Planetary Annihilation as a competitive game

Space ships are like experimentals in sup com, in that once you have them there is no need for anything else, they can shoot everything for more or less the most damage and almost everything can't shoot back. There is plenty of grand strategy already in the game.

I liked the part where someone said there should be some micro and everyone jumps down the throat shouting "ZOMG NO STARCRAFT MICRO"......which was never said, as Cola said, SupCom already removed all kinds of 'necessary' micro while still keeping a fair bit to keep the player busy ON top of the fact that Micro doesn't achieve nearly as much in SupCom as it does in Starcraft.

Mike

I classify that as supporting starcraft style micro. Twiddling units back and forth on the battlefield is exactly what we're against. It's hard enough to fight on two fronts on the same map in Supcom, expanding the battlefield to more than two fronts is going to require a certain amount of 'stepping back' from the individual control of your units.

Don't get me wrong, just because I like Starcraft 2 does not mean that I would like to see PA become a micro-heavy game. I want it to follow in FA's footsteps. I am just saying that micro-intense games like Starcraft 2 are a legitimate RTS-Type and many people like them. No need to get rid of them.
For PA some people seem to think that it is necessary to let my units think for me in the name of "STRATEGY". I so hate that word by now. Every time I read it my mind shows me an image of some ranting noob who is bad at micro-intense RTS and is looking for excuses, which is probably unfair to those who mention the word.
I am also surprised that people seemed to like the formations of SupCom1. They were stupid and mostly useless. Using them slowed down armies so much that it was far mar efficient to control the units by hand. So it seems that at least in 2006 AI-technology was not even far advanced to control a few simple formations and now people ask for their units to do far more advanced stuff xD

That is not really an argument against the possibility of improving unit efficiency by controlling them in a fine grained manner. If both players are unable to control all their units perfectly they will still play a fun game. The level of micro-importance that SupCom has was mostly fine. Make the formations more intelligent (they should not be much slower than moving without a formation!) and that is all that is needed really.

!?

I think uber should not underestimate the competitiveness aspect of PA and how FA is at that level.

Sure, there is no "public FA scene" with sponsors, public events..., but it's mostly due to the lack of support from THQ : No exposure in game conventions, ... But it's actually a very competitive game.

Actually, that's the only RTS game that I'm know that have a competitive team-game "scene", and one of the main reason (with probably modding) why it's still played 6 years later.
That's the only RTS game that is actually currently balanced evenly between 1v1 and xVx.

That's something truly unique Uber should cherish and try to replicate for PA.

I don't think people want to get rid of all click-heavy games there are. Just that they don't want the feature in every rts game. It belongs in some (the type with few units, less types, and high complexity per unit) and doesn't belong in others (the type with many units, loads of types, and low complexity per unit)

It shouldn't be hard to see in which category PA should be. It also shouldn't be hard to see in which category Starcraft goes.

There most likely isn't much thinking that a unit does, if it's only option are "drive" and "shoot". But if there's 80 of them in each of 3 different battles at once, giving each unit specific orders isn't really going to work. They need to be at least smart enough to fight on their own.

It was recently mentioned by a dev (Neutrino?) on this forum that Supreme Commander/Forged Alliance was never really a competitive game.

Not really competitive? Whatever. Why? because it was not an esport?
Will PA be an esport?

This is just because he did not work on it?

The game was highly competitive. Was the first game i think i had that was an RTS where you could download the replay and watch what other people were doing..
Is the only RTS i know that if you got good enough at it you could easily kill 7 noobs all at the same time. Try pulling that off in SC.
The differences in skill level were astronomical. Maybe this is what he means that some people were ****. But with more time and practice you got exponentially better. This to me makes an immensely competitive game.

Being able to give buildings orders before engineer even starts building them would drastically reduce the amount of unnecessary micro. I wouldn't have to constantly check when the engineer starts building.

First off, I asked the question. We are building a ton of e-sports features into the game but it's not clear to me that this kind of RTS is ever going to appeal to enough people to become a true competetive e-sport. None of the games so far have become one... doesn't mean we aren't going to try!

I was the lead programmer on SupCom and FA.

I agree that the game is competitive, that wasn't my point. It's never been popular enough to have true competition. Part of this is because the game is more complex than the mass market seems to want to accept for this kind of stuff.

Let me make a clarifying statement.

E-Sports and competitive play is very very important to us. We are building an immense amount of complicated technology to do things like awesome replays and to enable size and scope of games that haven't been seen before.

Not every single decision we make is going to be about competitive play though. There are multiple considerations.

During the alpha/beta process we expect to the community feedback, especially from the competitive players, to guide us on the best way to setup the game for competitive play.

Make sense?

It makes sense and is what I am hoping for. You have yet again planned what I think you should. I so love this whole project

I roffled.

I'd say what keeps a game in the competetive play is as mentioned before the player base but we must encourage people to be competetive. It must be a level where people can compare themselves to others, either with your friends or on an overall level.

