Super Units in PA?

Some of the specialty roles are very niche. That's why I think it's a good idea to pair them up with another role. Super, heavy, or large don't mean as much when the unit isn't a base breaker. We can have a large (but not super) Anti-nuke unit, but I think it should double as another role so that it remains valuable even while not firing anti-nukes.

A Mega reclaimer... I'm all for it. If it had an AMS for shooting down catapult missiles it would be able to get a lot closer to an enemy base while clearing out the wreckage from the last big battle.

My point is that FFAs can never be fair the way you want them to be. If there are a half dozen players in the game, of course one of them will be able to sit back and build up nukes. Just because you pulled it off doesn't mean you were better than them. It really just means you got lucky and didn't get attacked by three people at once. FFAs can still be a lot of fun, but they so often come down to people getting surrounded and killed off without a chance while others are never touched. You really just can't learn anything useful about balance from a game like that.

Afaik t2 flak deals with missiles as well ... so just let it have a mobile flak escord with it?

@conundrum ..... that is a very boast assumtion to make ....

Thats only true currently. In an FFA if I get attacked by more than 1 player, thats fair. Nukes allow me to kill a player on the other side of the planet that I haven't even scouted in 20 mins. Thats not fair not matter how you slice it. I make a point of nuke spamming as much as possible. You know Why I nuke spam? So that other players have a horrible time. Such a horrible time that they realize how stupid they are and come to the forums to bitch. Every game I ruin for players strengthens the call for them to change. I will continue to abuse them until they fix it even though I hate the nukes because I want everyone to share my hate for them. And guess what? It works! Uber doesn't care to listen? Lets see how many voices it takes to clear the wax out!

How is that different to a asteroid/planet impact though? Or using long range artillery on a not-recently-scouted player?

The player who does this is foregoing the chance to attack a direct threat to themselves. In an FFA, this means they've just exposed themselves.

Nukes aren't perfect, but I wouldn't say they are unfair purely due to the nature of FFAs (balance of nukes/anti-nukes is another issue)

Also, if a word is filtered out, it means it shouldn't be used on the forum.

It's different because Planets in the map are finite and are fought over by the players. It also requires map control to get them. Nukes can easily deal with direct threats too! Ever nuked an incoming army? I'm just saying that everyone who says we can't have megabots because they aren't perfect but that argument is invalidated by the fact that we have nukes as they are in the game. Filtered out words get the message across without actually displaying the word. Best of both worlds if you ask me.

That last part .. just sooo doesnt make ANY sense ...

Alright so anyone else think we should stem away from nukes and get back to talking about.. Large units? We've gone a little off topic here ^^;

In my opinion quite a few people are being a little.. narrow minded? I mean just because a unit is big doesn't necassarily mean it replaces others. If PA DID have a megabot it doesn't mean it would have to be the most powerful thing possible. I mean if you want to just keep using the recycled excuse "Oh it replaces units! Impossible, macro game!" then I guess we should just throw away planet smashing? Does that not replace my ants? My bots? My.. Everything? Why do we want planet smashing? Because it's awesome! I just love the concept of super units. Making the other player shake in their boots as a giant robot assisted by a whole army of units slowly walks to their base!

A megabot does not need to be invincible, it does not need to replace units. Just try and come up with solutions to give weakness to such a thing? As I said.. Pages ago.. Superunits could easily just be niche units, a megabot could use a high AOE weapon that's very bad at hitting precision targets, it could have health similar to the commander, VERY slow walking speed, decent range for taking out defenses, and finally a blind spot when units get too close.

Alone this unit would be completely worthless, easily destroyed by a string of T2 bombers, build as many as you want of these- they would be destroyed. You'd NEED to back this thing up, there's no way it could defend itself considering it's speed and blindspots. Like I said it's health could be similar to the commander and we all know how devastating a group of T2 bombers are for a commander. If balanced correctly a megabot could be a giant support unit. Large doesn't change anything- It just makes it look cooler <3

I agree with that in principle, but I still worry about making a unit with any kind of super anti-ground role.

If we make minimum range a weakness then we need to make sure it also has a huge AoE and we are using friendly fire. Minimum range doesn't work once you have a mob of 20 in play because the ones in back can cover the ones in front. We may also want units/buildings to take damage from AoE proportional to their size. Larger units would be weaker to bombers and long range artillery, and in this case megabots would destroy themselves or each other wholesale if they get swarmed at point blank range.

The larger the unit the easier it is to hit ...

Slow and large would give the long range artillery an advantage in hitting it, bu other than holkins and T2 bombers I really haven't seen accuracy play a large role in the game.

I agree that's actually why I like large units other than their intimidation factor. It adds an extra layer of vulnerability to units that are large and powerful.

Lets just take the vacuummegabot ... he is as niche as it could get imo

Actually a krogoth like unit doesn't make any unit obsolete even though it damages units directly, people really need to play TA for a few days, it wasn't perfect sure, but it did a lot of things right quite a lot of which was never picked up in other games. On the other hand, I too lean towards a mobile reclaimer/facotry, or some kind of orbital cruiser.
There is a niche waiting to be filled for a large Sumo like unit for crowd control, inferno's do not do this by all accounts so the role isn't filled, and a megabot could definitely fill this role in this instance long range units including sniper-bots among other things offer definitive counters. And seriously we could do with a unit like this for several reasons,
A: mass armies/blobs are good, but is that all we want to see, rivers of icons running into eachother, colliding and dissapearing...?
B: A land based method of breaking up blobs is needed
C: A megabot for crowd control would reduce lag... think about it. Countering a massive blob with a much smaller blob and a riot-bot means less icons/units being rendered.
D: Sniper bots are currently very niche, there's very few high value targets commanders aside and most others can be taken out just fine by any other number of units. More high health/high cost units would give snipers more reason to build leading to less dox spam (currently the go-to unit) and a increased focus on combined arms even from just one factory.

Artillery and bombers are anti blob ....
For the rest ... i cant say realy anything else other then waiting till the roster has been done aswell as the first few overall balancepasses ... that way we know what else might be missing or what else might be wanted


And yeah vacuummegasumo ....

Oh my gosh, Bmb. You may want to watch the last Live Stream from Uber, where a bunch of Builders reclaimer a Commander in zero time, and how that eliminated one of the strongest player in game.

Beside that, I remember ZaphoxD showing on YouTube a Team Match with some friends where players could build anything but Builders. It was an awesome game. They had to exploit the offensive capabilities of builders. That video taught me something.

Those two video footages prove that builders are way more capable than what you are stating since the other day.

And after your FatBoy dies, what does it happen?

Beside, how powerful do you propose this Super Unit to be? How many units could it produce per time, compared to a normal Factory?

Apparently my tablet has been auto-correcting every single case of me typing "megabot" into "megabit."

How many megabots of bandwidth does your base have?

.. oh boy .... imagine terrabots