Instant Death

I was always sold on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP21TTJ-cPA

But losing to a commander in a short amount of time kinda killed that for me.

I was responding more to the sentiment that I'm not supposed to aim to win, when it's the nature of games to try to win at them. Fortunately, Planetary Annihilation as a video game isn't bound to concerns over health and safety like those aforementioned sports, and the other rules you cited are simply part of the essence of those sports(no hands...in football; only move on your turn...in a turn based game.), and aren't more 'restrictive' than "Stumpy tank can only go this fast, and shoot this far". Commander rushing does not make the game unfair, the only bearing it has is determining how long the game lasts. It has more in common with this:

What's more fortunate, commander rushing doesn't have to be overpowered because I already provided you with circumstances where it isn't, and thus doesn't have to be declared 'unsportsmanly'. What's even more fortunate, you two can turn off assassination mode or go play bigger maps like I've been stating to you this whole time, which will give you your god damn experience A the kickstarter trailer allegedly advertised to you and if you still ignore this then you're a thick numpty.

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Here. I started a new thread relating to what you guys want. Is this more to your liking?

Suggest another one that will fit your needs, then we will talk about fanons.

Veterancy + imbalanced upgrades + small maps. You take your ACU, build a few research stations and move towards enemy. On particular upgrade path as soon as you'll reach your enemy ACU becames very tough warrior. Due to veterancy if may became nearly invincible after few minutes of battle. + kills give even more research points.

In 1v1 game early-days ACU rush was possible to counter. But in team game it was instant win.

That's a "cheesy" tactic. Cheesy tactic exists everywhere and means "exploit of game imperfection". Not at scale of cheat, but near to it.

Zerg rush in SC is not cheesy tactic.
Commander rush in FA or later-days SC2 is not cheesy tactic.
FAF-alike smurfing (deliverable trying to look like a noob) is a cheesy tactic.
Making agreements/communicating across opposing teams in benefit of one team is cheesy tactic.

In short - anything that falls out of "my RTS-playing skill is better than yours" category is cheesy tactic and should be avoided.

No. If it's counterable by early recon and couple of pds than it's not cheesy, but not possible - you can' kill "pro" by "noob" in that case - "pro" will counter that strategy, otherwise he is not "pro". And if it's not counterable - that's abuse of game imbalance.

Considering what we've seen so far of Planetary Annihilation has shown it to be deliberately lore-lite and not at all serious, I don't think one is needed. If the team at Uber wish to explain how the commanders actually work, I'd rather trust their word on it.

It sounds to me like Supreme Commander 2 had more problems than just commander rushing.

It is as it seems.

And that's coming from someone who has SupCom2 as one of their all time favorite games.

Using Forged Alliance as an example, commander “rushes” are not a valid strategy on any map except maybe Finn's Revenge (a map that is basically circular). On that map the counter to it is to perform your own commander rush - this results in a base swap, both players have to build up again from the other player's starting position.

As for the other tactic accused of being cheap or whatever, the T1 land spam: no.

Being proficient at pumping huge numbers of units is a core game skill. If you don't have that ability then you should lose against someone who does. When you face an opponent who is equally skilled at pumping T1 units, that's when the game needs to escalate.

There is no way you can logically make it so that a game is guaranteed to proceed past the early stage without making the early stage effectively superfluous. If you do that then why not just skip to the second stage? Even if you did that then you still have the situation where the weaker player loses and loses quickly.

Getting to the stage where the high-end weapons come out requires either equal players or a gentleman's agreement to play special rules. Play special rules if you want, but don't pretend it's the “proper” way to play.

In short, instead of complaining that a tactic is unstoppable, learn how to stop it.

If learning how to stop a tactic requires you to be a extraordinarily good player, then it is wrong by design.

Yes, but that's an entirely different argument.

I'm not a bad player of Forged Alliance, but I'm not especially good either. Of course these things are all relative, but I'm about average in terms of rating on FAF. There is not a single tactic in the current version that is unstoppable in my view, and every game I've lost I've lost because I didn't play as well as the other player.

If a tactic is impossible to scout and stop, or impossible to react against when scouting isn't possible, then it is wrong by design. No one says it has to be easy.

Typically, a really cheesy strategy will have a flash point where everyone's doing it. This means pretty much everyone is getting good practice on how to win against it. For examples, just check out the starcraft days of 6-pools, cannon rushes, 4-gates, and triple 1's. Either the players get good against it, so it's not cheesy anymore, or they realize there's simply no hope against it, at which point you whack it with a nerf bat.

Or everyone gets fed up with the strategy and stops playing. Don't forget that one.

Most people aren't so invested in winning a game that they're willing to play through hundreds of matches they consider boring just to increase their win-score and learn how to stop tactics that, win or lose the game, cause them to have not-fun for the next 5/10/20/60 minutes.

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, when Supcom was new the GPG forums were ablaze with people sharing information about newly-discovered strategies, build orders etc etc. Surely most players at least in the beginning will spend some time on the forums?

Also you can always watch a replay to see how your opponent did what he did.

To take this no-instant-death thing to its extreme (but logical) conclusion - if your opponent stands completely still and does nothing, should you be able to kill him inside five minutes? I would say that you should. Everything else is therefore a matter of degrees, if somebody is so much better than you that it is no effort to defeat you, then you can expect to lose in ten minutes max.

The OP is about weapons that inflict instant death on targets. Why are you talking about cheese anyway? Cheese does not inflict "instant death" you fools. Dguns do.

Instant death is actually not terribly hard to balance; it's just a numbers vs kills balance instead of HP vs damage balance. An army with 100 units effectively has 100 "instant death" hitpoints.

Wanna talk about instant death, I remember realizing some time not too long after TA's release that I could build an aircraft plant and an Atlas and pick up the enemy commander if he was ranging too far afield then just self destruct the Atlas mid air.

Talk about instant death.

One other thing that occurred to me about spam - in a game with a constant flow of unlimited resources, the only sensible thing to do is make a constant flow of tanks.

It's different in a game where there is a hard limit to the number of resources you can gather, but where resources are potentially infinite there is little to be gained by waiting until your forces are "strong enough" to attack.

Instant death leads to one immediate discovery: "Cool! I'm going to blow up his Commander and WIIIIIIN". That brings up the next question of "How do I keep my Commander alive?" Because if you can't, if there's absolutely no single way to keep your Commander alive after an instant death weapon hits the field, then the first player to get one wins.

The typical defense is to use your army and keep the Commander out of trouble. But as weapons get longer range and deal more wide spread destruction, there's more difficulty in avoiding trouble, and a greater chance for the Comm to get caught in the cross fire.

Without some ability for the Comm to survive, an instant death weapon can never be balanced as a unit killing, or base killing, or even a planet killing weapon. It always has to be priced as a game ending weapon.

It's a fairly natural evolution of conversation from instant death -> Dgun -> Commander -> instant wins -> whine -> cheese.

For standard units, it's a fairly simple system. One shot == 1 kill. It's a very different thing against Commanders, where 1 shot == infinite kills.

One of the reasons that TotalA Instant Death was a Comm only ability, is because a Comm wouldn't dare use it against another Comm. The other instant death option (nukes) was limited by direct fire(just walk away) and special defense(SMD).