The Game's Speed

So, I follow the development of PA since possibly 9 months. The devs discussed really awesome features in the pretty early (pre)-alpha livestreams. Like the Chrono-Cam and of course the "dynamic" debris. So, I played TA for a long time, and of course TA is a slow-paced game. But, here and then watching YouTube videos of PA (especially ZaphodX), I kinda feel that the game is really really fast (in comparison with TA/SupCom). The Chrono-Cam is pretty much useless because you have to concentrate on the battle and expansion, so you have no time to use it. The debris is, I think, not really implemented. Jon said, the "overkill" damage will determine the debris' state. The game seems to be too fast to actually use this feature. Who cares about the debris that could give you resources if you can just build more eco buildings. In TA, it was crucial when you lost a (big) battle. You had to really push your production again, so you don't die. The debris was a sign of the lost units and resources. In PA you really don't care because you can produce units too fast. Of course, PA is not TA 2, but a really fast strategy game is...kind of weird. Is it just me? What do you think about the game's speed?

PS: Also Uber, make trees destroyable and/or reclaimable!

- L771

Well it's kinda to slow like for me , if there would be option to slightly speed up game I would like to use it
About debris hm....
I think that once Dev will reduce number of metal spots on each planet/moon that appear after you generate it , reclaiming could have sense + we would like to see trees and stones and objects to be reclaimable

I think the game only feels fast due to the unfinished unit balance. As often discussed, most battles end up like "popcorn" because of low unit health and high damage splash attacks, like advanced bombers. You often rush to produce cetain things like anti-nukes and anti-air that prevent your base from just dissapearing in a matter of seconds. Hopefully, when units are balanced more, the game will play at a better pace.

you guys need to stop trying to brag, you just don't grasp what you can be facing here. there's always a bigger fish.
too fast.

Too slow, it takes 5 minutes to go from one planet to another. I can go make a tea and come back and commander made half of the journey lol. In first 5-6 minutes also not much happens.

The game is fast in some areas, slow in others, battles in particular seem to happen in the blink of an eye. In the most recent Live Stream they kind of talked about how they wanted to scale back the "popcorn-y-ness" of units, and as mentioned above interplanetary movement can take some time and they have also talked(but I forget where) about working on adjusting that to get to fit in with the rest of the pacing.

But in the end, some of the biggest factors to pacing are only just getting started on through balance, and half of the units and such didn't get balanced at all in time for the most recent update so it's hard to say yet exactly what the intent is, hopefully the next patch will give us some more information.

Mike

I was actually a little disappointed when Jon said "The first thing people do when they start the game up is they go plus-plus-plus-plus, plus10, and then they start playing."

It's just such an anecdotal piece of evidence to make a sweeping generalisation and it's certainly not how me and my friends used to/continue to play. If this is the case I hope there's a time slider that I can set to minus10, because I think that the game's pace is beyond frenetic at this stage and completely ruins the ability of the player to compose their thoughts and enact a strategic response in a reasonable time-frame.

At least in TA plus10 was an option. Now we're being forced to play at plus10 and it's completely burnt me out on playing. Everything just feels so twitchy... not my style at all.

Tatsujb is right. The game is too fast. By that I mean it requires too many APM. If you don't know that, then you must be the best PA player on the planet and be doing about 1000 APM. Or maybe you just think you're good, which is the problem with most people who deny this fact in my experience. You can be leet on 1 or 2 planets maybe if you have average APM. On more than that you are going to get smoked by a really good player who has really high APM.

I don't think the game is too fast. It's intense and keeps you at the edge of your seat.

Trees will be reclaimable in the future. I believe you'll have to reclaim the trees to build a structure, like SupCom, in the future.

Uber has also mentioned other cool stuff regarding trees. Things like trees being obstacles that units have to weave in and out of. Trees blocking unit's shots. Trees catching on fire and starting forest fires.

Lots of pretty cool ideas. We'll see which they follow through on.

This is a tricky question to answer- as Knight said the speed depends on what your doing. I think the basic game is rather quick, mainly because the units have no staying power (in TA and Spring, a clash between 20+ tanks each side would last a couple of minutes- with both teams repairing, attacking, retreating and so on- the unit clashes in PA feel allot more like supcom 1 which in my experience didn't give you much chance to do anything with them).

