There Be Dragons: Slaying the Deathball

If you really didn't have the option to build SMD, you would know that from the beginning of the game, and you would generally avoid building so much in one place that a single nuke would immediately make you lose.

You do have options even without SMD. However in SupCom, there's not enough reason to use them when it is so much more efficient to compact your base very tightly, and ensure it is covered against nukes.

If nukes can't be defended, then say hello to nuke spam. Spreading out a base only mitigates damage, and creates another weakness of having a thin base.

Defenses aren't a bad thing. However, singular defenses create very binary outcomes that are best avoided.

Perhaps with orbital gameplay there could be a more generalized orbital defense solution than simply "antinuke". I assume the ICBM will pass through the orbital layer like in supcom.

I've never heard the term but it describes what became known as the "Hogey Doctrine" when I played TA. I used to create a bunch of Bob tanks (those awesome experimentals) and give them a cloud of 3rd gen stealth fighters as guards. The fighters would naturally orbit out to just past the max range of the Bobs, thus giving vision that radar jamming etc could not defeat. The Bobs had the awesome combination of rapid fire artillery and super fast tracking onto targets. Imagine an M1 Abrams with 6 barrels in a gattling gun arrangemnt. I tended to have several groups of 1st gen missile trucks out in front to slow down ground units and I separated the Bobs into 2 or 3 firing teams so that I could direct them to different targets when needed. For many situations I could just direct the missile trucks and bobs to move across the landscape and the combination of all units would defeat most threats. Up to a certain point, I could keep the trucks right back and let the fighters provide vision (while hardly getting hit themselves) and the bobs would murder ground forces and fixed units. When a serious ground force was present, I'd allow the missile units to slowly get chewed up while I focused on directing the Bobs from target to target. My main opponent knew that the Bobs had a serious weakness though - they tended to clump together and loved to explode sympathetically with a unique noise that I hated. His strategy was Tomcats - if he could penetrate the fighter screen and my Bobs were clumped, I was screwed. Good times lol.

Possibly the best thing about the Hogey Doctrine was that even just 3 or 4 Bobs could do a massive amount of damage so one small battle group could be a real bitch quite early in a game.

... Yep. And while they're betting all those resources on Nukes, they're de-prioritizing other important stuff. It's one of those awesome trade-offs that make a good RTS so much fun to play.

The MAD-like risk/reward mindgames behind nukes in supcom is my favorite part.

It's pretty awesome to send a strike force to attack the SMD's too, you may not do any particular damage but the thrill once that last SMD goes down is unbeatable.

Likewise protecting your own SMD's at all costs is also exciting.

UP

In my last game the enemy had a huge 200+ unit death ball of heavy tanks backed up by those artillery tanks.
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... So i nuked it, problem solved.

If you want to solve deathballs, then you need to have unit composition, position, tactics and timing be more important than a unit's raw strength. Height advantage, weather, chokepoints, rough terrain, and perhaps most importantly flanking are what allow a statistically inferior force to triumph over a superior foe, and are what need to be emphasized IF you want tactics to be more important than deathballs.

But with a game as large as PA, do you really have the time for all that micro?

This seems more like an issue for Starcraft, where micro is praised, even though it is a fundamentally simple RTS complicated only by its incessant need for mouse clicks.

Is the deathball really even a problem in PA, when we have plenty of artillery options and nukes? I'd even say that ground/air units become obsolete quickly once the commander has left the planet. It's all orbital from that point on.
There are many times where I just throw units at my enemy just to keep them busy, while I build up my base.

I think a really important point to make about avoiding deathballs is the importance of MEANINGFUL micro.

It's important that a unit's usefulness is noticeably better, to a sort of extreme, while being microed, as opposed to not being microed. An example would be mutalisks, vultures, and dragoons from SCBW.

Mutalisks would just die if they weren't microed, they would just fall apart like paper balloons in a furnace. I believe because of their short range and low health. What allowed them to be effective while microed is their speed... and the fact you could stack them (though more of a glitch that was adopted).

Vultures had amazing damage, but they fired slowly, so if you just held your ground and fought, you lost. You had to back up, stop to let them shoot, move forward, move back... almost annoying really, but you couldn't use them with other units because, again, they were fast too, and if units got in the way, vultures died.

