[Philosophy] Large Variety of Units

While anathema to the indie spirit of the kicktarter project PA, I believe one if the strongest points of SupCom were units as believable, versatile weapons platforms, and a sufficient variety of them with enough overlap to allow for variations insead of alternatives when it came to tactics an strategies.

Units are one of the things that make RTS expensive, but I'd really appreciate a large variety of them. I'd gladly play with only one 'faction' if that'd mean twice the variety in units. Actually, this would remove redundancies (every side needs a choice of tansk, right?) and frees more resources to add more unique units of each category.

Unit variety is what set TA and SupCom apart from SupCom 2, C&C and others.

PA: Naval is kind of a must, let's push for that stretch goal, folks.

Actualy i believe TA supports this ideal far better than Sup Com. Where is sup com the division of tears obsoleted previous combat units meaning an end game land force was teir 3 assault units with teir 2 flak and experimentals, possibly support commanders or such. By comparison a land assault in TA was viable with a mixed force of any of the, what 13+ combat kbots, then again for vehicles. Then hovercrafts.

It was however definantly a strength of TA and the less units the less like TA it feels, however i believe that with the current two tech levels like in TA (which is really more like tech 1 and tech 1.5) and the designers they have, this philosophy will be upheld just fine.

Agreed. In fact, not only did TA have more variety than SupCom in units that remained useful, they where also farm more memorable in and of themselves. I mean, anyone who played TA before can remember things like The Can, Flash, Pyro (only reason my brother got into the game; just to burn those forests down with it), Peewee, Fark, Hawk, Brawler, Flea, Zeus, Invader and on and on.

The names made them easy to remember. Their bullets varied a LOT. They could be used in unique combinations (picking up an explosive unit with a transport plane, and then blowing it up over other units made a flying suicide bomber) Even the way they looked is scarred into my memory (again, the can, and how it wobbled when it walked).

Funny thing is, I can't remember how any units look from most RTS games (including SubCom). The only exception for this is StarCraft (played it for a little bit and still remember the units), and I don't even like that game.

By the way, I really hope they have different types of workers. I loved how each worker had its own advantages and drawbacks. SupCom just went back to the old RTS default of 1 worker does all (well, several ranks of the same unit with basically no difference between them other than extra buildable stuff).

I believe a better goal is to not have lots of units, but to work with the engine *now* to support as many kinds of units as we can come up with. Hover, naval, air, space, suborbital, underground.. the more types of behaviors that are supported, the more options modders and future UberEnt devs have to give us unit variety.

So for example I'd much rather have 1 hovercraft that works and 1 tank, than 0 hovercraft and 4 extra tanks.

I think both games have their strong points.

SupCom units were very expensive as assets during game production.

Yet units, especially naval units, were awesomely cool with their 2 or 3 weapon systems, plus defense systems and sensor systems.

TA had a little less of this. But in TA, tiers were not as game decisive as they were in SupCom.

Adding useless weapons to units (especially AA on battleships) annoyed me in Sup Com, both because of the performance hit & visual "messyness" for no gain, and because they made the units less unique. TA (ARM) had a battleship that was vulnerable to air and subs, but the cruisers had depth chargers as well as surface cannons. In this sense, TA's limit of 3 weapons on units actually worked to the advantage of designers.

tl;dr: don't generalise units, even if they are substantially weaker in one area. Less is more.

Battleship AA needs a buff. Please DO generalize units in a believable way. Cybran Sirens and Salem's were the best examples. Salems and MLs, too - enough AA so they don't die to a single gunship. Enough torpedoes so they don't die to a single sub. Etc.

If you have a unit alone it should die to it's counter. It adds more strategy, because you can't just spam a single unit type and have all your bases covered. Otherwise battles simply become a numbers game, if you have more you win, and there's no room for intelligently choosing your army composition.

EDIT: Although you do raise a distiction between TA and Sup Com; In Sup Com most units either die too fast or too slow. I'd prefer towards the too slow end of the spectrum (eg. lower dps), as it allows retreating from and reinforcing of battles. It also makes repairing more worthwhile.

No, HARD counters are StarCraft, not TA or Supcom.

