Poll: What do you want most?

Unit Cannon, 100%, I love the idea of cracking a planet with streams of units coming down, battling through layers of defenses and then laying down fire to support their brethren, all while listening to Ride of the Valkyries!

Mods.

No developer has ever (and probably never will) match the sheer volume of content that modders can provide. I think the amount of new units that people will mod in the first ~month after release will be mind-blowing.

Note: talking about the modding community as a whole, not 1 developer vs 1 modder. In case there was any confusion.

Nuke vs Anti-Nuke balancing for me.

I see that I'm the only one in this. Funny.

no you're not, but when I'm asked to weight it against scale I choose scale, "most desired" is personal, and varies from person to person.

I agree, the engine should be built to be scalable and to an extent "future proof" in the sense that if you have a fast enough computer you should be able to continue increasing the unit count (for example) without fear that you will reach an arbitrary "soft" limit where the engine essentially breaks down. TA was a great example of this, the engine was good at making use of newer hardware while not being awful on lower end machines. If we throw faster processors and more RAM at PA then hopefully the engine will know how to intelligently utilise it.

It's all fine and well having a game that requires a monster PC - but it has to be justifiable, and it has to be beneficial to the gameplay. People will see through a badly coded mess.

PA at the moment doesnt "feel" like it renders efficiently - the things we see on screen shouldn't really be as expensive to render as they currently are (apparently this is being worked on). At the same time some of the main bottlenecks or limitations at present are server side which is somewhat worrying since no amount of upgrades client side will address this (unless playing locally in the future I suppose).

Where is the "more UI power" option?

Flammable trees?

And other destructible terrain stuff. No more trees and rocks clipping through buildings.



... and what about the promised 'overhaul of strategic icons' ?

as in... go get me a beer (since I can't pause this game)? that's why I made a couple kids.

Heh, I've been using Tatsujb's SupCom icons because of this. I don't know how Uber managed to make icons that were so annoyingly huge and yet impossible to read reliably at any distance.

good one, Culverin would be proud.
I so deeply miss that guy.

YES! So we can make:

• Commanders with towels (and a button to use them of course)
• Stargate SG-1 conversion mod
• Custom units
• and other cool stuffs

No, more like "I can go get myself a beer even without pausing the game, because I do not have to micro a bazillion things at the same time, but rather can issue some high level commands that get interpreted by the game in a way that saves me aforementioned micro."

I would say performance.

More performance = able to have more planets in the system = more planets smashing into each other = planetary annihilation = win.

Trees go towards energy.

that sounds like a cool button to have. where do you want it, upper right corner?

Unit exceptions in pre-game set up.

No nukes
no navy etc..

Does your beer fetching 'mod' actually work as expected though? Or do they just rinse your internet bandwidth so you can't play?

I chose "polished visuals," I see I'm in a minority.

For reference when I think "polished visuals" I think:

(a) Jungle/Terran world related:
- terran planets with actual realistic biome merging (for crying out loud! its the ugliest biome right now)
- proper height variation
- proper mountains (current implementation looks like some kind of zerg infestation)
- rocks
- dirt/glass variation
- small city/temples/outpost/other-props in all biomes
- wild life
- collapsible trees (ie. when you build or walk near them they collapse and go away)
- more vegetation variation ie. tree variation in jungles, cactuses in desert, potentially even giant trees as terrain blockers, vegetation density variation (very thick forests/jungles, more sparse on hilly regions)
- terran world craters? because well you know every planet type gets hit at one point
- waves! and wave variation (as in open sea waves should be bigger)
- cliffs!
- beaches
- waterfalls!
- geysers
- vulcanos, lava trails, etc
- icebergs
- canyons (as in big ones you can go into, not just cracks)
- where's the "alien" vegetation? fancy florescent vagetation would be nice
- why is all grass green if its an alien planet?

