This is a concept I was toying with for our mod but never implemented. The idea that some weapons, no matter how many you have, will simply not damage units of sufficient strength. The idea is similar to the concept that you can shoot a tank with arrows forever but never damage it. Similarly, if this were implemented, you could take early weaker units even in a large swarm and never damage a late game monster unit. This could be implemented with the use of a minimum damage variable which you could set to a certain amount that is needed before the unit begins to take damage. I think I never did anything with it though, because I wasn't sure how to get around the consequences. For example, some weapon types may be damage over time, but have a very small actual damage amount per instance, and therefore such weapons might be ineffective against these stronger units, where perhaps you don't want that. This is a concept that could use some working out perhaps.
This is directly contrary to the point of having early game units useful late However, on a specialized counter unit it could work.
Not contradictory - since surely the mega units would not be the only targets in the late game environment. A unit does not need to be able to damage everything in order to be said to be useful.
This would lead to hardest-of-the-hard rock paper scissors gameplay. With very careful game design, it might be made to work. However I strongly recommend this not be included in PA. Damage types become exponentially more complicated with more types, and promote RPS gameplay even if they are non-absolute. Absolute RPS would be a very different RTS game in many ways. Could be an interesting experiment, though. PA needs to take a page out of ZK's book and have no damage types. Everything that does damage to targets should deal its amount of damage without modification (or at least any modification that might not also be present on anything else). This makes units behave much more intuitively, and it is simpler to learn. Arbitrary damage types are bad shortcuts that eventually cut out a great deal of depth in the long run, in return for very easily crafting a gameplay system by forcing players to do what the developers want.
Weapons that can't damage something, should still have an effect. Maybe stunning the unit, stalling economic throughput, or halting armour regen. Completely toothless weapons aren't weapons at all.
Agreed. Again - arrows and tanks... Just because the arrow can't hurt the tank at all doesn't make arrows useless. Tanks aren't the only targets surely. Its not super important to incorporate this, but it'd be cool to have the weapon tag in the blueprint anyway, for the modders.
So far what we have heard from the developers is that mega-units like the Experimentals in SupCom won't be as prominent in the game. If anything the 'super-weapons' will be what we've seen in the pitch and in interviews, moving planetoids into new orbits like massive transports, or crashing them into planets. Obviously shooting at incoming planetoids will require projectiles that can achieve escape velocity, or energy that is powerful enough to not diffuse over distance - they are as impervious to small arms fire (those little jogging robots and hover tanks) as tanks are to arrows - you require large weapons fire to scratch them. In other words, I think in pretty important ways your idea is already embedded in the existing design concepts.
