Paper units

The entire battle? Really?

That tank is definitely dead before it can turn its barrel. But the other 100 tanks right behind it are also aiming.

I would increase the health enough that it takes something like three-to-five shots from a unit to kill itself. It would keep doxes comparatively fragile but allow ants to feel more 'beefy' without getting to where blobs of units can just ignore one another.

You can have epic battles with many low HP to DPS units and many high HP to DPS units. It's a matter of what you want to emphasize. If you want to emphasize tactics, you need high HP to DPS units. If you want to emphasize positioning then you want low HP to DPS units.

It's that simple. I'd prefer we had a healthy mix of both like every sensible TA-esque game.

Just played a SupCom-FA game for the first time in a long while. I immediately realised how much longer even simple units can last. For awhile it felt like they lasted too long though as I was used to PA. I think PA units could last a little longer but I find there is not point balancing something that is going to get its scales tipped over again anyways as the new units come in.

Ideally they'd finish adding units and then do a few balancing passes to get where they want to be.

Dox need 8 hits to kill other dox. Ants need 3 hits to kill other ants. You'd actually be making Dox weaker.

Is that counting both weapons? I just threw out a number, I haven't played enough to actually know how much damage everything does. >_>

Dox fire a single projectile that looks like two projectiles. It takes 8 shots, or 16 of the 'bullets' Testing it in-game you can see their health will drop 8 times before they die. (Starcraft II marines kill each other in the same 8 shots, unupgraded.)

Ants have a stronger weapon, but are only slightly more durable than bots and are nearly useless for attacking base defenses.

watch it.

Code:

http://youtu.be/p2um1rLj-QQ?t=30m28s

can we bring this back? the strategy? look how important strategy is here.

Practically this is more like four shots. Since the muzzle velocity of the Dox is so low they have multiple shots in the air at all times, and will usually waste at least one pair of shots at an already dead target. For overkill purposes they kill each other in 2 bursts.

The number of shots is really not important. Rapid fire low-damage shots will have much higher numbers than single hits for high damage.

What is important is the time to kill a unit. And it is very important that time to kill remain low.

The reason for this is that time to kill is reduced proportionally to increased numbers of units firing. A unit that would take 10 seconds for a single shooter to kill will only take 1 second for ten shooters to kill. In that time, the individual unit will only get through 1/10th of the HP of one of its attackers. This doesn't reduce that force's firepower at all, and doesn't result in the winner losing any assets, or any resources.

The reason that this kind of "free" win is a problem is that the defeated player has lost resources and units, while the other player has not. To avoid this, you will never engage unless you have significant numerical superiority. Because both players will not fight without numerical superiority, this ultimately leads to both sides fighting with one giant army. And the winner of that fight will be largely determined by whoever has more units, and whoever wins that one battle wins the game.

Instead, the game should be designed to make large fights inefficient. Very large armies are stronger, but increase in strength by less for each additional unit they add. They must suffer casualties even fighting very small enemy forces to enable splitting your forces to be viable, and not just automatically lead to defeat in detail. By making weapons inaccurate, stacking large amounts of firepower results in proportionally more waste as well as more effective damage. By making common weapons direct-fire, and not pass through friendlies (or enemies, or wrecks), it makes tightly consolidated forces wasteful by blocking some of their own shots.

There are a large number of factors going into the calculus of force size. But the single overriding principle here should be that we do not want a player to just consolidate all their military assets in one place, for fear of losing pieces for free to someone who does. With respect to unit HP, this means low time-to-kill to allow small groups to get some kills on a much larger group instead of dying and doing effectively no damage.

It should be good to split your forces up into small pieces to chew on a larger army a little bit at a time. Guerrilla warfare can be used to fight a numerically superior enemy, not just raid undefended mexes.

Ledarsi, I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusions, but don't you think it's a bit extreme to say that will be the outcome if things are changed from the current set-up at all?

As I've said before, the idea of units dying quickly is something I agree with int eh context of PA but I feel that currently it all happens too quickly.

Mike

to see where the opinion of the community is going with this I opened a binary poll :https://forums.uberent.com/threads/paper-units.53458/
do not vote and leave, leave an explanation of your vote, the precice idea you have for unit HP and durability.

