One race = perfect balance!

I would rather you guys had more factions and less planet types. If its just a money saving issue pull the resource form elsewhere.

It just seems like cutting a corner..
I think there is a lot of skill in playing to your enemy’s weakness. For example in supcom knowing that a monkeylord is cheap to build means you may have to prepare for a exp rush.
Or knowing that a faction has T2 fighter planes may mean you will lose air superiority mid game and you may have to build more ground based antiair.
Or if one factions T1 tanks are hover tanks and the opponents don’t and you are on a water map.
The list goes on and on, and you would like to see this type of strategy dismissed?? I don’t get it. :s

Didn't neutrino tell you guys to stop thinking of it as a faction and instead think of it as a unit pool?

I somewhat agree with your point, but it`s not an applicable situation. In SCII matches are balanced across almost all skill levels. Levels where strategic decision making and economic structure is all that matters. Metagame is also quite stable on the high level play. There`s no superhuman playing so there is no supermicro in play. If there is a guy capable of that how do you judge that it`s not only his skill but the game that favors him somehow? It`s a very complex discussion right there. The game can`t hinder people for being incredibly good. The game must offer tools to measure the player`s skills. That`s what competitive games are about. Now, if every one that follow a set of instructions gets an easy win almost every time regardless of the other opponent`s choice, that`s a balance problem.

Creating more planet types gives you more "bang for your buck". I'd also imagine it's easier than unit creation in the long run. Once you get your planets to generate in a satisfactory manner, it's up to the players to decided if the RNG made a map they like. Units require a lot of maintenance because of unit and player interactions. Also don't forget that along with the planet types, we DID get more units, the difference is that those units were added to the same unit pool.

This kind of strategy is not dismissed. People will still need to commit resources to do one thing or another. They may shift completely but that costs time and resources. So they have to choose what to do and mostly stick with it. You don`t need different units for each faction to make that happen.

And besides, your solution for funding the many unit sets is a kick in the community that funded different planet types through Kickstarter. And the problem is not only funding, but that most people around here (myself included) really don`t see that much advantage on having many different factions.

Yeah, except those games added nation specific differences that adjust their play style. I loved it.

I think its a fantastic direction for Uber if they go that way.

In fact, if anything having a unit pool means INFINITY customised factions!

If every player can build the same units, the excerpt below suggest the game is solvable, ie. there is a single, perfect way to play.

(source: http://nargaque.com/essays/balancing-blizzard/)

If PA employs customizable, limited-sized factions from a single unit pool, the game becomes more like a trading card game. Eventually though, that too is a type of game that can be reduced to a small number of superior strategies if not completely solved.

One approach to make a card game more dynamic is to add new cards and new mechanics once every while. A further approach is banning older cards.

When speaking specifically about Magic: The Gathering, to prevent the game from becoming stale there is a type of limited formats in which you can only play cards printed in, let's say, the past year. Every year, the old cards rotate out: you have to buy new ones to keep playing. (Mark Rosewater: Setting The Standard)

On the other hand, the eternal formats' main focus must be on new cards to put a dent in dominating strategies, for they lack the removal of the oldest cards. Although by looking at the huge number of cards available, you would be tempted to say the game is complex enough to allow for a wide range of archetypes, effective decks of distinct composition. Nevertheless a recent controversial move by the card game's publisher to obfuscate players' decks hints at players solving the eternal format to easily.

(source: What is WRONG with you, WotC? Grrrr.....)

Putting 1 and 1 together...

... Perhaps PA going the same route as Magic's Limited Rotation scheme is the way to go for a balanced yet dynamic game?

This is an interesting inspiration for PA. I think Battleforge tried this. Key word being tried.

Didn't the trailer mention something about technology being captures and assimilated, transformed into the pinnacle of warfare?

If the war started with different units, its now got the state where every one has the same tech, only the commander is persistent enough to have what ever they cannot replicate from the metal worlds.

Any difference in each others armed forces will probably be determined of what planet built them (What metals they are made of, and for what purpose like in ocean worlds), and with what technology (Normal or metal world enhanced).

Problem is that at the end of the day, some people are better at some things than others. I know people who have amazing micro but their macro is trash. In my case, my macro is great, but my micro and click accuracy isn't very good at all so often I find myself missing clicks frequently due to the how quickly things progress at the limited zoom level. Its one of the reasons why the commander being one of the few micro units needs to be tied to the endgame with comdeath. Which is another reason why I love strat zoom so much, it allows you to both focus on specific points, and the whole picture in an instant. Rather than glancing at a tiny minimap for some smaller dots. My favorite type of combat revolves around superior unit positioning and proper timing on move execution. Can lead to some pretty amazing victories over greater numbers. It is somewhat micro orientated, but not micro ability orientated which is my main issue with starcraft II. But I don't hate the game, I try to play it from time to time but its just not my style. Inject Larva should be auto-castable. =x

I'm tired of people being deathly afraid of the concept of an RTS without factions...who think a game with one unit pool would be 'boring'.

