The Importance of Options

Graphical power of the machine is also something that a designer can't control. So there must be options for that.

But - and here's where most designers fail - it must be options that cater to gracefully lowering the quality, it must be transparent to the user why they need to turn something down. A lot of games just give generic "high/medium/low" settings that don't allow anyone, least of all average gamers, to make informed decisions about which options to lower to get good performance out of their specific machine. And this is because these options are often treated as just a cosmetic "PC gamers require this" thing rather than a way to let users fit the game to their hardware. Now you can have preferences for what performance you prefer, what level of visuals you are willing to trade that for, specific effects you want over other effects, but that is a side effect of having to trade off at all. A good options menu supports it, but it is not the goal of it.

Even here there is a minimum level of hardware where you as a designer have to stand up and say "this is what the game needs". PA does this, and their minimum is quite high, because they decided they need this many planets, and this much stuff on the planets, and this many units in the game. And that's the lowest that they are willing to go for the sake of gameplay. And you have to applaud that, even if your computer can maybe not run it so well.

Why give up and admit you can't do you job properly?

I just don't get this line of thinking. You have nothing to lose by giving options to the user as a designer. It is just some form of silly stubborn professional pride not to do it, if it is possible.

Way off topic from the original OP but having few menu items is what happens in console games. Give me a properly designed PC game with full configurability any day. If I wanted to conform to how things should be, I would have a console with it's fixed graphics, fixed controller and a press here to start button.

Except the effort and time it takes to implement those options. You lose that. And also the integrity of the experience you are designed, that suffers as well.

But I suppose we can consider the case where it's not important to the game or the experience either way, and you have the time and effort, or it is trivial to include. Then it could be alright.

I'd say such cases are exceedingly rare though.

You need to take the effort and time to explore the different options in the first place. Integrity of the experience sounds pretty handwavy.

Appealing to a wider audience ensures that you actually make a profit on your product.

I might not like EA, but you don't create a big business like that by making products for a minority of a minority.

We are capitalists first, artists next.

Guys can we stay on topic here?

Oddly enough, while I sense Brian disagrees with me, this is precisely why I disagree with movement of transport and OP-ness of commander uber cannon.

Typically RTS's give you a trinity of basic strategies to start with.

Rush

Econ-Boom

Turtle.

Excluding commander rush (which will always be present in some form), after the two changes mentioned above, there is no unit based rush. Which means there is no turtle strategy (turtle and econ-boom hybrid is traditional counter to rush, because read my posts on rushing in Commander is OP thread). So there is only econ-boom and tech while harassing and containing.

I have more thoughts on how CUCOP affected mid-game in comm ubercannon OP thread.

Previously, we had not discovered the 2 minute turtle/counter rush strategy, because we hadn't found the unit buildable in 2 minutes that was capable of quickly killing a 2-minute inferno rush before it caused too much damage. Possibly due to balance discrepancy (there is no anti-tank unit*, there is no guaranteed way to intercept the transport, there isn't a tower you can build which will deal with the inferno before it eats you**)


*I never saw the point of an anti-tank unit that @ledarsi kept talking about, but actually a long range high damage low rate of fire unit would be the best counter to an inferno rush.
**The rushing player's concern should be around preventing that tower from going up, not it being built.
Such a tower would invalidate the inferno in normal play however. Unless rate of fire was very low.



Why should there be a unit based rush?

So you can leap frog over enemies in an FFA early. Especially if you have a really bad start. You need your commander to build economy to catch up. He can't march away. If you do that, you screw yourself over completely. Avoid fights in an FFA? That's because there isn't a rush option.

Why should that be possible in the first few minutes of the game?

How long do games last? Seems epic unit spam goes up quite happily within 10 minutes. (Before they made everything more expensive, harassment early + 50 units in your base at 9 minutes as a wake-up call was a matter of course). That's utterly mid-game. T2 not long after, between 10 minutes and 20. You have the economy to start pumping out factories and hence units at about the 5 minute part of the game. The rush has to be made either before that point in time (before you've started putting military infrastructure in place), or by you investing more time into infrastructure, I've had more time to prepare my rush, and it's much much worse than it would have been because it's later.



I don't believe in PA that there is currently a deep enough economy to warrant delaying rushes until later into the game. If you haven't started building military at the 4 minute mark, you're starting to be behind your opponent anyway, and there isn't that much economy-wise to be investing stuff into.