This game is not about a hard slugging match between two units sat there pegging each other like a command and conquer game, it's about fast paced destruction, their low HP does not make them seem paper, they blow up for goodness sake, it makes them seem volatile like cans of destruction brimming with explosion. Please i implore you not to change it for worse, this is the only game I've seen this done in and it creates a great visual display of carnage and destruction (what they were going for and the backers payed for, that volatile concept video) and a highly fluid and fast play style.

Every skirmish should see fatal damage to some units, so that we know that each engagement is important. Also these are just the basic units we have to play with at the moment, the more tanky units will come later but still they won't last more than 4 or 5 hits and then some massive units will be HPed like the commander. We don't want this game to play like other RTS games and by making everything a fat glut of HP you will ruin the play style and feel of the game, it will introduce Micro because to get the most out of a group of units you'll have to rotate your damaged units back in the group just like a game of Starcraft *Yawn*.

I think it's fine if they do blow up pretty quickly but right now it's too quickly.

Battles can be over before you even know they happened.

This guy knows what he's talking about.

It is a spectrum. Increasing HP (and/or cost) results in fewer units that trade shots for longer before dying. Consequently, it is necessary to have a larger resource investment in an army before it makes sense to split off into separate groups. Players will build armies large enough to start inflicting kills, and won't use groups too small to get kills. More HP means you need more units to focus fire to get kills in a reasonable amount of time. By contrast, shrinking squishy troops results in more durable forces which can operate in large armies (lots of investment) or in smaller groups.

For those of you who want to build very tough units, have no fear, I imagine they will be added soon. But those units should be specialists used to augment a large army of units that die very easily. An assault element is a special group, more similar to artillery or anti-air than another type of regular. Durable units have their place as well, of course. Assault units, tanks, and so on will of course require more hits to kill, or require bigger guns to kill them quickly.



Yes, you could increase unit HP by a little bit and not have much effect. But to the degree that it has an effect, it would tend towards requiring players to consolidate their forces more. The more you increase the durability of an individual unit, the more consolidated your forces should be because larger forces get kills more quickly.

If you want more durable forces, why not ask for reducing the cost of units that are as squishy as they are now, instead of more HP? You get more HP for the same metal investment by reducing cost. You haven't changed their weapons, so killing the entire force now takes more time. Lowering cost is a vastly superior solution to increasing HP so individual units take more hits to destroy.

and you, sir (with all due respect) don't know what the hell you're talking about.

it's pretty clear you haven't played TA or supcom, had it been the case you might have seen where this comes from and wouldn't have dreamed of saying starcraft is slow paced high-HP.

Yes Starcraft is micro heavy, no not because of hight HP, on the contrary. units in starcraft die just about as fast if not even faster than in PA, and you probably don't even know about the crasyest bit here : starcraft and all those other games don't simulate projectiles, the supcom lineage games DO.

the whole point off all this HP and veterancy and simulated projectiles and units using estimation of impact hulabaloo is to break away from the starcraft ball of death s hit.

And it's done a phenomenal job, it's so incredibly lifelike and imersive. You're brain tells you it feels realistic because it's able to see that units attempted to target each other and adjusted as if they where each only self-concious and not omnitient.

When a unit in starcraft turns around in a split second because an enemy came within line of sight it takes you out of the experiece. Your brain, a clever fellow, tells you the game obviously told him that and not his own line of sight.
this is extrapolation to help you see the matter at hand:

We're not able to see the battles we see in PA as "cans of destruction brimming with explosion", "a great visual display of carnage and destruction" we're not. and we won't be able to force that impression on our brain. If our brain tells us the battles are a dull show of plastic toys going pop-pop-pop it's that the current state of the game must be lacking steel, weight importance, the possibility for you to change he outcome of an engagement with good commands.
the units basically being a one-hit kill means there's no time for all that simulated projectile realism goodness to come to life.


really I can't see when you're asking for "fluid" and "volatile" why you arn't asking for Starcraft III.

Ants are already beefy. Doxes vs ants lose if the ants are entrenched. Doxes need to flank ants. It means you actually focus on not sending large death ball blobs at a thin red line of ants, so numbers aren't important. It's a good thing.

I think your point is valid even with all the units not in play. Advanced units shouldn't be easier to kill or faster paced since it represents a whole step change in combat where both sides have stable economies to output war machines, not paper machines. These units should be durable enough to withstand combat but at the same time not be absolute tanks.

I guess the forum concern is heavy hitpoints making advanced units too beefy, which is understandable.

Good topic.

Now the focus in this thread is primarily ground combat... But what about air.