New armor system?

Thanks for the clarification - I did indeed not know that and thus generalized too much. I hope you take it in good spirit if I continue to insist on my point, though: In my opinion those aircraft taking off from the factory shouldn't be categorized as 'air'-units until they are well and truly up in the air - let us say 3-4 factory-heights, just to put a number down. Would that prevent the issue from occuring altogether? Most probably not but it certainly would result in less focused collateral damage. Paired with anit-air damage brought in line with the rest of the game's damage this should make this problem a thing of the past. Regarding that fighter tornado abomination - I would support the notion of projectiles with an expiration timer.
Thanks for bearing with me.

It is conceptually simple really. Decrease the strength of t2 air or increase the strength of t1 air. Then separate the advanced and basic units into different roles without one always being superior to the other. Advanced bombers could be carpet bombers suited to take out light units for example. Basic bombers could be precision bombers suited for taking out single high value targets. Basic fighters could be interceptors suitable for taking out bombers while advanced fighters could be good against fighters but be fragile so that they die quickly to ground AA. And you can do all this without armor bonuses.

Efficiency depends on the circumstances. The Peregrine have a "Costeffectiveness ratio" advantage of 1.563 against Hummingbirds. The Hummingbird have a better "Minimum assisted infrastructure cost" than the Peregrine (127.0 vs 152.2 with basic energy plants) so the infrastructure cost for Hummingbirds are better but the Peregrine is vastly better against Hornets and Kestrels as it can make almost full use of its' DPS against those and it can also tank ground AA much better as it has much more HP for cost.

I don't know how you calculate the time cost. As I see it, time cost varies during the game. It is not always the same. It is affected by number of assisting fabbers for one and the source of energy. Metal cost is always constant.

Okey. Whatever.

You haven't given an example of a complete armor system. How is the player going to know what is light, heavy, medium or whatever arbitrary armor types there is?
Read the unit description you say...
I don't like that approach.

I don't like arbitrary target restrictions either. If a unit have the potential to hit something I think it should try even if it does very little damage.

What's a Taffi now again? I guess its' the Ant or now called "Alleged Tank " .
You can get a feeling of how Ants perform against Infernos after seeing how Doxes perform against Infernos and using Ants against Doxes. Ants have longer range than Dox. Dox have longer range than Inferno. Dox dies when going close to Inferno. So you would expect Ants to also die to Infernos if they get too close to it unless there is some weird armor class making Ant tanks fire-proof or something **** like that.

In PA the number of units grows very quickly. This means that the Bots will not always have opportunity to spread out and attack the Anti-Bot Tank in loose formations. They will simply die off before they can get in range when they try to attack the Anti-Bot Tanks in loose formation.
Once Anti-Bot Tanks reach critical mass they will simply be unbeatable by bots because Bots will simply die before they get in range.
Those Anti-Bot Tanks also work well together with regular tanks. If the regular tanks have no splash damage, it means that the Bots can simply bunch up and run towards the tanks to get in range as fast as possible. However if there are some Anti-Bot Tanks mixed in it means that such an approach by the bots is likely to mean that they will suffer heavily from the splash damage meaning that the Bots have to either chose to attack in lose formation where it takes longer time for all the Bots to get in range or they have to bunch up and suffer the splash damage from the Anti-Bot Tanks.


Wooah...
10000 Character limit reached

Flexible to what kind of change? Adding more units? Do you think Zero-K needs more units?

Then you should play Zero-K. Lasers versus ballistics really means something and weapon types are really diverse. Instant hit lasers goes in a straight line while slow ballistic projectiles can be lobbed over wrecks and hills and can be dodged by fast units.

Wrong. This is exactly what happens in Zero-K. When you have 2 units with the same resistance/HP with different costs it takes more time and energy to repair the expensive unit.

Well in TA pretty much everything could fire at everything else. Only dedicated AA is arbitrarily restricted to shooting at air in Zero-K. Well torpedoes can't fire at ground units unless they are in shallow water both in Zero-K and TA.

Just because games have doesn't mean it is visible. Sure, armor might be intuitive because the gameplay reflects real world relationships like tanks taking little or no damage from machine guns but again we are talking future robotic warfare in PA.
I can't prove a negative. You have to explain how it is WYSIWYG.

