After the Alpha has been released, I would like to collect some ideas of unit types that are still missing for a balanced gameplay and interesting strategies. At the moment it seems a bit as if mobile land battle would be mostly about spamming tanks. I absolutely miss skirmishers like in Zero-K: Mobile land units (usually bots) with low health, longer range than tanks, low rate of fire, high damage, medium speed. They would make land battles much more dynamic, as they are effective against tanks. You need light bots with high speed to take out skirmishers, and heavily armored units with high rate of fire or area damage to take out high numbers of light bots. That would make land battles much more dynamic.
I'm not sure on what kind of marines you are referring and if they really have the same characteristics as skirmishers (especially concerning fire rate and armor). But skirmishers definitely are not the ultimate unit type, particularly when you have some fast bots, if you mean that. But to some extent they avoid tank spam and force you to make more complex and unit specific moving strategies instead of only going forward or back with the whole army.
There are lots of missing/potential unit types. But filling those voids isn't really the idea ATM, the goal at this stage is to get features working and set some baselines, and we have enough units(and types) for that, once we get a baseline and are done or mostly done with the features we can start working on adding in new units/unit types as the exact needs become identified. Mike
You're right, features may be more important at the momentary state of the development process. But I learned that skirmishers are essential for good mobile land battles and at the current number of mobile land units there should actually already be a skirmisher (to me that's one of the three most important mobile land units).
I agree that now the games feels like: - T2 = bigger T1 - T2 stomps T1 - Tanks stomp bots (?) I've not seen bots used, in most videos it's just tanks, air bombers and arty (tanks and towers) - Air serves as scout and commander assassination A bit higher variety and different roles for each unit would be better: - IMHO it's kind of silly to have 3 types of tanks which basically fit the same role, 1 tank is good enough (or maybe 2 if you really love'm) or at least they need different sets of weapons, speed and armor (but that means not all 3 really being tanks) - Infantry could be slow, and we would T1 "transport vehicles" to transport them - And each unit should be unique in it's role, with T2 bringing either more specialized or "more advanced" weaponry, but not erasing the interest of having T1 factories churn out stuff. But I guess this is alpha, and the focus is not on balance and unit design but rather getting the engine features in first.
