Should Build Speed be Reduced?

Yes, all RTS games have some layer of tactics, but that layer varies from "of small importance" to "of huge importance" and anything between them. For example, Company of Heroes & StarCraft 2 are in the "of huge importance" whereas PA and lot of classic RTS are "of small importance". Between them, you have games like FA.

Also, I do not feel like I have the right to tell what is "perfect version of PA". I consider it to be artistic impression of devs which I personally happen to enjoy. This makes me biased but I can reason very well that certain crucial design choices occurred because PA has more emphasis on strategy. I doubt that the causal relationship between choices and their outcome was not considered a priori.

This caricature is not adding up to any argument. Also, one unit would have deep impact in strategy because the game would revolve around catering this unit en masse. My quasi-caricature of MoW was meant as a friendly suggestion for you to try out MoW, it's seriously something you might enjoy. It's also not popular game so it's less likely you have tried it out. I also used it to back up my point regarding design choices that led to a given outcome.

Hey, I agree both on your points. I personally wish they could have little more visual appeal (afaik, there are mods for that and probably mods in future will also expand this). Zerg vs anything (if zerg always has the upper hand) is also not too interesting on it's own. However, I also spent some effort in trying to explain to you why, right now, face value of PA seems to be zerg vs. zerg with little else content. Did you completely ignore or maybe forget this? Do you not recall the part where I told that all these other more interesting features of PA currently remain unused which might be related to what you're currently experiencing?

If you do not agree with me that the lack of depth (at the face value) of PA is caused because matches are decided too often too early creating this feeling of shallowness, then that's completely fine. But I would like to hear some reasoning for this. And if you feel like there's something I did not address regarding your points, please tell me. But however, I would like not to hear about "many examples you have given in this thread", because that is not specific. If you could be more specific, it would help us both; you with voicing your perceived issue and me considering it and possibly addressing it properly.

I also would like to ask you to stop using this play on rhetoric. It's very bad practice and the way you're doing it can be done by literally anyone here. If you find it really necessary, please, try to at least provide us some cherry picked examples, that will at least support your argument to some extent.

Let me shine some light why this practice is bad. You might very well be right that a lot of people find PA shallow as it is, right now. But please, do not shoehorn this stance of any majority, imaginary or real, to back up your opinion on what the actual reasons for this shared experience are. For example, I find PA right now shallow to some extent in multiplayer, but the problems that I identify are completely different from ones that you are identifying.

I'll continue with this subject in my next post as it has little to do with the arguments themselves. But it's worth considering the subject in more depth.

Again, taking reviewers for more than just arbitrary players who get paid for reviews which sums their profession, is not really sensible. And sample size is just 18 instances of a specific time frame (which means, it doesn't tell us what they would think of PA right now, since there has been a lot of changes).

And if Uber won't be making PA2, well that will truly be a shame, but this is a property of capitalism. If Uber truly wanted to make PA a new blockbuster that will cater around casual players, the essential game design choices would have been completely different from what they are right now. PA was one of the first bigger crowdfunding projects and that's what allowed PA to go towards new grounds. And even if Uber started to casualize PA heavily right now, it would be far too late at this point to avoid that fate. The initial couple months are most important for the future of the title. After that only mods can save it with this business model (think DayZ).

Now, for the more detailed part regarding player experience and perceived depth. It's very, very misleading topic because we usually deal with it so, that we experience shallowness and then we try to rationalize our best guess in terms of what factors sums up to this experience. Evolution has led us to believe that each one of us are supermen, which is why reasons like "there is not enough toys to play with" usually are the ones we come up with most easily, because this way we circumvent the chance that the problem might be in how we currently use those toys and more on, how we are promoted to use those toys we have right now by the properties of the toys themselves and the environment we are playing them with.

