Many years ago, I played Earth 2150, that game was awesome, it was cool how it changed from day and night, units had lights that turned on, and you could design your own units. I thought of a couple ways to be able to customize our forces, one is time and effort intensive and the other hopefully not so much. The expensive option is to make a separate engine out of combat in which all you do is make new units from parts like having a quad bot with a laser and anti-air missiles. The second option is to have the developers make a large amount of different units and we can pick out which units we take with us to battle. Both options happen away from the combat game, having a separate area where you can make units or set up armies. This would add far more strategy not just during combat but also even before you start a match. Each unit if made or developer made will have a cost associated to it, if its an expensive unit in the game it will take up a lot of space on your roster, if its a small bot or tank it won't take up nearly as much space. As an example lets say you have 100 hard drive storage points, a small bot can cost 2 points and an advanced submarine can cost 9 points. The developers can tweak the unit cost however they see fit. There need to be a few rules such as you must have at least 3 (however many you choose) of each land/air/sea units and the rest is how you want to spec your army. Players have the option to generalize their military as much as possible or spec it to exactly what they want to do, if you want to go full air superiority, go for it, if you want to do skirmish tactics, that's cool, whatever you want to do you can do. The end result in implementing this would be smaller (in unit types) but have more specialized military's performing operations that would best utilize their capabilities yet similar enough that they won't be entirely different. Buildings shouldn't be modified from this. Some people will ask "how would this increase strategy, you are just limiting the amount of units we can build" that is true, but it also gives a higher value for every unit you decide to take with you. If everyone can make everything after time you will know what counters what exactly and it will be more of a game on knowledge than a game on strategy. This idea will make players be more proactive on the battlefield based off of what strategy they wanted to use and see how it stacks up against others. This is just an idea, I don't really care if it gets into the game, it would just be cool to play around with different setups. It would be cool to see a few total air superiority builds, maybe a few builds that are geared for fast attacks and skirmish tactics and a few geared for heavily armored and armed units designed to go slow but destroy anything in their way. Thanks for your time.
Re: Picking your Style I don't know about this... Having more units (many of which aren't used in a given match) would take more time to balance right. besides, wouldn't you rather have all the units instead of just a subset? At this point, we really don't know how many units we'll have so I think it'll boil down to how much variety the Developers think we need. This idea would be very interesting in galactic conquest though... I'm just not sure about multiplayer. And the other problem with this is that over time, you naturally get used to the power and utility of a given unit, just by using it. If some of the enemy units aren't in your usual build, then it'll be harder to get to know them. On the other hand, I doubt it would be too hard to mod this idea into the game. It would certainly be an interesting setup for a campaign...
Re: Picking your Style Would be cool as hell no doubt, i also loved that game! But to be honest i don't think the devs will get onboard with this idea. Seeing as how they already whiteboxed out (maybe even textured by now?) all the units that are gonna be in the game now, at least the most basic ones. They don't look friendly to modular attachments. I think the game will be just with simple base units for now and release. BUT, this is a great idea for an expansion down the line. I can very much see a PA expansion focused on maybe modular experimental robots, maybe a small T2 vehicle and a big experimental (think the Cybran spiderbot from Supcom, but with modifiable loadout). But i don't think it'll be something they spend dev time on right now before release, considering that naval units alone were a stretch goal. Hey, maybe we can make this a stretch goal too (too late?)
Re: Picking your Style +1!!! I loved that game and that was the bestt feature about it. reminded me of MOO2. I remember a game I played with my brother. He designed these crazy expensive helicopters that shot NUKES! lol, but my design was a very cheap spider bot with dual chainguns and thats it. While playing the game I started building these chaingun spiders and the factory doors literally never closed. It was a constant parade of spiders flowing from my base like an unstoppable river. When we fought, my brother had about a dozen of these nuking helicopters. Each shot from his helicopters cleared the screen! But the waves were endless... the more he killed the more my spiders flooded in to replace the dead ones. He was overrun and ran underground (another awesome feature of that game is that the levels had an underground layer!!!). The elevators only took 1 unit at a time though, so my spiders were unable to finish him and the game ended as a stalemate. So much fun! I also think this is an amazing answer to the "only 1 faction" thing, essentially making each player their own faction with the same tools to create units as every other player (faction). If you wanna make a mod for this, hit me up
