Legs vs track: Style vs. Function

There would still be a difference, it's not pure aesthetics. a walker will always be better at terrain traversal than a tracked unit.

I think it's pointless to differentiate between bipedal and more legs, or wheels and tracks.

Walkers have more mobility. tanks have more speed. Hover would probably have both. I'd make hover more expensive or higher tier anyway. (or both).

Your point is very valid, and while i am of the opinion that variety matters, i think redundancy does not. As i said before: i would like to have a clearer, more obvious choice of units. Having 3 forms of AA unit for every propulsion method is overkill, and just picking the right one from the beginning is best.

I do not believe this is true for every choice, tho. AA has it's main use for, well, AA. For a tank, speed does matter. Do you want speed or mobility?

Every unit in Zero-K is unique. Not every unit is probably what you would call "really unique" but it is hard to say that the rest of the units are generic. There are generic roles which the unique units for-fill in different ways. Raiders, skirmishers, assaults, artillery to name a few roles.
The theme of the factory sets the play style for the factory and the terrain of the map and the units deployed by the enemy decides how you use that to your advantage.

Not everyone here has played zero-K so we can't comment on it.

But I will say that if you have 2 AA units from the same factory, at the same Tech level, isn't that redundant even if they go about it differently? A player will pick 1, and then not build the other in favor of just building more of 1.

But we have gone off-topic as this isn't about unit roles, but unit mobility.


I feel like we could combine the hover and tracked unit factory's to cover the lighter units (Hover) and he heavier units (Tracked) as both are similar in their ability to climb up terrain, and neither are particularly fast.

Have a factory for ATV and leg users, and then have a fast factory for wheel users like scouts and other special weapons.

Rough terrain? ATV Factory.
Water or hazardous terrain(Lava)? Tank Factory.
Wide flat terrain? Wheel factory.

As I see it.

It depends. If there is enough diversity among among air units that you would want to use different AA against different air units then there can definitely be advantageous to switch between several types.
In Zero-K there is only 1 dedicated antiair unit in every factory but many units can work as flex AA and do pretty well, especially against gunships . In that case your army might be able to fend off airunits just fine but you might want to include dedicated AA that have longer range just to prevent the airunits from circling around your army and picking off lone units.

I have to disagree about hover units being slow. They should really have the fastest top speed since they operate without friction. They would just have poor acceleration/deceleration and maneuverability.

They should also be able to float over small obstacles (such as wreckage from small or low-profile units) without a problem.

Depends on the type of hover, do you mean like magnetic levitation or an airbag type of hover?

Magnetically levitated hover units would be fast, but very expensive to build, and wouldn't have as great weight carrying capacity as a air bag hover unit.

Airbag hover units would be slower them most bout would have the ability to equip heavy weapons and armour, and would be quite cheap to build.

I mean anti-grav. It is science fiction after all.

Airbag is completely impractical for most battle purposes (except a simple transport maybe), and magnetic requires a track.

How so? You can armor plate the skirt, and some modern day hovercraft are big enough to be ships.

While going over lava might be a stretch, I would think that anti-gravity hovercraft would be extremely expensive when compared.

Science fiction yes, but this is a war of thousands of machines, and some times the old ways are best.

Statistically different? Sure. There are countless ways to stat out a unit, as many as there are combinations of bits. How a unit chooses between the DBZ 3 (power, speed, technique) is a matter of personal taste and preference. They are factional differences, hence why I keep using that word.

Are the units functionally unique? Helllll no. There is little difference between HOW and WHY two different AAs are used, for example. Even the Zero-K strategic interface was aware of this, which is why it shows units as combination of frequently used chassis and roles.

Does PA need this? No. Does a player need every single combination of chassis and role? Nooooooooooo. If you find 12 different and interesting ways of dispatching a unit, fine. You need 12 units to show off just how cool you can be. But keep in mind that:

Counts as ONE.

There are 5 types of stationary AA turrets buildable by all types of engineers not to mention that all ground defense turrets can shoot at air as well. Each one of the AA turrets have their use depending on the situation and by cost.
Mobile AA turrets produced by factories have similar diversities and if you could you would use different mobile units in different situations not to mention that they can traverse different types of terrain, have different speeds and different turnrate(which is useful for dodging precision bombers).
I'm not saying that having just 1 AA unit is necessarily bad design but if you want there is plenty of ways to differentiate AA depending on how much diversity you want.
Airunits aren't 1 type of unit like the Cyberdemon. Having different types of airunits might require different types of AA if you don't want to deploy fighters which gives the defending player more active choices to offset the passive nature of defending vs air with ground forces.

But 5 types seems rather excessive considering that some kinds of AA are simply better overall at the job, even with draw backs.

T1 AA from supcom was never useful once you got T2 and T3 AA.

And even with T2 AA and T3 AA being different in their roles, you technically could still replace T2 AA with just more T3 AA and get a better result.

But isn't this a debate for another thread? as It has nothing to do with mobility and style vs function.

That has nothing to do with the mechanics of the weapons and all to do with SupCom's Tier Balance.

Mike

Ahh fair do's mike.

I like the Idea of having more functions with these different units, but perhaps the variation should not be offered all at once, i have not played TA and just recently started playing zero-k, it offered that huge variety all at once and was not easy to learn all the different options. I am not sure Zero-k has enough differentiation between bots and vehicles, bots should certainly be mobility focused and more spamable, vehicles should be faster over flat terrain, more powerful, and more armor, as well Zero-k doesn't have enough of the right kind variations in ship. I suggest that Tier 1 is just the basics, Kbots, vehicles, aircraft, Ships then when you get to tier 2 you get the specializations.

