hand to hand fight units

Yes it does actually. See Dawn of War.

Starcraft II uses stupid stop to shoot mechanics to allow melee to function. Otherwise those zerglings would be kited by a few marines, so its not a valid example.

Actually naval ships still carry plenty of guns because missiles cannot fill every role on the battlefield.

We aren't saying that they can't be balanced. We are saying that they can only be balanced if you use stupid kludges or work arounds that would change the fundamental nature of the game.

Short range != melee. So this is not an argument.

I don't see how this applies. Unless you are implying that all ranged units should just be more expensive for no real reason. Which would be a stupid kludge.

Since nobody has been able to show that melee would add *anything* to the game in something like 18 pages of posts I think we can answer with pretty good certainty that no, melee will not add anything to the game.

Then go make a mod to add one to the game. I would like to see all sorts of crazy mods.

Zerglings are faster than Marines.

Doesn't matter. By the time the zerglings catch the marines they will have lost too much HP to be able to kill the marines unless the marines are significantly outnumbered. And even then it will allow the marines to inflict a disproportionately large amount of damage. So range still acts as a powerful force multiplier against melee.

In gameplay, yes it is.

Melee in game play is a gun with 1 or 0 range.

So your argument is, this one game did melee units that way so no other game can do it differently thus I win?

It works for any melee unit that is faster then the ranged unit obviously. Or to be more precise, the necessary condition is that a melee unit can reach a ranged unit, how it does this is secondary.

Did you take a recent look at a modern warship?

This here is the closest the US navy has to a battleship, a freaking destroyer. It has a single deck mounted 5 inch gun which is useful if you want to blow up a pirate's speed boat where the missile is too costly.

Its also really a guided-missile destroyer. Like allmost all modern warships are.

Yeah, making a melee unit faster then a ranged unit makes the fundamental nature of the game different.

You just said that something with longer range then something else can outkite it forever. So yes, it is an argument.

The difference between a unit using a 5m range flamethrower and one using a energy sword with a range of 1m is semantics when your argument relies on melee units being outkited all the time.

I don't think you know what the word means you're using all the time...

So you don't think that if one makes an unit A and then another one B where the difference is just a longer range, that B now needs a drawback? That's called balancing, calling it a kludge isn't an argument at all.

All RTS games that use melee are mico based. Dawn of War is just one example, Starcraft is another. No game that I am aware of has *ever* done it differently. This is because the sort of unt dynamics created by all the workarounds require micro to allow the units to really work properly. This isn't necessarily bad. Its just not what PA is about.

No, it doesn't. Because you don't need to kill the melee thing before it reaches you to win. You just need to wear it down some. Since melee units can't have better HP to DPS ratios while still being faster they cannot kill an equal number of ranged units without a stupid kludge to save them.

Yep. And if one highly accurate rapid fire gun with variable ammo types can do the job then thats all you need. At the end of the day the ship still needs a gun despite all those missiles. The same is true for fighter jets.

As I already explained simply making it faster isn't even close to enough because it will either not be fast enough to cope with tanks or too fast to work properly with static defenses.

No. It's not. Melee is night and day different from short range because differences in range are generally very small outside of artillery and tac missiles.

No it really isn't. You can use accuracy, time to target, splash damage, and the ability to fire over wreckage to create weapon dynamics so range doesn't matter that much as long as you have at least some of it. IE: As long as you *are not* melee. As I pointed out earlier most units of the same type have very little difference in range anyway for these very reasons.

If your balancing has to use arbitrary workarounds or silly game mechanics or relies on making the melee units out of pure handwavium or otherwise violating common sense just to allow an entire unit class to work then your balancing is total crap. Proper balancing in a TA style game naturally flows from physics based weapon dynamics, not fancy ways to reinvent Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Melee cannot function without kludges like stop to shoot mechanics or "melee turns off guns", things that would change the fundamental nature of the game and turn it into ether Dawn of War or Starcraft. We already have those games. We don't need, or want, another one that plays like they do.

