First, I don't care about any multi-player game type other than 1v1. Second, I prefer my game to be 30 minutes: 10 to 15 to dispatch a weakling, up to an hour to battle a worthy foe. Rarely, an epic 90 minute game is appreciated. Nearly every 1v1 game should feature the players starting on separate planets. (it is called PLANETARY after all) Off-world travel should usually be available immediately. Expanding to other planets should be quickly done and not be a mid/late game thing. Attacking my opponent should be a viable option very early and their home world base shouldn't be impregnable. I should regularly have 3 or more planets. Having a planet destroyed should be far more common than experimentals were in SupCom. Let me blow things up with regularity as the awesomeness is exponential that way. What I don't want is to just play a game of SupCom on a weird round surface which ignores the unique planet aspect. What I don't want is to spend 30 minutes building up my ability to attack a guy on another planet (because this part of RTS is lame and done the same over and over. Aka "the build order"). What I don't want is to have each game play the same way. I watched the intro vid a few times and while the thing with the rocket launching to carry a trouper into space is cool, it makes it seem that actually getting to another world will be hard to do and require much infrastructure. I think that is a bad move that will either lead to really long games or downplay the planetary aspect.
I personally think there should be cheap quick planetary travel, and more expensive planetary travel. Yet, I am not sure teleporters are necesary, but I am more sure being able to build interplanetary travel within a couple of minutes into the game is a good idea. One, for the reason you stated, it should be a valid tactic to bring the fight straight to your enemy immediately if desired. Two, for the reason that quanity vs quality should be a personal choice. Whether or not to have one planet you completely fortify with cannons preventing entering the planet early game, or you decide to colonize multiple planets with only bases and not planetwide defences. Three, to make teleportation less necesary if you can more easily travel between planets by cheap means. P.S.: I would find it interesting where some games you start on same planet. First, it allows traditional inside-planet-defences base-vs-base. Second, it makes it interesting to expand while fighting base-to-base like on the kickstarter video, who can capture the moons and asteroids faster. Just as fun, probably faster.
The topic has been raised before, but easy access to orbital technology has several implications for the ground-combat game that could be very detrimental to gameplay. One example is that if you can go orbital quickly, you would think you could choose where to land on the other planet.. in which case, why build boats / air transports when you can launch into space and 'hop' over any land obstacles? And yet, without easy orbital transport, a 1v1 on two different planets will end up being a long slug fest due to the amount of time you get where you don't have to worry about the enemy attacking. All that suggests to me that a high cost orbital transportation system could only work if the standard matchmaking 1v1 is on a single planet. I honestly don't see how you could have a long drawn out game that is well balances and spans several planets, and a short game that uses the same spread of units and technology. Either you upgrade too fast and hit the top tech tier long before you leave your planet, or you just have to live with the fact that a small 1v1 will by its very nature use only a subset of the overall game.
Maybe a solution involves starting with the game already seeded with players on multiple planets with mini fire bases on each. The player could then choose which fire base to land his commander at, but all locations will be build able immediately. This could result in two players sometimes choosing the same starting planet, and with interesting early battles to eradicating an alien presence from a world. An early loss of a key resource planet could mean an early loss. Or players could choose to sacrifice one location for another. A lot of times these sorts of choices don't even happen in games. This would also be an interesting change from RTS which in my experience ALWAYS start from one spot and expand out.
I like T1 interplanetary but very with limited speed, starting on same planet seams best for a fast games. I would like destroying planets to be uncommon and more of a last resort to invasion, or it becomes an asteroids land grab, and looking at the number of asteroids finding the enemies asteroids might be near impossible.
I do not agree on this one. For me 1vs1 is small skirmish on a planet escalating into a planetary war. Not going on other planets for the 10 first minutes is okay Being able to to planetary jump/assault easly at the begining kill the scale of the game ihmo.
agreed, for short games in the range of 15-30 mins you should expect your enemy to be mostly on the same planet and not much planet hopping. Otherwise, the changing of planets would be to easy/fast for longer games. still, it depends a bit on the total "map" size: ratio between area/planet and number of planets
It should be easy to spread across the planets quickly. Everything else would lead to a boring early game. I think it would best play out like this: At the beginning of the game you only have a very small interplanetary transporter, that has a limited range and can only transport one or two small units, so you can quickly transport engineers to nearby asteroids, planets or moons. Means to transport bigger amounts of heavily armed units however should be high tech and only be available after like 15 to 30 minutes of the game. I cant see a problem with this.
I don't see why this is an unreasonable request. I think you could perhaps expect the games to be a little longer than 30 mins but why not imagine we are talking about a no-rush kind of idea here. It's sort of like having two enemies starting on separate islands in a SC game. Basically if you have a planet to yourself in a 1v1 match then it's going to take you an average amount of time to set up an economy and get off the planet using T2 interplanetary dropships to get to the adjacent planet. I see that as a workable mechanic. I'm imagining something along the lines of T1 = standard transport, T2 = interplanetary dropship and T3 = galactic travel of some description (see the galactic gate topics). So anyway, you could rush to get off world and start dropping your units to your enemy planet after a relatively short time if you were unhindered due to having the planet to yourself. Perhaps say 30mins to an hour for argument's sake. Your final battle ending in the annihilation of the enemy commander at 90mins. I think 15 - 20 mins is a tall order for a game start to finish just due to the scale of the game. But I don't see why you couldn't conclude a match in 90 mins if you simply stuck to low level units and dropships. Personally I think you would be missing out on the best elements of the game. However, I seem to recall in a Dev vid or perhaps in the live stream the Uber guys were talking about a drop in and drop out style of gameplay. So a game can last say 24 hours but individuals themselves do not play for that entire duration. This also seems like a feature that may appeal to you.
