The Importance of Inaccuracy

Glad we agree ...... but I believe it works well currently. If ants are dead on with their lead that will render dox useless with their shorter range. Perhaps not entirely but the causality rate will increase dramatically. I'm good where things are at.

If you want to effectively dispatch a group of bots with tanks you're going to have to micro to some degree, provided your opponent is microing his bots. If they aren't and are just throwing them at your tanks they're a fool
I do agree that the hp needs a buff,I believe we all agree on that....

Inaccuracy does not make gameplay about 'luck.' Given the number of units, and the number of shots that those units fire, inaccuracy has the statistical effect of creating a new 'normal' using a spread of firepower. A group of artillery shelling a target area isn't based on 'luck'- it carpets the area.

I do think it is very strange that the exact same people who think 'micro' against enemies that can't aim properly is interesting are the same people who are saying unit HP needs a buff. Making shots inaccurate has the effect of reducing a shooter's effective DPS while leaving its damage high enough to inflict kills quickly.

Getting up a strategically placed piece of artillery that the enemy wasn't aware of, and have it target an important unit on their team is a complete waste, if the unit can't hit the target, and 30 seconds later is destroyed. How is that good for gameplay / not make it about luck?

Yeah the argument about statistics has one flaw: What about early game? When my 2 bots raid your 1 engie 1 bot? With such low unit numbers it suddenly turns into a gambling game.

"The art of using troops is this:
......When ten to the enemy's one, surround him;
......When five times his strength, attack him;
......If double his strength, divide him;
......If equally matched you may engage him;
......If weaker numerically, be capable of withdrawing;
......And if in all respects unequal, be capable of eluding him,
..........for a small force is but booty for one more powerful."
- Sun Tzu, the Art Of War


War is chance.
Just because you have numbers doesn't mean you will always win.

Then you were using the wrong weapon to take out a single target.

Mike

If you want a single specific enemy target dead, your best bet is to get up close and personal with actual troops.

Failing that, you are going to have to pay for some on-demand firepower at range, such as an air strike (preferably missiles) or a cruise missile. Long-range shelling and saturation bombing are really not your most effective tool for eliminating a single enemy target, especially a hardened target.

Regarding Colin's point about one or two units against the same very early in the game- the types of units that will be used in these confrontations require very special design considerations, more than just their weapon accuracy.

I think the Artillery at least is doing pretty well as far as accuracy is concerned. Playing a match earlier Hodgekins(Or Hawkens?), the T2 Artillery, was doing a fair job of hitting an area instead of a specific unit, unless they were standing still. Even with big columns of units moving around they would sometimes go wide or long or fall short.

exactly my point...... I'm in agreement that radar only fire should be slightly inaccurate much like TA but when los is available it would be pretty precise

I think it's actually fine as it is

two short seconds always in the begining phase of the game isn't redeeming enough.


as soon as >5 units are involved, it's over, no more micro.
just potato mashing.

you know the feel from FA's engagements is missing.

you don't get to strategise with troops in PA, once you have an army it gets simplified to evaluating the right moment for them to get sent in.


HECK, when do you ever micro 100 units in PA?

you don't it's just "go there"

But the first few minutes happen to be especially important. If you lose ground early on you'll have a hard time coming back. Losing ground early on to stupid units behavior/randomly missing shots isnt funny.

make it so the whole lenght of the game is "especially important" why would micro be a first five-minute thing only?

they didn't ever "randomly" miss shots in FA, if you looked close you could always see it hapened for a reason. And even wager you couldn't possibly have evaluated the shot better than that tank.

I am saying that if you lose 2 units to randomness in minute 30 of a game you dont care because you have dozens or hundreds more. But if you lose 2 out of 3 workers early on due to randomness that is 2/3 of your expansion at that point. It cripples you based on a single stupid random event. That's why smaller fights need to be more or less predictable as well. Otherwise the early game will stay a gambling game as it currently is.
I don't know why you are arguing about micro. I don't. I am talking about predictability in unit engagements. You can't add randomness and talk it of with "yeah statistically it will be fine" when in the early game 3 v 3 unit fights are super important.
Basically we need some cheap well aiming predictable unit for the early game. Could be the dox if it had decent aiming.

And I'm saying that while it could behave like randomness in PA if it was implemented, it didn't in FA.

don't tell me you can raid better in PA than you could in FA, in FA raiding was much more rewarding and usefull, especially since in FA, you had to go much further out and actually fight/reclaim with you com on the front lines and you couldn't just sit pretty in your base that's has 5 extrators in the com's gun range.

it's not raiding in particular it's the whole game.
FA was addicting because of the simulation, you could visualise a war because it was imersive, and it was imersive because it happened with circumstantiality, hits were not decided by a dice roll, the projectiles were simulated and yet no single unit could know ahead of time if their shot was worthwhile or not. It may have ended up that it was ....but for an unintended target!, when halfway through the shot it seemed like it would be a miss and right at the begining it had seemed like it was going to be a clean hit.

It really REALLY felt imersive.