This is not to say, that lack of toys cannot be the problem, but rather just that our brains are more likely to come up with such answers because they're easier to deduct, regardless of their actual significance. A similar type of behavior occurs in how we deal with spiders for example. A person who has deep knowledge regarding spiders would be likely to say that for the most part, fear that spiders cause, is irrational and makes no sense. But when you think about the average Joe, he doesn't have the same knowledge of spiders - he only knows that some of them can be fatally dangerous. So brains deduct that the most logical solution would be to avoid contact with all spiders because some of them can be fatal. And this seems irrational only until you actually recognize that human brains have their limitations; after this it's actually logical behavior. However, this is not to say that it should be this way, like some proponents for discrimination would argue.

When you consider this, you might gain more profound grasp in what you would perceive as being the underlying problem that causes the perception of shallowness; lack of toys or perhaps the dynamics between the toys we already have?

But the important thing here is to understand that what you perceive as depth is not really more than just a perception. Your brains fool themselves to believe that there's some depth involved in the process where your brains utilize their short-term & long-term memory along with pre-existing schemes or schemes that brains might even create for future reference to find the most optimal way of doing things. See how this also works with spideys? Given that your brains have no adopted a library of the species, they cannot form a scheme regarding whenever said spider would or would not be dangerous; the efficient scheme is to assume it would be, in order to preserve your life more likely, which is important for offspring.

This is why, asymmetric design, for example usually results into more interesting experience. When done properly, your brains won't be thinking "gee, these factions are the same!" because it's not too obvious and there is no real reason to uncover this possibility even if it involved only minimal amount of thought. Heck, even I enjoy asymmetric design even though I know this much. Which leads to the next problem...

Where should devs focus? Asymmetric design isn't likely going to be for the worse if designed properly. But at the same time, it also takes resources to make it happen that can be spent elsewhere. Companies do not have inactive resources like governments usually do (the amount of unemployed is literally that for governments). So if asymmetric design won't do squat about the perception of shallowness that some people at least have, then it will have really much less impact than you would initially expect and thus the added benefit won't as likely (at least initially) be as ideal for the resources compared to if they were spent to something else that would have more impact in removing this perception of shallowness. And this is why me and some other folks here at least see asymmetric factions a smaller priority, because we are not seeing that it would solve what we believe to be the problem.

And generally speaking, it's healthy practice to keep in mind that any given company has limited amount of resources and implementing new features eat them. With limited resources, you will always have games that cannot expand everywhere. Only certain games like EVE can sustain a huge expansion because their amount of income supports huge & most likely modular development teams. While no one probably ignores this, but suggestions such as asymmetrical factions would require a lot of resources which can be spent elsewhere. Unless you truly consider this, you might run into false impression that not having asymmetrical factions is illogical decision. It's a decision that lead to the possibility of other existing features by now.

I've done a mod with real acceleration though? And units seemed fine as far as I can remember.

Try steering large unit blobs through cascades of choke points. They perform worse than with the stock settings. Watch out for units bumping into the walls on the sides of the choke points. Side effect is some lag, as the colliding units put more stress on the physics calculation.

The reason(s) I didn’t provide actually reviews themselves is because I didn’t want to derail the thread (something that has already happened it seems). I also didn’t want to list a bunch of cherry picked reviews, losing any credibility. That’s why I implored you and others to poke around on metacritic or steam reviews. You can just as easily look objectively and see lack of depth is a very common complaint. Since everyone seems to think these mythical reviews don’t exist, I guess I’ll take the time to list a plethora of reviews centered on shallow gameplay for you:

“Despite its solid foundation this is not a good game. The techtree is too shallow, strategic finesse, cunning or defensive play is hardly rewarded. Add to that pathfinding problems, performance issues and even crashes and it becomes clear that the potential (or ambitions) were bigger than the final result.”

“There’s a great game in here, somewhere. Rapidly getting into jaw-droppingly huge wars spanning multiple worlds is brilliant - it really is. And there’s no other RTS that gives players so much destructive power. But the lack of tactical depth and focus on constantly rushing makes Planetary Annihilation tiring.”

“The lack of variety is just another bad call in a series of bad calls. With only a single faction, with nothing resembling a tech tree or upgrades, with maps having only a single shape (a sphere inside a sphere) that negates terrain, Planetary Annihilation misses many of the elements that make a good RTS a good RTS. It instead is so in love with its concept, which isn’t very good in the first place, that it never gets around to the vital business of being a good game.”