I still haven't seen anyone point out what melee would add to the game that couldn't be gotten from traditional units filling specialized roles. Can anyone point out what melee and only melee can bring to the game that would justify its higher development costs? Because if nobody can then is entire debate is pretty pointless. Leave it to the modders to make Samarui bots wearing +4 armor of "looks cool" that carry +5 swords of "badass looking moves".

Range definitely acts as a force multiplier against shorter range units, if you can keep those units out of range.

The rest of your argument is on less solid ground; "they will have lost too much HP" is an assumption based off no solid background of facts (you have not provided, for instance, the damage output of marines vs the HP of zerglings, and the closing speed or average time to close, to provide a solid basis for your statement), and of course the common phrase "zerg rush" is based on the gameplay mechanic that zerglings are far faster and cheaper to produce than any other unit, and are therefore always used in far greater number.

Without providing any supporting facts, I can as easily claim that a melee unit is too powerful because they always do disporportional damage "as a kludge" to make them viable. Or that artillery is overpowered and they always give it a minimum range "as a kludge", so why use it in the first place?

Opinion. Adding melee to the game would add melee to the game. A tautology, yes, but perfectly accurate and disproves your claim. It would also likely end up adding jumpjet or charge mechanics to the game, "as a kludge" to allow low HP melee units to get into range without being mown down, or having to have loads of HP to be viable.

You are actually opining that "melee would not add anything useful to the game", which is your opinion, yes, but the fact that after 18 pages people are still trying to argue for the case fairly strongly shows they they do believe it would add something useful to the game.

You mean like mobile artillery units having to stop/deploy to fire (at all)? Or making long range artillery pieces less accurate, and giving them an arbitrary minimum range? Your arguments against melee are completely viable against many unit types, which have always traditionally used arbitrary mechanics or handwavium as a balancing feature. Just because people expect long range artillery to be inaccurate does not mean it actually is, ballistic trajectories are a relatively simple calculation, and accurate weather information can make them surprisingly accurate over multi-km ranges, even using only dumbfire shells instead of actively guided munitions. Yet every contemporary of PA has had the top tier artillery inaccurate as hell, and only useful for raining death on large areas (apart from the Mavor, obviously ).

Sorry to bring artillery to a melee fight, but while I understand why artillery has been portrayed that way in previous games, it is no more or less arbitrary than any other mechanic used as a balancing measure e.g. Starcrafts stop-to-fire mechanic, or Dawn of Wars "units in melee auto-switch to their own melee weapon" version. While some people might be asking for massively overpowered choppy robots, it is entirely possible to create balanced and enjoyable melee/short-ranged units that employ only as much handwavium or arbitrary workarounds as any other unit on the battlefield.

Opinion. Why do you believe melee needs to turn off guns, or requires stop to shoot, just to function? If your "melee" unit is a similar size to your range unit, why would they not keep getting shot at even at point blank range? Sure, a unit with a large AoE weapon will damage itself, but that's a mechanics drawback and therefore not a kludge. A unit with an EMG style weapon (no AoE, rapid fire) will be a good counter to melee using purely the mechanics of the game (also not a kludge). Since the exact damage outputs of the AoE or EMG weapons are already arbitrarily chosen in the name of balance, the damage output of the melee unit should be done likewise (the same goes for HP values, they will all be arbitrarily chosen in order to balance units). I see no need for extra kludges, just an opportunity to add a different unit mechanic (or 2) to the game.

Note that through all this, I'm envisioning "melee" units as identical to other units, but with a melee weapon, i.e. a tank with a Donkey Kong hammer instead of a gun (cf Robot Wars), or a Peewee with boxing gloves. Implementation of the actual "melee" weapon(s) aside, I am failing to see the inherent imbalance or mechanics issues it would create, aside from those you get with any unit (e.g. do I have a DPS/(unit HP)=(unit tier) formula I need to stick to).

