Its Just Too Massive!

Im sorry but I dont think it quite needs this... but Id hope that it would be modifiable so that we can have Huge mass if we choose so... The ability to change the settings on the planets and system makeup really makes mass not that big of an issue when you tune in the systems to the amount of players. I honestly just leave the main planet to the AI and build up my own with other players. I will fully agree in saying that if we do get to much micro it can be quite hectic and ultimately slow.

But maybe that's part of it? Honestly If the war gets very large it is the same issue that countries would have in war. Expand to fast and without allowing the time to manage everything leaves you vulnerable in different locations. Shouldn't that be allowed for large wars? I admit if the AI is not somehow limited to have some human traits of losing focus we may have huge issues trying to take on the AI on the hardest settings.

I guess I do agree with the topic in ways but I hope that the ability to choose this is the answer if we do all agree. But who listens to a new guy like me right? Ill just put my two cents in and leave the rest of you to it.

I'm somewhat baffled by this thread. No matter what you do, this game is going to require high speed and powerful multitasking. If you make the game slower, good players will just increase the granularity of their micromanagement. They would spend the extra time on things like scouting more often and more carefully, splitting armies more to attack from more directions simultaneously, doing more tricks with dox micro, more com rushes, more careful econ management, etc. I would challenge anyone that thinks otherwise to identify a serious RTS game that does not require speed and multitasking in order to succeed at competitive multiplayer. Good decision making is great, but even a game like chess requires speed of thought when you set a time limit on the length of each turn.

Chess is nothing compared to PA.
It's getting to the point, and I want to remind you that it's the first of it's kind, where it's basically becoming unplayable. We're not even at the limit here. I'm talking about 10 player matches. Try to manage the eco of 2-3 planets, while micromanaging all your units (idle units are bad) and while trying to think about your next step, which would be: more of the same of what you've been doing for 30 minutes already.

I'm getting really tired and lazy after some time. "Grind and repeat" gameplay like in PA keep me attracted for like 30-40 minutes. But games can easily take a lot more time than that. And if the game is expecting me to do even more of what I've been doing for 30 mins already then it's getting boring. I'm sorry to say.

I really like the spam mentality, but after 30 minutes I need something fresh.
The argument I make is about fun.

I think there is a bit of hyperbole here, but lets agree for the moment that, out of all RTS games to date, PA has the highest skill cap for optimal play. If I understand correctly, what your saying is that the expansion and expansion-raiding aspect of the game takes up too much play time and/or is too repetitive. Would I then be correct in inferring that what you would like is something along the lines of decisive mid or late game battles--as opposed to a drawn-out econ race that focuses on map control?

Personally, I don't find that the game gets boring, especially not in 1v1. We should acknowledge that here are game mechanics that somewhat circumvent the 'spammy' nature of the game, namely com snipes. But I do think that perhaps the game could use something to make the battles more interesting and less dependent on who simply has the most units. The community generally seems to agree that battles should not be micro-intensive in the vein of Star Craft. Its not obvious to me how to make battles more interesting in PA, but my intuition is that what is needed is greater depth and viability of combined arms tactics. And for that, greater unit variety would generally be a prerequisite.

I'm sorry if it sounded a bit harsh. I'm just trying to be honest here.
I don't know how to exactly solve that problem. But optimally I'd say something that would elevate the battlefield to a new level. And with level I don't mean more interplanetary interactions, which are coming, but rather which is the major focus of the game: ground combat. Planet smashing is nice and gives a really nice touch to this game. But that's not what I'm talking about.

More variety would certainly help in that aspect. But my main problem is, that at some point there should be the option to stop producing more spam (factories), and kill your opponents through other more refined methods. In general: Make decisions easier towards the lategame. My attention span is only holding up for so long.
Spam metal extractors, spam factories, more factories, more energy, spam orbital, spam nukes, spam anti-nukes, spam walls, everything. And then do it again. It's getting to the point where the game is turning into work. And again, games will become even bigger than they're now. Much bigger in fact.

I'm not talking about 1v1s here. I'm talking about the really big games. To be honest, I play this game competitively in 1v1s. But I also do enjoy, and am really looking forward to massive games in the future.

There must be something that changes the battlefield, requires new tactics and strategies and creates more challenges. At some point it's just getting too repetitive for me. I don't know what would be best in this case. But expensive late-game units would've been, and still are my only solution.