“Planetary Annihilation looks and feels underwhelming. Interplanetary combat might seem fun on paper, but gameplay-wise it's an absolute chore. And that's just it, Planetary Annihilation is missing all the FUN which was present on Supreme Commander - a much better successor to Total Annihilation.”

“Strategy takes a backseat to speed, efficiency and swarming your opponents.”​

Those were professional Critics, you know, people who review hundreds of games to make a living. Most (not all) are very credible, they have some inkling of what makes a game good and enjoyable. I don’t want to hear conspiracy theories about paid reviews (please keep your tinfoil hats at home). But what do they know right? The rag tag team of diehard fans on the PA forums know better! On with the user reviews:

“PA is probably best surmised (in my opinion) as a dumbed down version of TA/Supreme Commander played across planets instead of flat maps. It does have a few interesting features to draw in the crowds; epic scale, planet smashing and the metal planet 'anniahlaser' being the three.

Unfortunately upon release I am disappointed. I feel like the game lacks polish (from wonky unit animations and odd planet smashing textures to poor strategic options when invading planets and the navy STILL feeling like a second class army choice) and has a pretty poor choice of units - none of which feel interesting or innovative!“

“Uber Entertainment really cashed in with this cash cow. There's nothing revolutionary about PA's gameplay, you win by superior micro and spam. The game has no save feature for the anemic singleplayer and every part of it is DRM'd.“

“But between the crashes I have a chance to play, what appears to be, a completely unfinished game. There is a very limited number of units, weapons, and strategies. Many of the game play mechanics are underdeveloped. Also I appreciate the idea of a plant down sphere view instead of the typical flat map. I can see how it could be really cool - but it isn't. It's hard to use and just awkward.“

“At its core PA is a basic RTS. Battle for resources, use those resources for development of stronger armies and then destroy your opponent's commander. You're most engaged when you can keep track of those tasks at the most basic technology level. The game shines when things are kept simple but that's not saying much because it doesn't feel like there's much of a strategy beyond building a mob of units of the same type and hurling them at your enemy's weakest point of entry. In order to win you'll have to travel to other planets and build more advanced units, this is where the game quickly breaks down. The game becomes frustratingly unforgiving when you're expected to always be making the best decision as to what to do over multiple planets, across the orbital layer, the air layer and the ground layer. Focus is a resource in its own right and it just becomes unreasonable to pay attention to so many things going on. It can be better to play on a system with one or two planets, which defeats the premise of the game entirely.”

“This game makes me never want to contribute to another Kickstarter game ever again. I contributed to this game since day one on Kickstarter. I was extremely excited of what would come out of this game. When alpha came out, it was bad but I kept saying to myself "it is still being built." Beta was bad still "It was being built." Even now, they fixed a lot of issues but the game is bland as it could be. Just does not have that excitement and fulfillment of a game I was expecting. I REALLY tried to like it, but it was a HUGE disappointment.”​

There are sooo many more examples, but hopefully you get the point (I didn’t even look at steam reviews). And honestly, I just ran out of time. Oh, and for the record I counted save game as an issue 3 times total. It’s definitely a complaint, but hardly as common or is impacting review scores as much as cola_colin state it to be. The problem is as @Zainny already stated, people have moved on to better games and forgotten about PA. Some like myself, will probably return in due time to see if Uber has addressed anything. I still haven’t given up hope that Uber is listening, though looking at these reviews their track record doesn’t look so great. These people are not the ones vocal on these forums.

I understand your point of view with tactics but I don’t understand why think more simplistic gameplay is good for PA. Do you like have Grenadiers not very effective? Do you just prefer large simplistic blob vs blob mechanics? For you, the fun is in managing economy and factories? Personally I’d prefer some unit roles, like tanks for damage soak, long range artillery with splash damage and snipers that a weak but high damage. I’d also like some innovating and crossover units that are not just role specific so there are some soft counters as well. And some units that are just plain fun and balance them in accordingly. This ALSO adds strategy because it’s not just microing your units, it’s deciding what to build as a reactionary to what your opponent is doing. Larger hp pools on defenses and units would turn the game away from its current popcorn state, it would and increase game length because build time would have to be slightly adjusted to compensate. If you need the same amount of units to make an assault successful but they take longer to build common sense would dictate that game length would increase accordingly. It also allows you to create some of the more interesting interplay with unit roles.