Dragoons were effective because of their high dps, but they didn't fall apart like paper. They fired slowly which meant you could target units in between shots with small groups, which was preferable because otherwise you had massive amounts of dps going to waste because of overkill. Also, their pathing was ****, so if you didn't micro them, they wandered across the battlefield like clueless drunken moonwalkers.

Just throwing this out there... unit selection caps help, but that's really just a band aid, not a fix. I mean, if brood war didn't have a unit selection cap, I think there would have been deathballs, but not nearly as many as SC2.

Side note: PA needs melee units.

Even though this is from the Alpha, the problem does still exist. I'm sure with the inclusion of several more units and variants we will see more use of smaller, tactical unit groups and much more intense micro.

The game has physics-based hit detection.
It would be a shame to not fully utilize it.

Many of you might not know, but TheLittleOne of SC2 fame used to play Forged Alliance competitively.
He has spoken about how some units are much stronger in FA when being micro'd properly.
I think he mentioned Aeon destroyers?

You should watch some of his replays and see how he micros.
It's not like he wins the game with his micro.
But it does help to turn the tide of a battle.

A lot of smaller-scale RTS people are talking about micromanagement. That's not really what I'm talking about with regards to deathballs.

Micromanagement is not a good way to discourage deathballs. While it does make very large groups of units less effective, it only does so for players with slow hands. Faster hands enables a larger group to be managed, and increases the group's efficiency. As a result, creating a micro-focused solution to the deathball introduces another problem: Players with high APM become extremely dominant, because they can have more efficient armies of larger size.

Breaking up a deathball means creating an incentive for a player to use multiple smaller groups. They don't necessarily have to micromanage each group. The important feature of this distribution is distance, not vertical organization. These groups are separated by distance (and therefore time) and fight independently.

Instead of having every unit you own fight together in a single location, it is much more interesting to have a variety of different forces in different places. There are countless reasons, including how one battle doesn't necessarily decide the game like a single clash between deathballs does. Breaking up the deathball into smaller pieces also lets players be more active and aggressive using expendable smaller groups, without fearing defeat in detail by an enemy deathball. It opens up more player freedom to have different numbers of different unit types in different groups. And so on.

You don't necessarily have to micromanage the smaller armies. Unless you consider giving large-scale move and attack orders to groups of units to be "micro" in which case, perhaps Plants vs Zombies or another tower defense is more your style of game. Giving orders to groups of mobile units is a mechanical task, but that doesn't necessarily make it micromanagement. Telling force A to go to location X, and force B to go to Y, and so on, is par for the course in any RTS, and it is simply unreasonable to expect PA to make those decisions for you. You might decide to split your forces differently, place importance on different regions of the map, or make other strategic choices that impact your decisions about where to move.

I would argue that if you have all your units in one place in PA you're begging to be nuked, hit with advanced bombers, artillery or just attacked from the other side of the planet by raiding forces.

My point being that we already have plenty of ways to deal with "death balls" and the game favors splintering off groups to attack from multiple angles.

We had a lovely little discussion on the use of Micro as a balancing tool here.

Disclaimer: I have never played Planetary Annihilation, I only watched some footage of the game, so make of this what you want...

Death balls aren't necessarily problematic. The word has a negative connotation because of problems with the concept in Starcraft 2, but that's related to the specific implementation in that game.

The original post mentioned scaling of units, which is intrinsically related to death ball performance. There are multiple types of scaling which are relevant here. First there is the performance of small versus large. (I'll go into that later) Secondly, there is the performance of small versus small, and then the comparison with large versus large: do some units scale better once they get to higher numbers? Typically this is true for ranged units versus melee units, at higher numbers they can use a ball formation where every ranged unit can fire creating high concentrated damage output. Melee units on the other hand need to surround this ball. But four times as many ranged units creates two times as much surface area to attack, so evidently it will scale worse if we keep to this simple scenario.

The latter effect seems very ominous, you might think that it would lead to gameplay where one player is encouraged to simply stay at base and mass up an unstoppable army. This can be generalized to the death ball problem as mentioned in the original post, where one player will have the stronger late game army and can play passively. However, we should consider that in rts games it is not possible to create perfectly equal scaling unless you allow only one tech path and one race. Therefore, it seems like this can not be avoided and care should be given to reign in the excesses and focus on the positives it brings. And while the excesses are the sort of degenerate gameplay the original post talks about, the ways in which it can contribute to the game aren't highlighted.
Note that in a competitive game, the strength of death ball play immediately creates a counter balance in anti-death ball play. Consider that if one player wins by virtue of growing his army while playing passively, then the other person in the game can simply take map control and create a vast economy that can match the stronger core army of the opponent. And keep in mind that you will want to split up your opponent's army, since you do well at multiple lower size confrontations. You will also want to force trades, to keep army sizes down. All of this promotes harassment, counter attacks, being out on the map.

