Role of the Commander

That's a very bold statement, citation required.

And really, that's it for the commander? A predefined role dictated to you as the optimal and only way to play him. That's exactly the problem with today's commander that I am trying to address.

Your description of how to use the commander stands in sharp contrast with Uber's lore:
- The lore paints a portrait of a commander with feelings, memories, awareness, desires, and intrigue.
- Your description is a drone pre-programmed to do repetitive tasks over and over again.

I think Uber's vision for the commander is much grander than the limiting role that you have settled with.

This statement seems like a really easy way to shoot down ideation. I'm encouraging others to brainstorm creative and interesting ways that can make the commander as interesting as the lore's portrait.

Remove fabricators. Now the commander is the most important unit always!

(trolling)

But come to think of it, this might be an interesting mod.

Just look at PA and TA, even stock SupCom1/FA follows this mostly, even a fully upgraded commander is still quite weak in direct combat, in fact the strongest reason SupCom ACUs even have Upgrades is because of the way the different Tiers are balanced, If proper micro a stock ACU might be able to handle 30~ish T1 units attacking at once with no other support, but even as many as 5 T3 units can totally wreck an ACU without Upgrades, and even with upgrades 30~ish T3 units could probably wreck an ACU assuming good control.

Commanders can defend themselves, but they can't fight a war alone, and you don't want them to anyways considering how they're the lynchpin of the entire army.

Feelings have nothing to do with it, Bolos have feelings as well(Mark XXV and later) but they still do the thing they were designed to do. You're talking about character, I'm talking about what they do. They build an Army, it fights, wins and the Commander Moves on. You can still have all kinds of personality, but this isn't some Anime where a strong Spirit makes machinery perform better than it's supposed to.

Look, I'm not saying that you are envisioning can't be made to work in a game, just not this one. The problem is that as a mechanic, it just doesn't work well in this particular Sub Genre. The thing is that the Army size isn't limited, this isn't like Starcraft where you know an Army can't grow beyond a certain size, in PA you could easily have 100+ units shooting at your commander at once and you can't sale the Commander like that. For the gameplay it's better for the Commander to be useful in the early game, and once the early game is over PA gives the commander the ability to "reset" the game by starting the process all over again on a new planet, moon or asteroid.

There will plenty of depth and variety to be found in the unit pool, much in the same way that FPS games let you have different weapons. Commanders will/may have some limited variety in the form of different abilities as I've already linked to, but just like an Ant will always fill a specific role, the Commander will generally fill a rather specific role as well.

What you want just doesn't really fit in with the rest of the game to be honest.

Last thing, you need to separate the story/fluff from the gameplay, Neutrino has said he's perfectly fine with changing the lore to suit the gameplay and as I said, what I've laid out doesn't detract from any kind of "character" Commanders might have.

Mike

The Commander is designed to jump to a planet, build an army, and ultimately win with that army. Any risks or obvious dangers to the Commander should be addressed in its loadout. A Comm that can't deal with common or obvious dangers is quite simply a bad Commander that deserves to die.

The best Commander design is straight from TA. It was not necessarily the most strongly equipped, but it did have the BEST tools for the RIGHT jobs. Its lathe was the strongest of any game, with more power than 4 starting constructors (future games crippled this to 2 or 1). The d-gun was a superweapon that cut lines through light and heavy tanks alike(crippled to the uneventful "overcharge" and weak *** "ubergun"). Throttled by energy demand, the d-gun allowed the Commander to scale in combat power well up to the midgame(the other guns couldn't come close). For late game he had a cloaking device, which demanded extreme energy but gave immunity to snipes. It was only 2 tools. But both tools worked together to keep the Comm's capability and survivability high, in a way that scaled well for a game that depends on scale. No other game has been able to repeat that success.

Supcom1 gave the Commander clearly inadequate tools, which could only be salvaged through a glitchy and sometimes broken upgrade system. Supcom2 went the other way to create a mini experimental with its own upgrade tree, which didn't work that well either. PA seems to be going down the Supcom1 road, which makes sense since the Devs also worked it. Oh well.

If it had a proper d-gun, those upgrades would not have been necessary. There's a reason the weapon was designed to kill a NUMBER of targets, not a STRENGTH VALUE of targets.

