The idea of counters and how they work (now about armor)

That "silly relativity" is how games get built. Without a firm foundation for building units and establishing their differences, you'll be throwing numbers at a dart board for a loooooong time.

There is going to be a "best" unit whether you design for it or not.

They are designing for it. It's called a Re-activated Metal Planet. Pretty sure a laser that kills planets is a "counter" to everything

I'm not entirely sure what this disagreement is about, but there seems to be two points happening:

bmb admits that for any situation there is a best unit to respond to it (or unit combination, for instance say stealthed artillery). however i also get the impression that, although not excplicitly stated, he admits that while that unit might be the 100% best, there may be half a dozen other options that range from 90-99% as good. He is just pointing out that there will always be a 'best'.

Then people seem to scoff at the word best and demand more options, that probably exist in both scenarios. Just like there will always be a best, even if its to close to call during the game.


The second part of his point is that a unit needs to be designed to have a purpose, which in many ways seems self evident. You design artillery, you design a heavy tank and give them statistics according to that role. Similarly how you design anti air missiles and scouts. This is a choice about your mentality when designing units that they have a role instead of having a weapon (this weapon will them probably be better against certain units anyway).

There seems to be an assumption that having a designed role automatically means hard counter, which it doesn't necessarily. As i said before, some units will be better against other units, its just a measure of the maximum discrepancy. While its obvious that heavy tanks will just demolish scouts, they should also beat standard tanks, but be vulnerable to anti tank weapons like heavy rockets. Labeling a rocket bot as an anti tank bot doesn't change the values of its weapon.

bmbs point here seems to be that it aids unit readability and design to state the units prefered role instead of have the player forced to memorize whats good against what.

At the end of the day i feel that everyone here is on the same side, but some things were assumed to be self evident and other things should have been said. Given that though i'm making a fair bet of assumptions myself here, i hope i'm right...

Maybe this debate is comparable to whether the difference in unit roles should be like Sup Com 2 (1 Tank, 1 Artillery, 1 AA unit etc, all with basically 1 role each) vs TA (often much more "fuzzy" unit roles - Rocko vs Jethro vs Fido vs Pather)

Good point, I hadn't thought of it that way, however many of those roles are more methods of locomotion than anything else.

possible roles are:

Scout (fast etc)
Assault (basic combat unit)
Siege (higher health, lower damage)
Anti Armour (tends to have high alpha strike, long range, direct fire weapons)
Mobile Artillery (self explanatory)

All these things working with phrases like light, armoured or heavy to become more explicit of the units role. After sup com the thought that differences between assault and seige units don't really click with me but i would like to see the difference brought out, assault units are better in the field where their higher damage works better against similar units, however siege units higher health allows them to help your army close on fortified positions at the cost of their own damage and probably cost. Similarly these similar roles can really bring out that 'best' bmb was talking about, while they have a best for the situation they are still adequate at their opposing roles, and both similarly vulnerable to anti armour, even if siege is more so (mass for mass).

However as i got to write anti armour, my normal terminology started to break down with how to differentiate between flak and missiles. perhaps the best solution is half and half, use whatever is most descriptive of the unit and its role.

I think zero-k's was something like:

Raider (Fast, rapid fire)
Skirmisher (long range, low damage)
Riot (Slow, high damage)
Assault (Strong, short ranged)
Siege (Slow, long range)

And I'll say the TA model was an unbalanced mess, not fun either as what unit does what is basically guesswork unless you are a vet. I also said the supcom model was simplistic and if you had bothered to read my posts, you would know I argued for the existance of clear cut inbetween roles that reflect the flexibility of TA units but in a more balanced and orderly way.

I also argue that in order to balance the "best" unit you can easily make it vulnerable to the units that it isn't "best" against.
The result is that if you know what you are up against it is the best choice, but if they are caught by surprise they are essentially glass cannons.

I am going to repeat everything I said in my first post since you did not read it.

If you start by defining the basic roles of "ground to ground, ground to air, ground to sea, air to ground, air to air, air to sea, sea to ground, sea to sea and sea to air" you already have these 9 basic units that are respectively superior in each of their fields, but useless at anything else.