Might need some tweaking in the game settings perhaps to increase economic income to get the game moving a little faster. Sort of like the 2x resource modifier you could use in SC.
Perhaps we need to ask ourselves how long a normal 1v1 should be. My personal feeling is this: 5-10min: short game, somebody rushed or cheesed 10-20min: this is where normal games should usually tend to be 20-40min: longer game, still not too uncommon. 40min-60min: long, rare 60min+: very rarely seen extreme lategame. Those are basically the times that you find in really good RTS like SupCom or Starcraft. This is for a reason: games of this length dont eat up an unreasonable amount of time. You dont need to make sure that you have a whole day of free time to finish the game. If you are only able to drop to other planets after 15 minutes it would be similar to playing 1vs1 in SupCom with 15 Minutes no rush. Thats no fun. Being able to spread quickly about multiple planets is the key to games with multiple battles all over the map without a long boring early game where people just build their base. I am not saying that we need a unit cannon after 5 minutes ingame. But sending off a single engineer to a nearby asteroid/moon/planet has to be possible very quickly.
I kinda talked about timings here a bit; viewtopic.php?p=555504#p555504 Keep reading till the end of the page Basically I see the Rocket Gantry(the thing that sent the Commander to the Moon) as a high Cost T1 structure, if you need to build factories and tanks and planes and stuff then it'll be hard to carve out the needed resources to rush it before your Eco can properly support it, but if you don't need huge amounts of tanks and planes and stuff(like say you spawned on different planets) you can more easily focus on it to get it up and running sooner than you normally would. It kinda 'self-balances' itself based on the context, thought it might be tricky to get just the right values to get it right, but that's what alpha/beta is for. Mike
With the model they are shooting for with PA, game speed is going to be highly configurable, at least indirectly. It boils down to one simple question, how many planets, moons, and asteroids do you want. The larger the map, the longer the game is likely to be. Adjust these values to your personal taste. Have fun.
The problem is that the OP wants multiple planets AND short game time. The problem I have with this is that it shortens the race to end game for those who want a long game time. On the other hand, only being able to have a short game on a single planet preserves the scalability of PA (IMO).
Having multiple planets is != a big map to my understanding. You can have multiple small planets for a rather short game, or multiple very big planets for a long game. Also it would be possible to take the distance between planets into account. So you need more resources to travel to planets that are further away from your start-planet. With such methods it should be easily possible to have long or short games depending on the map, not on the techlevel or price of some transporter. Also while PA will probably scale well enough to make games of any length and mapsize possible we will have to chose a certain settings as standards, otherwise competitive playing would not really be possible. For that however I guess we really need a playable version to test around to find settings that lead to the desired game length of normal 1v1s.
Pretty much this. We won't know until we have something to test. Unfortunately, I can't help but think that a interplanetary transport that's available very early in the game would destroy the scale. Even with two large planets, you could send your transports to anywhere on the enemy planets, so that it's size doesn't matter. But again, we would need to test it. For all I know, all those engineers all over the place would turn into little skirmishes happening all over those two large planets (thereby creating a long game due to the innumerable little back and forth battles) and would be awesome...or maybe it only sounds that way on paper.
A Transport that can only transport a small units, say a single engineer? No. You would spread engineer over your nearby asteroids/moons/planets and start to build up on those places, just as you do in your mainbase. Yes you can drop that engine nearby the enemy base, just to see it killed by him. You have to drop away from his startpoint and start to build a base of your own. Your opponent does the same + you both build up additional bases on moons/asteroids where you really are alone. Results in multiple bases on multiple planets/moons/asteroids that will all fight each other at the same time. At first it is just the fighting of the bases on the planets. Big epic fights, requiring the player to multi-task as much as he can... I cant wait for it Masstransportation (like the unit cannon from the trailer) of bigger amounts of units definitely needs to be expensive. But cheap expanding stands for bigger fights over the whole map, thats a general principle I believe in
from my perspective, there is minimal time/cost for first "manned" inter planetary transports: travelling from point A to B on the same planet X should be faster/cheaper than going to B by jumping to a planetoid Y and back on X at point B. time/cost should be seen as combination off building+travel time/cost, including any prerequisites (since pure space travel time will be always faster than ground travel or you wouldn't get anywhere ). Also, this more intended for the early part of the game where prerequisites are still being built, after that the relation might shift somewhat. But based on this consideration, in the first minutes of the game ground vehicles should cover more ground (at least on the same planet) than inter-planetary hopping, because their fast build times, or ground transport becomes nearly superfluous. Sure, you can limit the space travel in terms of what you can transport early in the game to reach the same goal. (e.g. the first thing I would offer to the player are utterly defenceless, cheap, fast recon drones to get an idea where the other players are) In the end it would be a balance thing, which would have to be tested in different variations.
This was what I was envisioning for the rocket launcher platform thingy too I would think the comm can move round fairly early on, and the unit cannon that we saw in the trailer would probably be a more mid-game unit, to prevent early spamming before anti-orbital defenses can be put up What people have to remember concerning starting players on different planets that each planet could well be the size of a 20x20 map, so starting two commanders on opposite sides of a large-ish planet, with the option to move to moons/asteroids, would be a viable 1v1 setup