One of the biggest issues with rushing to me is the difficultly in finding an opponent, and then deciding if they are too far away.

This is why id love to have the scout units be hybreed rushing units, later to have the raiding role replaced by the dox to focus on the status of a throwaway scout.

Chris Taylor hates rushing so he made a game where you can't really do that, which forces games with big battles later on.

I agree. Game enders have too few options right now. Nukes or planets. Having megabots gives us another option for a game ender. I support more options!

You know what would be REALLY fun and REALLY crazy? If we could collide gas giants into each other somehow so they form stars and blow apart everything when they form.

One I kinda miss is the tech strategy(get the most powerful units ASAP to give yourself an advantage)

Ofc. to have this you need tiers/upgrades/(something you can invest into to make your units better). In PA, where all units should be useful at all stages of the game it's kinda goes down the drain. Having to make less units saves time. Understandable.
Hopefully later on (or with a mod) we'll get upgrades/tiers/whatever to allow for this strategy.

Oh and @bmb if you hate options go play on consoles. PC is the platform of options and modding.

The thing about a rush is you need staying power. Raiding is not rushing. Mass scouts can clear up a fabber, even mexes, but can't take on military units when they are produced. Even dox perform poorly against vehicles.


Yes. That lack of information is why there isn't a non-air rush in current build, while bombers do not have staying power. At least air dropped vehicles can cause issues. Particularly the inferno. But there is no point in rolling out the vehicles in what could be the wrong direction, and even dox exploring don't get anywhere useful before second fac.



Tech boom is partially present. In its limited form it's basically a part of the econboom. I have mixed feelings. It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel. However, factories having to build blueprints before certain units would fit into ubers definition of 'not a tech tree'. There's ways to do it that way. Older games have entirely production based research paths.



Tech could also be represented by universal factory upgrades. Off topic. 'Advanced crystal refinement improves TAPI Laser Damage output'

All I got from this thread is that t2 fighters + gunships are to effective in critical mass to counter effectively with ground based units. And other anti air...

Also that bmb has an opinion and successfully deviated the thread with people arguing against his opinion.

good post and some valid points but there was 2 points I do disagree with though. 1st is how experimentals in supcom were known as game enders because there was no counter to them, there was a few counters to them, but the most reliable counter was to simply build your own experimentals, but don't forget, you also had the option to completely disable experimentals from the game, and disable air, disable nukes ect... So if you and people you were playing with wanted to play a very specific game, you could absolutely do that, while not eliminating the audience that actually LIKED the experimental units or the nuke spams ect... I think this has to be very clear for people that complain about having the bigger units in the game, yes they absolutely should be in the game but there must absolutely be an option to disable them if you dont want them.

2nd thing is the randomized planets. Seen a couple people complain about this that there should be set planets because in competative gaming because having randomized elements makes a game too much at a disadvantage so to speak. Randomized planets I would have thought absolute does the complete oposite, if everyone can memorize a map so easily like you can with every other RTS game out there, namely the C&C and supcom games, doesn't that actually give you an advantage over someone who doesn't play that one particular map as much as someone else does? and in order to be classed as number 1, you absolutely should be able to adapt to all situations, and all environments no matter the circumstance, its about being number 1 at strategy and that all about adapting to the maps and the players you face, if you can easily predict where your enemies are going to rush to, what their setup is most likely going to be based on the map, then that doesn't mean your number 1 or a top player on the ladders, you've just good at anticipating what the other players are going to do, as apposed to actually beating players and better the far superior strategist...............

but..............................UBER have already stated that we will be able to "save" planets and give them to friends to share if you have a particular good system or planet, so this wont be a problem for people who dont want randomized planets in the competitive scene.

Yep and Chris Taylor's game company has had massive layoffs and a failed kickstarter project. not a good example to compare to this game or Uber to.

Actually it kinda is because all those things had nothing to do with being a bad game, those we serious internal issues as gas powered games that did other projects, not just the supcom series. Supcom is highly regarded as one of the best RTS games of our time, and is why it is still played by 1000s today.

When it comes to the failed kickstarter though, that was simply a market disaster, no one knew about the thing till it was pretty much finished.

There's also going to be mirrored planets.

So the two halves are exactly the same.

Which allows us to have randomized planets and perfectly balanced planets at the same time.

Gonna be awesome.

NOW THAT is kool

But combining gas giants to make stars isn't? ok.....