hand to hand fight units

Actually, I would suggest that both yourself and Antillie are the ones deliberately ignoring pefectly valid reasons why melee does not require kludges to balance. You yourself admitted you could do so in a game which does not already have any kludges for melee, i.e. SupCom. So surely it follows that if you can balance melee in SupCom, you can balance melee in PA? It would just look "silly", which as I mentioned earlier is a perfectly valid point even though I do not personally agree. I perfectly understand you not wanting melee for aesthetic reasons

Refutation the first: balance is not about lore. Balance is about unit mechanics. Unit balancing is quite specific; it is about changing the stats of a unit so that that unit is neither too powerful, nor too weak, compared to other units, and should be done by applying some method universally. What you are talking about is theme, which is not yet fully established for PA. I have no problem with you objecting on aesthetic / themic reasons, but please don't pretend it has anything to do with unit balance.

Refutation the second: you are using the wrong definition of balance. As I mentioned a few posts ago I believe balance should be "ensure that the unit does not stray outside a set of acceptable values for damage, range, cost and utility". Nowhere in there does it mention requiring that the unit be able to destroy any other unit that is superior (ranged > melee) via the application of broken mechanics.

If you insist that "balanced" actually means "making it capable of fighting one on one and standing an equal chance of winning against any other unit in the game" then I put it to you that you are using a broken definition of balance, which is why it requires broken mechanics to implement. I do not agree with that definition of balanced, even though we both agree that ranged is inherently "better" than melee (which I also mention in the same post).

Using my definition, melee units would get more stats for the reduction in range, but those stats should be consistent with the unit cost and other factors. If you would never use them then that is your choice, but claiming that any formation that has some melee is less useful against ranged, is like claiming that any formation that contains some units that cannot shoot air is less useful against air. Logically consistent, but tactically irrelevant unless you have a specific situation in mind. Seriously, using your own unit composition rules would mean that you only ever build anti-air units (e.g Jethros) because air exists in the game. Yes, we know air exists in the game, there are several whitebox air units

Unrelated to the topic at hand, but still I feel relevant to discussing why I believe your current mechanical / tactical arguments hold little water (your aesthetic ones are perfectly valid):
Apply your own argument to discussing balance between ground and air, which is another case of inherent superiority (air > ground), and I suspect you'll notice it starts to sound a little off. Especially when you get to the point where your argument suggests that ground (melee) should not be in the game, because air (ranged) is just plain better; why build a ground unit when you could have built an air unit?. You have to specifically kludge ground (giving them overpowered anti-air weapons, or nerfing air hitpoints) to make them "balanced" against air. Yet I have not seen you start a topic about removing ground from the game for being too weak, or removing air from the game for being too overpowered. You are apparently happy that ground and air as is are working despite the bodging required to get them to work together, when a commander "trying to design the perfect army" would have come to a different conclusion; air is inherently better therefore all air, baby

In fact in TA, I seem to recall that air was considered overpowered until it got "balanced" by the AA flak weapons, which then got derided for being overpowered themselves. Since this was 15+ years ago I can't guarantee I'm remembering correctly though, can anyone recall if the tech 2 AA flak was in the release units or added by Cavedog in a balance release?

That same argument applies to ANY change in scale. It is possible to give artillery units far less health and speed than their cost should allow, and it's stupid. But it gets done anyway, because long range units with the same health and damage as a tank are broken as ****.

Which is why I'd suggest settling on a method of balancing (e.g. a generic formula of how HP, DPS, range, speed, cost etc. relate) and applying it consistently and universally. Straying from the formula for a particular unit is a bodge, whether it's a boost or a nerf; having to boost or nerf units for "game balance" concerns is what most of the anti-melee position has been about. I agree that doing so (boosting or nerfing) is stupid, I don't agree it is required for melee to be viable.

If you want tiers (e.g. SupCom's tech 1, 2, 3 and experimental tiers) then you may or may not wish to apply a multiplier for tier; I would suggest that you shouldn't, so that a unit twice as "good" (tech 2 variant) is also twice as expensive. In my experience however most implementations do, so that there is incentive to tech up; a tech 3 unit is normally much cheaper than the same HP (or damage) worth of tech 1, rendering the lower tech obsolete at that point.

I'm pretty sure Uber confirmed they don't want a situation where basic units become obsolete, so a consistent method of balance would be the most straightforward way of implementing this across tech tiers; massive tanks with twice as much damage and twice as much HP should cost 4 times as much metal, to make it worth still building the smaller tanks.

