Paper units

I am actually of the opinion that advanced units should not be beefy. You are paying for tech, for specialized powerful functionality, not just for a combat unit that is tougher. Units like that might even be placed in the basic factories.

Basic and advanced could be the difference between an M60 tank and a M1A1 tank. The M60 (basic) is inexpensive and quite well armored. The M1A1 (advanced) is extremely expensive, and significantly better armored. However it has a much more advanced, more powerful, and more accurate main gun, including a stabilizer allowing it to accurately fire while moving.

The same type of basic/advanced distinction can be drawn for any other possible role, from fighter jets to self-propelled artillery. Advanced units are more effective, but due to their higher cost they are actually inferior to a comparatively large army of basic units. An F-18 is an amazing plane, but one SAM and you're out some preposterous cost that could have made an entire armada of crappy interceptors that would take a lot more hits.

If you really were looking for durability in a unit, you should just make a whole lot of the basic unit. Despite the superior durability of one individual advanced unit, for cost the advanced units should actually be rather fragile.

A large army of advanced units is, of course, vastly superior qualitatively to an equal-sized army of basic units. But an immense investment is required to build such an army. And for the same price, you could have an even larger army of basic units. Or several armies.

The way this eventually turns out in gameplay is you want a large army of basic units. However you don't necessarily want a pure army of basic units. Adding in some powerful functionality from advanced units is extremely desirable. But you don't want an army composed primarily of those advanced units. You will be run over by someone who just built a really large army of basic units, either because they can be in more places at once, or because there are just too many enemies for your vastly superior units to defeat.

I've learned from my ridiculous spamming of scouts something really valuable. Bear in mind that I don't micromanage.

1 scout takes 1 fighter 1 second to kill. So 2 scouts and a fighter takes a fighter 3 seconds to kill. 1 second more than 2 fighters, but for the same hp.

Using 1 leveler to every 5 ants costs the same as 2 levelers, does more damage than 5 ants, but would increase the time it takes two enemy levelers to kill two levelers, assuming no micro.

I wonder, this is one of these things where there is no logical correct answer since there are advantages to both approaches, therefore it would be interesting to test both higher and lower damage outputs in the game. That's something you would do in the alpha version of the game though.

not really, I've been saying it should be the case for all units.

reminder : poll is over here : https://forums.uberent.com/threads/poll-paper-units.53458/

I think, this video is a good reminder of what TA really was like. Considering this is the video that made me fall in love with the game... reaching for the goal of 'TA-like gameplay' should, imho, give me the same combat experience, no?



Take a look at how long it takes the LLTs to take down peewees. They still die 'fast', but shots get fired at the LLTs, the LLTs have to swing around to target the next ones, and so on.

This is the very very basic, core, 'lightest unit vs lightest defense' balance.

That video features LLTs and Peewees, therefore it isn't indicative of what TA was like at all.

Yes it is.

Because if I can recall Peewee rushes were all the rage.

Early on, sure, when people first got it, the same time they were building things like stumpies. It didn't last very long. You have to remember that in '97 it took longer for word to spread on what the best builds were. Even back then the peewee was quickly replaced by the superior in every way flash tank.

TA was:

Vehicle construction units
Missile towers
AA units
Rocket kbots
Hawks
Rapiers
Berthas
Flash tanks if you were playing on an all hill map
Pelicans if you were playing on a water map
Tier 1 bombers
Nukes

The rest of the units never saw any use in competitive play.

If you think peewees are at all reflective of TA then you didn't play it very long, or only with a few friends without exposure to the wider scene. I wanted peewees to be relevant, which is why I'm so happy that bots are in PA because I get to live those peewee dreams.

The original game TA was indeed relatively poorly balanced from the perspective of maintaining unit diversity.

You're not entirely wrong about peewees being irrelevant in mid/late game. But early game they were huge, and in the midgame for raiding they were still very important units even though they would lose to more expensive units. A lot of games stayed on low tech for quite some time because both sides were taking so much economic damage from raiding each other. That was when you knew you were up against a real opponent.

The Flash wasn't strictly superior because it costs twice as much, but for camping a mex you only need the one peewee. For direct combat purposes it is superior, but that doesn't necessarily make it a better unit. And I think you made a typo about making Flash tanks on an all hill map- you would not use flashes on an all-hilly map because they would not work well compared to kbots, you would use peewees. If you want to talk about TA's problems, the Peewee/Flash comparison is not even on the top 20.

The two major issues with TA units were with Samsons/Slashers, where spamming them was ridiculously effective due to their range, accuracy, and ability to fire on the move. Sam Spam was an extremely problematic unit monoculture that was very difficult to defeat without doing it yourself. I am assuming this is what you meant by "AA units," Quitch. Secondly, massed Hawks/Vamps (mainly Hawks), because of their mobility, stackability, and how you could not deny them from going wherever they wanted and focus-firing anything they wanted to instantly destroy it.

