Its Just Too Massive!

The game needs more macro tools for sure, but from what I understood we'll be getting them at some point. Limiting mass reduces the scale of the game. Of course it is easier to handle a smaller economy because there are just fewer things that need attention and doing.

I think they huge scale they have is pretty awesome. It means to play large games, you'll need additional players on your team helping to manage different parts of the army. A single player should be able to reasonably handle a 200-300 radius planet and probably more as they add additional macro tools. Past that you really want extra players to help manage everything. And I think this is one of the major points of the game they were aiming for. A single player can handle a smallish chunk of space and can stretch themselves to deal with a much larger area, but their gameplay will be poorer compared to a team of 3 managing the same area.

What types of games are many of you playing? FFAs on 400+ radius planets? 2v2s across 6 worlds? The real issue might be that we have the options to create a game that we really just can't handle and don't realize it. Once you hit a certain number of planets or size of planets you really need more players to effectively use all the extra space and eco you have access to.

So, to be clear, the UI is hindering us and causing too much micro? If so, I totally agree.

The game is still very macro, but there is too much micro. Controlling the armies is fairly easy, right up until you have to keep watching them.

Sounds to me like your planets are to big.........

I have an idea for reducing micro, but I suspect a lot of players won't like this at all. When line building factories, have every factory in the line automatically share the same build queue. The player can then treat them all as a single big factory with a single build queue instead of having to give each one orders individually.

There have been some great ideas on this thread, most of them could even be mutually beneficial. My favorites were:

Raising the cost of power plants to slow the growth rate without reducing max economy.

A "Macro Command Que" that automatically assigns idle workers or factories as they become available would be sweet.

Raising the health or lowering the damage of most units to reduce game speed.

Units reacting more defensively with less user-input

Built Templates to reduce micro on expansion bases.

Late game resource sinks. These don't have to be "experimental" units, but they should justify the expense. I know one I'd like to see ***

Units already have a "Weapon range" and "Guard range", where if an enemy enters the larger of these two areas the unit will automatically attack. I would like to see a "Protect Range" that is significantly larger than "Gaurd range" and if any friendly unit takes damage within that radius our unit moves to engage the enemy. This would mean your Dox sitting on the other side of your base would respond to an attack, but wouldn't run off into the void just because an enemy was in LOS miles away.

Even if units never get a new behavior for defense we can fake it as players. Instead of simply giving a rally point for all your factories, give a Patrol Area command slightly larger than your base for all your factories. The units will still hangout in the relative safety of your defenses, but they won't sit around like dummies if the base is attacked while you are away. It's a couple extra clicks up front that can save you dozens of clicks later.


***I think an assistive AI on your team is terrible... but I think it would be awesome to build a new commander who deploys as a new AI player on his own team, allied with yours. You could dump your 400+ surplus metal into him and then send him off to a moon you don't have time to micro manage. He's a full fledged player entering the game late at the spawn point you chose for him. He's not under your control, he's only barely your friend, but he'll build a base and fight your enemies without becoming an unpredictable drain on your economy. There's also very little benefit to spamming these new commanders. They have to earn their own resources, so if you dump 10 on one small moon there won't be enough metal to go around.

The scale of the game aside, I too would like time management tools to allow me to play the game exactly as it is now.

After that, you can argue seperately if the game the way it is now is better or worse than it can be if balance is tweaked this way or that way.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...umanvcomp-matches-and-or-human-v-human.55432/

We need this!

In many ways this suggestion is very similar to playing the current team game with an AI on your team. My worry is that while it would may reduce the micro management for the player, it may also create a very unstable and economy because the player has too little control over the assisting AI.

In that same thread (and this one) I've suggested a similar alternative that would reduce UI in a large system, but not give up the players autonomy.

Comparing the old pa-db.com (still shows values of the old patch): http://pa-db.com/table/vehicles
with the up to date version on my server: http://www.nanodesu.info/padb/table/vehicles

Actually the dps of units has been decreased by 50%. I still have not played any games in the new patch, can somebody tell if it feels like this?

EDIT:
Actually the leveller has gone down from 500 dps to 25 dps (!). Is this correct? Wtf

Sadly I have a full time job and Tuesday-thursday I spend my nights at the Dojo, so I haven't played the new patch yet. I'm very excited about it though. I can trawl through forums at work but I can't play the game.

Yes, it all plays very differently now. Tanks can pack quite a punch. And personally, I like it.

I would like to see a game where no T2 mexes are allowed.. then you would have even more reason to expand aggressively. To build nukes and other high cost stuff you would need an entire planet full of mexes, which sounds good to me.

No that's a cool idea. Personally I would have it so that factories assist one another.

You know that give orders to things that are still only a template idea?

That I would like to see for factories.

I had an idea like that called "Factory Complex". It got many negative reactions.

@arachnis
And yet people also talk about SupCom's system too. I agree with your idea.

I don't like the fact that if you just want to spam tanks from a factory, but suddenly you realise you want a vehicle fabber, you need to turn off your continuous build and turn it on again when the fabber is complete, or you need to add a ridiculous number of Ants and then add the fabber to the start of the queue

It is, and it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

If you just remove t2 mexes and energy then a lot of the problems with the super growth are fixed.

With the ability to easily access other planets by building an orbital fabber and telling to to build a tele on another world, the second world effectively becomes your t2 metal/energy.

As the current game stands, I can get ridiculous amounts of metal from 5 mex points if I bumrush advanced. 10 points is a buttload. 20 points and I can essentially just constantly nuke if I focus my build power.

Yes, the sheer size of the map containing multiple planets largely makes the advanced mex completely superfluous. It only serves to create the possibility of expanding less, which is bad because contesting territory is the players' whole motivation to actually interact in the game.

Well, before this patch I would have argued that they were mandatory to get an economy up in a reasonable ammount of time. With teleporting to other planets that's not really an issue now.

I think I actually could agree on the removal of t2 mex.
T2 energy however.... t1 energy is a pain in the ***. It stalls all day. Reaching t2 energy feels so good because from that moment on metal actually starts to limit me. Which just feels so much better.

no that's called not taking the problem by it's root and covering the decrepit wall with some light paste.

and just to be clear i supported that because it's a good idea but it is in no way designed to be a solution to a problem nor can it be the solution to this problem.
the underlying problem of too much micro will just find a way to dig it's way through and slap us in the face again.