Paper units

Currently the issue is more that units do not group up properly. Units still often form lines that will allow the enemy to pick them off one by one. Let's get formations in, then decide on the effectiveness of units in terms of their HP to damage ratio.

I'm going to, as per my normal behavior, cite TA as handling this pretty well. A single T1 tank would take about 10 T1 plasma shells to destroy; compare that to the Ant's 3 T1 laser bullets to destroy, as well as its increased rate of fire. Mind you plasma shells were also slow-moving, inaccurate and had a very high projectile arc. They'd miss about 50% of the time.

And this worked really well. My only change would be to increase the range of the plasma shells, PeeWees and Flashes had could destroy these things too easily. But PeeWees and Flashes were designed to be overpowered, so take that how you will.

ledarsi
you can't say balance isn't askew, navy for one feels completely jumbled, I'm surprised navy is this much despised(considering it had it's own private leap goal category), it's just weeping, wallowing in a corner, look at those puppy eyes, look at them! don't you feel ashamed leaving it in such a terrible state?

What's satisfying is when units do actually kill what they shoot at. Far to many RTS games have some kind of idea that you should be plinking the other units with rubber balls until they finally topple over and die. There is nothing fun or exciting in seeing two stationary units trading shots until the one that shot first happens to explode.

A near 1:1 relationship is probably ideal actually for smaller units like tanks and bots. I agree that the bigger battleships could need a little bit more HP.

The way TA had is an Extreme just like the current set-up is, we need something that more so of a middle ground, slightly closer to the current system than TA I imagine.

Mike

Missile ships do five thousand damage per shot. Battleships have 1250 hp. "A bit more hp" isn't going to stop the Stingray from one-shotting a battleship (or anything else except Commanders, Halleys, walls or T2 factories, for that matter) every ten seconds. From beyond their range. At a lower price.

Nobody is saying the game is finished. But everyone who is freaking out about imbalance needs to realize that balance is pointless until we actually have content to balance.

Unit diversity and behaviors first, then number tweaking. There's no point coming up with tightly-balanced-PA-with-16-units, when Uber is going to add over 100 units. Adding the other 84 units is going to completely break all the work you did to tweak those first few units.

I don't think TA is an extreme at all. If anything TA was a middle ground and a revised PA is still an extreme.

what? not at all.

Yeah, early engagements between medium tanks were too sluggish. It could take upwards of a minute for a 1-on-1 to end.

But those never happened because Flash Tanks

He said it. This issue isn't about PA's system, its HP, its weapons, or any of the things anyone is actually mentioning.

This is about variety. We have basically 4 land combat units. Try playing TA with nothing but Peewees and I suspect you will find they die all the time too. Complaining that every unit in the game dies too quickly because Peewee vs Peewee is a close-range bullet-riddled death pit is ignoring the fact that there are going to be other units. Just, later.

If you have the same reservations after those units are added, I would be vastly more prepared to agree with you that 'all the units in PA are like X.'

The problem as I said before is that there is only room for tougher units, you can't make anything "weaker" than the units we already have. The 'Baseline' units need to be tougher so there is room for weaker AND tougher units, instead of what we currently have where you can only create tougher stuff.

Mike

they die all the time to each other, and we have that case for advaced units too.
there currenlty isn't a single t1 boat that doesn't die to a single shell from a t1 bomber.

Levelers one-hitting ants: Levelers do 500 damage, where an ant has 125 health and 42 damage. This has everything to do with certain T2 units having absolutely ridiculous placeholder values for their damage, rather than units having too little health. Also see missile cruisers, T2 bombers, and T2 fighters. Balance is incomplete, as is the unit roster.

Micro: If FA's micro was better because of target leading, then ask for target leading. If the micro you desire is related to features not implemented, increasing TTK isn't going to implement those features.

Unit variety: If you don't think there's room for unit variety because the ant is already as slow as it gets, then the issue is with how fast the ant travels, or how expensive the alternative unit is. Increasing the ant's TTK isn't going to affect those variables.