The moment the game opens and you build three starting resource collectors instead of two; move that lab a few squares off; deploy a tank instead of multiple light units; decide whether to include anti-air in your unit composition or not; gear your production towards aircraft over ground forces - all of that is faction diferentiation. The major difference here is that players now devise all their strategies, advantages and playstyles on the field, instead of there existing a pre-game.

On the contrary, games which focus more on factions are the more boring ones. Sure at first, they give off the impression of improving variety and replayability. If you play these games long enough though, you realise all they do is lock you to certain strategies and pigeonhole the amount of ways you can play.

I actually felt the effect of the huge unit count of Forged Alliance to be depressed because of the increased amount of factions present. Most of the new content went to creating cookie-cutter counterpart units to form a new faction. For each single faction, there were few actual 'new' units; and thus ways to play.

Unless your defined sides play radically different to one another, or you're following historical accuracy, there's very little reason to define your RTS game by the amount of factions it has. By the second half of the previous decade it got out of hand with how RTS game makers kept adding factions and sub-factions instead of actual content. It reminds me of classes in FPSes today.

I'm sort of glad Uber are taking the single unit pool approach. It's better to just let players play how they want, and ditch these god-awful 'factions'.

In the end, this topic is just a good example for lengthy debates without much convergence in positions, because it contains a good deal of subjective opinions and personal tastes.
There is the objective part in terms of dev time/complexity of unit pools/factions, which already has been answered (at least in part).
The rest is more a case of liking or disliking one way or the other. Given, that for most of the variants discussed here, there are at least a few representatives in past games, it's more a question of personal play style and opinions, to which everyone has a right to.

So the discussion can go on without much progress until some other new hot topic arrives, which buries this and similar threads in the depths of the forum history.

Then again, there are games with no more than 1 unit.

There need not ever be a perfect play just because everyone has the same options. Go is a good example. But there's a far simpler one available that everybody will understand:

Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Books have been filled on strategies for playing the game, but there exists no perfect play. And there never will be.

Your wrong, dead wrong., I can win any game of paper, rock, scissors, 100%

When the 1,2, 3 count ends, I extend a clawed hand, and yell loudly: "Metal Claw"!
Metal Claw crushes rock, tears paper, mangles scissors.

I win.

Seriously though, the Rock, Paper Scissors "game" is a classic example if people mistaking random chance for strategy.

Check out professional Rock, Paper, Scissors. There is far more involved than random chance. It's a battle of statistics, body-language reading, and psychology.

Random chance only applies when you're not trying. Or playing against a computer.

I agree, humans are not truly random, which opens up a surprising amount of strategies for the seemingly simple Rock, Paper, Scissors.

However, to refute the earlier comparison, unlike Go Rock, Paper or Scissors has essentially 3 units, has it not?

----

To move on with the discussion, why don't we ask ourselves what we want from PA and which things we wish to avoid?

For example:

- No single exploitable strategy, more effective than all other strategies
- Allow a reasonable number of various distinct strategies
- A periodically shifting metagame
- No single most effective unit
- No units that perform below the efficiency curve and will eventually left unused
- Viable, distinct early game
- Non-deterministic environmental factors (procedural terrain)

Pitch in.

Computers are not truly random too. All random number generation in a computer is created through a pseudo-random algorithm, usually seeded with the current time in microseconds. If this algorithm is not good it may have a poor probability distribution, therefore predictable.

Here`s the thing: Starcraft II, until Master`s League, is about macro and metagame. If you can survive the guys on silver and gold rushing you like hell keeping a stable economy you win easy. At Master and GrandMaster, micro comes in play because players are already damn good at the macro side of the things.

When you make competitive games you must think what skills are important to make a player good at that game. That is a game designer decision. In Starcraft II those skills are basically, from the more important to the less important: Production maintenance, metagame awareness, scouting and individual unit control.

That`s why some guys find out some great strategies shifts (When LiquidJinro made mech viable) and have great success until people become metagame aware again (develop counter transitions or adopt the same strategy)

Here in PA my hopes is that the game style will make individual unit control less important at the highest level of play, and instead of "this unit hard counters the one that the enemy is doing", be based more on diverse unit compositions, even knowing that there`s a tendency to try to counter unit compositions with less varied groups.