Why not make Doxes immune to nukes? People will figure out that anyway so it doesn't matter if it is inconsistent and arbitrary.

So what is the armor rules in PA? Right. There isn't any. Why don't you make something up then?
Oh... wait. There are armor rules in PA. Buildings and commanders takes less damage from the Ubercannon because? I don't know why. It is a new rule and it makes as much sense as air plane missiles doing no damage to buildings.

I have no problem with a consistent armor system. It is just that the current armor system isn't consistent and why should you just make up an armor system when you can have so much more intuitive and elegant balance solutions without armor classes?

Thanks for having that civilized conversation. Could we now collectively forget that such a thing as an armor system was almost introduced and convince Uber to remove any left-over evidence? That would be great.
The outcry on this topic clearly shows that such a thing simply does not gel with PA's lineage and thus expectations.

@Godde

Please just quote me in a block. It is much easier to deal with.

After t2/t1 are changed, either t1 air is too good versus early air defense, or T2 is too bad versus late game air defense. That "solution" has in no way addressed the dynamic between masses of ground AA and air units.

The reason I use time is because metal is overruled by time (metal is just a function of time) and it is a streaming economy (i.e. you don't save up for stuff to buy it, you always put a little bit of resource aside to save up for it) Time cost is simply divided metal cost by the metal per second you're putting into the project, and then normalising for factory specific stuff. The ratio of hummingbirds to peregrines fluctuates from 3 to 6 to 3 to 4.5 to 4. Using time, I gain both the short term and the long term ratios. Using metal, I gain only the long term ratios. The benefit is that time gives you the ratios you can expect while reinforcing losses, because it takes into account the fact that you can't just instantly buy everything you need.

I compare vanilla values and assume ceteris paribus.

We're going in circles, but either the player gets that information from the one line factory description (and don't forget, we're talking about a new player who hasn't figured out the game mechanics yet, so they should be reading those one line sentences that the game gives them) or they get it from gameplay, and either way they'll get the information sooner or later.

They keep stuffing around with the name of the t1 tank. I've given it a nickname. You figured it out through context, so clearly it's appropriate and not confusing.


Bots always have the opportunity to spread out and attack the anti-bot tank by presenting to them the longest single line of units that they can. You can achieve that result by area attacking something, and when we can draw formations we can simply draw the units into a solid square and tell them to attack stuff. You can have 60 bots in a sphere, or you can have 1 arc of bots separated by 1 each within the arc. The AOE works well against the bots in the sphere. It does not work well against bots in the line.

If you bunch bots up to run towards tanks, they die. The turret rotates and then the tank fires at multiple targets in close proximity. If you send 3 bunches of bots to flank the tank from 3 directions, the tank has to move its turret after the doxen enter range, which gives them more time to destroy it.

These are the Planetary Annihilation forums, where future modders will one day add to the game, hopefully without having to do FA levels of rebalancing to make the existing unit roster work.

Do you not see a gigantic and massive "preconception" when you typed that, of similar magnitude to "light caliber projectiles penetrate heavy armor to a lesser extent"?

Weapon types affecting characteristics is similar arbitrary decision to armor doesn't exist. There are many science fictional universes out there where indirect fire energy weapons are possible, including our own (magnetic confinement on plasma). In Zero-K, laser vs ballistics does mean nothing. You could just replace all weapon effects with fruit and vegetable sprites and nothing further would need to change to make it make sense.

How on earth is it even slightly logical to have two units with the same HP, one of which is more expensive than the other, and make it the more expensive one which is harder to repair? It should be the other way around - you spam out the cheap unit quickly, you prioritize repairing the expensive unit because it is easier to repair.

Eh? Don't dodge the bullet. You have to explain how it is not WYSIWYG. If you can't back up that assertion, your point is void. Saying "armor may be intuitive" does not help your argument, nor a number of related points you have made in this thread.