The low Time To Kill threshold makes battles with huge numbers of units resolve more quickly and it magnifies the effect of small advantages. The first issue allows large numbers of units to be spammed without battles becoming bogged down by units entering the battle faster than they can be killed. The second issue means that positioning and timing become more important than just having extra firepower.

Personally, I think this flows perfectly with PA's intention of ridiculous unit counts, but one has to remember that what one 'thinks' and what one 'likes' are only opinions, not facts.

Dementiurge, I am otherwise 100% with your post, but I really must correct you on this point. They say I am an objective thinker. Because I object to everything.

Huge numbers of units does not magnify the effect of small advantages; it diminishes the effect of large advantages. Nobody cares about a battle where you have 1 more unit, or 1% more units, or even 10% more units. The important battles are where you outnumber the enemy by MULTIPLE factors.

Suppose you have (rounded for ease of calculation) Peewees that cost 50m, and Bulldogs that cost 500m. You can have 50 Peewees vs 50 Peewees for the same metal values as 5 Bulldogs vs 5 Bulldogs.

Alright, suppose we both have Peewees. Only you have 50 and I only have 10. You outnumber me 5 to 1. That's 400% more units. You obviously win the battle. But how many Peewees of yours die? 4? 5? Maybe even 6 or 7 if I am lucky. The fragility of your units means each individual unit is easy to kill, and each casualty reduces your firepower as well.


Bulldogs (Big Units)

Now consider Bulldogs, with the same metal skew. You have 5 Bulldogs, and I have 1. My lone tank will deal 1/5th of the HP on one of yours before dying. Zero losses for you. Zero lost firepower. You have 100% damage output in the next fight.

Now, suppose we both have equal numbers of units. You have 5 Bulldogs, and so do I. We both have to make a strategic decision about how to divide our forces. Five groups of 1 Bulldog? Two groups of two, plus one? All five together?

If you think about the way the fight goes if a smaller force of Bulldogs fights a larger force, obviously you want to have the more numerous force. That means five groups of 1 is a very bad strategy, because any other strategy except 5x1 will beat it unless it immediately wins me the game. Two on one fights, three on two fights, five on one fights, it's just not a good situation to go 5x1. You kill one tank, with all five of yours left, and now I only have four to fight against your five (with one at 80% HP). Not winnable.

So suppose you go with the 3-2 split. If I go 2-2-1, or 5x1, I lose. But if I go 4-1, or better yet, 5-0, I win. My group of five crushes either your group of three, or your group of two. And the remaining group, no matter which one it is, cannot possibly beat my surviving tanks.

You, being a smart player, realize that if you go 3-2, I should go 5-0. And there is no strategy that beats 5-0 except going 5-0 yourself. Which is a draw, and a Nash equilibrium deathball for both players. Put every unit you have in one group because otherwise your risk being defeated in detail too efficiently to fight back.


Peewees (Small Units)

Now let us go back to the Peewees. We both have 50 Peewees. It should be immediately obvious that you have a lot more options for how to split 50 units than you do for 5 units. Fifty groups of 1 is actually possible, as is ten groups of five, five groups of ten, different groups of different sizes, etc. But even if we suppose we must split into only two or three groups, as the Bulldogs did, the Peewees behave fundamentally differently.

A smaller group will inflict more casualties on a larger group. In the Bulldog case, a five-on-one fight was a non-starter. Strictly a bad strategy because you essentially lose a tank for free, with only minimal damage on one enemy unit. However the large group of Peewees gets weaker even in fights that it wins. A 50-0 split is not necessarily ideal. While it does contribute the largest amount of absolute strength in one place, it barely survives fighting a 25-25 split, with very few survivors. Even a 5x10 split leaves the group of 50 badly weakened, whereas the 5-0 Bulldogs lose one tank (assuming perfect focus fire on the damaged tank) in a 5-0 vs 5x1 series of battles.