From there you can branch out and create units that are more flexible but less powerful, basic flexible units being air to everything, ground to everything and sea to everything. Jack of all trades, but hopefully master of none. (anything else would invalidate the basic roles)

Just shooting down a specific type of unit isn't all there is to it though. Roles can cover everything from fast attack, economically cheap, amphibious, AOE, high precision, high damage, high rate of fire, long range etc. etc. etc. can potentially branch out non-basic roles to virtually unlimited amounts of specialized roles.

All the while being careful to respect the basic frontline roles. If your artillery is better at ground attack than your ground attack units then your ground attack units just got out of a job. If your amphibious vehicle is just as good, then they are just as good and amphibious and your basic unit is again out of a job. These were both problems with supcoms strange balancing desicions btw.

I think it's a simple way to think about what a unit does while inherintly balancing it to other units and avoiding rock papers scissors.

would you agree to my assessment of your point?

I always found it kind of interesting that Uberhack tried and tried to 'balance' TA's unit pool, and yet, at the end of the day what ended up happening was that you just had a giant blob of all the different types of units - because what's the most flexible thing in the world? One unit of each type. All units being equally useful was the mantra, and while I think it was achieved, I believe the gameplay in the end suffered for it.


So while you're discussing roles, keep in mind the question of what happens when you take 50 of each role and put them together. Do they form a giant deathblob that can handle everything?

The most major thing Uberhack did that vastly improved vanilla was it killed the sam spam once and for all. By making samsons, slashers, jethros, and crashers only shoot air. There was much crying, but then people realized the game was much more fun afterwards and got over it. Need to be very careful with cheap units with great range that do acceptable damage to anything.

Indeed. Killing the 'soft' counter of AA being able to shoot ground is a great example of how a 'hard' counter (unit that is good at 1 thing) can really improve gameplay.

There will be rock paper scissors in PA. I'm not entirely sure if you mean that RPS needs to be completely avoided or just that there shouldn't be hard RPS where the units are completely defenseless against their counter.
Well I agree that there doesn't need to be an RPS where units all have similar traits. In Zero-K for example the Raiders lose for cost against Riots but on the other hand they are so much faster that they can outmaneuver the Riots and even overrun them in some cases. So Riots aren't a straight up counter early game against Raiders even though they severely beat them for cost. If all units in the RPS has similar traits like speed and weight then it might be a bit shallow. However if they vary in different ways like speed, weight, range, projectile velocities that makes their use much more situational and more about strategic options.

I'm quite sure there will be some hard counters in PA like torpedo bomber>submarines>AA ship>torpedo bomber for example.
Although you could soften up that RPS by allowing the submarine to submerge and use its' AA guns though like Seraphim t3 subs in FA while the AA ship might be able to attack surface targets as well as air.

It's also a great example of failing to make a good thing work.

There were plenty of ways to make the Jethro shoot air+ground without making it OP. Crossing off ground units was a cheap hack to avoid doing real balance work.

Such a unit would fit within my scheme as a "ground to everything" unit that would necessarily be less useful against air than a dedicated AA unit.

One great way to make units much better against air than ground is by using a minimum missile arc. Basically, the missiles are installed to go up. In order to get them to move back down, they need time. Requiring a minimum range between the unit and the target of 50% of its max range would probably go a long way to fixing it without making it look out of place. You can clearly see the missile trailing up, then curve back down. And it'll refuse to shoot stuff that's too close.

It could still be balanced as a dedicated AA unit because it's anti-ground abilities would be severely situational.

Minimal range would be pretty effective. It would get creamed by close range units.

Another solution is to continue with direct line fire, but let friendly units block its shots. Since planets are round, any small obstacle or peewee in the way would ruin the AA's ability to target ground.

Jethros also did crap damage due to being directed at air targets, who already had little health.

To me that was enough to switch to non-tracking rocket bots.

The AA missiles where good but i never got the impression that you would win against comparative ground forces if you tried to use them, everything else was cheaper, often tougher and dealt considerably more damage.