Melee units poll

You just described the difference between the regular move order and attack-move order in Supreme Commander.

This is easy, come on now.

Regular Move

Attack Move

Mike

Almost, except even on attack mode they don't deviate from their course to chase enemies, they just stop and shoot.

Sure you could just make melee units chase enemies down, but that is very exploitable. "oh no my random unit is being chased, ill just walk him into a killzone. Suddenly gameplay relating to melee units becomes very micro intensive.

You need to start being much more specific, are we talking about shooting units or Melee units? because simply due to thier base nature you have to treat them differently, it's part of the reason why DOW1 Had several different "stances' for units to take.

Mike

Your original detracting point was ordering large numbers of melee units to distribute their targets would be too hard. This implies you envision the usage of melee units in large numbers. Now you want to complain about individual units being picked off due to enemy micro?

Either way, how is looking out for one type of unit to make sure they don't die any different from looking out for any other type of unit.

I have many detracting points, they two you mentioned are not mutually exclusive.

..and because this particular unit *has* to run off in order to do anything practical.

And by this unit I generally have a picture of a spider bot in my head that scuttles around and punches/whacks enemies with a sword. There are some more interesting types of melee units mentioned in this thread that might have potential, I believe bobucles summarised them earlier.

The only reason why melee works in TF2 is because of the limited gamesize.


From an efficiency point of view:

Take a unit. take a melee unit of equal size. Roughly, 4-5 melee units can attack 1 unit before they start hitting eachother.

Take a unit. take [a unit with a gun] of equal size. How many gun units can attack? Until the outermost units can't fire at it. You can have dozens of units firing on one.


Why does melee work? small army numbers. In TF2, melee works well when your gun runs out and you run into an enemy. in PA, you're not gonna run out of ammo. And you're not gonna have 1 enemy running into another on a regular basis. And if you're in an analogous choke point in TA(if such a thing will even be there), it's better to have ranged units because of the "more units can shoot a unit" argument.


Lastly: if your unit can cloak, having a gun means you have all the advantages of a gun unit. No need to go primitive and strap a sword on.

How a particular unit has to behave is irrelevant; your current complaint now is micro. Yet you seem to ignore that there have been many units in prior games which require careful attention to either be effective or not die, even without the quality of being melee units: the ARM flash tank also *has* to get up close in order to be useful; the Forged Alliance attack bombers are known to require microing to not uselessly die. Are fast attack vehicles and attack bombers bad now?

So far the reasons you've layed out for why melee units are bad are "because they have to melee", "units have to clump together"- you're just describing the essence of what melee combat is- you're not explaining why it in itself is bad.

If you simply stated "I don't believe melee units fit into the scope, the balance, nor the theme of this game." that would be fine enough. Instead you're predetermining their exact usefulness from your own drawn up super-duper technical terms about how the engine can't possibly handle them(which you can't possibly know), speculations on what Planetary Annihilation's engine is capable of(which are likely false), obscure in-game scenarios(which are also likely false), and your own inability to identify problem areas(the engine not being able to handle them would actually make it an engine issue).

I'm with Ayceeem. While they should be skip because they're not in the right kind of scope, it would certainly be possible.

You can make them behave properly with new commands. Why not introduce a form of 'squad attack' for them, for example? A simple "attack everything in this area" should do fairly well. If the enemy falls back too far, they'll just break off the attack.

There's also a reason the Dawn of War light melee dudes all come equipped with jetpacks. It's to get into the fray quick enough.

Also, there's a major advantage to being surrounded by enemies with guns if you're a melee bot. Any shot fired at you that misses will hit an enemy. (Well, normally it'd be "your enemies can't get a safe line of fire", but somehow I don't think machines are going to care)

So yeah. Doable, but shouldn't be done, I guess.

let's re-examine this:

Say you have 10 gunbots firing at a melee bot. All 10 can hit it, and not necessarily eachother

say you have 10 meleebots hitting a melee bot. only 4-5 can attack at a time. the other 5-6 are doing nothing. the "hit eachother" argument applies here too.

Now say it's 10 meleebots going after a gunbot. If they have equal speed, the gunbot wins. if the meleebots are slightly faster, it depends whether the gunbot can fire fast enough. in roughly 60% of the cases a single gunbot can win from an arbitrarily sized melee army....
(with a roughly inverse linear relation between the amount of melee bots going slightly faster and the survival chances of the gunbot)


Any argument of making the meleebot faster, better, stronger, invisible or teleporting, can be applied to a gunbot and it will still have all the advantages of a gun vs melee.

As noted above: it only works if you force it in. Only if you make arbitrary and forced decisions. Especially in a world where only metal and energy count, a bullet more or less does not matter.

Assuming an infinite flat plain and infinite time, yes. Not exactly battlefield conditions, those.

Actually a melee bot can be stronger than a gun bot for the simple reason that a melee weapon has less volatile and complex components than a gun. It's also a cheaper option than a gunbot, which might also make the difference.

Because we all know that the invention of the cross bow destroyed the use of swords forever right?

Guns are dominant now because you can't shield against them, but down the line that might not be the case, meaning a return of melee weapons to finish a opponent.

point 1: are you willing to sacrifice this little bit of complexity along with the ability to attack at range? Also, they're robots, they're complex by definition.

Point 2: cheapness? money is of no concern and resource-wise it doesn't matter

Depending on the machine and its purpose. I don't actually know that much about supreme future tech. Doesn't change the fact that sometimes you might need a machine that beats things with a shard of metal. Who knows.

You must start every match by building the biggest robot ever seen, I suppose?

No. However, assuming an equal robot frame for the gun and melee bot, there will only be a minimal difference in resources...

I think assuming that the gun is such a cheap part of the bot might be a bit bold. But then again, I don't know much about future space bots.

Well, whatever you design, it's gotta have:
-CPU
-Actuators
-Power source
-electronics

i think that's more "expensive" than a gun

I don't know. I never really thought about the kind of components that go into a weaponised laser, a gauss rifle or a plasma cannon.

As justification for a cloaked melee bot, you can easily hand wave that and say that guns have a type of reactor that can't be cloaked. It could be an interesting surgical strike unit.

handwaving is not the problem. It just makes no sense, and it only serves as an "i want melee so we have melee" and not a "it makes sense to have this unit".