Now, it is at this point that the contrived experiment breaks down because if there are absolutely no other considerations, 50-0 is still theoretically ideal for Peewees. However, in actual games, there are other considerations. Mexes to attack, for example, which gives intrinsic advantages to covering more territory. How you distribute your forces then becomes a balancing act between absolute strength of a force, and spread over area. Fifty groups of one covers the most area, but gets trashed by a relatively small enemy ball.

The takeaway here is that you absolutely cannot afford to split 5x1 Bulldogs because the advantage gained from covering four additional areas with Bulldogs does not outweigh the efficiency lost by splitting the group. Peewees are both more expendable and more fungible, meaning a smaller group can be discarded provided it deals at least some damage. The absolute maximum 50x1 area advantage from 50 Peewees is much larger than the 5x1 with Bulldogs, and the efficiency loss from fighting small group vs large is also much less.

My point is that "paper units" (the Peewees in the above example) are fundamentally more interesting than expensive, durable units.

You can add a 100 or 1000 units, it doesn't add any variety if most of them still just 1-2 hit each other. Might as well as keep the different unit count down to 3-4 then. And no, just varying ranges and speeds while keeping this onehit system does not create interesting "variety".

So, it has everything to do with the HP or DPS of the current units.

Once formations are implemented, we'll have whole armies nearly instagibbing each other with proper positioning (no more sprinkling in one by one), so the issues described here will be even more obvious.

You just assumed that new units would not add variety, and then concluded that adding 100 or 1000 units would not add variety. Extremely tightly circular.

New units will add variety. I believe that is a fairly safe assumption.

Furthermore, current values are largely placeholders, not legitimate, well-tested, tightly balanced numbers. It just seems to bizarre to be complaining about unit balance for a game that literally only has 1% of its actual content implemented.

Your point is irrelevant. The PeeWee, in PA terms is a veritable leviathan of damage tanking, capable of lasting a whole 4.1 seconds under fire from an equivalent unit, more than double the durability of the Dox, its closest equivalent. The PeeWee, known for its fragility in TA, were it in PA, would be the tankiest unit in the game. In direct combat, the Ant is the toughest against its own counterparts, capable of surviving an eternal three seconds under fire. If you're using the PeeWee as an example, you're effectively arguing that you can double the HP of every mobile unit and still obtain the paradigm you want.

You are absolutely right. It is entirely possible to have a wide range of unit HP's in the same paradigm. Even a Krogoth-type unit could be implemented in PA.

My point concerns the efficiency of units, not whether they exist. Smaller, cheaper, weaker units need to be the most efficient units. In TA, that was units like the Peewee, granted the Peewee is a tougher unit than the Dox. But if you just doubled everyone's HP, you haven't really changed much except the time to kill a unit because everyone's relative efficiency is the same.

Although, that actually does has some other side effects like making units with a lot of HP disproportionately better because their HP went up by more, and making slower units better able to close range with defenses of fixed DPS because movespeed and range haven't been adjusted...

But anyway. Small, cheap, weak = must be efficient. And efficient means it will be mass produced. And it means your mass-produced cheap units are going to do a LOT of exploding.

If big, expensive, and durable is efficient, then you get very, very bad things in gameplay. Imagine if the Krogoth were actually efficient to construct, and people tried to porc their way into mass eco and spam a deathball of Krogoths. Very not good.

PA is presumably going to have a great deal of unit variety. Different roles, different costs, different amounts of HP and damage, and so on. Some units will die very fast; either cheap ones, or squishy expensive ones. Other units will have more HP and will die more slowly. That will generally be limited to somewhat more expensive units, because cheap units with a lot of HP will still die quickly, but a group of them is nonetheless tough to destroy.

The point I am trying to make is not to fear the 1-shot, because the units that are getting killed in one shot are probably going to be the most durable units.