I might be wrong on this point but what I've seen kill some E-sport is the terrible word that shouldn't even exist in my opinion. The word is "Random", you should win every match because you or your team were better. Not because one player got his planet or starting location generated better and gave him an advantage, or some other random act like misses, crit and dodges. Well, I think you got my point, the game should be as balanced as possible with as little "random" factors as possible. This is ofc something most games is aiming for and not a simple task but I hope they make it!

The problem I see with SupCom is the fact that the game takes time to become awesome. Quick matches are usually who upgrades their commander faster and attacks the enemy commander first to blow him up. Thats not interesting.

Interesting battles are the ones that last at least half an hour and perhaps not many people got interested in streaming or commentating over them.

I hope there will be more good commentators once PA comes out, I wanna be among them also. Hopefully we will be able to build a good competitive nation of commanders. Both for SupCom and PA.

I'd say those are the games that people will want to stream and commentate, IF there are things happening all the time and not only build up a base and reach the final upgrades and the make one massive fight and the winner of that fight wins the whole game. But 30 mins of fun and active gaming!

I strongly disagree on this. SupCom played on a "high level" usually has action from minute 2 or 3 onwards. At least on small to mid-sized maps.

Yes action consisted of tech 1 units accompanied by the commander attacking the enemy commander and his 20 units.
How is that fun? Thats just annoying for both commander and ruins the development of the game.
I watched an endless amount of supcom battles both 10 minute and 2 hours long and I do believe anyone will agree with me that 10 minute battles are in most cases funny or stupid.

SupCom should be epic with awesome tactics, strategy with resource and unit management. That can't develop if the game barely lasts enough to build a tech 2 tank.

I have to compare to Starcraft 2 since we're talking about competitive strategy and that one is the most known one. In Starcraft 2, the competitive games are based on small maps with very fast gameplay and quick tactics with the idea of eliminating the enemy as soon as possible (same as SupCom 10 minute battles) but in Starcraft you have to do that cause you have limited resources, you can't play forever and the main goal of any game there is purely to win.

In SupCom you essentially have unlimited resources and a massive amount of units, huge maps and great potential for epicness.
That is why streaming a huge battle is almost impossible or people simply don't wanna do it. As soon as you begin attacking your opponent to defeat him(before you build an army), the match will end probably with a commander attack one on one.
SupCom should be 20 minutes of creating the base with small waves of units to annoy the enemy and THEN the epic battle begins with huge waves clashing together creating mayhem.

Using this logic, the fact that SupCom didn't work as a competitive game with commentators and active tournaments(even though FAF has tournaments and ladder) is not a surprise.

Basically what I'm trying to say, SupCom fast paced battles with a quick ending are not interesting(reason for the game not having a competitive audience with active livestreams)
SupCop long battles are slow paced and take a long time to heat up and have waiting periods where both sides are preparing(unless its 2vs2 or 4vs4) and people didn't find any interest in livestreaming hours of the game at once.

If PA would have the ability to get interesting and epic right at start then it would have very big chances of being a good competitive game with lots of media surrounding it

Those little fights are the normal beginning of the game. They are way more interesting as just watching the players build up economy. If the players are equally skilled the game will usually develop further and feature higher tech. If one of the players dies quickly he either made a stupid mistake or he is just plain worse than his opponent in which case it is totally fine that the game ends.

In any competetive scenarios you always want to get rid of your opponent as soon as possible. That's the whole point of "competitive"

Not waves but constant fighting. That's what the early t1 fighthing is for. You seem to be descriping some late-game-unit-crashing. Building up stuff to crash it after 30 minutes is boring.

There were tournaments and streams and all kinds of things back in ... 2008 or 2009. It was fun.

While you seem to misunderstand how SupCom is played if two highly skilled players meet and play a good game you are asking for the right thing: Let the action begin in minute 1 and let it last for the whole game. That means constant fighing first with t1 than with t2 while spreading over the whole map.
The "problem" here is that in many cases you will have 2 players that are not equalls skilled and one player will be overrun in the early phase of the game. I wonder if that really is a problem, though.

The thing is that's not a problem with gameplay or balance, but with matchmaking, and there are already threads for that.

Mike

I understand how SupCom is played if two skilled players play, I've watched enough of them to know, perhaps I worded myself poorly(thats what you get when you think 90% and type 10% of the time) but that is indeed not the point here, point is to make the game worthy of media attention to make it as competitive as possible.

The game will need an excellent matchmaking system and the players will surely need to be ranked properly according to their capabilities.
I think even if two noobs played against each other, as long as their skill level is similar, the game will be interesting. Maybe not as interesting as pros but worthy of a livestream.

I believe making the game good for e-sports is quite important in both finance and marketing, especially now in 2013 when e-sports has a huge amount of media attention and money surrounding it.

I just wanna be sponsored by Razer and commentate over PA battles and get money for it man COME ON I'm not asking for much :ugeek: