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

Mmm, Million units? We would have to rescale the current planet sizes in a major way just to have sufficient space for that many units to stand in. Currently you would have a hard time fitting 25k units on a planet of the current sizes.

As for the longevity of PA, I don't really consider PA to be an entirely new game. Its really more of a continuation of TA, and since a significant portion of the PA dev team are the same people who developed TA, I think it is more proper to say that PA has been in development for over a decade. Its not just a business or software project, its a life's work with this dev team. I liken it to Nethack. There is no reason to believe that this will not continue to be developed in some form or another by these guys. Even at this point, I consider the KS a complete success, and in my mind, the most important part of the goods has been delivered. All that remains at this point is continued refinement and expansion.

So games have to be complex to have an emphasis on team play?

The most units is about 80000 but that's over 6 hours and not touching them ever since it will crash you.

That's where team play comes in. And for those who say people don't want to play teams in RTSes, we need to find out why this is so. It can't be inherent in the team play concept; the biggest multiplayer games today are team-based. How do we make RTS players adopt team play to the same extent as other genres have? Obviously, we must first have a game that supports teams. Then the players must be encouraged to try it out. Then more and more of them will end up preferring it to solo play. And finally we can have a game that is more or less entirely team-based.

I don't see why this cannot be accomplished by the RTS genre. In fact, as I have explained -- and as even the naysayers are unwittingly doing when they complain of increased complexity -- this is the only way forward for the genre in the long term.

You can also see it the opposite way. If increased complexity is a reason to use team play, team play without increased complexity is superfluous. To understand what I mean, take an extreme example: imagine Dune II offering 10-man team play. What would 10 people do when controlling a tiny Dune II army, with only a single layer of combat, etc.? Most of the time they'd just be sitting there and staring at the screen without doing anything. So if you make a game that allows 20 people on a team, you better have enough complexity in there to keep all those people fully occupied, otherwise your large team size is a gimmick.

Now, the million units that Uber is shooting for is certainly enough to keep 20 people occupied -- or even 100 people lol. But I would take 500,000 or 100,000 units and an extra layer of combat any day over 1,000,000 units and one layer less.

Guys, remember that the "1 million units" thing was NOT a gameplay goal, merely a technical goal.

Mike

I've mentioned this in previous threads, but basically, having space battles and space units almost entirely invalidates fighting directly on planets at all. If controlling space between planets was a thing, then having land armies would mean absolutely nothing. Controlling and locking down space would be the only viable strategy, and planets would become like planets in sins of a solar empire, sitting there as resource pumps for your space fleet, and never seeing ground combat at all.

Um, Wirths Law says that if you create an engine capable of supporting 1 million units, someone will design a mod that is planned around 1.5 million. Also, if you balanced out spaceships by making them extremely expensive and slow to build, you could balance the ground game back into relevance. Not to mention making cheap ground based anti-spaceship structures could easily make it so that the best (cheapest/quickest) way to gain control of a planet is thru a ground invasion.

This is the opposite view to those who say space would be useless for the robots. You are saying space would be the be-all end-all for the robots.

In other words, this is a balance issue. Which I have already indicated:

EDIT: Brokenshakles beat me to it.

Yea, you would have to design around making a ground army a projectile launched by a space navy as the interplanetary standard. Make that the optimal strategy and you will have a ground and space game that can coexist. Just make anti spaceship terrestrial weapons cheap and long ranged enough to guarantee a zone of exclusion around a planet for the current owner/possesor and make the best way to breach the zone dropships containing ground units, preferably preceded by a nuclear strike. Note that the anti spaceship weapons would have to be tough enough to survive multiple nukings as well. Since anti ship weapons would not be able to target terrestrial units, gaining control would depend on the ground armies ability to destroy these defensive systems so a space fleet could close in and offer support via war material drops and orbital bombardment.

Might as well add another item to my wishlist. Its purpose is to allay the fears of those who are against layer creep, which should help move the game in the direction I desire.


5. MAKE ALL LAYERS BEYOND GROUND OPTIONAL
When setting up a game you get the following options, with checkboxes next to them which you can tick:

Naval
Air
Orbital
Space

So if someone is only comfortable with Dune II-level ground game, he can play that to his heart's content. If someone else can deal with ground and naval, he can choose that. If he can also handle air, he can add that on top too. And so on and so forth. You could even have a warning next to the Space layer saying that team-play is recommended for this option.

Naturally, the balancing work needed to balance all those options would be immense... But we are talking 5 and 10 years down the line, so I don't think it's impossible.

Thats a useful tool for modders, but not really so much for the game lobby. They should definitely throw something like that in the SDK though.

Yep, I'm already content with being able to get up to 1000 - 2000 units!

The cherry on the top would be a dimensional layer. Fight on multiple fronts in alternate dimensions! Dimensional Annihilation, where you can smash dimensions on top of other dimensions!

You miss my point entirely.

Games do not have to be complex to have an emphasis on team play.

PA already has an amazing team play side.

But, if you introduce an extremely complex element and the reason for justifying the element is "oh, they can handle it because two or more people will play together" is bad reasoning because it screws over solo players.

I see a new Kickstarter brewing...

As Uber has said before, the vast majority of games are single player matches against the AI. The number of people who have the time and energy to devote to online play, let alone team play, on a regular basis on top of their full time job or education is vanishingly small.

I would have posted "Stop asking for Star Control".

Idk, it makes sense to me that space battles are bound to only the single plane gravity well. If you start making a whole lot of empty space to randomly stash units in, there is a lot of jerking around to be done. My biggest concern is having commanders just be able to be anywhere at all.

I like coop VS ai

Wikipedia says that 67 million people play League of Legends, a team-based tactics game, every month. I don't imagine most of them are unemployed and uneducated. It's just a question of getting a few tens of thousands of them to get to love PA. I don't think this is an unrealistic goal. In sum, I do not think that the human species is genetically incapable of creating and nurturing a large-scale team-based real-time strategy game.

Definitely doesn't happen overnight. More realistic to think they would play a game against the AI, then coop against the AI, then play against a few friends, then start playing against randoms for serious, and then not even do so with a high level attempt but just an attempt to try to beat more people than lose against.

Progression makes more sense, then again, start somewhere first, whatever makes numbers first, then facilitate gradually.

Right off the bat there should be some way to seek competitive play, there already kind of is with community ran sign ups then meeting on a teamspeak and running a bracket. As well as PAStats.