Kbots
-Cloak
-shield
-amphib
-spider

Vehicles
-Hovercraft
-tanks
-amphib
-shield
-specialty

Aircraft (gunships)
-fixed wing (non-stop fast)
-transports
-Orbital
-seaplane
-Commander Aircraft/orbital flagship (built by commander for commander)

Naval (transports included in base or as seperate option)
-Submarines
-Carriers
-legged
-artillery
-flagship (built by commander can contain commander)

Total Annihilation started the theme of 'give every mode of traction a set of generic roles, with each traction providing distinct battlefield advantages'. All Zero-K(or Complete Annihilation as it was called when I still played it.) did was carry on that theme but remove the distinctions of 'tiers'. This discussion is about the validity of that theme. So I consider these games very much relevant.

No; there is no reason for an RTS game to have as many different units- any more than there is a reason for it to have thirty, or ten, or just one type of unit. This comes down to what kind of unit balance is being aimed for.

The reason I would need a tankish kbot over a tankish vehicle is because I need a tankish kbot. If moving over steep hills from the ground becomes my only viable option then that heavy, ground pounding kbot serves a critical function. It has nothing to do with faction diversity. Now Supreme Commander didn't need so many roles defined by traction. This was because, apart from terrain blocking fire, battlefields were mostly static; all movement was relegated to '100% passable/100% impassable'. If Uber Entertainment intends to implement at least a similar level of environmental interaction in Planetary Annihilation as was present in Total Annihionation(grades affecting performance, different modes of traction inducing different performance levels) then it would be silly not to include such environmental factors into the equation of possible unit balance.

Although; I can give you a perfect example of unit redundancy in Total Annihilation if you want one: seaplanes. Their only defining factors were they could land on the ocean floor, and had to be built from a seperate waterbound factory. Beyond that, they had no functional difference from normal aircraft.

That is an excellent point, and I hope Uber keeps this in mind.

However, it's important to remember that while Supcom's terrain differentiation was more rudimentary, it made up for that through the scale of the conflict. My concern is that if you keep that scale, but add in the terrain differentiation of TA, it could result in a more micro-heavy game, as the player would have to focus on managing the units over their appropriate terrains.

I feel this is the issue in Zero K, which, while it has an excellent tactical and strategic base, doesn't scale up well to the grand strategy level, as there's a heavy focus on low level unit control. (And a good portion of that comes from working with the terrain.)

That said, I'd definitely like to see that terrain differentiation come into play in PA, but it shouldn't take away from the higher level strategic aspect.

There's only so many ways to kill units. Supcom T2 and T3 showed two major variants of anti air. T2 was the "riot" variant, a flak cannon that killed swarms. T3 was the "direct fire" variant, a missile launcher that could intercept the fastest craft. So yes, there were two different AAs and they clearly filled two different needs.

What didn't matter was the difference between T1 and T3 anti air. Both were direct fire, pretty much the same weapon style doing the same job. The only difference was that the bigger one was a superior model. Even if tier balance wasn't borked, they'd still be the same units doing the same thing, separated by differences only OCD can find.

So just call it what it is. You're looking for a niche unit- a generic role with some kind of extra perk. I have nothing against niche units, but the point is that you only need them for an odd job. If it wasn't for the specific need, then the generic unit could just as well have done it.

Favoring generic units is a way of adding more importance to niche units. If a player just needs raw units, then they'll be happy with the cheapest junk money can buy. If a niche is so important that players will pay more, then it's absolutely adding something to the game. There are many different ways to change a unit's cost, but I favor increasing the necessary infrastructure (energy, build time) as the player isn't necessarily getting more raw power, but is rather getting more niche tools with his "tech level".

In this respect, TotalA has quite a bit in common with Zero-K. Factory types shared a lot of common units, but were separated by a few unique units. The differences are pretty much what you'd expect out of a faction- a complete unit set with some perks. Separating the factories meant that it was expensive to access all the best units and perks from each set.

Even so, you didn't pick a factory for its generic set. They could all have the same gun, cost, and HP, and it wouldn't matter. You picked a factory because its niche units had something that you wanted, which the other factories couldn't provide.

In this respect I applaud supcom and even supcom2. Supcom simplified many things down to show clear and concise unit roles, and its factions had tangible differences between units of the same role. Supcom2 pushed out from those boundaries, sacrificing the basics but trying out new ideas and exotic ways of fighting. It's that sort of stuff that gives niche units their flavor, giving them differences that really matter as opposed to a "Rocko of +2 climbing".

Possibly, but when you keep the mechanics and do balance things you can make them into 3 distinct AA types. But I've mentioned that plenty of times before(Meanly Tier-based Threads) and don't need to re-iterate here.

Mike

One of the problems (and yes, I'm calling it a problem) with Zero-K is that the huge number of units makes it really difficult to get into the game. It takes hours of play to really figure out all the units and how the work and how to defend against various things. And those aren't hours of fun play. Those are hours of "I just lost a game of 1v1 because I didn't know the answer to this one unit and it destroyed me completely".

So if you're going the multiple redundancy route, at least make it clear and visible how to stop various kinds of units with various other kinds of units. You don't want players to learn all of that by heart, because it's not a fun part of the experience to lose two games to each unit just to figure out how to stop it.

Hell I've played dozens of games of Zero-K and I still don't feel comfortable enough to play anything except Cloakbot because I don't know the units well enough to be able to put up a fight with them.

Personally, I don't find Zero-K's learning curve steeper than other unit-rich RTS like Dawn of War or Warlords Battlecry, and being skilled in one or two unit sets is enough for a new player, especially in team games.
Learning those units is also quite enjoyable for me, perhaps that's due to I spent majority of time in single player and chicken defense as a newbie.