Let's assume that Uber continues work on PA for many years...

To counter the negativity regarding PA's apparently imminent official launch, let's imagine that the game remains financially viable for many years, and that Uber keeps adding features to it at the same rate they've been doing. What would the game look like in 5 or 10 years? What would you want it to look like? Talk about all the far-out additions to the game you would like to see Uber implementing.


1. SPACE BATTLES
Number 1 for me would be the widely mentioned space battles. The setting was made for them and basically screams out for them, and if they are never added the PA universe will seem very incomplete to me. Uber says they need a new UI to make them work, so hooray for a new UI! (Incidentally, I would love to see someone with experience in this field open a new thread and discuss possible solutions and implementations.)


2. RETURN OF THE HUMANS
Reading Uber's answer to the following question gave me an idea for an expansion pack:

Humans are back, and blah blah blah some cool backstory that Uber's writer will come up with, and they want REVENGE on the machines that blah blah blah whatever it is that the machines did to them.

I have always thought that the TA-SUPCOM-PA line of the RTS family tree has had a somewhat bland and sterile feel because of the lack of a proper narrative and the focus on emotionless robots. To be sure, there is a narrative justification for it, and in some respects it's cool and different from what everyone else has been doing, but a narrative justification for an aesthetic deficiency does not suddenly make the deficiency any less deficient. PA needs another "race" anyway, so why not make it humans? The "as far as they know" line in the above quote makes me think that someone at Uber has at least considered this possibility. Of course that would only be the first of at least one or two more races that I would like to see make it into PA in the long term.


3. EXTENSIVE CITY- AND BASE-BUILDING ASPECTS
That's another area in which the TA-SUPCOM-PA line is inferior to Ensemble's, GSC's, etc. line of RTSes. The "city"-building aspect of an RTS is supposed to be where half of the complexity of the genre is coming from (because that's what an RTS is: city-building + RTT), and there's just not enough of that in these games compared to the competition. TA is lauded for having a "complex economic model", but it has only 2 resources compared to Cossacks' 6. Now, you might say that that would end up turning the game into a micro-fest, but this segues nicely into my next wish:


4. MAKE TEAM-PLAY THE CENTER OF THE GAME
From what I've seen (I haven't played the game -- waiting for 1.0 to drop before I do ), PA has the best implementation of team-play in an RTS ever, by allowing as many players as you want to control a single team, giving orders, sharing resources, etc. AND THIS IS PRECISELY THE SOLUTION TO THE MICRO-MACRO antagonism, and the one which makes perfect sense. The more you complexify the game, the more people you will need to bring in to control a faction, exactly as it works in the real world. You can't expect to control the "one million units" that Jon Mavor is shooting for alone, all the while managing the giant logistical structure that's necessary to create and support such an army. If Mavor wants to make the ultimate macro-RTS, he'll have to face reality at some point -- the same reality that people like Napoleon face when they decide that maybe it's not a good idea to try to run an entire empire on your own, and find some people who can act as his generals and lieutenants. In this way, the mentally challenged StarCraft nerd who hates strategic zoom and can't fathom controlling more than 200 units can be given his squad to blissfully micromanage all day long, and the megalomaniac brainiacs like us can take a step back, observe the entire conflict unfolding, and bark orders at them all the while crafting the long-term strategy that the S in the RTS is supposed to stand for. This is the next step forward for the RTS genre. It is ambitious, it is difficult, it will not be very popular (because there are not many megalomaniac brainiacs around ), but it is the only way to keep evolving the genre, which means to keep complexifying it. Sooner or later someone is bound to do it, and I have high hopes that Jon Mavor and Uber Entertainment will be the ones to do so. PA is being built with scalability in mind, so all that they have to do is keep adding features, and whenever someone complains that "this **** is too much to handle!" reply "then get someone to help you out!" And voila: you'll have the ultimate real-time strategy game.


But that's enough of my wishes, I am looking forward to reading yours.

Creating and enlarging your own planets with absurd amounts of mass/energy. Would be so great.

I very much disagree with 1, 3, and 4.

The only reason I disagree with #4 is because I argue that it's already in the game. Playing the army game mode is by far my favorite part about PA. I'm not an overly great 1v1 player, but I'm pretty good at team play – and it's tons of fun to work together.