On the other hand the orbital play is too slow.

As for wreckage- I think that this is being worked on, which is good as wreckage in TA was a big factor. I've won games with very little map control or economy in TA based purely on holding and reclaiming wreckage field- catching your opponent unaware when they *think* they've won and then carelessly fed you a nice wreckage field is one of the best parts of TA game play.

I was actually very surprised at the "everyone just goes ++++10" in TA. The early game in TA is pretty slow, so I can understand that some people preferred to fast forward through factory construction and early macro, but once actual combat begins, TA gets very heated very fast. I certainly wouldn't like to play a TA midgame at +10 speed.

I think the other problem is that the vast majority of players are..... not really playing seriously. Turtle styles, or nuke styles, super unit rushes, or very extreme economic strategies that involve a huge amount of waiting for fusions and moho mexes just to make huge numbers of big, expensive units and structures, and so on. There's no reason not to do these kinds of ridiculously passive play styles on +10 speed since they don't really require any input.

That or when the map is a literal box to rest your back on, you only need to worry about one direction.

TA factories were much slower to ramp up, and extra lathes were some of the slowest building things in the game. There's nothing wrong with speeding that along a bit.

I think the issue here is the time between choosing what you want to do vs. being thrown in the thick of things. Even Starcraft gave a few minutes for the player to warm up.

Its funny how you feel the game is too fast whilst i feel the game is too slow. Sure some areas could do with a slow down eg. army engagements, but in general it feels like my processor is underclocked whilst playing.

I agree bobucles. The very slow early game is one area of TA that PA can easily improve upon. However it is very important not to do this by making the economy ramp up so quickly, because the exponential economy then becomes explosive. To the point that players stop macroing not because it wouldn't be optimal, but because they can't be bothered.

I think increasing your income needs to be much more expensive, and therefore slower. Mexes need to be inexpensive, but energy needs a giant cost increase to slow down the rate at which a player's energy income increases. Not a cost increase of the structure itself, but reduced cost-efficiency. The structure itself might even be cheaper, but with much lower energy yield. Likewise, mexes should yield less metal. The basic mex is in the ballpark of reasonable, but the advanced mex is outrageous.

Instead of having a rampantly exponential economy, the player's income should increase at a more deliberate pace. By itself, this would make the early game very slow. But another mechanic can easily be introduced to specifically boost the early game, be that reclaimable rocks out on the map, or some kind of "egg." And reclaimable unit and structure wrecks would also let players retain more of their resources after their units roll off the factory.

Increasing your income should be an expensive and substantial investment in the future. Not a high-return exponential clickfest with a very short double time.

Pacing is important. Really, some things do need to happen faster while others slower. The sad thing, is in a game with queues, I don't mind the first mexes and pgens, because I have time to queue my first 10 of each by time my first factory is done, so I can then queue that too without focusing on the first queue I did.

When that is gone, I am going to have to click a lot faster.

If everything in an army took just 1 shot more each, that would extend battles out a bit.

The game needs less ample metal, not more, generally.

Me and my friends never upped the speed to +10 as it was simply way too fast. The original game speed was just right in my opinion. I was pretty disappointed aswell.

First, I want to describe what I view as the fundamental definition of pacing as it applies to strategy games:

Pacing = ([Number of decisions] * [How important those decisions are]) / [Amount of time to make those decisions]

A player can feel more rushed making one momentous decision in a short time, than making a lot of unimportant decisions over that same period. Whether or not anyone agrees with this definition is their own prerogative, however I hope this elucidates the rest of this discussion from my perspective. Now, onto the main part.

I'll admit that I was also a little surprised at the "everyone plays at +10" comment. Whenever I played/play TA, I would indeed increase the speed to +10, but only for a couple of minutes after I had set up my initial build order, and I would crank it back down to normal as soon as my first factory was producing units. I suspect that this is a pretty common pattern.

