There Be Dragons: Slaying the Deathball

Experimentals and 'super' units are tactical by their nature and reduce the game to tactical trumping.

Experimentals are not deathball killers. They are just very big individual units that are very strong. In fact, experimentals are much more amenable to being used in deathballs than smaller units, typically due to having more HP, more range, and more firepower, with a higher power ceiling when used in quantity.


Look, the entire concept of trying to design the game with a "deathball killer" or in such a way that you can fight a deathball head-on and win is fundamentally misguided.

Any unit you might use that outperforms a deathball in a heads-up fight is itself upping the deathball ante. We want less force concentration through space, not an even higher density to more effectively fight the enemy's high density firepower singularity. Low firepower density per area means you are spread across space.

The only solution is to design the game in such a way that no firepower singularity works. If one does work, it needs to get changed so it doesn't, not have a counter unit introduced.

I still like the idea of giant support units, like a giant multi-turret repair unit, or an aoe stun unit.

A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A big EMP sounds like fun. But anything that CAN be small, SHOULD be as small as possible. Otherwise, there is no point to huge robot army battles! For example, it is easy enough to pack an entire Fatboy turret on a single unit, and it is easy to flood the field with lots of fast repair bots. There's no expensive price up front, and no balance problems because we know that small units work okay.

Big units only work well if the role is something that will never work with smaller units. Supcom2 did this pretty well with their more exotic experimentals. For example, a hunk of 50 mass will simply never be a strategic artillery gun. Such a weapon HAS to be big and expensive, it can't be any other way.

It is really the density of power that makes a death ball. Perhaps understanding it as a hardness scale might make the most sense. A more tightly packed force can rip through lighter squadrons, but barely scratches a denser force. It is that "hardness" value that determines how deadly a death ball becomes. It also helps determine how difficult a loaded defense line is to break.

I want to say again that it cannot be fixed. There is nothing you can do to make more power in one place less powerful than that same power spread out. It's just how things are, nothing can be done about it and nothing should be done about it.

Hardness for minerals is actually a fantastic metaphor. A deathball is "hard" and requires the opponent use at least as hard an object to even scratch it.

Removing deathball gameplay requires that everything in the game be "soft," such that it can be scratched by most other things. More economy and more production will mean you have more stuff- more volume to keep using the same metaphor. More chalk or charcoal, if you will. Your larger volume makes sense to split into a greater number of discrete rocks. So there are a larger number of rocks of charcoal spread over a larger area.

A deathball would be a more expensive force that is harder. Like a diamond. Charcoal is never going to scratch a diamond. The other side is basically forced to also build something at least as hard as a diamond. And now both sides are using deathballs. There is less space being filled, fewer rocks on the board, some of which are simply destroying others for free (diamond vs charcoal), and less is happening strategically.

Although this is where the metaphor breaks down because theoretically in an RTS you could just build SO MANY "charcoal" units it eventually overwhelmed the "diamond" deathball, whereas actual diamond is 100% un-scratchable by softer rocks. Still, it is an excellent metaphor.

That's not entirely true. You can also use mechanics that make the death ball "shatter".

Death explosions are one such thing. When one unit dies, it hurts things around it. Things that clump better can have bigger explosions. As the death ball grows, its ability to chain react with itself reaches critical levels. The Supcom2 bomb bouncer was an example of a special weapon that annihilated any ball too close to it. While the name betrayed the unit's function, damage reflection/redirection is another way to turn an enemy's power against itself. The Cybran Loyalist sampled this trait, which was especially nasty against UEF Commanders. The Loyalist gun tried a similar thing with capture power. Lastly, nukes and KEWs remind every army that no death ball is too big to wipe out.

There are a lot of ways to destroy death balls and make huge armies irrelevant. The hard part is making sure that small armies have their place as well. Some of this comes down to map design, some of it is by building niches that work naturally well in small scale use. That's no easy feat, because nearly everything works better in huge numbers.

Staaahp. You are missing the point and derailing intelligent conversation. Read more, or stop trying to contribute.

This thread is not about Lots of units being more powerful than less units. This thread is about fundamental balance issues that have been pushed to the end game by changing costs so that they can only be accessed with large economies.

The reason that it's actually a problem in this case, is because in Planetary Annihilation, what used to be the traditional end game, is now just step one or two on a path of solar system domination.

The funny thing here, if you go back and look at my whole 24 Samsons vs 288 Peewees argument, in which the SAMSONS are the Deathball, despite only being made of tiny tiny numbers in comparison, Death explosions only make the dominance of the Samsons even more absolute. And that's the kind of problem that Ledarsi is trying to discuss. The only thing here that is different between the Samson VS Peewee argument, is that developers are smart enough that they will make a force that has the same effectiveness that Samsons have in this scenario only accessible at the end of the game (or, if they are really smart, even later). But in a game like PA, that end game play is just the beginning, it's barely a mid way point unless you are vastly superior to your opponent. So the possibility of deathballs that didn't even emerge at the old end-game play starts to become a very real gameplay killing threat with the new scale available.

Peewees don't death ball well, therefore they don't need to explode. Samsons make fantastic death balls, therefore POP.