What was the range of the D-Gun? In SupCom many T3 units outranged The Commanders(which goes back to the Tier Balance) so even if the ACUs had the classic D-Gun it's still potentially pointless against a T3 force. I don't know much about the exact stats on the D-Gun thought.

Looking at the Stock ACUs they do share many of the same Qualities TA commanders have, things may not be perfectly aligned either way, but it certainly could be worse.

Mike

An unupgraded ACU dies to 2 tacmissiles or 3 stratbombs. Going to D-gun the bombs out of the air, are we?

You also seem to think the Commander's role in late game is to cower in a puddle with a sonar jamming sub and an underwater fusion plant, which is hardly 'relevant'.

The D-gun range was "less than artillery bot and less than laser tower, but more than assault bot". Assault bots had the absolute best power per cost, which is where the d-gun shined, while artillery bots were a big step down in overall efficiency (both ways). In addition, TA artillery weapons did not have effective fire on the move, nor could they kite in any decent way. Only AA weapons had range on the d-gun, AND the kiting power to stay away. So it was quite a few factors that worked together to make the d-gun special.

Except for the weapon. The ACU was designed around a high health with a consistent damage output and TERRIBLE overcharge. The TA Comm had moderate health, an awful damage output, and a superb d-gun. The former could not cope with scale, and the latter did. That's the difference.

Supcom tried to be 3 games in one, with T3 heavy assault bots having more range than T1 artillery. There's no point trying to get ANY serious ideas from a game that couldn't even be internally consistent. Supcom had such broken tier balance that I don't know why you'd use it as a counterargument.

Yeah, Supcom was messed up. A d-gun probably couldn't fix it all, especially since air was the TA Comm's weakness as well.

What a pity that Samsons were the bread and butter of TA T1 armies then. It was either Flash rushes or swarms of all-purpose missile trucks. And you seem to forgot that TA had T2, which was full of units which crushed Commanders before they could get in range. How many shots from a Penetrator can a Commander tank? Or a Luger? Or a Sumo? And I'm pretty sure Mavericks can circle-strafe a commander all day long.

Overcharge can kill three SABs in one shot if you're any good. If you can't make it work for you, it's not the weapon that's terrible. And it killed your own troops less often, which made it more useful for supporting your other units, while the D-gun's line of effect made it a pretty effective friendly fire machine.

In what way is SupCom not internally consistent? It's not like "all units are relevant at all points of a game" is a requirement of a good game, you know. And it's not like TA was guilt-free in terms of tier obsolescence. T2 air was just better than T1. Flakkers were so much better than T1 AA they had to break the golden rule of not including enforced layer targeting. Goliaths made such a mess of T1 units that once your opponent was fielding them, you basically didn't want anything to do with your Flash/Samson army. Why bother with LLTs when Sentinels were available? You've been tactically avoiding admitting that really, the TA Commander wasn't actually very good at fighting T2 and its best option was to hide.

The commander is its army, the army is the commander.
​

Stop thinking of the commander as a separate unit, but as the apex of the entire army. It IS one entity, with one purpose. Your own body is composed of millions of cells that work in synergy to give shape, form and function to you, a human. If it helps, think of the robotic army as a swarm of bees, or a bacterial colony. Sure, most of the cells/entities will be similar, some will also be more vulnerable than others, but stronger systems will defend the weaker ones. A queen bee is never outside her hive save for moving to a new one, a hive is never without a queen or it will die, even if there is a fight between queens, one will prevail. The queen is always at the heart of the hive, with layers of defense around her.

Personally I find the fact that the role of a commander changes over the course of the game to be something that adds depth to the game and makes it so unique. It prevents early rushes from being effective, confers some degree of resource generation, offers supreme power at the start of a match, but in mid to late stages you are faced with protecting your commander (do you have it move with your forces or build layered defenses?) or leaving the world to expand further.

I don't think it adds depth that you should use the commander aggressively for the first 10 minutes and are then point blank forced to merely have him building for the entirety of the game.

Aren't we all forgetting the uber cannon? I mean right now it's a WIP, but once it's done, I'm looking forward to it making the com a useful addition, at least with the ability to one shot. M.A.D. with the uber cannon should discourage com battles, but it'll be invaluable for base defense as long as there's something else to soak up the damage.

I skipped second page after reading the first. Continue onwards...

Hi there,

interesting ideas here ..
I like the role of the TA Commander very much and so I like the PA Commanders too .. I very much agree with KNight.

