No counter to 5x SSX1304 lasers ?

at the very least, this clever trick is a good exploit find. Nice job gamma testers.

I have found few people on the forum actually be unreasonable, as most people have their reasons that are all generally good for the game from their own perspective.

There are outliers however.

An exploit whose accessibility and viability is limited by the investment needed to pull it off is still an exploit. Those two things do not balance each other out because they do not belong to the same class of mechanics - if you want to call glitch exploitation a mechanic, that is.
And while patrol orders circumvent the issue they do not solve it.

Oops.

you'd think the easy solution is making the unit pause before taking a shot. Affects other circumstances too but not too much because it already only kills structures and com after a wee chase, that wouldn't change.

Unreasonable tends to be on the people. There are some very unreasonable viewpoints floating about. E.g. you put the commander on a zero cost patrol route, the lasers take more time to kill him, you can spend some metal on anchors or whatever to kill the 1660 skitters that are chasing him around. That's a fairly low cost counter to implement and its simple too. I'm not really convinced a counter argument is reasonable, it seems to be the kind of argument I make mid rant.

Assuming Zaphod is correct that patrol path buys you relevant time.


its 125000 metal that you didn't do anything about in advance, nor did you take a rather small precaution to keep your commander safe against the attack (and nuke snipes too, it throws the targeting off if you are rotating between antinukes)

And 125000 metal worth of asteroid effectively landing on your commanders head will also kill your commander, even when they implement smaller areas of damage we are talking about a stationary commanders.

Sounds like all right, good night to me.

Just to prod a dead horse - this argument would also consider the following scenario to be valid behaviour and not an exploit in need of fixing: Amass Vanguards worth 125000 metal and attack-move them to the enemy commander in a valley unreachable for ground units. After that command they realize that their movement path is inadequate to bring them to their goal position and automagically teleport to the indicated spot and kill the opposing commander. A patrol path would have the same effect of delaying or even denying destruction of the commander in this scenario yet I do not think anyone would be fine with Vanguards teleporting willy-nilly just because they have difficulties getting where they have been sent to.
So, since instant teleportation is not valid behaviour independent of the unit or expended mass involved this still leaves us with an exploit to fix.

Except

The Astraeus is fundamentally broken and is clearly not finished, so no, that argument is not equatable.


More importantly, lack of patrol path means that any Intel your opponent had when he sent lasers is still valid. Because your lasers are moving, and you HAD to have vision on the commander when you issued that attack command. Plus it's not queable. That window in terms of commander translation is not actually all that big.
And as just stated, lasers have to chase a moving commander anyway before thet are able to fire.

The counter relies on you buying time for your defences to do their job. And it has zero cost.

Honestly I feel that if you believe it is a perfectly viable late game strategy to have your commander completely idle and be immune from snipes then you deserve to lose. Nukes, lasers and vanguard drops, do you really believe this game should be so turtle heavy it is viable to defend against all three with a stationary commander? You really feel it is perfectly fine for your opponent to know precisely where your commander is without having him a moving target?

You don't think it is a prudent choice to have your commander next to a teleporter so he can be moved as soon as you see one or all of those 3 heading towards your planet? I think that's just silly.

An other potential fix is to prevent unit stacking by giving them a behavior like land units.

not really, you're not experienced and you know about it.

It really seems pretty obvious to me, it's a small pain in the buttocks, but things that are a small pain in the buttocks to do in real life can save you a couple thousand dollars, or your life. Kindof like a seatbelt.

I feel dumb admitting it but in Supreme commander I've gotten TML sniped a lot of times before. And in that game... it's the same thing! a simple patrol would have saved my life!

As for nukes/anti-nukes, they are presently imbalanced, they likely will not stay the way they are.

but for the SXX you gotta admit it, it's totally balanced, and not in the SXX's favor. I can't line up with you, this is beyond ridiculous.

that'd be nice.

A moving target is of course harder to pin down and kill.

I'm more of a "My base is a unending sprawl of factory's, power plants and troops, and I am actively hunting for your scouts and sats" kinda guy.

Love building me a hive of units to deny enemy scouting and automatically deal with raiders.

