and the lander is still launched form the Orbital Launcher.
Details I left out. There area lot of details I left out.

I think there should be a mode where you can turn orbital play off. I personally like my ground/army battles as it was in alpha

A unit that repairs units? I wonder how that will work out. So far in PA (also in FA) the health-state of a unit does not matter that much at all, because units usually just die in combat or they come out pretty much unharmed. Too few hits between a fully intact unit and a broken piece of wreckage* for any repairs to be useful.
Also we will need a way to give an repair-area command and be careful not to make "repaired commander" rushs even more powerful. Which is easy. Prevent engineers from repairing anything that moves and make the medic thing an advanced unit.

Sounds great. However I hope you are working on a better orbital UI equally fast. I am only rarely using orbital, but a few days ago I actually had a 80min+ 1v1 that saw orbital units and the current UI is ... well beta and unfinished and I want to see where you are heading with it

*on the terms of wreckage: I hope this will see improvements too (if you already plan this, which I think you are just consider this a block of noise from a person who will be happy later on ). So far it just dies too quickly in fights. I would propse the addition of "micro" wreckage that has the following behavior:

- Is created when bigger wreckages are destroyed
- Does not block units at all
- Still has a useable value to reclaim

In addition engineers currently use energy to reclaim. The changes in PA (energy consumption stays high even if you are limited on metal) already make it quite a lot harder to have enough energy, so having to pay energy to reclaim is pretty much a deal breaker for reclaiming. Make it free.
Again I think I actually heard you guys already talking about this and it probably is a given, I am just restating it because I care so much

might i ask where this teleporter screenshot is?

is there any planned changes for t2 fighters, i just find it weird that they are so unused, 99% of streams that go air is spam t1 fighters at an insane level, and when they do get t2, its going to be pumping out t2 bombers 99% of the time, because they are such a better defense than t2 fighters. Perhaps if t2 fighters were better able to deal with swarms of large numbers of t1 fighters/bombers at faster it would be something to help the guy who rushed t2 vs the guy who spammed 15 t1 air factories for fighters... hell i'd also love to see a more advanced anti air tower :S

I am actively looking at the balance of every unit and making sure their balance work and their role works. T2 Fighters are one that will probably see a radical change.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/teleporters.54939/