Late Game Sudden Death - Discussion

It's a core feature - everyone has a commander, and if it dies, game over. In the early game, you have to either be getting really aggressive or screw up badly to lose it, but as time passes and everyone's army size starts getting larger, the commander becomes easier and easier to kill. Past a certain point, an unupgraded commander in an army will get immediately focusfired to death - and if it stays behind, the most efficient strategy might be to throw everything at its location in a suicide attack - while ignoring the army altogether. Of course, there are options that can make this less of a problem. For instance:

Shields
If you opt to leave your commander behind in the lategame, you naturally want to take measures to ensure their safety. Base defense shields are a natural response - protecting both the commander and your buildings from sudden raids. However, if there are units designed to rapidly take down shields (stratbombers come to mind), then once it becomes feasible to achieve a "critical mass" of these units, shields will no longer give your commander sufficient protection to move your army anywhere else.

Transports
If this game has lategame "heavy transports" for hauling lots of units around, loading your commander into one gives them both mobility and security. On the other hand, unless there's a way to discourage large numbers of anti-air fighter from making a massed suicide attack on the transport, its defensive capabilities in the lategame would be very limited.

Commander Upgrades
Upgrading your commander to make it tougher delays the point where a suicide attack on it makes more sense than directly engaging your army - but the upgrades are usually limited in number - whereas your opponent's economic capability continues to scale upward. Unless you can keep making your commander tougher, there will come a point where your foe has enough units to one-shot your commander several times over, at which point your commander must turn to alternatives.

Base Defenses
Killing a commander in a base requires having enough units so that whatever doesn't die to the base defenses still has enough firepower to kill it before the army returns. Since both defense structure production and enemy army production can scale with economy, effective base defenses could ensure your commander's safety - provided they can effectively wipe out hundreds of units in a very short time - since this is the kind of suicide attack a lategame economy can support. If 25 of unit X can kill a commander in 5 seconds, and the enemy has the economy to send 500 of unit X, then base defenses must be able to destroy over 95% of the enemy force before they reach the commander. When dealing with fast units like bombers, this does not give much time (though air defenses that slow attackers might be a limited solution).

Patrols
Knowing that a suicide attack is coming greatly improves your ability to respond, and hitting it before it nears your commander gives you a lot more flexibility. However, a fast suicide force means less units that can intercept it and less time to respond. In addition, a player who invests everything in a suicide attack will outnumber the patrols of someone who still invested in a conventional army - so the patrols may not be enough. For patrols to be effective, then, they must spot the suicide force in time for the army to return to defend. This seems like a feasible option.

Summary
Considering these options, it seems like implementing ways to maintain an effective scout network can head off much of the "suicide snipe" problem - but one must be wary of fast moving units backed by a powerful economy that can move in and kill a commander before a sufficient response can be mustered, even after being spotted. Alternative, scalable measures like base defenses or fast interceptors that slow them down, deal AoE, or can rapidly reacquire targets, would be needed in such instances.

Hope this rambling can start a good discussion.

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=41336&start=280

Here is a 29 page discussion on the same topic
Also, shields and commander upgrades will not show up in the game.

Here is the major thing keeping this from happening. To my knowledge, I don't think the enemy will know exactly where your commander is. Between the hundreds of Planets and Asteroids, I think this would be a hard tactic to do.

In the off chance the command is found, I think there should be some sort of alert to the player that your commander is in trouble.

I don't think it is a core feature.

Victory conditions are key in this disscussion. I love coming back from the loss of my commander to win when set to annihilation.

in SupCom the Commander was a human being, so assassinatino meant he was dead, and that was it.

But in PA a Commander is just a robot. If I was a robot in the far future, I would replicate myself, all connected to each other. That could be a way late game could work without the fear of imminent assassinations. The Commander could build a factory for new Commander Bots and spread them on his planets.

Annihilation is the name of the game why not set this as the default win condition. Assasination is fun but i enjoy hunting people down to the last man, there is some skill to finishing people off completely.

Different play modes have different win conditions.

The nice thing about assassination is that it forces a quick end to the game. Kill the Comm, go home and start a new game. There's no need to scour the galaxy personally destroying every single factory and constructor. However, there is a problem with apocalyptic tools being used to only kill the Commander. Without adequate ways to avoid trouble and escape, the first player to get one of these tools WINS. That's just terrible.

The ACU snipes thread presents many tools that to help the Comm survive at various stages of the game. A more explicit one, detailing individual abilities and how they might work, is in the topic index.

Like this idea! Set the right price for a commander-bot, and you can ensure a reasonable balance between the cost to create it an the resources needed to destroy it.

Depending on how things work out, the implementation might also need an exponentially increasing energy maintenance cost as you make more commanders - or not - can't really draw any conclusions pre-alpha.

Where is the topic index? This forum does not seem to have a search function (an excuse for missing the first thread)

Thanks for the responses!

My idea would be, if there is an Commander in an Army, it can only be attacked, if there are less tahn x number of units around him.
Or just make the defence of the Commander gets higher, the more Units are around him(/are alive).

http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=42948
Most of the discussion has already happened in the general forum. There's rarely anything new in the backer's lounge.

It's best to avoid arbitrary "can/can't attack" rules as much as possible. If physics make a weapon impossible to use for some reason, fine. But anything else should be fair game. Half of the fun is watching awkward weapons flail helplessly against the wrong targets, half of the fun is watching them connect.

Similarly, aura stacking effects are not big part of this game. PA is built off of a world of pristine technology, where things just work. The fine art of buffology belongs more in a fantasy realm.

I got an better, but similar Idea, how about making the dmg delt to the commander will be less if there are Units around, like 5% per unit. The dmg delt less to the commander will be equally spread to the units around the commander.

Too arbitrary and counter-intuitive.

Mike

what exactly is this topic about, because it looks like strategy sharing to me

It's about this; viewtopic.php?f=61&t=41336&start=0

Mike

Are we certain that commander death is insta-death? I searched around the forums and couldn't confirm it, but it's entirely possible I missed something.

While the game takes spiritual cues from Supreme Commander it is not a Supreme Commander game.

Again, apologies if I missed something that has already been stated.

The Point behind Commanders from TA and ACUs in SupCom is they are literally the Head of the Army, I'm Not sure on the fluff for TA, but in SupCom everything but the ACU and SCUs are robots controlled by the ACU/SCU, if the units had nothing controlling them they self destructed to avoid being hacked by an enemy ACU.

PA seems to be following a similar trend in that the Commander is directly Controlling all the units it builds, the units don't have a full AI like the commander does and if the commander dies they are essentially useless.

But really it all comes down to the game mode, Assassination is if you lose your commander you lose the game.

Mike

I wouldn't mind a mode that fits right between Annihilation and Assassination where once your ACU dies you lose control of all your units and buildings and an AI takes over focused solely on building a replacement ACU which once built will give you back control of everything. So if your ACU dies you aren't out of the game but it gives the other player a pretty massive advantage that could end the game quickly if they can capitalize on it, but if they fail and the replacement ACU is built then you still have a chance for a comeback.

Now, this is all fancy pantsy, and all.

But.

If you keep your commander in one location, one can always fling a planet at it. If you keep him moving, it's a simple matter of moving faster.

I tried outrunning a planet once. I wasn't quite able to get up to 107,000 km/h.