BUT:
I think that the TA Com was pretty damn good against bigger groups of units because of his DGun which very much outclasses the Ubercannon of the PA Commander right now! (Hope this is will change!!)
just because:

- u were able to shoot at the ground with it not only on a unit or building - enabling a cutting strike through the ground and destroying everything in its way..

- u were able to shoot it as long as your energy could afford it .. so with big storages in your base the com was a devastating unit for a SHORT time, capable of destoying bases and armies in seconds .. and then recharging

- u were able to shoot out of range targets with it by aiming for the path the enemy takes (took some skill)

.. I also miss the ability to build turrets with the PA Com.. I think he should be able to build them again to be more useful at the frontlines or building up your basedefenses quicker..

moldez

.. whoops somehow I didnt see your post AyanZo .. but yeah .. the Ubercannon needs those improvements !

I agree with this sentiment. I don't think that hiding him in a padded room in a straight jacket after he sees a few ants crawling his way is very fun...

Uber/Neutrino mentioned (somewhere) they wanted every unit to be useful throughout the game (citation needed, I'll dig it up...). I don't buy that the commander in Beta is useful throughout the game. Hiding is not useful, having him capable of filling multiple roles (whatever they may be and in whatever capacity) is.

The fact that he can blow up and you lose it all makes it a thrilling experience to use the commander in dangerous situations. That's fun my friend. But there's got to be a reward for it; today there isn't, I think that's the element that's missing!

Last thoughts....
A commander isn't called a commander for his masterful ability to avoid the call of duty by fleeing to a remote planet at the first opportunity.

The commander is useful. He can colonize another planet way faster than a single fabber could and isn't at the risk of doing to a sneeze when he is on said planet.

And he is called commander because he commanders his army....? They are robots. They do not know fear, nor courage, nor any other emotion. His drones won't care if he goes to another planet, nor will he feel like a coward. His systems will just think "Staying alive to destroy enemy commander at a nother time - true *flees*" done.

Yes, TA had its own set of problems. AA weapons held some dominance mostly due to the game's weak pathing. The maverick was totally nuts, sporting more range and speed and damage than the Zeus assault bot. The Penetrator was a frickin' Annihilator on wheels for a third less cost. What do you want me to say about that?

It was clearly apparent that anything which could outrange and outrun the Commander can kill it. That's why laser towers, dragon's teeth, and combat units exist. That's why most units had less vision range than shot distance, to pull forces into d-gun range. That's why the best Comm killing units tend to crumble against things that normally fall in droves against the d-gun(not always, but it sounds good). That's why the Comm eventually cloaks. Granted, the TA cloak was a bit broken because he could still be shot by radar. But if you can't fight something, then the next best option is to avoid the fight. That's just how it is.

The PA Comm is utterly helpless against asteroids or nukes falling on its head. Is that the Commander's fault? Not in the slightest. It is inevitable that something will overwhelm the Comm's ability to fight, even with the best stuff. You just gotta learn those weak points, and keep him out of trouble.

1) Killing clumped bots has little to do with skill, and everything to do with the enemy's failure to unclump.
2) 3 SABs is pittance for Supcom's scale. Even the TA Comm could handle a pile of Zeus bots, or some unsupported sumos/goliaths. With cloak, anything less than a dedicated kill squad stood no chance. (FYI the luger was artillery, and no one feels bad about arty outranging a Comm.)
3) Killing your own stuff is a cromulent counterbalance to the strongest weapon in the game. Saving the Comm's bacon is totally worth a few losses. Even then, it was a 100% player mistake, as the d-gun did not have FF until it hit the ground.

I feel like the commander is currently a good support for normal troops with its range and weapon damage, a good body guard of engineers and ants can really make a commander into a real beast.

And I like that, you upgrade the commander with an army.

Megabots should solve this if they were like exo suit.

Something definitely needs to be done lategame. its just way to easy to sniper commander, and he isnt exactly the most agile or fast thing. Have enough air units you an just bomb rush it very easily.

If not exo suit, then some kinda shield generator or a building commander can stay inside.

IMO, the problem is other units in the late-game, not the commander in the late-game.

Hopefully if we fully adhere to the basic advanced system then this shouldn't be a problem.

I just hope the power-gap between the two isn't so big.