I suspect I could condense all of your posts up to this point into

Which is a perfectly valid opinion, and one which may even be entirely true for the game right up through release. The total number of units directly affects development time and costs, so I would not be surprised if we get nothing "melee" at all due to time and cost constraints. It does appear however, that just as we have a very vocal anti-melee crowd, we have a very vocal pro-melee crowd, so we'll have to see what happens

Debugging the specifics of Starcraft unit mechanics is not relevant to PA so your argument does not apply. But since similar cost units of the same basic type must have similar DPS to HP ratios the ranged units don't really need to do much damage to the melee units before the melee guys catch them to win every time. The very concept of melee being cheaper "by default" is the first flaw with your logic.

The limitations of artillery are based in newtonian physics and are therefore not stupid kludges. No supporting facts are needed to see that making swords do more damage than guns just to make them balanced is a stupid arbitrary kludge with no basis in the PA mythos.

This does not disprove anything. Nothing is its own justifiable reason to exist in game design. Melee units *must* bring something unique aside from their mere presence to the game to be worth having in the game. Otherwise you are better off spending less time and money developing a couple of tanks and a mine layer to fill the same roles.

If you are going to give melee units some way to teleport or whatever you may as well just give them guns. So what did you really add? Nothing.

Just because someone thinks melee will add something useful to gameplay does not make them correct. The fact that nobody has been able to actually articulate what it would actually add further reinforces this point.

Not all mobile artillery has to stop to fire. Please see tac missile units. The limitations of artillery are based in newtonian physics and are therefore not stupid kludges. Also I am not aware of any of the artillery having a minimum range in TA or SupCom. Sure their tracking speed meant that they had a hard time hitting fast things up close but they could still kill stuff at point blank. And since newtonian physics is the single point from which all unit dynamics flows in a PA style game this makes perfect sense.

Not really. There is plenty of room for specialized units that fill a variety of roles. Each with their own strengths and weaknesses that result from emergent weapon dynamics. And honestly, the Big Bertha and its cousins are pretty damn accurate. So accurate in fact that a single one was a massive threat. And then there were the rapid fire ones. They were perfectly capable of ending a game with just one unit. Top tier artillery is has to be powerful because it is a game ender. This is perfectly normal.

Once again, not arbitrary. Please see physics. Short ranged units are perfectly viable as I have already pointed out due to weapon dynamics. Melee however, is not. At least not without violating the spirit of a TA style game and making something closer to Starcaft or Dawn of War.

Fact. Go fire up a trainer in Dawn of War that removes the kludges and see how the game plays with ranged units not being artificially held back. The Tau become gods. No melee unit can have a better DPS to HP ratio than an equivalent cost ranged unit. If you need to arbitrarily adjust DPS and HP to let melee even be viable at all then you have used a stupid kludge and probably broken static defenses in the process by making the melee units out of magic metal that nobody thought to also use for tank armor and tank rounds.

Then you are blind to the issues that melee creates for balancing.

Its not that I am against melee on principal. I greatly enjoy Dawn of War and it is arguably more of a melee game than a ranged game. I am however, against anything that would make PA play like Dawn of War or Starcraft. And since as far as I know melee cannot be balanced without borrowing kludges and workarounds from those games melee has no place in a TA style game.

If someone can present a way to make melee really work without making PA into something other than what it has been envisioned to be then I will get behind melee all the way. Unfortunately the pro melee crowd seems to be mostly comprised of people who just think that plasma swords look really cool or otherwise just haven't really thought the implications of melee all the way through as it applies to a TA style game.

Now the idea of fast little mobile bombs or somewhat mobile land mines would fill a similar role to melee and would be quite cool to see I think.

You brought up Starcraft mechanics initially, and then made an apparently baseless assumption ("By the time the zerglings catch the marines they will have lost too much HP to be able to kill the marines") with no supporting facts. Supporting facts please (number of marines, marine damage, number of zerglings, zergling HP, average time to close before marines automatically win, you know, some facts) or I'm going to have to write your assumption off as invalid, it being impossible to prove or disprove with no facts. Preferentially I would like a mathematical treatment of zerglings closing on marines with variables being number of marines, number of zerglings, and engagement distance, so we can mathematically prove you are either correct, or in fact incorrect, with your initial statement. Alternatively, we can completely forget this part as, like you say, it has no bearing on PA (not sure why you brought it up though, but whatever).