In TA, units like Samsons and Pulverizers were good vs ground AND air. Freedom Fighters were good vs ground AND air. You could micro Goliaths to kill Brawlers, you could use walking mines as bombs; and actually a large variety of units was AG and AA at the same time.

TA and SupCom are about SOFT counters. About clashes of units that are better, mass for mass, at one thing over another, yet always leaving enough headroom for creative minds to improvise and truly excel on both a strategic and tactical level.

It has always been this improvisation, the inherent reward of the resourceful, creative player that made these games fly with me and my closest gaming friends.

I'm completely sick & tired about Rock Paper Scissors balance. It's exactly the type of RTS game play the PA kickstarter pitch doc implies is undesirable, and I am fully backing this. Hard counter game mechanics allow for little or no emergent game play, for no alternative strategies, for now surprise moments.

Make versatile, believable units that have individual strengths and weaknesses, not imposing a strict black & white dichotomy of abilities and inabilities.

About unit hardness:
I think TA had it right, mostly, some of the SupCom units were too brittle and some were too tough. Still, overall, Forged Alliance felt very right in a lot of ways, and still is by far the best RTS out there.

You misunderstand, I also hate "fake" hard counters, but an aircraft is always going to hard-counter a unit without AA, and that doesn't mean you shouldn't stick AA on everything. It improves battle readability, while still introducing some element of tactics, to have AA on only some things (and as a more general rule, giving units a single offensive or defensive purpose). Dual purpose is fine, Samsons after all were a primary unit in TA, but Guardians didn't have AA missiles, and neither did alot of the heavy ships. In fact, the only unit that could target everything in TA was the torpedo seaplane, and that died easily to normal aircraft (meaning they weren't abused).

Yeah, you shouldn't stick AA on a great AG unit (especially if it already has some anti-navy capability).

Ships however are pricey, and a generalist unit is always weaker mass for mass than a specialist - meaning if you provide BOTH generalists and specialists (e.g., Destroyers, Cruisers and Subs in SupCom), you offer more strategic headroom - do you want anti-air? Go Subs (and ignore Air) or Cruisers (and counter Air). Do you want anti-land? Go Destroyers or (depending on faction) cruisers. Do you want anti-navy? Risk an expensive engagement with Destroyers, or silently sink their fleet with Sub spam.

The risk is critical mass. Even if you make the AA & anti-sub weak, if you build enough of them, it becomes too powerful, so you either make it so weak as to never matter, or reduce the unit's effectiveness as a whole, making it useless compared to a mixed force (since a critical mass of a mixed force will kill the generalist unit).

One-unit armies should never be viable.

Agreed.

But making counters softer will also mean that the person who DOES the countering will also need to diversify.

Because single unit counters shouldn't be viable, either. (counting the counter force as an army makes it easy to see how your argument cuts both ways)

Smoothing in all from a perfectly boolean (countered or !countered) to a fuzzy "20% countered vs. 80% countered" balance will yield the game play we love so much from TA and SupCom:FA.

True, but that can work whether it's a force comprised of 20% AA units + 80% AG units, or 100% units with strong "80%" AG weapons and weak "20%" AA weapons.

I'm happy with mixed AA and AG on a single unit, but only if they are both useful, making the unit intentionally "multi-role". A battleship's role in Sup Com is not Anti Air, so it shouldn't have AA. Destroyers are Anti-surface and anti-sub, and cruisers are anti-surface and anti-air. You can tweak how good they are at each role, but they should still be defined by (and useful at) their role, and a role shouldn't encompase all theatres (anti-Air, anti-surface and anti-sub).

Another way of looking at it is it's hard to conceptualise the strength of a force made up of 30%/30%/40% (air, surface, sub) units vs 30%/50%/20% units when they are actually on the battlefield. Even if the overall offensive capacity in those theatres is the same, seperating them by unit allows the opponent to, for example, single out and focus on the AA units, then follow up with aircraft. It is also much easier to determine the relative power of the group of units.

There are ways you can mix this up to keep it interesting, like adding a role with cicumstances attached (surfacing subs to fire AA, but it makes them vulnerable to surface fire), or removing roles and making the primary role much stronger. You can also use support weapons like anti-missiles. It makes the units more defined than if you added a bit of everything.

