Remove commander Sniping

You commander isn't unprotected, it has a gun and the Uber Cannon. not to mention as Nanolathe said it an build it's own factories.

The problem is that you stop thinking as soon as you come up with a situation where the commander dies and don't apply any further thought. Yes there are potential ways a single unit can kill the commander, does that mean we need to nerf units or buff the commander? Of course not! Making decisions based solely on Edge cases isn't wise.

Mike

Why put the effort into thinking ahead logically when giving up and calling it "broken" is so much easier, Eh Knight?
:roll:

Hm, ok, I brought up a stupid scenario. Well, one question: Do you guys think we will be able to transport air units from one planet to the moon? What if you land on a moon, then then the guy brings in T2 bombers? 'cept we can bring in escorts of course. But sometimes it sort of sounds like the commander is the only one who can just land on a planet with the lander.

I'm sure there will be unit transports at some point or other. And you may not be able to bring planes, but there are AA units

I'm quite sure I was in one of the games shiny is complaining about, and am "guilty" of the t1 bomber "cheese".

The reason I did this is simple, I like to attack early. Especially because this is alpha and the server will almost definitely crash if it goes on too long. Every game I played with shiny was on a massive scale 6 planet, and the only way to effectively get to someone's base early is with air.

It didn't work however against another player I did the same thing too. They saw what I was doing and spammed t1 and t2 fighters. And I lost.. So there you have it. Scout and mass fighters. Problem solved.

I think this game is a good example of this discussion, and it's a great game too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODkY0OywjFQ

Spoiler: Highlight below to see.

It shows bombing raids that both fail and succeed. Can you see why two (or three) attempts fail and 1 does not?

The servers don't crash, that happens on very very rare occasions and it's never happened to me. lower your graphics to absolute minimum and turn off shadows.

I honestly don't think we'll be carting Air units around too much. To me it makes sense because one of the air unit's strengths is that it has a high, unaffected speed. It doesn't matter what the terrain is, Air units always go places full speed. When you think about that in terms of a planetary landing scenario, it suddenly doesn't matter where specifically you land because Air units are never that 'far' from thier target. You can't strategically place defenses against landings when Air units can ignore it all. Basically to "strategically" defend against air landings you need to more or less cover the entire planet, in which case you'll be massively over-invested.

The current talk of Interplanetary transportation looks somewhat like this;

Lander - Not practical for armies, Commander/Fabbers only maybe.

Teleporter - Not Practical for armies, likely to be very expensive, but travel time is liekly good to be short, good for long range or immediate transport.

Unit Cannon - Is Practical for Armies but may have functional limits.

While we don't know much in terms of details but based on Dev comments and my own insight/opinions, heres some potential uses.

The lander is basically as we've seen from the Pre-Viz, uses basic Rocket Technology to get a very limited number of units off planet at a time. YouLocalMadScientist has a great explanation HERE that I pretty much agree with, I've also got some older write ups myself but they are very dated at this stage considering they were from September.

The Teleporter is kinda the opposite to the lander in some ways, it essentially has the same capacity, but instead of being 'slow and cheap', it's 'fast but expensive'. Bascically it takes the same basic mechanics of the Lander but super charges them to speed up the late-game.

Then you have the humble Unit Cannon, although we understand the CORE mechanics, Take unit A and shoot it to location X, there are a LOT of finer details we don't know, and likely won't be decided upon until we see how it meshes with the rest of the gameplay. So pretty much every past here is just my personal 'ideal' for the Unit Cannon.

First, the Unit Cannon(henceforth 'UC') can't move units out of larger gravity wells, so you won't be taking that planet bound army and shooting it to the moon. You can shoot from a moon to a planet it's orbiting, maybe to nearby planets/moons/asteroids as well.

What this all means is that once an Army is planet bound, it's not likely to leave which brings with it some important considerations when playing like "do I need an army to defend this planet?" if there is an enemy army also planetside then you probably will, but if they're not? Gioven the inherent difficulty of moving whole armies around and deploying them quickly, it might be that you can get away with building a bunch of factories, but not making any units until you know that planet is being assaulted by an enemy army. Then it comes down to wether or not you have enough factories to produce a defending force in the time it takes for that enemy army to attack, the time between those 2 points depends on a lot of factors, if you managed to scout it, and how much of a trip it is fro the landing point to your 'main base', how many defenses you have ect ect.

For me, that's a heck of a lot more interesting than "I've been building an army since my first factory and I just send everything out when I decide on a target" type of thing.

There is a lot of depth possible here, but being this is pretty much entirely new ground that Uber is marching into, we have to accept that there might be some compromises or that it will take some time to find the exact mechanics needed to make it all works. Right now we just don't know enough hard facts to make anything more than wild guesses really, but if we put the thought into it someone at Uber will read it and might take it into consideration and so we debate.

Mike

I've turned off shadows and my settings are quite low. I'm pretty sure it's a server crash because I see "Simulation Terminated." and there's no option to get back into the game when re-starting the client. It only crashes for me in mega scale 6 size planet games and the unit count get ridiculously high.. It also seems like these scale 6 size games are the most popular type and that's why it's happened frequently in my experience.

People who are posting "CLOSE THIS OMFG" or "LOL THIS THREAD SO FUNNY" are as destructive as any other Troll. Get yourself together.
And saying i am ignoring the pieces of advice other people give me is as lame.

I am fully aware that i couldve spent the whole lategame with my commander spamming anti air, building him a golden throne sorroundet by repairing t2 engineers.