So what does this tell us about pacing if this was a common pattern? It tells us that the initial planning stage (setting up the initial build pattern) is best kept as a slow affair, that the execution of this plan could be speeded up, but the planning and execution of subsequent things should be slower again.

At the moment, the pace in PA is neither uniformly too fast or too slow. In most of the games I have played, I believe it is possible to break up the game into 4 different phases based upon speed and expansion. Remember, these phases are not defined by length, but by the qualitatively different feel they have on how the player must act.

1. Initial planning phase: This is where the player formulates their initial plan, normally in the comfort that interaction with their enemy is impossible during this phase. Currently, this phase is somewhat variable, as it depends tremendously on how close the initial spawn points are. This could do with being a little longer and slower generally in my opinion, either by tweaking how spawn points are created, or even by creating a short delay between "start game" and the commander being usable, possibly while he lands on the planet with the egg.

2. Early game: This is where the player begins the initial execution of his plan. Interaction with the enemy is possible, but decisive assaults are not on the cards. I actually think the pacing here is quite reasonable, but the decision making is a little odd. Here, the decisions (which mexs to go for, what econ should I build next) come at a reasonable rate, but part of this is due to the fact that these are very simple decisions at this point in the game's development. I would personally prefer more important decisions, but less of them. Thus, providing that the planning phase has been spaced out a bit, I would be in favour of a factory first start in order to get straight to the meat of the decision-making, and an emphasis placed on scouting, with all factories having decent viable scouts.

3. Mid game: This is where the player has got their first factory up, has some information about their enemy, and is able to launch effective assaults. Here, the game pace slows down a lot, and this is why some people have got the idea that the game needs to be sped up. The key point here is that the player will start to bottleneck on energy, which drastically slows down their expansion. This can create periods where even competent players are able to do nothing more than build eco in order to prepare for the next phase of the game. This would be helped by having more energy options (some of which may trade efficiency for fragility), and a wider selection of raiding units. Another option would be to, oddly enough, slightly decrease basic mex output, as this devalues buildpower's utility. By doing such a thing, players would build construction units less often, meaning that spending their available build power becomes a more important decision, which has the psychological effect of making the game appear faster.

4. Late/endgame: In many different games, the onset of the endgame is somewhat vaguely defined. Here though, the late-game feels (at least to me) as though it has a laser sharp definition: the point when you hit T2 economy buildings. As soon as these are on the field, the pacing explodes into a ridiculous quantity of decisions. The player suddenly has to ride a horrifically exponential expansion curve or lose. The answer to this is clear enough. Nerf T2 economy hard, with further balance considerations being based of this necessity. This is the part of the game that makes many people feel that the game is too quickly paced. Furthermore, the fact that this rapid pacing occurs at the end of the game has the effect of creating a goal that players must achieve as soon as possible. It is not possible to stand up to a T2 economy with a T1 economy under any circumstance. This means that players have to race to get there first, creating less time to make decisions as they are pressured to meet this objective.

Overall, the fact that there is dissension on this topic should tell people that there are arguments to be made for the game being both too fast, and to slow. In reality, I don't know that it is either, specifically. What is definitely wrong is that the pacing is very uneven, and it is possible that if it was evened out that people would be in a better position to determine if the game was too fast or too slow.

We have heard a little about Scathis's balancing method. I would put forward that the lower and upper bounds of pacing are "edges" that need to be found, and that a lot of other balance issues will flow better once the pacing feels more even.

Well that's the thing with 'feel' style arguments. My ideal range for actions per minute would be about 15 (maybe lower) at all stages of the game, because I'd like the rest of my time to be spent strategically considering my options and watching battles unfold slowly. A problem with the game that I've identified on the forums is the idea of the higher APM player usually winning; the "if you do more things, you'll get more things done." concept. I have a real problem with that since the game is still promoting execution over thought.

Something MadSci and I have been considering for potential mod material is an APM limiter, potentially as a player-set and agreed upon limit before the game starts, or as a sliding variable that either increases or decreases during gameplay depending on a few different parameters... current game length for example. This would tackle the APM issue nicely we feel, but of course would require testing.

This. So mush this. Although you could argue the late game stage of T2 is potentially a separate stage from endgame interplanetary nuke spam.