I agree with raevn, there should be units with fairly extreme weaknesses. Something that wasn't mentioned is if an artillery ship is 10% AA and 10% anti sub then I am effectively forced to hedge my bets on my opponent having subs and AA. But if the ship is 100% artillery then I have the choice to hedge my bets by constructing a few anti-sub and AA units.

I think most roles will be at least a bit flexible in ways that makes sense. For example the artillery ship is likely to have some use against small mobile targets (depending on it's weapon type). Missile units could also shoot at aircraft.

Should there be a return to the TA scenario where all units can shoot at everything (badly also within reason, like long range artillery being able to reach the satelite sphere) or should things have restricted firing zones like they did in sup com?

Supcom's artificial limiting of what things a unit can shoot at is in a sense undesirable because they go against the whole simulation ethos. However occasionally arbitrary rules are needed to prevent boring or annoying tactics. Hawk spam in TA was a problem, and even without AG capability ASF spam in Forged Alliance continues to be a problem in team games.

Also in TA, the rocket vehicles (Slashers and I forget the other one) were too powerful because they were too multipurpose.

It's a difficult one to call, but ultimately if the D-Gun miraculously doesn't work on commanders it's probably better for gameplay.

I think the worst thing they removed from SupCom was friendly fire for T1 Artillery, and in general, friendly fire of a lot of splash damage weapons. I can see how it's a necessary thing to have so clumped up armies can properly bring their firepower to bear without decimating themselves, but really, buildings etc. should block shots for ALL units, not just enemies.

And if it explodes, it should damage anything that's there. You may put a damper on the damage, like 50% less for friendly fire, but even that's arbitrary and counter-simulationist.

It might be worth considering the effect of groups of units in the discussion. It's one thing to compare, say, a single tank vs a single aa vs a single plane. It's quite another thing to compare a group of 80 tanks with 20 aa units vs 100 planes.

Suddenly you've got new issues, like how do you prioritize your targets, how do you issue orders to 100 units so that they all fight as effectively as possible, how do you avoid the scenario where you select 100 units and pick out targets one by one. And the one where it's easier to destroy 20 aa units to remove 100% of all AA than it is to destroy say a force of hybrid that have 20% of the aa power.

The key to the unit variety isn't necessarily a hard or soft counter approach, but rather that regardless of the approach taken, it is clear to the user what is going on and why. Want to include armor that blocks lighter shots? Good, make light weapons fire distinguishable from heavy, and show it bouncing off the heavy unit.

In this sense, it might be worthwhile to have an AI selection for target preference like: Ground Only/Ground Primary/Air Primary/Air Only

Give units only a couple of weapons to keep it balanced. I like how in TA that if it's got AA and AG, then it can't be as effective against both. If it's super effective against one target, like a flak cannon or battlecruiser, it's pretty much worthless against ground units or air units respectively.

Say, compare the Jethro/Crasher and Rocko/Storm kbots. Jethro/Crasher shoots missles, Rocko/Storm rockets. The rockets do more damage overall, but don't track, so they aren't very useful against air units. Jethro/Crasher can shoot at both air and ground, but isn't as effective against ground targets and has a lower fire rate. The units are balanced because while they have some overlap, neither is outright better than the other in every situation.

So long as units have a balanced cost and usefulness, even if I don't decide to use them in my strategy, they are still worthwhile. Having selections and decisions to make as far as composition is a part of the metagame that plays into the bigger strategy.

It's the same with having a vehicle version of a unit versus a kbot. The Flash/Instigator are the basic tank units with similar weapons to the Peewee/AK, and have better armor and weapons than the basic kbots, but also have less mobility and more cost.

I see those types of tradeoffs as allowing the trees to be full of options, having at least 2~3 per unit type, and there being 3 main types confirmed (vehicle, kbot, air), but those options being worthwhile as well, based on how the player wants to do things.

If I want only vehicles, that should be viable by the numbers alone. Only kbots, or only airplanes, the same. The reason it's only by numbers is that if my opponent gets wind of me only using one specific unit type, then they only need to defend against that, which would in turn force me to diversify my strike forces in order to not be turned away effectively. In that manner, I can't just use only one unit, I must also use different types of units as well.