Ok skipping over the debate as to guns v Knives. The general fact is that ranged weapons are better in Open battle than melee. convincing people that an open knife fight in the field is a part of futuristic warfare is a no-hoper.
But liking melee units for their awesomeness and ferocity is fine, indeed the whole point of them both in recent history and in most games is to drive home an emotional impact on the enemy usually terror.
They come in 3 categories:
1. Berzerking tanks. With more health than sense.
2. Nimble zealous types who exist for religious/moral reasons (like the sword elites in Halo)
3. Silent assassins who use getting close a way to avoid all the ranged stuff which is otherwise so problematic.
1 and 2 generally require acceptance of a lore that is otherwise counter-sensible. The issue being that the 'perfection of robotics' argument stands against the 'Awesomeness' argument in these cases. I.e. no matter how strong a bezerker is, kiting him from range would always make more sense. And the existence of a samurai unit class there for posterity doesn’t tie in with robotic brains theory.
However there is hope in number 3. An assassin bot that needs to get close to avoid detection would find the silence and immediacy of a point black melee attack highly advantageous. So I’d suggest focusing you desire for a bad-*** plasma sword wielding ninja, who can drive shock and terror into the other player, here.
Obv there would have to be some restrictions on what he can kill/destroy without warning, and he would have to be suitably expensive.
Id recommend either a enemy-unit-disguise or cloak (the better of the 2 as its expensive to run as well as build). That must then de-cloak/remove the disguise just as attacking. There would then need to be a cooldown before he can disguise and cloak again for the sake of balance. This could provide the opportunity for the vastly higher than average speed/agility that usually accompanies lightly armoured assassin units to be shown off as he TRIES to escape with his life.
This would be suitable terrifying and emotionally impactive/ fit in with the common sense surrounding the whole guns v swords argument and fulfil the Awesomeness quota

Stephen

This thread needs an image or two:

Balance is tied to aesthetic. Maybe we are just debating semantics here, but as a contrived example, if a game's lore stated that plasma is more powerful than a bullet, you can't balance a bullet-based unit by giving it more damage than a plasma based one (even if it still falls within the accepted range according to the balancing scheme).

My view of making something balanced is simply making sure it is strictly better than at least one other unit in enough situations to matter. If it isn't, it wont be built. This incorporates all aspects; force composition, map situation etc. I understand this isn't a 1v1 thing, but you can compare 1v1 for the purposes of somewhat determining if another unit is strictly better.

Maybe it's easier to explain by stating that if a ranged ground unit's job is to attack ground, and so is a melee units', then if the melee unit can't do as good a job as the ranged one, without having some other benefit, what is the point of it?

Air is not plain better (plane better? :roll: ), aircraft have strategic and logistical limitations, as well as physical - less armed and armoured to accommodate flight, so weaponry against it is naturally cheaper (melee vs ranged ground units do not have this difference). It's not strictly better than ground (remembering this isn't a 1v1 situation, as you have rightly pointed out, so the fact that not all units shoot air is not an argument in itself).

Since air isn't strictly better, this argument doesn't hold (see above).

This is true, but the issue was caused by stacking - land units can't go over one another, yet bombers and fighters could (bombers especially were a problem, since only the bottom unit would get hit, not the whole stack). Essentially, an engine limitation caused this problem, which allowed air to form deathballs.

I agree, I think we are debating semantics at this point. I'd suggest that lore / theme defines what technology you design onto units (i.e. bows and catapults for fantasy, lasers and plasma artillery for scifi) and balance then defines the actual stats. If the game lore defined one type of weapon as strictly superior to another (rather than allowing balance to define weapon strengths), I'd suggest it's the game designers painting themselves into a corner with unit design

If you ensure DPS is scaled to the weapons max range i.e. shorter range gets better DPS to "balance" it, then "melee" units will have strictly better DPS per unit cost than any ranged unit. Only situationally useful (as you and Antillie both pointed out, if you can get kited all day then the unit is no use for that situation) but would be perfectly usable against slower moving or stationary targets. In that sense melee would be vying with artillery, rather than tanks. And again, if you include range as a balancing factor, artillery is always going to be more costly (or more squishy) than melee for the same DPS.