I've already said it backs up expectations based weapon dynamics and materials science. It's amazing you persist in arguing in the negative, because a combined approach supports interesting weapon dynamics. (I'm not counting the games where it is done badly, nor am I counting the games with poor balance where damage modifiers were not used) I think you would probably be surprised as to how many games other than TA and Zero-K do not use an armor system.

Reductio ad absurdum doesn't really help your argument, I'm afraid.


You can also have inelegant (and downright unbalanced solutions) without armor classes. Pretty much, having TA's/Zero-K's system is completely unavoidable.

Sorry, I didn't see this post.

Both pure armor (i.e. everything has the same speed, range, damage) and physics balanced games are equally limited. The best RTS games are the ones that combine both of them and do it well. Every armor game I can find is actually physics balanced with armor added on to enhance that. The advantage armor provides is weapon types are more than just pretty particle effects on screen. E.g. some games have shielding add extra health, but mass based projectiles bypass shields and have less damage mitigated by the shield.

Armor gives you weapon-material dynamics that simply are not present in a system without armor. I really fail to see the problem with that.

An added armor system does of course open new avenues of fine-grained control over unit interactions - indubitably far more than the current system alone. But it does so by expanding the possible combinations of unit values by additional magnitudes, exploding the potential complexity in the process.
And in PA there is no need for this level of control - but there is the pressing concern for keeping the level of complexity down.
Plus, a full-fledged armor system in a game where units die to stares and planets to a cough seems like a lot of wasted complexity to me. And if there are concepts that unbalance the game those concepts should be looked at first - not the game's fundamentals.

Sorry but our posts are way too long and contains too many different subjects to be used in a block. I will break out different arguments and response to these and sometimes I will even quote previous posts if I think the subject is being changed.

My solution weren't intended to adress "the dynamic between masses of ground AA and air units". Anyway, in current PA, t1 mobile bot AA have been buffed while t2 bombers HP have been reduced while the other advanced airplanes have had a cost increase so t1 bot AA are very relevant even against advanced air.

This is a discussion that we should rather have in my "Defining mathematical balance metrics" thread but we can have it here if you want.

We have "Infrastructure cost" which is variable on the fabber or factory and the source energy. You could factor in the cost of metal extractors there but because neither fabbers nor factories metal output varies you can treat metal cost as a constant where the fabbers/factories and energy plants determine how much it costs to get 1 metal output of a specific unit. This is exactly what I do in my tables.

What is "vanilla values"? In my local database I can read directly from the gamefiles from the latest version and then upload it to the server.

I think the player shouldn't have to read to understand how the armor system works. If you have an armor system it should draw inspiration from real life equivalents to guide the player or it should be very clear how the armor system works by the design of the units.

I prefer to call it "Ant" since that is the name it had for the biggest part.

I'm not talking about lone anti-tank bots. I were talking about groups of units. Against groups of units, bots will not always have the opportunity to spread out how they want without increasing the time it takes for them to close the distance to the tanks.

How often do you see single tanks in PA and how often do you get the opportunity to surround single tanks with Doxes?
Most of the time tanks will travel in large groups where the tanks will target the closest enemy and the effect that you are describing will have a minor impact on the outcome of the engagement.

No, I don't see the "preconception" except of how it works in real life. Fruit would behave like ballistic projectiles and not like lasers or missiles. This is a very silly argument.
Have you even played Zero-K?

Because more expensive stuff are usually also more expensive to repair.

Here it comes to the point were you have to design and define an armor system for PA. Define what should be "Light", "Medium", "Heavy" or whatever armor type you like to add. Is Slammer "Light" or "Medium"? Is Gil-E "Light"? Does the Gil-E do "Piercing" damage? Does Laser Turrets do "Piercing" damage?
The thing is an armor system "may be intuitive" but it might also be a mess that confuses the player.

Actually WYSIWYG isn't really well defined for RTS. I found an article on games and WYSIWYG.
But really if you make the argument that armor is WYSIWYG because the players will "find out" the armor classes eventually, I can also make the argument that Doxes surviving nuclear explosions is WYSIWYG.

10000 characters again.

Well Zero-K is an example of a balanced game with lots of units and lots of weapon diversity so having a well balanced game without armor classes is really possible but I still struggle to find a well balanced game where there are no arbitrary targeting restrictions and no armor classes. I hope that PA could be the first.