Being able to kill the commander with lasers is fine. Keeping your commander moving when you're at risk of being attacked by lasers is fine. What *ISNT* fine is the fact that in the scenario given by the OP- you have not sat your commander in a vulnerable position. You have built up a sizeable force of orbital defences. You own the planet and orbital. In those circumstances you shouldn't be able to use an exploit of moving between orbital bodies to get an inta-kill. If you want to go and laser snipe the commander you should reasonably be expected to have to contest with all the orbital defences your opponent has put up first.

At least with a vanguard drop you can *kill* the astreus if you have orbital. Its the same with nuke snipes- you can only get nuke sniped if you either don't have an anti nuke, or you're opponent out produces the anti nuke / nukes you do have. Either way there are ways to prevent the attack reaching your commander. This particular exploit is worse because you can invalidate all the defences with an exploit due to how the game deals with orbital. If you could intercept the lasers en-route then I'd be fine with it, but you can't attack anything which is between orbits, and the units conveniently pop into existence directly above the target and fire instantly before any of your units can respond.

I agree there is a work around in the form of putting your commander on patrol- but remember if he's on patrol he'll auto assist things (meaning he'll end up standing in one spot anyway). Now if this is a proper battle and this is *your* commander we're talking about, and you're busy actually playing the game against other players you don't want to have to constantly baby sit your 1 commander just in case someone has decided to pull off a trick which is clearly a bug. Good players can and should learn how to win the game without using exploits. That was how I always played TA, Spring and how personally I'll approach PA. This is a game about scale and strategy- if you degrade it to a series of cheap 1 shot kills you may as well not bother playing imo.

(Psst.... Commander cloaking.......)

Seriously though, are we going to get commander cloaking? Is there a reason we should NOT get commander cloaking? The whole point of the commander cloak was to help prevent sniping tactics from taking over the game, which is pretty well what's happened to PA. Having your commander move around or whatever in order to help thwart orbital laser sniping is a keen idea and all but it doesn't change what I see as the underlying problem which is that the late game is all about sniping in some form or another.

Can you prevent my lasers?
Can you build anti-nukes faster than I can build nukes?
Can you build enough flak to shoot down this many gunships before they kill your comm?
Did you build defense against the flame tank drop?

There seems to come a point in every large-map game where we aren't attacking each other's bases anymore because it's really just about sniping each other's comms. Commander cloak solves every conceivable sniping situation (short of "you're only on one planet and I have this asteroid").

True, I think to make it balanced commander cloak needs to be power hungry- meaning you need to disable your opponents energy in order to find it. It will actually give strategic importance to the base in that case. I'd also like to see generators be made more volatile as that will help prevent the stacking we currently see. T2 reactors should be precious imo, and you should have to think twice before building them all in a nice big clump.

Which is precisely the point of commander cloaking

To find the enemy commander you need to cripple his energy - that usually means having to take out a significant portion of his base

Well maybe I'm not a great player but with 600h of PA under my belt I'd say I am somewhat experienced ....
It's not that hard to implement a 2s power on delay on orbit entrance (you could even allow movement in that period), and it won't affect the balance of the laser at all. I'm not sure the idea above about orbital units being able to stack (as opposed to land) would actually though as the laser seems to be able to fire at a slight angle.
Patrols can work if you're careful on placement and avoid areas of construction, but the game is so large sometimes you can do with a little peace and quiet to be able to manage other stuff, you should feel safe from lasers under 100 anchors. Average players might not be able to read icons and don't know what type of orbital is coming at them but they'll see the nukes. IF they keep an eye on orbital, via PiP or whatever. There's so much going on all the time and cheap tactics are fine, but instakill, no counter tactics have no place in this game.
Forget about the cost, it's irrelevant in large, long games.

Thing is, against an asteroid that has total umbrella coverage, getting lasers to arrive and fire immediately (before they are shot down) is one of the few ways to try and break someone's grip on the place. Trying to fix the problem so that it can't be used to assassinate commanders is going to hurt our ability to break these umbrella locks.

Regarding commander cloak, what if it was automatic? Instead of a toggle, as in TA. It costs 15,000 energy/second and is in operation so long as your current energy income is in excess of 15,000 energy/second.

This way nobody has to remember to toggle it on or off. It's just something that happens with high enough energy. This could be indicated fairly intuitively on the HUD, I think, as small letters and a light next to the energy income bar:
• Commander Cloak
[+15000 energy required]