Everything you can do with melee you can also do with artillery, we both know (and agree on) this. However I can envisage situations where I might choose to build melee instead, either because I can get more DPS for the same cost (and have a plan to get the melee there to do their job without them getting decimated), or because I want to take tactical advantage of the drawbacks of melee in some form (i.e. goad an enemy into kiting them, to move him out of position). Not having melee does not give me these options; I can work around them anyway, and you may feel that it's not worth the extra effort of providing them in the first place. I think we're both agreeing that melee does not have to be in PA for PA to be fun anyway, and I'm not going to be put out if Uber just stick to the same units in the whitebox list. I think our only real disagreement is in whether melee can have a place in PA, and that is at least partially aesthetic, and therefore has no real "answer" per se.

Air is deliberately given less armed and less armoured (and limited fuel, and in some cases limited ammunition) as a balancing mechanic. Air is effectively kludged to make sure it is not overpowered.

There is no lore based reason why air cannot fit the same weapons as ground (following lore would suggest they use exactly the same weapons across all unit types, since these are the "best" weapon designs refined over thousands of years). There is no lore based reason why air units would fit less armour than ground (you can argue physics, but lore suggests they have far exceeded our meagre knowledge of physics). I'm suggesting that all the games that do so, do so primarily for game balance reasons to ensure that air is not the de facto tactic

Without kludging / deliberate restrictions on air, I'd say it is strictly better. With kludging it is certainly not. If you allow for (and agree with) kludges on air, then yes, my argument for air being inherently better does not hold (air having been specifically balanced so that it does not hold). It's the same with melee; if you allow for (and agree with) kludges on melee, then melee is not inherently worse than ranged.

Apply a strict mathematical balancing formula on all units equally (whether ground, naval or air) and you'll see that air is inherently better than ground though. A VTOL Bulldog vs a ground Bulldog should be an obvious case of inherent superiority, with all other stats being equal (same HP, same gun, same speed). What usually happens is that cost for air units has a multiplier built in; a VTOL Bulldog would end up costing 3 or even 5 times as much as a ground Bulldog, to ensure the ground Bulldog has a place in the game.

Off-topic, I am really liking the sound of a VTOL tank, as in a Bulldog but with engines at each corner. I can just imagine the noises an opponent would make when they see it :mrgreen:

Without any balancing beyond simple unit statistics, air > ranged ground > melee simply by virtue of being what they are. I feel that ranged ground and melee are still complementary if using unit range as a balancing factor (more range requires less damage, or less of any other stat to compensate), mainly because I feel that "melee" is simply a very short ranged unit (e.g. 0 - 1.5 unit radius range if equipped with a polearm), and thus can be balanced as any other ranged unit. For similar cost, you should be able to get more damage, or more health (and the same damage) as a longer ranged unit.

What you are describing is not an engine deficiencly of TA specifically, it's more a deficiency of the default missiles not having enough splash damage. Messing around in TA last night, I made the mistake of trying to build some buildings in range of an enemy Punisher. It managed to take out multiple flying engineers with each shot easily enough, so the Punisher AoE is big enough to deal with aircraft stacks, even if it wouldn't actually be capable of hitting a moving bomber. That's what the flak weapons brought to the mix, a method of easy AoE damage to discourage aircraft deathballs. They (flak weapons) also seem to have issues easily hitting bombers or fighters moving at full speed, however that is probably a balancing mechanic to stop the AA flak being far too powerful, to be fair.

If you look at SupCom, even the tech 3 AA missile defense has the same issue as TA missile towers; it does huge damage but only to one air unit at a time, as it has very little splash. You also need some tech 2 flak towers to be able to AoE massive groups of gunships or bombers to discourage aircraft only deathballs, since aircraft also stack up in SupCom as well (not by default, but gunships do pass over/under each other when strafing a target).

Have you seen the mantis shrimp yet? Its powerful little clubs are a nice reminder that melee weapons are always sexy.

There is also the specific tactic (exploit?) of bomber stacking - issuing a move order from an air factory, then a patrol order at the exact same place. The bombers then built stay still in mid air, and form a stack that appears as a single bomber. When arranged like this, missiles (not sure about flak) only ever damage the bottom bomber.

The Japanese variety is known to shout "Supercavitating Sonoluminescent Punchu!" as it performs the technique, and it is rumoured that Chinese "Mantis style" kung-fu was actually based on the shrimp, not the insect

Yeah, I think I'd define that one as an exploit myself, although I'd assume that flak as an AoE weapon would damage the stack equally if it hit (which may be why some people objected to flak being broken, if they were relying on stacking aircraft). Did the same thing work in SupCom? Aircraft would definitely stack (pass over/under each other) however I know long movement orders would cause most aircraft to assume formation if they were issued a group move.