I am just saying that it shouldnt be like that. People seem to think that that tactic is 100% legit, but in the end, this is a lame excuse for people who are not skilled enough to face people in a serious battle.

Its the same with Starcraft 2 Cheese, you roll the dice, hope for a single mistake of the enemy to win by weak game mechanics, or autoloose if he doesnt make any mistake
If that is what strategy means to you guys, i am probably in the wrong place.

Golly, good thing we're still in Alpha right?

Like I said Earlier, calling this an issue and trying to fix it is silly given the current state of the game. The problem is deeper than you make it out to be, the root cause is because we are still locked into one planet with no means to leave it, once we get that things will change. Once we get more Anti-Air that will cahnge, oncer we got more options of almost any sort that will change.

TL;DR Things will change, this is a Real Alpha after all.

Mike

It's been mentioned that there will be an option to remove that commander dies/you lose mechanic. So can you be happy with that?

I won't be playing in games like that because it's frustrating enough trying to kill the commander let alone all buildings of a player on a huge map.

Also if you want a more strategic rich "Starcraft 2 like experience", I would suggest playing on smaller planets. These games I find are much more intense and people get up to all kinds of crazy shizzle compared with the large planet spam fest games.

Im not in the same league as you no doubt but the reason these guys are making fun of you is you keep making the same statement and not realising you are not looking at the whole picture.
It appears your definition of "a serious battle" is a column of tanks steam rolling the opponents base.
From what you describe you've been beaten in open (serious) battle.
you fail to recognise that you've won the land battle which will all other things being equal result in your victory. however in the case you are describing all other things are not equal. by the sounds of it your opponent is focussing say (as an example 70% of his production on winning air dominance, while you focus zero% of your resources.
His 70% will beat your 0% resources in the air long before your 100% on the ground defeats his 30% on the ground.

Stormie

I will just relax for now i guess. Much of the stuff said actually makes sense, especially the alpha thingys, and the "i dont want to hunt every little shizzle fizzle down on huge planets"

Still kind of frustrating having huge armies and huge bases and loosing because one tiny unit of you is somewhere a bit off the rest. Makes the whole effort you put into the game 90 minutes a lil bit like laughingstock.

Maybe the commander can have additional lifes, if you build a "Comm backup system" somewhere, and ur comm dies, he is instantly recreated. Ofc that building would be very expensive and very long to build.

Was an option in ta, won't be default setting but no reason why it wouldn't be in this game.

That being said, i think air and arty can both use a mild tune down, yet the commander is more than capable offensive and defensive. Especially later when you can bounce him among different cosmic bodies.

Yes, it can be kinda frustrating when you think you've won but the enemy still has the better tactic hidden and kills you. But losing is always a bit frustrating.

There are 2 ways to avoid comm sniping through bombers that don't involve spamming tons of AA. Play on a map with deep water, send your com into the deep water and aircraft can't attack it anymore.

Play on small maps, large maps are basically "broken" in the current alpha stage as the gameplay and ui isn't designed for it. Large maps (given competent players) have no other way to end then due bomber spam just because how ground units work atm.

With small maps, your enemy won't have the resources to spam so many bombers and you can quickly counter that by ground forces so you'll get the gameplay you personally seem to like more.

When i imagine the gameplay I would like the most, it involes armies of a combination of air and ground, moving over large areas to flank the enemy, Having thoughtful battles on several points on the planet, loosing and gaining area, while scouting the weak spots of enemy bases and sneak a couple of units into it. (i hope we will reach that point somewhere in the beta).
I would LOVE if, instead of having 20342038 metal spots everywhere, metal is more rare, but gives more income. So the battles focuses on certain points of the world,

The last game was like that:

1v1v1

After 15 minutes i sent a huge army of bombers to an enemy, instakilled him (play only commsniping right now and i am kinda successful with it)
after another 10 minutes i send a huge air army to the other enemy, my airforce got beaten by his airforce (probably because i lost so many bombers by the death of the first enemy commander and he had all the time he needet, but he had much more anti air-air anyway) he flew to my base, i had ofc no more units, and he killed my comm

The Alpha excuse obviously won't work forever, but clearly many mechanics aren't available yet. Most importantly is that anti sniping tools are not in the game.

For example, the only way to deal with bombers right now is to kill them. That is not reasonable. Bombers are front loaded units that depend on getting off a couple of shots to justify their existence. Who they can potentially target should not matter. If they opt to target the Comm, it is the Commander's job to not be killed by a dedicated air strike. It's not AA's job to instakill everything in an impenetrable defense.

It doesn't prove anything, most of the players are quiet bad (no offense). If you know what you are doing, it is easy to win random matches. commsniping has nothing to do with it.

... air fighters

You would have prefer to invite them for diner and become friends ?

Owww You bad commander, you get killed again by T2 Bomber ! that is bad, bad commander !
:lol:
If you think it is not the job of AA to take care of air strike, you should question yourself.

edit : Seriously is not so difficult to settle a anti bomber cover. Build Air fighters and stop whinning. I don't see the problem, it make sense to have air fighter. you defend your base at the land level no ? why you don't do it at the air level ?

...
The point is that you can't screw over a unit just because it does one thing particularly well. The problem is NOT with bombers. It's far more fundamental than that. The fault lies with the Commander's inability to avoid focus fire in the first place. It's a conversation this forum has had before.

The Commander is very much a special case. Remove it from the equation, and it becomes obvious just how awful bombers really are.