Lastly I’d like to thank you for making such thought provoking posts. You do make some good points, and it shows you really thought about it.

Unit roles and health buffs don't have to force micro to being the dominant part of the game, and that's a common misconception.

What you need to know is in essence we don't really disagree with you, and if you go back to the threads of beta and Gamma you may see how close they are to yours. We want unit diversity, heck it was a long fight for advanced to not be upgrades of basic units and only sidegrades, units with specific roles they excel at, for so very long.

We want interesting units, decent health pools, etc.. But we also want large armies. And are all pretty iffy on large units unless they actually have a need to be large, like it's intertwined with their role.

Large armies is the staple of PA; yiu may see it as just a game of rushing, and maybe it is.. But that's what it's intended to be, it's a game of its own that remains unlike many others.

I didn't want to ignore you on MoW again (I didn't mean to last time and I ran out of space this time). I've played it, it's a pretty unique interesting game. Half of me likes how ultra realistic it is and at other times that's what turns me off. I still prefer Company of Heroes 2 over it for competitive play. It just feels a bit more polished and it walks a perfect line of realism and gameplay. I do like all the extra units int MoW though

Btw, CoH2 is where asymmetrical armies really shine and add a layer of strategy. Having played that I'm surprised you don't feel that way. You can have a one unit as simple as an heavy machine gun on one side, have an armor piercing ability while the heavy machine gun on the other side, doesn't have the ability, instead it has superior range and firepower. Or take the anti tank guns for example, on one side it can camouflage itself when standing still, but it does less damage, on the other side the gun has an armor piercing ability. Both units are interesting and useful but different at the same time. Some of the factions play completely different, vastly so. Some have larger tanks and more slow moving heavy hitters while other factions like Americans are more about versatility and having more multi-role units. I could go on, but there is nothing stopping Uber from drawing said influences from asymmetrical design to make it interesting. I'll agree that TA's extra faction wasn't really vastly that different and didn't add that much to gameplay, but that doesn't mean PA can't learn from that and evolve.

Is that in Uber's best interest to do now? Who knows, It really depends on how much Uber is hurting for cash. A large free expansion with a new faction for example on steam could boost sales substantially. So could positive word of mouth from a balanced, interesting game. Ideally I'd like both, but resources aren't unlimited.

If they ever did they reverted it, current github version does not feature it.

I really don't get this discussion anymore. Yes many reviews say the game is "dull" or whatever you want to call it. However many of those reviews are outdated, as you can see by some mentioning stuff like "there is drm everywhere".
Also I don't even disagree. Yes PA, especially the release version from last year, is missing stuff in the gameplay area. Nobody tries to argue against that. Yes those reviews have a point. Nobody tries to argue against that.
But they do not offer a way to fix the issue. All they say is "dull", "boring", "not deep", "blabla". Those all point at the fact that some issues exist, which we all probably can agree on.
Now the real question: How to solve them? When I read those reviews I think
"ha they fixed that drm stuff already"
or
"ha next big PTE will finally get those single player people their savegames (yes reviews don't list that as often as "boring gameplay", but really trust me if you read through the forums as well as steam you can find dozens and dozens of people who miss savegames)."
or
"A yeah the game could use better balance and more useful and interesting unit, great that Uber is working on it".
Really what is Uber supposed to do?
They added submarines just last month, last week the PTE got awesome looking new walls, the week before they started to experiment on mines and combat fabbers. They are in the process of making more ladder maps, tvinita has been going around doing test games on them with players he found in PA Chat. They are in the process of rebalancing so many things. Yes they have not perfected it all. But they are most certainly working on it. Just not by adding experimental units, but rather by first fixing issues on the existing tech levels. Why add more stuff if the current stuff clearly doesn't even work?