It also didn't help that NOTHING on the ground was particularly agile. Samsons were pretty fast, long ranged, and accurate, with minimal weapon waste. That's a lethal combo.

... Exactly? But you see, 100 Peewees would likely be unable to even destroy one Samson, so, Samsons still dominate, until you get enough Peewees to kill one Samson, and then the Samsons would just need more steady reinforcements.

The thing about that, is that the simple, straight-forward Deathballs like that are easy to predict and nerf, what's more worrisome are the possibility of three units working together in an unexpected way, suddenly becoming a deathball. Then the issue gets really multiplex, and those units have already been balanced with other aspects of the game in mind and removing one, or forcing one to be more expensive or nerfing one would likely unbalance other areas. So your best solution in that situation, is to do a little nerfing and a little cost adjustment until you push that moment where they hit critical efficiency, require a much larger group of them. But their dominance would still exist, and on the scale that PA is talking about, the moment one person gets control of an entire planet, your economy of scale hits critical mass, and ANY number of broken possibilities become available, so long as they exist.

This problem isn't solved by planet crackers either, because all you have to do, with a big enough economy, is set up those game breaking masses of units on your enemy's planet, and use them to tear your enemy a new one, while you get your Commander off-planet. Then you use your Commander and those broken death balls to take over the new planet, since your enemy will likely be focusing on recovering from being driven off a planet, and building up on an asteroid to destroy the future threat, they likely won't have a whole lot of defenses of their own (because they know that they need that asteroid to crash down into you before you reach them), and re-establish your economic Juggernaut.

Why would you want to play with 100 peewees? Let's say you and your opponent have a 100 vs 100 peewee battle. The entire skirmish depends on how the engagement starts - whoever got a couple more shots off initially will snowball ahead into victory. That is not rewarding or interesting. That is StarCraft 2.

well with 100 pee wees things wouldn't really snowball as we know it in starcraft 2.

you might come out with 10-15 peewees left instead of double or triple that in starcraft.

Why are you assuming 100 peewees is all you've got? What if you had 5000 of them- as many as 50 groups of 100. Just because someone sends 50 peewees somewhere and the other player sent 100 doesn't decide the game, just that one local battle.

Hopefully this arrangement will be less conducive to having 5000 peewees vs 5000 peewees fighting at a time, in a single confrontation. That would be a VERY long battle line, if so. It would probably be the circumference of a planet and still be a few peewees deep. If you just had a huge blob, most of it wouldn't even be able to fight at once.

But there isn't necessarily ever a reason to enter into that situation- it makes much more sense to split your forces up rather than fight such an inefficient battle. The player marching around with a 5000 peewee blob is being foolish when the other's forces are strategically spread out.

I'm drawing attention to the fact that when fighting with peewees the most significant factor of the battle is how you began the engagement, which is really uninteresting. Samsons on the other hand made for much more interesting battles. And Samsons+Peewees also made for interesting battles since Samsons occupying other Samsons would give Peewee flanks the opportunity to do very cost effective damage.

Why is everyone taking my Peewee VS Samson simulation so literally?? Or are they all talking about it in the same figurative terms that I was initially using and drawing more context than I intended to imply?
Do I have to reiterate that I know Nothing about how the original Total Annihilation plays in this aspect beyond a few abstract samples I got from reading this thread?
I'm confused again guys. :?

Also, something like 500 vs 500 sounds potentially rollingly fun if micromanagement were simple, and intuitive, and there would be huge benefits to making minor groups split off the backs of your armies to flank and scatter your opponent. Or scattering your own forces as you attack to maximize the amount of DPS you bring to bare, at the cost of putting more of your own army within your enemy's range, and the awesomeness of the pathfinding plus the possibility of wreckage determining frontlines and absorbing damage means that you could both actively play to surround each other in a way that would push the front back and forth and spread it out depending on who brought which units and put them where (something to easily select a certain unit out of a large crowd could be implemented), and the longer that battle drags on, the more important raiding parties on both sides, around the major conflict would become, as it would become heavily advantageous to set up fabricators behind enemy lines, or even destroy your enemy's unit supply fabricators/econ stuff... Sooo... Basically TA plus intuitive micromanagement and the possibility of 1000+ units is what I'm asking for there... But I've gone totally off topic.

A 100 vs 100 hundred Peewee battle is anything but deterministic. You got wrecks interfering. Death explosions going off which punishes concentration of force and thereby concentration of firepower as well. You got formations. If I can surround your force I will have greater firepower and take less damage when the units blow up.
It isn't the one who got the first shots off that will win. It is the player who have the best spread, can maximize firepower and avoid chain explosions that will win.
Naturally you get the most firepower from spreading out on single file line. However the opponent can chose to use double file line or just ball up to brake through the enemy line before his units start to die and cause damage and then spread out to maximize firepower to avoid chain explosions.

Not to mention terrain does mess with the results people are predicting.

A missile launching tank/car can't run forever on most maps, and so the peewees would have an easier time actually using cover when advancing, especially due to the direct fire nature of the missile launcher.

This game is looking basically like Supreme Commander in space. Supreme Commander had nukes, when you encounter a so called 'deathball' you just nuked them. No reason to think PA won't have WMDs like supcom did.

Doesn't quite work like that digital, and nukes are more of an anti-base option in that regard.