Things that annoy you in RTS games

Here's a list of some of my major gripes:

1. Unrealistic damage. A direct tank shell from a tank hitting an infantry man (in say CnC series etc.) does not kill them, infact in CnC games and others it requires up to 8 or beyond direct hits just to kill one solider.

2.Magic damage bonuses / penalties for a RPS method. Pretty much linked to how the above system handles things. It's understandable if you are shooting a tank with a rifle, but in some games anti-tank units do little damage to equivalent anti-tank units. A big example of how RPS damage bonuses are applied is in Empire Earth whereby ships for instance all fire cannons, but some ships do more damage to specific ships even though they have the same armaments.

3. Homing bullets / unrealistic trajectories. Just image below

4. Units not to scale. Yeah, lets build a battlecruiser, oh wait it's a little small isn't it? It's very hard to be impressed with some units simply because there is an unrealistic sense of scale. A battleship is a massive vehicle and I think it just doesn't look right if a squad of soldiers are larger.

5. Cheating AI (without options of non cheats). The main annoyance being able to see the entire map and not being able to play fairly. That secret base over there, yeah I see it, I'll send my armies straight at it without scouting the area out at all.

List can go on

Luckily none of these things seem to be coming about in PA, except maybe cheating AI which I find more hilarious than annoying.

"But the AI is CHEAAAATING!"

"Yes, it is, now run along and play some humans."

Cheating AI's can be okay so long as they are explicitly chosen to cheat in the first place. Decent AI's shouldn't need to cheat to play strongly in the first place. Sure it's fun playing player vs player, but sometimes a co op comp stomp is also a very fun thing to do, so long as the AI's are clearly chosen.

Fully agree, although if you'e playing 2vs2 with 3 AI players the AI should support you and also support itself. There's no fun if I kill one enemy base and the other AI sits there and watches me and does nothing to help it's ally

I also dislike having to do upgrades. For example the Hellion in Starcraft2.
It works there but for this sort of game with the lore of all technologies have already been assimilated and refined I'd be annoyed that I then had to spend metal to unlock to get technology which should be made available with the unit.
Although on a positive side I did love RA2's anti air vehicles which could be combined with different infantry units for extra variety of attacks. I do think it'd be cool if that was an option for PA but the decision isn't upto me and I don't mind it.

The awful need to swarm all over the map to find the enemy, especially when you play 1 on 1 or on a rather large map - just to get rid of that annoying fog of war for good anyway once you have found him.

Not especially a problem with fog of war, there are also good implementations. But the TA/SupCom style was always lacking as you are completely blind a first, but get almost perfect information the moment you get radar coverage on the enemy base.

I can no longer play a rts style game that does not have strat zoom. My friends always want to play some silly mobas, and the most irritating 'feature' is the claustrophobic camera combat system, most likely designed to cater to the Asia population and their lack of adaptability towards advancing trends. Whats worse, is any attempt to get these features implemented is lynched by the legions of 'CHANGE IS BAD' fanboys who fail to understand when everybody has access to the same features that its not imbalanced.

TLDR, Everything is better with strategic zoom.

Oh my god. The number of hours I spent on that game.

How cool features that were in the single player, were not available in the multiplayer side of things.

I thought when I said that I hate micromanaging units special abilities and when to use them I was going to get a tirade of "what are you talking about?" They've become so ubiquitous in modern RTS I was getting the impression everyone loved that setup. Glad to hear that's not the case.

Ooh this is an absolute deal-breaker for me. I played RUSE for a while with my friend, and fairly quickly we got to the point where we could win despite being outnumbered heavily by computer opponents on Normal. Switch it to Hard and both of us together couldn't even beat one. After a little investigation we found that the reason was the Hard AI was a cheating little ****, constantly gaining extra money and spamming you with tanks before you could even afford a tank factory. That's called lazy design peeps.

Suffice to say I haven't played it since. Completely lost all interest at that point.

I was about to write something similar, but then i did read your post
Same here, its ok for units to have certain "skills", but they should use them whenever they seef it and not need me to click that stuff.
This would be even more horrible in a super scale RTS like PA , TA and so on I think.

And all the rest has been already said here too, I agree with nearly everything posted here....well except: I like Upgrades

Arbitrary Unit caps. Hate 'em, hate 'em, hate 'em. They always seem to degenerate into "who can fill up their allotted cap the fastest" game. Oooooh they whinge it makes it more tactical because you can't diversify your choices into out economising your enemy. Bollocks, i say.

It's RTS, not RTT. The only "tactical" I care about is the one followed by the word "nuke".

Hear hear!

Quotation of the day right there xD

I do agree with you, why limit yourself to a cap. We have the resources of an entire planet to ourselves if we had 6 billion vs 6 billion it's going to be more epic then just 400 units fighting. Uber did say they weren't aiming for realistic they were shooting for awesome. I'd rather be in a game where casualties were high. To me thats just more epic

Technically (and it's tenuous at best) if you have a low arbitrary unit cap, then part of the "extra tactical" decisions that need to be made are to do with force composition; do you go for generic deathball (a spread of capabilities but no real strengths) or a focused deathball that may have specific weaknesses or strengths which an opponent can exploit.

Which I agree, is just annoying. I know why other games have unit caps (to limit resources required by the sim) and I'm glad PA is only going to provide soft unit caps of "the point where the server falls over" rather than a hard cap that will soon be rendered obsolete by hardware advances.

As above, neutrino has stated they don't intend to have a hard cap in PA, you can build as many units as you like and you'll know it is too many when the server keels over

If you are playing on beefy enough hardware (i.e. a dedicated LAN server with plenty of memory and cores) you should be able to have games with thousands of units in

(FYI in alpha and likely beta as well, we're playing on Uber's servers and they are specifically limited in order to properly test the limits of the engine. Don't expect epic 10000+ unit games just yet, at least until the server program is released and people can run their own on deliberately overspecced hardware)

As above, neutrino has stated they don't intend to have a hard cap in PA, you can build as many units as you like and you'll know it is too many when the server keels over

If you are playing on beefy enough hardware (i.e. a dedicated LAN server with plenty of memory and cores) you should be able to have games with thousands of units in

(FYI in alpha and likely beta as well, we're playing on Uber's servers and they are specifically limited in order to properly test the limits of the engine. Don't expect epic 10000+ unit games just yet, at least until the server program is released and people can run their own on deliberately overspecced hardware)[/quote]
Oh yeh I do know that and that's only fair, at the moment I'm very happy with the set up and the fact it's improving all the time means it should be a great game so the finished product should be great. My only gripe right now is the heat in the UK is so intense I can't play the game right now until it cools down....might need to upgrade to something with a good cooling fan in it.

It was 94 degrees here today... I use this crazy thing called an air conditioner to keep myself and my computer cool

Air con is rather rare in the UK I'm afraid...

Indeed - I'm having similar problems.

More on-topic: do we know whether you'll be able to set unit cap in the game so once you've found out what makes your server cry you can make sure you don't accidentally do that mid-game?

No idea regarding being able to specify a cap at the server level; again that probably won't be a thing until they release the server, by which time there could be all sorts of cool stuff to play with

Also my rig is dealing with the balmy UK weather ok, although it does put the room temperature up to ~35C if I run it hard :x