The only disagreement here may be on "what" they need to do to fix it. But that is a long long topic and I am sure if you were to ask the reviewers of the reviews you picked they all would come up with different things.
There is no one golden solution to it. Yes a few more hitpoints to reduce the popcorn factor are probably a good idea. Yes reducing the pace of the game in some areas probably is a good idea (again look at PTE, that is what is happening there since right about last week).

So gameplay problems exist, Uber is aware and fixing them by working with the community better than ever before.
All well and good then?

Uber is supposed to fix the goddamn balance. That's it. And I think they need to just scratch the whole thing and start over. Any other result may well be a patchwork of quick fixes that no one is happy with.

Also, can we please just completely ignore the IGN review? I know I usually say there's a grain of truth in everyone's opinion. In his case, it's just not there. He flat out detests the game and made a review that reflects that belief.

I'm sure they can pull a workable balance out of this mess, but I'm skeptical nonetheless.

What happened to the "we'll overhaul the balance before release" idea? I remember that from the beginning of Beta. It was something I was told after asking about it (the balance had tons of issues back then, but it was quite entertaining), and I was (and still am) quite surprised when they chose to just adjust it.

EDIT: also, Colin, there are standards. "Better than" is a terrible measure of someone's performance. Hold them to a standard, not a subjective measurement that most people can surpass.

EDIT 2: I would be perfectly okay with the devs taking a month(or two months) to overhaul any part of the game with few updates. Hell, they could publish their work on the PTE and we could help them test it! I'm not the only one, either.

What standards for community interaction do you know?

Most of us already know what metacritic contains - 18 arbitrary reviews of a certain time frame which tells us little of what PA is right now in their opinion. And more over, nobody denied their existence, only their importance is being questioned here. I would like to point out that

Yeah, professional critics. So, let's say, you would pick any person from anywhere and tell him "play this game for X amount of time, review it and you will get Y amount of cash" and he would agree; what exactly would make him different from a "professional game reviewer"? Experience? How does that experience change the practice of reviewing when there is no feedback mechanism attached to them? As long as they don't give 10/10 ratings to every game and more importantly, give terrible ratings to games that failed obviously (like Simcity 2013), they have nothing to worry about. They won't lose their jobs. Well, unless something like gamergate would occur.

This is really why I find that this "profession" isn't exactly something that should have position of any kind of authority. It's much like economists - they have huge swathes of authority in most modern societies. They are taken as a credible source for predicting the economy, despite the fact that they prefer inaccurate tools for prediction because they can be certain that they will, most likely, get it wrong, over the less inaccurate ones (yes, I'm serious).

This is what happens when feedback mechanism either ceases to exist or never existed. What could a game reviewer really do any better when there are no goals for them apart from writing arbitrary reviews? How does the accumulation of past reviews increase any more credibility - and anyway, what kind of credibility is there? I have no idea what reviewers are supposed to do exactly. If I would be asked to review, I would make an introduction of how I personally related to the game and follow up with what kind of features there are and how I experienced their implementation. Then I might continue in some more specific topic that seems to be hot regarding the game (like, crowdfunding in context of PA or features that I feel missing). But ultimately, I want to help the reader to form a picture whenever it would or would not likely result enjoyable experience for him/her. For example, I'd rate SotS2 very high but I would stress that 99% of gamers would never be able to enjoy it, whereas the 1% would likely enjoy it far more than most other games. But it's obvious that a lot of reviewers do not practice their profession like this. So for most part, I do not give reviewers much authority over any random gamer out there.

It's hard to understand the point when one of those reviews is actually contradicting with what you have said. Someone finding how micro actually is too important? And a lot of them are clearly from the period of when PA was initially released - which again tells us little. For example naval is far from what it was back then at this point. Some of the points mimic what I have said - for example, the lack of strategy beyond building big blobs. How do these highlighted points actually support your point about how lack of tactical emphasis is the ultimate problem?

This is why I wanted those cherry picked examples, to gain some picture in how you interpret them. Because my findings did not support your position only.