I'm also wondering where you have got your "similar cost units must have similar DPS to HP ratios". This is an assumption with no supporting facts beyond your own belief it should be true. Supporting facts specific to PA please, that similar cost units must have similar DPS to HP ratios?

Finally, where did I say anything about melee being cheaper by default? I was attacking your assumption that marine:zergling ratios would be balanced (your quote "unless the marines are significantly outnumbered"), by using the common phrase "zerg rush" to emphasise that marine to zergling rations are never balanced, and marines are always going to be outnumbered. Zerglings are always used en masse. They are not cheap "because they are melee", they are cheap because they are zerglings.

I am well aware exactly what newtonian physics is, and I am also well aware that if you drop an artillery piece to 0 elevation, it can shoot something 1 metre away. So, bearing in mind that a tank cannon (a ballistic weapon on a mobile platform) can shoot units next to it, how is limiting an artillery piece (a ballistic weapon on a mobile or stationary platform) so it cannot shoot a target next to it not a stupid kludge? I don't think you've listed all of the assumptions you are making about what constitutes "artillery piece", e.g. "somehow limited to only firing within a certain range of barrel elevations, which is smaller than 0 degrees to 90 degrees, therefore rendering it incapable of hitting targets within a certain range".

An artillery piece capable of raising the barrel to 90 degrees (straight up) will hit itself, without wind or other prevailing conditions as a factor. This is a mathematically provable fact based upon "newtonian physics" (actually ballistic trajectories, which is a subset of newtonian physics). An artillery piece capable of lowering the barrel to 0 degrees elevation will hit a target directly in front of it. This is also based upon ballistic trajectories / newtonian physics. I would have also thought that both edge cases were trivially obvious to anyone familiar with the aforementioned branch of physics, meaning that artillery that cannot hit a target 10 metres away is being artificially limited in its application, regardless of how big the barrel is. Or a kludge, if you will, which goes against the proper application of ballistics in the physics sim.

You added melee? Just because it ends up irrelevant (or to be more accurate, deliberately balanced by applying intelligent unit design) does not mean it adds nothing. It means it adds nothing that you are interested in, but something that I might be interested in. It adds tactical scope to unit formations, and more complexity to the game creation process, which is why I have no issue with there being nothing melee until someone mods something in out of their own time. Uber can spend their unit design time however the hell they want, I have faith that the result is going to be awesome anyway

Note: teleportation is not identical to having a gun. If you honestly believe that you appear to be overlooking how positional dynamics affect the outcome of firefights, and can be used to panic opponents and draw fire away from vulnerable units :?

Just because someone thinks that melee adds nothing does not make them correct either. I have yet to see anything from you but opinion on why melee will not be any good. I have been providing opinion on why I think melee can be good. Constantly restating opinion as fact, does not make it fact, so please feel free to mark your opinions as opinion. I am

Please see above where (I hope) I make it abundantly clear that I am well versed in physics, and therefore in ballistics. Any mobile ballistic weapon can be designed to be able to fire on the move, what you sacrifice is accuracy. A contemporary tank is a mobile ballistic weapon designed to be fired on the move, the only difference between that and what we refer to as "mobile artillery" is usually a matter of calibre.

Artificially requiring a particular unit to deploy prior to firing (rather than allowing both firing styles with an accuracy bonus for deploying), and artificially limiting a unit from being able to hit targets at any range within it's ballistic arc, are the kludges.

Really, because the last few games I played of TA (over the last couple of days) it took over 10 shots to hit a stationary target from the rapid fire artillery. They are only a game ender if your opponent lets you build them within range of their base.

Really? I'm starting to wonder just how much physics you actually know. Real life ballistic weapons do not have a minimum range, unless you deliberately design them with one (e.g. slightly larger than the damage radius of your ammunition sounds like a sensible option to me). Please see physics.