But I would say that OTA itself was not the true golden age of Total Annihilation. The mods that followed were the real prime of the game's life. Balance mods like the hugely influential Uberhack, and many different megamod packs with hundreds of new units and very different gameplay were when TA really shined.

Vanilla OTA was a great game. But the games that followed really did improve upon it over the years. And now we have extremely sophisticated, highly-evolved descendants like Zero K, and some very different games derived from TA, like NOTA. And I do hope that Uber is paying a lot of attention to the most current evolutions of TA instead of going directly back to TA itself and trying to duplicate the original TA verbatim.

You didn't raid with peewees for a number of reasons:

1. You started vehicles because vehicle construction was faster, both in unit and construction speed.
2. Peewees were counted by missile units which emerged from... that vehicle factory you'd produced.
3. 99% of any army was missile units.
4. 99% of your defence were missile towers.
5. The peewee couldn't do anything later on, it provided no value to your force.
6. The jeffy was a better MEX raider in the early stages before missile units, the flash was a better MEX raider after missile units.

The flash could potentially raid and get away again, a peewee wouldn't survive long enough to do anything and you'd put yourself at a disadvantage by having gone kbot early enough to raid.

But my point is more to the idea that TA had this wide variety of great units that PA should adopt. People forget (or don't have the experience to realise) that TA may have had a lot of units, but 90% of them never got used.

And now we have games like Zero K which have extremely diverse units which are all viable at all points in the game.

The original TA was more revolutionary than excellent, since it was the absolute first game to go full 3D and full physics simulation, and to do quite a few other things. Our modern versions of the game are vastly superior after countless experiments of tweaking TA in every conceivable way.

TA had a wide variety of units. And balance tweaks and large mods made that large roster of units work much better than it did in OTA. If TA had begun with as few unit types as, say, Starcraft 2, we would be having a very different discussion about the history of TA units.

PA should have a wide variety of units. The fact that certain units pathologically dominated TA doesn't mean we should do away with the notion of having a large and diverse unit roster.

Total Annihilation doesn't look 3d... are there camera controls?

3D units, 2D terrain.

You don't need camera controls to be 3D.

The maps are 2D but with 3D height data. The models are 3D. The projectiles are 2D. Airplanes exist at a per unit defined height, and projectiles fired at them will have an arc subject to that height.

It's a 3D game, but it wouldn't look 3D if you moved the camera.

Technically you do... I'm thinking about rotating the camera so you're looking at the unit from the other direction.

They look like they are 2D isometric projections. There's a screenshot online of a hanger building with a road coming out of it? It looks like if you rotate the camera from north being top to north being bottom of screen, you would still see the same view of the building, so the road would still come out to the south (whereas now it should be coming out to the north)

Does that make sense?
I do understand about terrain. I was mildly concerned about units, but I've done more digging online, and found out I am indeed wrong .

3D refers to a three dimensional space, just because it doesn't look 3D doesn't mean that it isn't, in the same way that a 2D picture which looks 3D is still a 2D picture. The game played in 3D. It had width, length and height and tracked this for units, terrain and projectiles.

It was 3D in every way. It simply didn't feature a rotatable camera, something which has nothing to do with whether you're a 3D game space or not.

Some projectiles were 2D sprites, but again, this has nothing to do with the game being 2D or 3D, it's how the game tracked those projectiles which matters. Them being 2D was for performance reasons.

Yes. I just had to do more research. Only the units were 3D. Everything else was 2D.

For the game to be perceived as 3D, you have to rotate perspective so that it is apparent that units aren't just sideshows of appropriate isometric projections. Technically the question was "are units models or images".

The game did not have height for terrain or projectiles. Only for units. It changed the pathing of projectiles so they looked appropriate for 3D. It changed the location of aerial unit shadows so they looked appropriate for 3D. It had a 3D "layer", but the game wasn't actually 3D. It was 2D. They made it look 3D. The reason why it's the first ever 3D RTS is because of units, nothing more, nothing less.

I thought that the units were 2D isometric drawings, like many other games of the time did (and TA was the first one not to do). In which case, hypothetically if you were to rotate the camera, the 2D building sprites would not appear as appropriate.

It seems some people don't understand that rendering and simulation are different things.
Seeing the terrains in TA from another angle won't be anything different than rotating a photograph, but this has nothing to do with whether the heightmap is 3D.

I cannot wait not only for that, but also for units to have amazing sounds like that thats whats really gonna make PA shine some awesome unit sounds like that.

I don't believe those are the sounds that made it into the game for the LLT. The peewee ones sound about right though.