Role of the Commander

The commander is the piece you defend like the king. The king is a standoff unit in chess, not the powerful queen though. The commander has gunfire to resist a squad of enemies. He is king strong.

Nothing wrong with a power gap if it's got some hefty limitations holding it back from being an 'upgrade'...

The Big-Bertha vs The Guardian, for example.

He can only resist them if they aren't moving.

Why not have him fill the role of king and queen, it makes for a nice risk-reward tradeoff.

The chess queen barely has more than a dozen or so enemies to deal with. The Commander has THOUSANDS. At some point, you have to throw in the towel and admit that the Commander can't fight against those odds.

Completely irrelevant. The Queen doesn't kill every unit, just like the commander doesn't. The Queen has support, just like the commander.

In Forged Alliance,
Commanders and upgrade to become a resource generator, you can put a stun field on your commander.
You can turn him into a super engineer.

He doesn't have to be the one doing the killing to be useful.

The fact still remains that he needed those upgrades due to the way the Tiers were set up.

If SupCom only had T1 units, the Commander(Buildrate: 10) wouldn't need Upgrades because he was already better than T1 Engineers(Buildrate: 5), but once you get to T3 you realize that without upgrades a Basic T3 Engineer(Buildrate: 30) was 3x faster at building than the Commander is, even the T2 Engineers(Buildrate: 12.5) were 25% faster than the Commander.

EVEN when you get the upgrade, his new build rate is only 42, for it's cost you get more build power out of T2 Engineers than you do out of the Upgraded Commander. The T3 Build Suite is a bit better, bringing his Buildrate up to 126, but for a combined cost of 3120 mass, you could get six T3 Engineers for a total Buildrate of 180.

Mike

Agreed. I like the analogy that the commander is both the king and queen combined. Vulnerable yet still powerful. Trapped and doomed if caught alone, yet a single unit capable of functioning in numerous roles as needed. A yin yang duality where the vulnerability and power makes the commander interesting to play.

You say that like it's not capable right now.

Mike

Eh, that was an accidental post. But now that you responded... You yourself said he's designed to build and flee to distant planets to start new bases. That's because he's not really capable of attacking in a meaningful way. Scouts can "attack" too....

But The point is that the Commander is powerful to attack in the right situations(small numbers of units) and in TA/SupCom that only really happens for a bit in the Early Game, once you get to the point where you have substantial armies being thrown about it can't defend itself. That's the great thing about making the Commander the best tool for expansion because now not only is he relevant for his Lathes but also his self defense into the Mid Game and even the Late Game in some scenarios.

Mike

Personally, I'd just like to build T2 and T3 structures with the commander after an upgrade or maybe a T3 engineer can build a commander upgrade center, where you park your commander and perform tier upgrades on him for a resource cost.

RAS was one of the worst things about SupCom, and I could easily live without anything like it being in PA.

My worry is that players will turtle their commanders in the late game due to less reward for the risk. If a player could invest resources in making the commander more useful late game it my help discourage this.

As long as we are not talking "torpedo's not hitting the pond" commander turtling, I think it'll be fine.

No it wouldn't, because the entire point of the game is to kill the commander trying to push it to into combat isn't going to help.

The thing is that the Commander is the best single unit to start your expansions on other planets, moons and asteroids, if you're not using him to do that and trying to hid him behind defenses he'll be at a fairly serious disadvantage when it comes down to how owns other planets, moons and asteroids and is just that much mor vulnerable to having the planet he's hiding on get utterly destroyed.

Mike

I wasn't purely suggesting a combat role and I half agree with on the commander being the best unit for expanding to new planets. Personally I would like to see an upgrade for the commander that gives him access to build some T2 buildings.

I hope I don't offend you, but I think I understand now. You did not know how to play the commander in supcom. This is the source of your misunderstanding for the commander in PA; you are now projecting those experiences or your play style onto your vision of the PA commander. This might be why you don't understand where I'm coming from. You are incorrect, in SupCom, the commanders were incredibly powerful throughout the game, especially late game.

Just one example.... in supcom, the microwave laser upgrade does 4000 dps. A T3 unit has around 4000 life, in one second it can kill the strongest army unit in the game. What about experimental? An experiment has life around 65000, that means the commander can kill him, alone, in 16 seconds.... I don't want to get more into details, that's not the point.

I don't necessarily want or am advocating recreating the Supcom commander for PA, but what I do want is a commander that isn't a sissy. There's a lot of creativity and innovation that's possible with such a unique character.

Which brings us to the topic of the thread, what would be some ideas to make the commander role more interesting, dynamic and viable throughout the game. I think upgrades for the commander would be a good start.

Another thing, the problem with today's commander is that it incentives and rewards turtling. I get the feeling that people who like today's commander are the people who turtle. I don't turtle. I want a commander that can reflect my play style.

The only one who isn't understanding here is you. The fact is that the only reason the ACUs in SupCom got upgrades was because of the way the tiers were balanced. You even go so far as to grossly overstate an ACU's capabilities, yeah sure 4000dps sounds great, until you realize that DPS along doesn't make something great, lets look at some numbers.

Assuming you've upgraded your commander with the Engineering Upgrades to boost his health the Cybran ACU has 17,000 HP, assuming you've done the Cloak and Stealth Generators as well brings it up to 25,000.

30 Titans do just under 5000 dps and would kill the commander in about 5 seconds, they would take some casualties that could up the kill time but lets be frank, 30 titans isn't a lot of them and are even regarded as the worst of the original SABs.

It only takes 16 Percivals to one shot the ACU, from well outside the ACU's range. Or 19 Aeon Sniper Bots, or just 9 deployed Seraphim Sniper Bots.

The Upgrades do a **** job trying to keep the ACU relevant late game and only the Cybran one manages to do it but has to rely on the gimmick of of Stealth and Cloak to make it viable, once you get any kind of Omni on you your ACU is back to being worthless.

Oh by the way, that only works with the Cybran ACU, good luck trying to use the other ACUs like that.

In SupCom the ACUs are never as powerful as they are in the T1 phase, even worse they lose any reliable relevance due to them being outpaced in Build power even WITH upgrades. Upgrades were basically about as effecting as a band-aid over a shotgun wound.

Why would you turtle with the Commander? That's like going kayaking and throwing away your paddle and using your hands instead, sure you progress somewhat but you'll never go as fast as someone who kept their paddle.

And even if you do make an "impenetrable" base/planet, good luck stopping all the asteroids.

Mike