I'm going to go ahead and use your own reasoning for this one: Debugging the specifics of Dawn of War unit mechanics is not relevant to PA so your argument does not apply.

Nope, but I'm also not ignoring the fact that it can be balanced, or even that it should be balanced. I can think of a few ways of getting underpowered melee units into a fight where they can do some damage, and that's without any kludges or handwavium required.

"I am however, against anything that would make PA play like Dawn of War or Starcraft." = you are against melee in PA on principle

I can see that very clearly in your writing so far, hence my including it as a precis in my last post. You are very much against having melee in PA, which as I said is perfectly understandable, and is highly likely to be what happens anyway. I've not seen any melee unit types surface yet, and we are in the backers forum

Actually, that's exactly why they are cheap - without massing them, they would be useless. Now lets look at kiting. Without even needing stats, kiting would cause the marines to do more damage to the zerglings. That's a fact. Add in range as a force multiplier, and suddenly marines are far, far better at killing them.

So what do you need to do to zerglings to balance them again?
1. Make them faster. I'm sure it wont break all other unit interactions and make zerglings OP when it comes to harassment and bypassing defences. </sarcasm> Also, why can't ranged units be made faster also (in PA).
2. Make them stronger. Let's look at this argument in PA terms, that is, adding armour. Now if you can add armour to a melee unit without increasing the cost, why can't the same additional armour be added to a ranged unit?

Some it comes back, again, to anything a melee unit can do, a ranged unit can do better. The only argument you've made for melee units is "they can be balanced". Yes, we know this, Starcraft & Dawn of War & Warcraft have done it. But they are fundamentally different games with rules in place to allow melee to exist. Can you provide a reason for melee's existence in PA, within it's lore, other than it can be forced to exist?

You go on and on about artillery and ignore the "guns do more damage than swords" argument. Regarding artillery though, I agree - Sup Com shouldn't have prevented direct fire shooting from artillery pieces. There goes your argument.

(I've left out a few paragraphs later as they return to discussing artillery and ballistics and is somewhat tangential.)

You misunderstood. The argument is, if melee units can be given teleport, so can ranged units.

So all the examples from other games, the logical arguments as to why melee doesn't make sense in the PA mythos, the practical examples and rational discussion about kludges needed to allow melee to exist in games is just opinion?

What, an example of how gameplay breaks when using melee unrestricted is "not relevant"? How convenient for you.

So please, state them! It hasn't been so far in this thread!

Overall, I am the same - against it on principle. The reason I am against it on principle though, is because it does not make sense. That's a step up from "I want melee because".

It is not an assumption. I made this point several pages back:

And once again, debugging Starcraft unit mechanics does not apply to PA. High level Starcraft examples are only useful as general statements regarding the overall mechanics of balancing ranged vs melee, which is what I have been using them for. So the premise which the general example was supporting still stands.

Balancing units by their HP to DPS ratio divided by their metal cost is the cornerstone of unit balancing in a TA style game. Unless you want to make some other style of game this is how things really should be done.

Right here:

And being cheap and squishy they cannot win against a smaller number of marines without stop to fire mechanics unless they have a truly *massive* numbers advantage because they are, you guessed it, melee units.

Are you also aware that artillery in TA did not have the limitations you claim that it had? A Big Bertha was perfectly capable of blapping a Sumo 3 feet from it. Hell they could even hit aircraft in flight on occasion.

Once again, artillery in TA was perfectly capable of doing everything you seem to think that it couldn't do.

No, melee brings nothing to force composition decisions that you can't get without melee. The pyro and flash are good examples here. However it does add an opportunity cost. If you spend time and money creating X melee units you will have X+Y fewer other units in the game. Not only did you not really add anything but you actually took something away.

You are correct. Teleportation does add something interesting once you take 3D terrain into account. But it does not need melee to be interesting. A flash with a teleporter would fill the same role. So would an air transport in some situations.