You can note that a lot of this depends on the ability to not reduce the game to army clashes. If, no matter how strong your economy, you will never have the time to produce a second army after your first one is crushed (responsiveness of the opponent's army versus your ability to reinforce is part of defender's advantage) and your opponent despite lacking map control can acquire sufficient funds to create at least one army, the game is still reduced to the death ball. If you spread out over the map by expanding and attacking in multiple locations, then if none of your smaller armies can ever deal sufficient damage to his defensive positions and can never trade at least mildly equally then this just becomes throwing away units. If your engagements and aggressive play can never dent your opponent because he is too solid and comfortable and if his army is too powerful for you to exploit your own economic strength, then what is left?
If there are no natural counters to death ball play (not in terms of unit compositions, but in play styles) you will be forced into very specific types of play: timing attacks to break the opponent just before his army kicks in, or alternatively, create a death ball yourself. Both of these are not fun to watch or play, and are impossible to balance. It's difficult to force the two armies to be of equal strength, more likely one of them will be a bit stronger and end up winning. It will turn the game in a battle of army efficiency where defender's advantage becomes problematic as it won't allow either side to attack. It's also difficult to balance timing attacks since if defensive play becomes optimized you can eventually always survive and still win off the strength of your death ball play.

How can you stop this from degenerating though? Primarily by careful balancing of all these different dynamics. There are some specifics that I would advocate, the first one is to not cap the game too early. I'm talking about supply caps, economy caps and also shallow tech trees. By delaying caps you prevent the game from entering a static scenario where this death ball play becomes prevalent. It is not the best solution since it doesn't address the problem specifically, it simply tries to have a higher percentage of the game be interesting. Limited ability to out expand your opponent is one such cap, it doesn't allow you to outgrow your passive opponent. And of course if by taking map control you could leverage your advantage into an economic one that would allow you to never lose the game, that is also an example of degenerate gameplay into a different direction. Keep in mind what I said about the need to create a careful balance. Note that the ability to grow your army for a long time might allow for ever stronger death balls, but will primarily benefit the player with the better economy. One problem with Starcraft 2, for instance, is the low supply cap that prevents you from making use of your expansions due to not having supply to invest into workers and not having supply available to spend all your money on. However, a supply cap does allow for comebacks, if you lose out on an early economic advantage you can still aim for a maxed army. And by having non shallow tech trees you can continuously reverse which player has map control, which player scales better for the moment, for a very long time. This creates more back-and-forth action.
The second solution is to address the core of the degenerative aspects of the death ball: its ability to utterly annihilate lesser armies. I'm honestly not very familiar with PA mechanics and so I can just say that it's a combination of unit design (range and splash, maybe friendly fire) and pathfinding (clumping) so that not all of your units can engage at once. There are also scenarios where units have mechanics that make them stronger in large numbers even without taking into account clumping and range. An example would be that for every unit you kill you spawn a temporary new unit, this means that if you have the initiative in a fight that you will quickly overwhelm your opponent. A counter example is that for every unit of yours that dies it spawns a new unit for a limited time, this will let you deal some guaranteed damage to your opponent even if losing the battle. Note that these mechanics aren't necessarily bad, but they do risk units that are too weak in low numbers and too strong in high numbers.
Another way is actually to change the interface to not allow you to control too many units at once, so that there is limited unit selection. This makes death balls more unwieldy, while it promotes smaller groups of well positioned units in a defensive stance and rewards a player that splits up his units.

Note that you do want defender's advantage, it has many benefits, but the unfortunate reality is that too powerful death ball styles make defender's advantage problematic. If this ever happens to Planetary Annihilation try to be cautious about reducing defender's advantage and see if there are some core issues that you should address first. But if you are committed to a certain path for the game, then you have to lower the defender's advantage since it is more important to have a working game rather than one that fails trying to live up to some sort of ideal.