(b) Moon stuff:
- moon crater variation (at least make them random spread and size), case to point: http://imgur.com/XM8ZGqu (better lighting/textures on moons too)
- platos you can move on top of (the current ones are such a tease

(c) Water planets:
- water planets, ie. planets with actual "small" islands, archipelagos, visible underwater biomes, giant sea rocks as mountains, floating rocks, icebergs, giant sea life (space whales, etc), deep ocean ranges etc—we'll probably just see renamed terran with different default water height and different colored water but whatever =P

(d) Units & Buildings:
- more animation and variation in details (smoke, jet thrust, heat effects, better explosions)
- water splashes for naval units moving and firing
- naval buildings should have some small variation like floats around them; they look too much like they're just glued to the top of the water; personally I feel like you should just be able to build some things in shallow water
- naval units should actually float, ie. tilt and move around as they turn and move forward
- naval battleship should actually break in half and sink rather then look like a burnt building
- more fire
- gunships should have a helicopter hover effect on planets with atmospheres; since they fly low enough for it
- building under-texture should go away immediately after getting blown up or get replaced by a destroyed structure version
- better animation for the vehicle/ship construction animation (the bot and air are way too good by comparison)
- smaller/more interesting wall model, current implementation doesn't really make sense and is ugly—real life tank walls as known by most http://imgur.com/fQ0BH1d here's also dragon teeth type walls: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_teeth_(fortification)
- cannon looking artillery pieces shouldn't fire a slow missle looking thing =P
- more realistic tank movement
- bridges/small-rivers that are required for gameplay (be they natural, ancient or build option)—just make them near instant/invulnerable if its a balance concern; though honestly they would at least add one point in the difference between tanks and bots (since bots should be able to cross rivers by themselves just like soldiers)
- why does nothing fire missles at ground targets? like in a straight line, not an arc
- more lighting on nuke (players with no direct visibility but near by should still see a nice big flash on the screen in the general direction, and of course the nuke should be fairly visible from space); regardless of actual gameplay size the nuke should be huge with it's dust cloud—just because you need to balance for smaller nukes doesnt mean you cant have a big boom
- anti-nukes hitting a nuke should be a little more dramatic not just "poof"
- units should be able to walk over dead units "carcases"

(e) General:
- planet rings?
- tank tracks
- unit dust trails on dust based planets (lava, desert)
- plane trails
- clouds? weather? When we look at a planet we generally look at its weather moreso then its surface; the amount of weather/clouds it has is also how we generally percieve atmosphere; at the moment no planet feels like it has an atmosphere.
- more interesting lighting (http://imgur.com/6zFcIdD). I don't mean like in that image, I just mean having some lens flares, some bloom, etc more stuff like clouds would probably do wonders with making more interesting shadows. Also things like moon relfections/shadows and such would make sense.
- invalidation for systems with planets that cross orbits
- more control over planetary orbits
- more stuff in space (1) there are rocks flying around (2) games like homeworld have exagerated space with very big success so ya just add some random junk
- orbits that are not on the same plane
- planets that orbit on different exis positions
- more control over orbit speeds (yes this is a visuals tweak =P)
- planet shape control (the earth isn't a sphere for example)


...oops, should probably stop now before I go on forever.

With regard to my opinion on some of the other choices. Out of the popular choices at the time I write this "asteroid belts" seem pretty meh to me (no offense meant to people that like them). I mean if you want that (and I assume people want it for the gameplay implications) why not just make a system, fill it with say 100 tiny little terran planets with max height variation and max height or at least close enough to get just a small building space. I would love to see asteroids for aesthetics but dont have high hopes for gameplay. The other one going down seems to be performance, personally I haven't seen performance issues that would call for it as a priority recently, a few months back ya, now not so much; looking at streams there doesn't seem to be performance issues that often these days. As for unit canon, same as asteroids kind of meh gameplay implication IMO.

I wanted to vote polished visuals too.

sacrifices had to be made. I didn't even have my own preferred choice but I ended up going with "performance" as it was closest to both "scale" and "bugsquashing"

yeah, admittedly they're still kinda buggy. lots of spontaneous crying and more of a resource-hog than I anticipated. need to optimize so they eat less and make less noise. and the beer delivery performance is spotty, at best.