I have given quite a lot of arguments as to why and how melee would change the nature of the game and make it less like what PA is envisioned to be and more like Starcraft or Dawn of War. While these are good games in their own right PA is not supposed to be like either of them. Since there is no precedent for melee in a TA style game the burden of proof is on the pro-melee camp to prove that it is worth adding.

While your understanding of physics is top notch you seem to be under the impression that TA artillery had arbitrary limitations placed on it to keep it balanced. This was not the case. Whether or not it should have had some placed on it is a separate debate. But TA was a great game nonetheless. I agree with you though, taking a penalty to range and accuracy is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff in exchange for being able to fire while moving to represent the smaller charge the must be used so as to not break the wheels and the fact that the unit is moving around and going over bumps.

Given their rate of fire that is about 3 or 4 seconds, maybe 5 tops. I would say thats pretty powerful. You are correct though, it is your opponent's job to stop you from winning the game.

Neither does TA artillery so I think we are in agreement here.

Except that I wasn't going into the specifics of Dawn of War unit interaction. I was making a general statement about melee vs ranged and the challenges of balancing them while using a general statement as as example. So my argument stands.

I never said that it couldn't be balanced. I just can't think of a way to do it nor has anyone else been able to come up with one as far as I know. I would really like to hear your ideas on how to balance it.

So you admit then that melee cannot work without making PA play like either Starcraft or Dawn of War? Because I am against anything that would make PA play like Dawn of War or Starcraft because we already have those games. This is not the same as being against melee on its own. Shogun Total War pulls off melee and ranged pretty well without much kludgery. But medieval Japanese warfare is not the same as super advanced kill bots so I don't think the mechanics will translate to the PA mythos. As I said before, I would love to hear your ideas on how to balance melee without arbitrary kludges.

I am against having it done badly or in the style of a game that we already have. So far I am not convinced that it could be done any other way. Melee on its own is not the problem. Its all the balancing issues that come along with it that are the problem.

I agree that it is highly unlikely that Uber will include melee in the game based on what we have seen posted to the backer's forums. So honestly I am not too worried about it. If there is a way to make it work without kludges then I am sure they would find it and I would be happy with it. But until they say they are working on it, just leave it to the modders.

What is, and what is the purpose of a "kludge"?

To collect... a shrubbery!

:|

A hack; an attempt to force a particular outcome when it does not fit naturally.

All I see in the above quote is assumptions next to opinion, with one fact waving at me from the middle.

*There is no guarantee that you can transfer cutting technology to kinetic rounds (e.g. bullets with cutting lasers in them). If you allow for cutting technology that cannot be miniaturised into ammunition, you allow for short/melee range weapons that can be as effective (or more effective) against armour as longer range weapons.

*There is no guarantee ranged attacks will always outdamage melee attacks, given the same total kinetic energy (or the same energy input). Throw rocks at a concrete slab, then see if you can do more damage with a sledgehammer. Total energy input would be the same (1 human power whether you throw or swing) but I suspect that the outcome (and damage dealt) will differ between the 2 methods, probably quite drastically.

*Put a few tanks in front of your melee units, and you can get them in position while trading fire, and the enemy has the choice of holding position (and getting melee'd) or kiting, and losing the position. Do this with "the position" as an enemy forward base, and you get your melee units into position to effectively smash buildings while your tanks kite their tanks, or their tanks hold fast and get kited by your tanks and melee'd by your units as well. I don't think any fight in PA is going to be one on one, single unit type outside of a few rare edge cases.

*Speed being proportional to mass is only true if a uniform powerplant is being used across all vehicles. Double the powerplant as well as the mass, and you'll achieve similar (but not uniform) performance characteristics. "Heavy armour = slow" is actually an arbitrary balancing technique; light tanks like the 22 tonne Stingray can hit 70kph (on-road), and main battle tanks like the 62 tonne Leopard 2 can hit 70kph (on-road).

However I have seen nothing which confirms the HP, damage, armour or cost of any unit in PA. At all. Stating that this is how it should be done is fine, but is quite blatantly opinion, since we have no facts about PA unit balance. Also your balancing system is missing multipliers for stealth, weapon range, locomotion speed, extra locomotion abilities (e.g. amphibious or jumpjets) and intel capabilities. Just sayin'

And this bit I'm going to leave as a big lump:

Ultralisks? Zealots? They are melee so they must be cheap and squishy too amirite? Or maybe you are missing the point that zerglings are, first and foremost, supposed to be cheap throwaway units and them being melee is at best incidental, and at worst a deliberate balancing technique. Zerglings are not designed to be balanced one on one with marines (ranged) or zealots (melee). They are supposed to be horde mobs.

However, Supreme Commander (and FA, and SC2) all had arbitrary minimum attack radii for ballistic units, and had deploy-only artillery units, and they are games which very closely match TA. I was assuming you would be familiar with them as well as TA. If you guys are going to use Starcraft and Dawn of War unit mechanics as analogies I think I'm entitled to add in those games, and their well received but artificial balancing mechanics.

If PA implements artillery the same way TA did (now that I've had a chance to revisit it), I will be a happy bunny :mrgreen:

Eh? What does Y represent? If you spend resource creating X melee units, then you should have a reason for it, (even if the reason is "I felt like it") and a supporting force for them as well. You then try to use them for the best operational advantage, e.g. escort them into the middle of an enemy base and let them start smashing stuff.

You will definitely have (resource used to create X) less resource, but I'm struggling to work out what you mean by "X+Y fewer other units in the game" being a direct result of building X melee units. Is Y the units you would have built instead? Is Y some other unexplained extra that the engine deletes whenever it sees a melee unit built?

Pyro, Scarab, Galactic Colossus. The colossus in SC2 actually hoovered up enemy units, crushed them in its big manly claws and then fired the corpse back at the remaining enemy as ammunition. Highly amusing to watch :mrgreen:

I shouldn't need to mention Metal Fatigue, since the main units are giant robots with massive melee weapons that beat the snot out of each other. It even had a proto-orbital layer as well as underground. The vehicles were secondary to your potential army of giant sword and axe wielding behemoths.

I've only played a couple of C&C titles so I can't remember offhand if they had melee only units.

Actually, you were arguing using specific balancing techniques as applied by Dawn of War, which incidentally were only introduced to make the RTS follow the tabletop game more closely. You were going into the specifics of unit interaction, you definitely stated that I should run a trainer to remove the artificial rules in that specific game and see how the outcome changed combat between melee and ranged.

I've played Warhammer 40k, and I agree the mechanics are not purely physics based. It works off d6s for a start! It is space battle opera where realism takes a back seat to epic fights with epic units. Asking Dawn of War to be realistic, or berating it for not being realistic, is pointless; if it is to remain true to the base material of Warhammer 40k it will never be realistic, and melee units will always be able to break tanks if you have enough. Orky Boyz loves to smash stuff, see?

PA is not a tabletop game, you do not roll d6s to see if units are killed by a melee attack. So I'm sorry, but your argument does not apply. The background engines are as different as chalk and cheese, and should never have been compared.

I don't think it does need specific, deliberate, forced balancing (aka kludges) at all. Have melee units use the same basic balancing mechanic that all units have; similar HP and speed of any base unit (light tank, tier 2 kbot, whatever they are based on), and similar DPS vs range properties; when I'm talking about "melee" I should really be saying "range between zero to very short". Make players come up with their own strategies to deliver them where they are effective (eating bases is where a very short range unit excels). If they aren't effective, people won't use them; however there are units I rarely if ever used in TA, and the same goes for every RTS I've played.

I'm not going to demand special dispensation to ensure <insert favourite unit type here> is viable as a standalone. I'd much rather people built a weapon primitive (gun, flamethrower, inflatable hammer), bolted it onto a standard unit base and let the engine do the rest. It'll either work, or it won't. Pick and mix unit design is one of the things I loved about WarZone 2100 in that respect

Let me be clear here: My issue with melee is actual "hand"-to-"hand" fighting (think robot wrestling). Flamethrowers and other short-distance weapons do not apply.