I can understand that frustration. I'd like to see more late game money sinks and some alternative to making unit swarms swarmier, but I also agree with many of the other members that we shouldn't let ourselves fall into a trap of replacing the core gameplay with super tier4 units that make everything else obsolete. That doesn't mean not having them. It just means they need to be more interesting.

I agree, that PA does and should require high speed and multitasking, and I don't necessarily want to make the game slower, either.

Right now, the only thing that really affects the outcome of a battle is the number of units. Sure, careful play and good unit selection can mitigate being outnumbered, but if you have 30% less mass in your army, you loose. As you should!

The problem is that the only cap on how much mass I can put into my army is how quickly I can build masspoints, lay down lines of factories, queue up the right mix of units from them, and toss them at the enemy.

The difference between these rapid-fire decisions and decisions in even timed chess is easy to see. If you remove the time constraint, all the decisions I make in PA are obvious. Of course I would choose one way over the other, if only I had the time to think about it for a split second. All of the decisions are trivial, its just a matter of executing them quickly enough. This is micro. PA demands all of your attention, and leaves none for making tougher decisions.

Instead, the decisions themselves should be hard, and there should be time to make them. Lets say I see, through radar, a mass of units. If there are lots of bots, I should charge right in with my tanks and lay waste to them, before they can start kiting. If they are mainly tanks, that would be suicide, so let me use my 50 bots to hit them from the side, and once they are engaged there, Ill attack with my tanks. Making that type of non-intuitive (or alteast more complex that a-moving) decision correctly is far more gratifying than spamming clicks faster.


EDIT-

I also want to say that currently, I still think PA is very fun, and enjoy playing it. I just feel that it could be so much more, and the scale be so much grander, if I had to WORK to get that army of 200 levelers, instead of fighting to spend all the mass I am getting.

RTS will always be fast paced; I don't see how you hope to increase the time available for decision making. However, I have personally witnessed ingenious responses to the kinds of scenarios that you mention. Also, there is much opportunity for analysis and strategizing in between matches.

This isn't completely on-topic but I'd just like to add that another side effect of basically unlimited income later in the game is that it's easy to build so many units that the game slows to a crawl. I think the server-side simulation is the bottleneck because AI games are worse than all humans and I have a good PC with a 30mbit internet connection. It's not just that it gets visually choppy (which can be a bandwidth issue from what I have read), the simulation clock seems to stall and slow down a lot.

lets remove fighting for an area entirely

Nah, lets not.

Mike

I agree with you.

More time to make 'other dissensions' isn't free time because smart players will simply use the time to manage something else.

Unless the devs want to make this game like Starcraft, here is no reason why every action shouldn't take smallest amount of clicks possible.

More than one click to build a mex is too much. There is no reason metal extractor needs to be in the buildings list. It would be better that by simply clicking the metal point the fabber would automatically start building it. If fabber isn't selected, the game would automatically select the nearest fabber to do the job. Also a hotkey to select a nearest idle fabber to the cursor would be nice. Etc...

You're talking about an utopian AI. The future of gameplay. Playing the game with the fewest clicks imagineable.
"Do you need a touchscreen, Sir?" I don't know if it's possible to eliminate micro completely. But even then. Repetition will still occur.

Don't misunderstand me, I enjoy this game very much and I'm not hatin'.
I'm just worried and trying to give constructive feedback.

Btw, I was sceptical at first. But the inclusion of area commands, and especially the area patrol command were really welcome from my side. So I'm convinced now that micro should be removed as much as possible.

What I'm saying is, that it's not only a problem of too much micro, it's also a problem with game design. Every stage of the game should provide me with new challenges and features to play around with. Planetary Annihilation is much more massive than any other RTS that I know of. But to be totally honest with you: The gameplay atm reminds me of some fun maps I played in Warcraft 3/Starcraft 2 back in the days.

There was one map where you had a square map, divided in many little squares. Your goal was to conquer other squares, which in turn would increase your unit production.
Simple concept, and I loved it.

On another map, you could only build marines, it was a SC2 funmap. And it kinda reminds me of how PA plays atm. Only fighting with marines can be fun and challenging, but not for more than 30 minutes at a time.

What made these fun maps so fun, was that the games were challenging but relatively short.

There is something, that attracts me about the concept of spam. It's fun in a way, that with "limitation" you're forced into other ways of thinking. Like the boardgame Go is fun, and challenging, while both sides only have one piece to play with. It gives you the feeling of pushing around little figurines on a board depicting a military map. And I always loved that kind of gameplay.

But that concept is only fun for so long. This game is massive, and massively time consuming. You can't compare it to some sort of fun map. That's why the concept won't work in really long games. Yes there are more units than before now. But has the game really changed with them? All they do is shoot "better" or differently, or have some stats changed that let's them excel in different roles. But is it really different? To me it just looks like more spam. And that's not bad. I want this game to focus on spam. It's kinda unique in this way.

But I can't, really can't stay interested in it for more than 30 minutes. And to me that's a sign that something is really wrong with the concept, or that the concept has to be adapted to the lenght of games we're able to play. I never had this before with a game that I liked. And I hope that I'm not the only one, and that it doesn't look like I'm sorta ranting and spouting bulls*** to you guys.

A game shouldn't exhaust me to the point where I want to stop playing it.

Well while the game starts in a kind of mobile war spam fest.

Do you believe it continues as such?

What would you rather the game turns into?

I'd say less spam, more diversity. We'd have to look to other RTS games to find out how they managed that problem. And we'll most likely always find some kind of tech tree, to keep you motivated throughout the entire game. I agree that higher tiers should not mean "better" than the previous tier, but more diverse.

That's what I'd rather see. Much more diversity in the unit roster. I'm seeing the new units, and there will be more, certainly. But the units that got implemented didn't really meet my expectations, I'm sorry to say. They didn't really change the battlefield in as much of a drastic way that I hoped them to do.

You know, I'm still advocating mega-units. But a big stompy megabot is not the only thing PA has room for.
Like in Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion one faction had a gun that could shoot planets in other solar systems. What I mean is that there are end-game units that completely change how the game plays. Fleets were still important as ever, but you had more diverse and refined methods of achieving your goals and annihilating your opponents. It wasn't perfectly implemented, but it's the thought that counts.

I see the flamethrower tank, the sniper bot, the vanguard tanks and other stuff. And I'm thinking to myself: do they really make sense? Are they what the game really needs most atm? Is even more spam the way to keep me interested throughout longer games?

And I have to say no. It's not what makes this game more fun to me. It looks like implementing units for the sake of having more different units.

What I'd really like to see, is something like they have done with artillery and wall mechanics. Walls can stop one half of the units, but the other one will just shoot over it. It created diversity in gameplay without using arbitrary stat limitations. I want more of that.

I think this is part of it also. The game is so big that reaching a sort of 'economic singularity' is basically built into the fabric of it.

This would not be a full solution, but it might be an interesting option: What if in games with say, more than 3 planets, you could in mid-game, open up sectors of your economy/army to outside players - basically ask for lieutenants to help you manage everything. Once they logged in, they would be in control of an area defined by you - for example all the units on and around a certain planet or a couple of planets. Of course you would maintain the right to kick them if they proved incompetent. But it would be interesting to see games that started as 1v1 balloon into two groups of real people as a game expanded.

An interesting percipient to be sure.

And I agree that the units currently don't really play much differently, although after a a certain amount players are still going to be throwing around masses of units, so saying that stuff is spam after a certain point is just saying that the army's are huge.

Welcome to the club!

Indeed.

Props for sticking to your guns I suppose!

Like asteroids and inter-moon nukes? Id really like better counter-play with them too, as using them is fun, but trying to fight back is hard and unrewarding on the most part.

Well again, spam is really just saying big armys.

Hopefully the snipers and flame tanks will give encouragement to not charging in with huge death blobs as snipers add attrition to nearby enemy forces, and flametanks munch through all of the spam that is silly enough to charge at them.

That is what I want, flame tanks that counter spam head on, but are easily picked off by snipers and artillery.

Preach it.

Hell yes I agree, the new artillery model is fantastic and I really love it. Although haven't tried being the defender yet....or against a human (IM a comp stomper), but it looks fantastic.

This is similar again to an idea I've been thinking about. If we could build a new commander, drop it off, and activate it we could add new AI players allied to our faction. Then use the alliance rules to share excess resources and give them some units to get started. There would have to be no "takebacksies" though. You've created a player, he's going to do his own thing.

I think if you could invite a friend to take over an AI's spot in the game you could use it to do exactly what you described.