As far as I know, a lot of people here agree with these statements for the most part. At least I do. Except that as game progresses, you will eventually have blob vs. blob mechanics no matter what, because your focus is better spent in strategy than in managing small unit groups. Improving T2 balance would help somewhat regarding this, but the fact is that most games don't get to meaningful T2 stage, so even when T2 would be ideally balanced, it won't necessarily change the experience all that much. To be honest, the fact that sniper bots & shellers are as powerful as they are right now and there's so little complaining about them, tells me that not all that many people get to the point where T2 units would be too significant.

It's hard to predict whenever you would or would not need the same amount of units to make assault successful, but it would mean that if you lose a fight, recovering from it will take longer as well. So essentially, building speed would do little about the snowball effect which mitigates the return in effective length of games. Larger health pools would neither help with this, well, unless they're only adjusted to defensive structures, which might help to some extent, as long as it won't promote more turtling which can happen.

Personally I think the defensive structures (esp. t1 ones) that we currently have are sort of designed in the logic that they would be used in normal 2D map. In spherical maps they're really risky investments because they can be attacked from any angle. Mere few doxes can easily take out a single turret by outmaneuvering their rotational speed, so you would have to have two apart from each other for reasonable effect, yet, metal and energy spent in two turrets for one location is really big investment compared to what you can do with tanks or dox of same resource amount.

Pelter is exception to this, but also is very vulnerable structure on it's own, so to employ pelter in a reasonable location, you would also have to make sure that it won't get instantly raided down. And you would need radar or good map awareness here as well.

Hey, it's always nice to spend some effort in debates. And you also provoked lot of these thoughts as well.

The same standards you hold for other people.

As an example, I was taught to be forthright and honest with sensitive information. That way, both parties can work together on a solution, instead of one side desperately trying to fix it before the other side notices. I expect the same from Uber. But, I also have a level of trust with them. If they withhold information, but tell us later and explain why they did so, I would (dependent on the outcome) be okay with it. This has happened previously, and they have earned that trust. They've also thrown it to the wind, which is why I see them as improving.

I was thinking of a real formal standard.
I could say "in my standards they are doing very well with community interaction", but that would be even less informative than "compared to a few month ago their community interaction has improved a lot".

Never said you couldn't have an opinion. Just said there may be reasons your opinion is flawed. I also like the posts that I agree with and there is no point to repeat what has already been said. Attacking me personally and my delicate sensibilities is very mature and helpful lol.

I too would second I'd like to see current balance scraped and started anew.

Oh come on that was said with tongue n' cheek. I am sorry if it honestly offended.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pte-build-78421-pte-now-up.67988/

I think you and a few others are semi agreeing with some of what I am saying now, but early in the thread I was being fought tooth and nail and the majority of people were saying "PA is fine the way it is, it doesn't lack depth." I am sorry but I just couldn't abide by it. That was the point of bringing up what I did. I think you bring up some good points though.

I don't know if this is what you are getting on about, so correct me if I am wrong. But I haven't seen lot of Ubers interaction on design philosophy or where they intend to go next. Dungeon Defenders 2 for example, has an hour long dev videoblog ever week, where they discuss what they have been working on, and where the game is going. They take user questions every week and provide answers. It's basically a weekly ama and communication is great. I'm not saying Uber should copy that model but a little less transparency would go a long way to making me feel better, I don't know about you guys.

I think that was a misunderstanding. From skimming over the first few pages again I think what happened is that you directly proposed your solution to the problem of "not enough depth", being "slow down the game" and then people stormed against that. Not because people think PA doesn't need more "depth", but rather because they have other ideas of how to add that "depth".
At least I have never argued for "PA is fine the way it is, it doesn't lack depth". My stance on that is that PA has some depth in some areas and is missing it in other areas. Slowing down the pace of the game a little is probably a good idea, as shown in the most recent PTE, but it isn't the one holy grail that you seemed to make it out to be at the start of this thread. To add more depth we need a better balance between the existing units, we need all units to be useful in certain situations and then we may need some extra units or features, like a new version of the krogoth or wreckages.