Hi! Don't worry - nothing about unit balance here. These are just some things I've noticed in my umpteen-thousand hours of play of TA, SupCom1, and Supcom2. From my experience as a coder, I believe that most of these types of things would be fairly straight-forward to implement, and are little design features that would go a long way toward making games easier / more enjoyable / less trollable. Thanks for listening. In no particular order: GAME SPEED SETTING Allow hosts to pick an arbitrary game speed in the lobby, but then LOCK THE SPEED AT START. The most common way SupCom2 games were ruined is that the game speed was 'Adjustable', and then ANYONE could screw with the speed to ruin the game. May I suggest the following interface? - A sliding scale between -10 and +10 for game speed. Perhaps assign labels or "jump-to" presets for 'Normal' and 'Fast'. Make it easy to select 'Normal' or 'Fast', and that also will show people what numeric value they are equivalent to. - Next to the game speed slider, have radio buttons or a short menu that allows for exactly one of three options: --- "Game speed locked at start" --- "Only host can adjust game speed in-game" --- "Anyone can adjust game speed in game" PING SOUND In SupCom2, the ping noise when hitting f5, f6, or f7, was way too subtle. The sonar-like ping from SupCom1 is more preferred RANGE RINGS - Anything that can fire offensively, or is in any way intended to damage nearby units, should have an associated range-ring for that weapon. (In SupCom2, I believe there were 1-2 factory add-ons that did not show range. Structure detonate also did not show range.) - Consider making range rings a single-pixel in thickness, or at least very thin, no matter how far zoomed in they are. Pick a bright, almost artificial looking color, or somehow display them so that they are not confused with the terrain or map. (Radar range rings on "Tourney Dome" in SupCom2 were notoriously impossible to see.) MOVE / ATTACK ORDERS SHOULD ALWAYS BE HONORED WHEN THEY MAKE SENSE - In SupCom2, it was very frustrating to tell my Noah to fire units into an enemy base, only to find that 15 seconds later, it wasn't launching, because the game knew (but I didn't) that I had chosen to launch right on top of a structure. Noah's had a wind-up time before launching, so this caused real problems. What should have happened is that it just dropped units as physically close to my marker as possible. Same thing with placing a Space Temple beacon. NEVER HAVE "TOGGLE" BUTTONS This is for things like stealthed/visible, submerged/surfaced, etc. If a unit can be in only one of exactly two states, there should be two buttons, one each for the states you could possibly switch to. This is important when selecting groups of units which, when taken together, could be in both states. In SupCom2, it was very frustrating to have to waste a LOT of time individually picking out surfaced subs in a group and telling them to submerge. If I high-lighted the whole group, and hit the toggle button, every one of them would change state. That's a game-ruiner if you ask me. Would be just as bad trying to stealth-ify an incoming group of air or whatever. (More applicable to SupCom1). I think I just want to see two buttons, one for each state, and never a single toggle button, which makes no sense once a group of units are selected. DE-SYNC INTERFACE SUCKED As the PA devs, you'll want to think through very carefully what should happen in a de-sync. In SupCom2, once a legit de-sync happened, remaining players kept seeing this obnoxious dialogue keep appearing with a 'Quit' button. It made the game unplayable, because people either accidentally quit as the button appeared out of nowhere right under their mouse, or they had to keep clicking to get rid of the window every 3-5 seconds. If you're going this route for de-syncs, please move the dialogue box out of the field-of-play, or least way over to one edge. Honestly, I wouldn't have minded if the game just ground to a halt and ended. I can think of very, very few games that survived a de-sync that were either fair or enjoyable. LOBBY WOES - Allow host, when kicking a player, to ban the player from being able to join that game again. Also give them a 'ban for 30 seconds' option. - Consider allowing slots to be 'locked'. It was frustrating setting up games with A.I. players only to have real players join the game and override those slots. (If you're not doing A.I. for PA, this point is moot.) - If you implement exclusions, please have a really obvious visual indicator that at least one exclusion is in effect. In my opinion, in-effect exclusions should be listed in the lobby page itself, not hidden under their own menu. Something should probably be drawn in a different color as well - exclusions in-effect REALLY need attention drawn to them. I shouldn't have to remember to check. This ruined a lot of games for people, because they'd quit when they realized it was a no-arty or no-rush 20 game. - There was a post from the SupCom2 devs stating that after the 8th player joined the lobby, the game needed time to "sync up", and hosts were advised to wait a few seconds before they clicked 'Launch'. If this is still the case with PA, please bake this sync time into the system automatically so that this isn't something hosts need to worry about. That's all for now. I apologize if these are repeats of what other folks have said, but I only had a few minutes to whip up this list.
TLR; SupCom2 was mostly rubbish. Luckily, nobody at Uber worked on SupCom2. Also, desyncs should only be able to affect one player due to the client/server model. I like the idea of having two buttons instead of a toggle though, would be easier to control and therefore better.
There is not even the concept of a desync as the game isn't synchronous. This is a very good thing. If you drop or have a problem just reconnect to the game.
So if SupCom2 was rubbish and Sorian worked at GPG during SupCom2 clearly Sorian is rubbish! Haha! You're rubbish Sorian
You KNOW he's gonna put something like If Opponent = "Polynomial' { Cheatmode = 'Ultra';} .. don't poke the bear.
MOSTLY. Sorian is MOSTLY rubbish. And no, don't make the range rings pixel thick. That's very hard to see, no matter what color is chosen. FA's range rings were just fine. Also, toggle buttons can be implemented just fine for groups, you just need a default toggle state that everything resorts to. Plus it saves on interface space.
You could make the range rings like invert Color of pixel that would be ther original, this should be easy to see on any ground.
But pretty ugly. It's better to use bright primary colors, that won't occur naturally on the terrain. And also, don't use additive blending. (I'm looking at you, Zero K). Again, FA does a wonderful job with these. I've never had an issue identifying the range rings.