The same way our brain can tell us instantly where a sound came from through triangulation or how distant a visible object is through the laws of perspective but placing said calculations on paper is harder for our brain to understand : it's not a big visual gap on paper between starting from an always hit rule with a miss coeficent added and simulated projectiles, but somehow our brain tells us "meh" on the first and "Dude! This is the real deal!" on the second.

currently PA units feel like toys it's hard to value them.

I feel if the simulated projectiles aren't being explored and utilized to their full potential at all.
also the "rookie" system from FA where units straight off the production line "learned" durring their first three shots was great. it never hindered raiding because of the firering frequency and how life to damage ratio wasn't 1/1.

I dont understand your points at all. You cant just sit in your base in PA at all. You need to expand all over the planet to get a decent income. The reasons why the commander in PA is not used to fight as much are mostly unrelated to this.

EDIT:
Also aggressive bot raiding is super crazy far more effective in PA than in FA. Personally I am a rather defensive player in FA who rather defended his own expansion instead of attacking. In PA however currently it is plain impossible to defend and way better to attack with bots. They are too unpredictable to defend. So I find myself running around the planet with bots in the early game, raiding enemy engineers.

Well someone should tell this to the commander when he is trying to hit a stationary dox for 5 minutes.

I also agree with colin, if you send out your 3 early workers expanding and protect them with 2 dox, it is possible for 1 dox to kill all 5 units. Even if all units are microed by 2 similar ability players. This is chance and annoying, not immersive.

I'm pretty sure there is some inaccuracy already in the game, because I shot a missile from whatever ship and it missed.
Also, I'm pretty sure that if they implement it, my game would crash five times a game.
The physics in this are crucial to the gamr, but very, very, very, laggy. But it would look "pretty"

I don't understand the angle you are coming from.

This is purely for the case of the artillery guns in the game.

Because the entire PA game is compressed into a much shorter time frame than a realistic conflict, your pieces (armies and so on) move rather quickly and don't have much reason to stop moving/remain stopped. As far as I can see, this means that the first defence against the artillery is to start your bots/vehicles moving again, and because the artillery is inaccurate (there is a fairly large lag between shots firing and shots hitting their target), you don't even have to micromanage your army. The AI as it stands is perfectly able to avoid major casualties from one artillery gun simply by continuously moving. If the AI has a large group of bots very densely placed together, then the lone artillery gun is more likely to hit something.

If the developers give us formations, so we can tell our armies to be loosely spread, then not only is that the defence against artillery when moving, but we can tell an army to sit tight within range of artillery to reduce losses.

It makes sense for artillery to be unable to hit a singular moving target, but to be able to hit a large mass of multiple moving targets. It isn't actually able to destroy the entire mass, but it is able to offer suppressive fire, defensive fire and covering fire.

So I don't see how this is an issue for artillery. It seems what you want to do is to move 200 fabs right up to the enemy artillery emplacement and start building counter batteries (or just walls to soak up damage) while the artillery fires ineffectively. At the moment the counter for artillery is to have more mobile troops or aircraft, not to rely on inaccuracy.

I am very puzzled as to what you could possibly be thinking about with the above post. Inaccuracy is not a "counter" to artillery, it is a property of their design. You do not "rely" on an enemy's inaccuracy; being shelled is bad.

First of all, I don't see stationary artillery as the primary artillery asset in the game. I see mobile artillery being the most important type of artillery. And mobile artillery can maneuver, whereas a structure cannot. This means that you can actually bring your guns to the enemy, not, as you say "bring 200 fabs and start building counter batteries."

Furthermore, in general artillery must splash. A shell which will fall within a large radius may be unlikely to score a direct hit on any particular target, but the more it splashes the more of that inaccuracy radius it fills. Its serious inaccuracy is mitigated by the fact that it doesn't have to strike a unit directly in order to deal damage; a hit nearby will damage as well. Very inaccurate artillery with significant splash functions very differently from highly accurate artillery that always hits its single target.


You do not build artillery within range of the enemy. You build 200 self-propelled guns and drive them into range. Either to lay siege to a well-defended base, or to provide fire support for an army in the field. Mobile artillery can be moved when the enemy discovers its location, which is critical for avoiding counter-battery fire, air strikes, and so on. Hiding your artillery is very important because it isn't that difficult to destroy if you have artillery, air strikes, cruise missiles, and so on and so forth. This is all part and parcel of strategy games being a war of information, maneuver, and player decision-making of where to use which asset, not just unit stats and quantities.

You could try giving a unit a lot of HP to make it harder to destroy with an air strike, but really all you're forcing is a larger air strike. And giving individual units a lot of HP basically gives them a lot of freedom to ignore certain amounts of enemy firepower. Instead, make the weapons very deadly and force the player to be clever about hiding and maneuvering. You need a larger air strike to eliminate more targets, not just to be successful at doing any damage at all. And that same capability to eliminate more targets also generalizes to spreading those units across different regions, or in separate strikes in the same area to spread out the risk. Whereas the minimum capability needed to get one kill simply requires that X size strike must be used, and using fewer is completely futile.

The same goes for artillery. Artillery should kill. But it shouldn't kill a huge army in one volley, and it shouldn't be that useful for sniping a single target anywhere within its enormous range. The best solution to giving it both exceptionally long range and also killing power and avoid it being useful for sniping is to make it highly inaccurate.