Every time you build a melee unit, you are not building a non-melee unit. Meaning a force that includes melee units will have a weaker ranged attack that without. So straight away, in order for them to balanced, melee units must have some kind of advantage to make up for this. As I stated in my previous post (which you neglected to comment on), you can:

1. Make them faster. If you can make a unit faster, why not just add a ranged weapon to it?
2. Make them stronger. If you can add armour to a melee unit without increasing the cost, why can't the same additional armour be added to a ranged unit? If you do increase the cost, it will be back to being underpowered.

Ergo, you'd need to break some rule to balance melee units. Starcraft does this by having few ranged units that can shoot while moving. Dawn of war disables guns when engaging in melee combat. PA does not (and should not) have these restrictions.

You're describing a melee unit with similar HP, Speed and DPS as a ranged unit, but with no (or next to no) range? It would get slaughtered, and no-one would build it. Why include it? It's strictly worse than other units.

Nope, its not. So the rest of your points go right out the window.

I have not proposed a balance system. I have simply made a perfectly reasonable assumption about how unit balancing will probably work given how previous games in the lineage have been balanced.

Irrelevant. Specific Starcraft units mechanics do not apply to general statements about ranged vs melee. I could just as easily have said swordsmen and archers.

Indeed it did, but that was arguably a flaw.

We are using general statements as examples of overall balancing techniques. Not specific unit mechanics. So no, you may not. Well received or not their balancing techniques do not belong in PA. Because then PA would no longer be PA. It would be a DoW or SC clone.

As will I.

You completely missed my point here. I am referring to game development resources. Time and money. Those things that we all want more of but only have a limited amount of.

I am not sure what your point is here. SupCom2 had some crazy experimental units? SupCom2 is generally regarded as a bad game so I don't think we want to emulate it too much.

I never played Metal Fatigue but I have heard good things about it. Based on its mechanics how would you balance melee units in PA?

They did not as far as I know. At least Tiberium Dawn, Tiberium Sun, Red Alert, and Red Alert 2 didn't have any melee. I stopped playing them after that since they went very down hill after that in my opinion.

Nope, you seem to be getting this all mixed up. It was a general statement about the overall balance of ranged vs melee in Dawn of War and that you could break it fairly easily.

I'm sorrry but it does apply. DoW does not get a free pass just because a bunch of table top game books say that it should. The PC game must stand on its own merits. That being said its a good game. But the fact that does things so differently from a game like PA is even more of a reason to not borrow the game mechanics from it that allow melee to function.

I'm sorry but short range != melee. There is no way around that. Short range is fine as we have said many many times. It is melee specifically that is the problem. Please enlighten us as to your wondrous unit balancing techniques.

I am of the same opinion. And that is why I am against badly implemented melee. Neither you nor anyone else has been able to propose a way to make melee work that won't turn PA into Starcraft or Dawn of War.

Ok, so I generally like the idea of the odd man out.

I think peewees are already kind of melee units for T1, because their range is short. I don't really want melee in T1.

In T2 there are a lot of unknowns. Things could be wierd and fun.

I like how Sumos in Zero K will do damage to units they land on when they jump jet. This is a great idea. Kinetic energy for the win.

I kind of like the idea of a frapacino bot that goes nuts in a small area around itself, because there is nothing like attacking your enemy with psuedo house hold appliances.

Last but not least, if the Freak was designed with a dark templar and/or stryder style Katana instead of a peewee gun would anyone care? Provide some swishes like stryder and you get some range on the strikes.
-long cool down, large damage, maybe a series of strikes before going on cool down
-very fast, fragile
-not a combat unit but a raider

I dunno. I don't have a problem with melee weapons as they actually produce groups that are very much not Death Ball. It would have to look good and congruent with the style of the rest of the units. It would be more work, but it would be great if we had an example of a melee unit to learn from for modders.

TLDR: No melee in T1. Everything should visually work together.

This argument is so dumb that I'm giving up on this thread entirely.