As for #1, the reason I disagree with it is because it would be way too much. Deep space combat in the style of Star Wars/Star Trek is a game in of itself. Adding that element would be simply waaaaay too complex. It's just too much.

I also disagree with #3 because of what you mentioned. It'd make the game too complex and to micro oriented. PA is supposed to be a combat oriented game. Economy should take a back seat to combat.

And "well, team play" is not an answer because the majority of PA players will play solo. If the game is so abundantly complex that it can only be played as a team game, then that's bad.

Things I want to see added in the next 5 years:
Unit Cannon
Unit Cannon
Unit Cannon
UNIT CANNON

I would see large-scale space combat as probably a game-mode of its own, and most likely implemented through mods.

Ever used or thought about the system editor or getting the cheat server mods? Everything you want has already been made.

To OP



You have successfully compiled almost everything that the devs do not want/think would hurt gameplay. I don't mean to be spiteful, but it's really remarkable that people post these every week with the nearly the exact same requests.
I sort-of-but-not-really like the idea of humans, but I honestly can't see a way for that kind thing to happen.
Different tech is a confirmed no, so...

Tell me, do you think people who are not you would benefit from your changes? I would say an extremely small minority. FFA's are a staple of rts games, so making team games the "stuff," won't work.
I can easily manage thousands of units across multiple planets, so can about 90% of the playerbase at this moment. Are teammates good to have? Certainly. In a team game.

How do you know? I find that many not ladder matches are teams, or AI, however I don't declare it to be so.

Proof man! Besides, the game needs to cater to both, no matter which is prefered.

Stop asking for Simcity.

Macro strategy doesn't mean micro economy. PA is a combat-focused game, and the economy is at the point where it's manageable and can encourage good gameplay, but doesn't take focus away from the robot wars and utter obliteration.

The proof that most people play solo comes from Uber themselves. They've said that most people just play against the AI. Take a look at the list of replays. They've said so on the forums, and Mavor has said so directly to me on the phone.

It's just that simple, the majority of RTS players play solo against the AI. It was that way on TA, on SupCom, and in PA.

And, like you said, we need to cater to both types of players. Let's say that it was 90/10, 60/40, 50/50, 30/70, solo to multiple players – that doesn't matter. We need to cater to both types of players. We can't introduce game mechanics that make it to complex to play as a solo player.

Pretty much sums up what I would have posted.

To add on to this, for clarity, they also cannot be too simple to be played in multiplayer. Where that balance less is very subjective, but both of these points need to be considered.

(Especially when making requests for stuff we want added)

For number 1 you may see a mod coming from me after release . Just have to learn how to use blender as I am used to using autodesk Maya, or wait till I can convert stuff from Maya so that it works in PA. Been planning the mod for a while so I already have a good idea of what i'm going to do.

I'll be starting a thread in the mod section soon showing some concepts for those who are interested.

Is kind of odd how often stuck requests are made, isn't it? If people want to pay sim-city, then play that. I understand the defensive-full-tech style play (that's how I was when noobie me started my Halo Wars journey), but sim-city isn't real time strategy.

Also, sorry for double post, phones are rough to use.

I'm not talking about the system editor, but ultra-late ingame mechanics. The way planets, orbits and annihilation works is to elaborated and complex to limit it to the starting planets.

I don't mind either of these. though I'd rather see a strong large competitive playerbase than new features messing with the community.

Supreme Commander of a Solar Simcity: Planetary Annihilation Co-op Edition. DLCs not included.

That argument makes no sense. The game already gets crazy to manage once you start throwing in more and more planets, teams or no. artificially making things more complicated is silly and inelegant.

I'd personally like to see Uber use the engine in some new contexts...

The idea of a space battles type game is fantastic IMO- *however* I don't think it fits as an extension of PA in it's current form.

No I think this engine would be great for a space combat focused 'Homeworld' like game, where the planets have much more involvement (normally these games are either *in space* or *on a planet* the PA engine allows for those lines to be blurred). The point is that in this new game (built on the now existing PA engine) the main game-play would be in space, however you would have certain things done on the planet as well. The planet side of things would be minimalist (like orbital in PA) to keep the game manageable.