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

Exactly!

You guys think too small. But the dudes who dreamt this game up did not think small. Mavor's talking about no map limits and a million units (a number which doesn't seem to have sunk in with the people in this thread who are still thinking in terms of thousands...), and you get your panties all in a bunch because some people are asking for a few spaceplanes and a little more complex base-building. I was even being deliberately modest in my proposals. You would have shot down Civilization, Deus Ex, Supreme Commander, and every landmark game in the history of the medium.

Besides, remember the word "scalable". No one is going to prevent you from playing on a tiny moon with 200 units and tech limits if that's the sort of thing you prefer. But there are already plenty of other games offering that experience. There is nothing that offers the experience that I am asking. Which is why I am asking for it

Regarding the space battles issue, let's put it this way. If space battles are never added to PA, the lore aspect becomes retarded. Like, seriously retarded. Are we supposed to believe that these sentient machines thousands of years into the future do not know how to make spaceplanes that we paltry 21st century humans will be making in a few years? Or are they retarded robots, and it simply never occurred to them that using spaceplanes might be a good idea?

That's what I mean when I say that the game is screaming for space battles. It's simulating a war across an entire solar system for christsake. How can you NOT have space battles?

Well you do in the orbital layers. The other thing to think about lore wise tho- these machines are tuned for maximum efficiency. They're not going to build massive space ships to fight war in an empty void without good reason to do so. What strategic benefit does holding an area of space *outside of a planets orbit with no resources available or strategic points of interest* gain them?

Humans need a ship to cross the void, these robots don't breath so can cross space on their own + they have teleporters which can move you between planets without all the hassle. I actually think game fits quite well from that aspect.

That *isn't* to say that I wouldn't love to have some nice space battles on the PA Engine, I just wonder if shoe-horning them into the main game is really a good idea. PA is a ground combat focused game after all.

They tried a mod called 'Final Frontier' for spring that was space ship focused, it looked awesome due to the large OTT ships with more guns than thrusters. The down side was as everything had so much fire-power it kinda got bland pretty quickly. I think a couple of very big powerful units have real impact, once everything is bristling with guns it gets a bit samey.

If they were going to do a space combat game I'd like to see it work out a bit how WingCommander views space combat- a variety of fighters and bombers based off of carriers + a few big heavily armed ships for support. I think a WC based space combat *RTS* would be really interesting..

Edit: updated statement for clarity

a ingame mod market place with total conversions, mods. some free some not. that would be epic!

I'm pretty sure that is exactly what they're planning (Neutrino has stated this goal quite a few times, sorry don't have a link to hand)

The idea is- let mod creators publish their work and charge for it. Uber will take a % of proceeds. Free mods will also be available.

Yep i've heard his plans for it and i think it could be massive.

I don't see the reasoning behind the near-religious level obsessions for a unit cannon

Haven't you heard? It *is* a new religion.

"And LO, the Unit Cannon provided dox, ant's and all manor of bountiful things"

First I want a ladder. A shiny one. Like the complex, super work intense to implement one that Uber wants to do and can't before release.
After that? The mod market place sounds nice.

I'd rather have server/offline.

@icycalm
If you're making wishes for the longevity of PA, wish for the two fundamental things needed to make it possible:

1) An extensive modding API for the engine itself, which will allow people to change PA in whatever ways they want.

2) Robust and compatibility focused-code. Most games built more than a decade ago are simply unplayable on a modern computer because of glitches and bugs unearthed after the operating system and graphics drivers evolved out from under them.

n-body physics for planets, as was originally the plan.

If Uber actually does continue to work on PA (which I doubt), then I have no fear that all my desires will be granted.

I think it's certain they will continue- the question is though, for how long? The answer to that will be determined if they can continue to make money from the game going forward. Personally I think it's got a good chance, RTS games are not like 'call of battlefield XXVI 2' or whatever, they tend to last and be played for a long time.

Look at sins of a solar empire, how many expansions now?

Actually the Lore for Ta, SupCom and PA all directly contribute to why there isn't space battles, and it all comes down to the Commander.

The thing is that building an army is easy, cheap even. but you know what's expensive? Trying to move that army across the vast interstellar distances between the hundreds-to-thousands of potential battle sites. It's a logistical nightmare.

But you know what what is cheap? Sending a single unit, the Commander. Comapred to sending an entire army sending just a commander is so cheap they can splurge on the Commander instead, making him the most advanced unit on the battlefield with special armor, comm equipment and so on.

The armies only take hours to build, why waste time and resources trying to cart them around instead of just building them on site?

Mike

For Server I really hope that will be there for release or very shortly thereafter. A missing ladder in the end probably really will only make very few people sad for a while, but a missing server to play offline would be quite an issue to a lot of people and I don't want to see people rage at PA for being in the category of "always online drm even in single player including overloaded servers directly after launch".

The guy who came up with this should be given a couple of gold stars. Quite clever.

Oh wait - he already has

PA is not a "ground game". There are ships and airplanes and orbital craft in it. Space is merely another layer in the infinity of layers in which a war spills over and is waged as long as there is the necessary technology for it. And in PA's universe there IS the necessary technology. I can't even begin to articulate a response to people who think that spaceplanes would not be useful to these robots. The very same argument can be made about why planes are not useful, or ships, or ultimately even ground units. Maybe the robots are better off fighting in a layer of mud.

Every layer is used to gain an advantage over the other, and ultimately over every one of them. This is what war is. The more layers your game simulates, the better it can potentially be (as long as you properly balance the layers, of course). That's why the addition of naval units was such a big leap, in whichever game featured them first (not Herzog Zwei, because it is an RTT, not an RTS), and the addition of air units, and the addition of orbital units, and finally the addition of space units (which are merely orbital units with a full freedom of movement). If PA can't accommodate them, some other game will in the future, and it will end up being a better game than PA.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. PA has already done a lot to advance the RTS genre. It will remain a masterpiece even if it doesn't do anything more. But it CAN do more, the devs are clearly capable of making that happen, so all I am saying is that they should at least make an effort to do so if the game is successful enough to make this financially viable. Why be content with less when you can have -- or at least TRY -- for more? That is the philosophy that has lead us from Dune II to PA, and it will be the philosophy that takes us from PA to the future. The only question is precisely who will be the ones to take us on the next step of this amazing journey. And my money is on Uber.

PA already pushes the edge of information and task overload for ordinary players. You're asking for a game that would be literally unplayable by the majority of people. There's no money in that.