PA is the future. Speculating what kind of material future warfare robots consists of is just that, speculation. We can also come up with science fiction where the robots armor really do correlate to their HP.

I'll reply more in depth after university/next week/next month/midsemester break/when they stop giving us damn assignments/during procrastination for exam study, but do you not see the massive preconception with "fruit would act like ballistic weapons"? You could quite easily give the fruits sprite some silly looking self-propulsion system, (corn with leaves acting like an ornithopter) and likewise you can quite easily launch fruit at high speed? You could also quite easily change every fruit-based weapon to a bird-based weapon.The keywords here are aesthetic weapon effects. There really isn't anything which prevents ballistic projectiles from being guided self-propelled or essentially behaving the same as lasers except the fact that some developer made the arbitrary decision that different weapon types should have the certain characteristics

Convention over configuration. There are mechanics and principles enough in PA that do away with things we are wont to from other games, TA and FA included. To abolish basic points of reference - e.g. projectile characteristics based on real-world counterparts, TA-style gameplay based on minimally few unit stats- without a clear need to do so is gratuitous innovation that hurts gameplay rather than enrich it.

Err... what?

This is what I read.

I'm not entirely sure that is what you meant to say, because it more or less agrees with everything I've been saying, but I can't find another way to comprehend the words you used.

That is the intended meaning. Not sure how you read me advocating increasing complexity into my words. But then again I might have misread your comments on fruit ballistics earlier on.

The or deviate statements are not present in the quoted text.

Very well, argue citation semantics. The gist of it still stands: Convention beats configuration - read: increased complexity - in systems that gain little from the latter. PA's combat system gains next to nothing from an armor system so sticking to the convention of not having one is preferable.

Looking forward to it.

Yes, I have massive preconceptions about the use of fruits as weapons in future robotic warfare. I don't think that fruit would work well at all.
If you look at Zero-K, they have both the instant hit lasers which is pretty much how lasers act in real life on short distances while they also have the "Laser blasters" which works like some sci-fi lasers that travel at lower than the speed of light.
Even though "Laser blasters" aren't realistic, a lot of people still have preconceptions that lasers should work like this in Sci-Fi games.

Like Vyolin said, I think it is better to use convention rather than inventing an arbitrary system.
Most important in my opinion is that the weapons and armor systems make sense in the game universe they are in and that the player can conceptualize and learn the system without seeing discrepancies within the game mechanics. A good system draws you in and the more you learn about it, the more it pulls you into the game mechanics and roots the gameplay in the game universe.
An arbitrary system could just be ignored as "Well it is only a game" but I think we should set the goal higher than that to allow the player to immerse themselves in the game universe by understanding its' laws and lore.

It looks like XKCD wanted to weigh in on the whole issue:

http://xkcd.com/1341/

Just out of curiosity.
Show me the damage and health numbers for bombers, fighters, and ground AA that makes this work.

It isn't so much about the actual health numbers but rather about the weapon and unit behaviours. Say Interceptors have spinal machine gun-like weapons which limits them to only firing forwards. They only need to turn fast enough to track bombers while fighters could out-turn Interceptors. This means that Interceptors wont be able to use all their DPS against fighter as the fighters will outpace the interceptor tracking and eventually end up on the interceptors tail.
With tracking missiles the fighters will be able to use their DPS much more reliebly in a dogfight and even in big numbers.
Interceptors could also be faster than Fighters which really do make them much better at intercepting bombers.
Lets say that Interceptors have twice the DPS and twice the HP for cost compared to Fighters.

I made post about an RPS design for Interceptors, Fighters and Long range fighters a while ago if you are interested:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/the-problem-with-fighter-planes.44141/#post-680990

An alternative is to make fighters numerous and light so that heavy fighters will waste most of their damage due to overkill. This was pretty much the case with Peregrines before their big rate of fire buff.

But it all comes down to numbers in the end. The devil is in the details.

That goes for everyone reading this. I'm curious to see if you guys are savvy enough so that your ideas can be backed up by values.

x>y
y>z
z>x

Rock paper scissors algebra