This is quite the harsh review

exactly. Once the sales slow down in few months (the negative critics wont increase sales of course) im afraid uber will stop developing.

I'm pretty sure PA will do pretty well, it's already done very well in the past. And most reviews actually seem positive.

Edit: At least last I checked, plus if has a 6.8 - 6.9 on metacritic, which is bound to go up when offline/servers are implemented.

To me, Reviews are Snapshots at what the game presents today. Tomorrow we might have offline mode, 3 days from now a fully developed tutorial. These are not the days where games stayed stationary and didn't have constant development. These are not the days where a base game stayed the same way for 1 year before an update was issued, (red alert 2) (Emporeror battle for dune) (Starcraft), were only updated balance and tweaked performance a little bit.

Today the game is constantly evolving and it isn't fair to review a game once and have it mean something 3 months down the road. So I can't take this review seriously after what I've seen happen in just 1 year. This game evolves fast and I believe these critics are doing a good job highlighting the critical details that uber can keep on their white board as tasks that still need to close.

You guys should stop senselessly defending PA. Seriously.

We all know it was released too early. It has no real tutorial, no offline, doesn't run that well, needs way too much ram, is (at least to newer players) really focused on spamming, and of course is missing LOTS of very important features.

The reviewer said so too:

I understand that some of you have put a lot of time into PA, but TBH it really doesn't deserve good reviews in its current state. I'm sure it'll be an amazing game in a year or two, but the reviews will always say it has no offline, no tutorial, ...

That's not the problem we have with the reviews...

Here is an example of a review discussing the crashes and lack of tutorial without going full blown mental: http://www.gamereactor.eu/reviews/253304/Planetary Annihilation/

We defend it for what's incorrect, yes it was an early release, but that doesn't mean you should lie, or go over the top. :S

I didn't say a torus is a cilinder, but a torus is an even more complex 3d shape as a cilinder or sphere (for navigation).
Altough easyer to unwrap. (but only the donut shape will have no warping) The video you posted matches a cilinder type of world.

A clinder only have two of its opposite edges sewn together, but Arsenal clearly has all of them.

I don't think the defenders are any more accurate, they speak about the game as if it would certainly be developed further for years, but the devs was never truly certain about that.

Unless you can see the future, you don't know if PA will get feature X or Y. The reviews are fair, they don't take account for what may or may not happen.

But guess what : A web page can be updated! They probably be updated when these features are in. Until then, they are not, so they don't lie.

That's not the problem either...

The problem is when people complain a feature isn't there, when it is there and they just didn't bother trying to find it.

That guy most have been droped on the floor as a baby, Its great with big scale on diffrent planets!

Thanks for running your site BTW, it's a good source of info.

When's the last time you used google maps? Was it a rotating geoid or a flat projection of a patch of the geoid?

I run an image generator right on my desktop PC. Heck I've even installed it on a MS Surface Pro.

You use level of detail and at some point you are low enough that the planet fills your field of view and you can transition to a flat model. When you're high enough that you need to see curvature, you can't see details of units, you would represent groups of units w/a strategic icon. It's a relatively easy thing to do.

I can fly around the world or land my aircraft on a seemingly flat runway (we make flight sims). It works just like you'd expect.

You have used google earth, and you've zoomed in and seen how it transitions from a spherical representation down to a map because the scale of the earth really is planetary.

The devs made a choice that tiny spinning space station sized spheres were somehow more epic than large flat maps like we had in SupCom/FA.

Ok, it's something new and it's their choice. But let's not mislead people and say it's impossible to represent a large planet on a modern PC because that is not true, or that it's impossible to turn a sphere into a flat surface (how would MGRS coordinates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_grid_reference_system work if this were the case?)

I've created the largest planet you can in this game, it's still a small sphere that is quickly traversed.

Whoa there, yes of course you can zoom in and it (Seemingly) becomes flat. What Brian means however is that it's impossible to get an unwrap of a sphere that isn't distorted (and being just normal flat)

Also I'd love to see some large planets, even a size 2000 would be four times that of a size 1000... That'd be pretty massive (Gameplay wise)

You're only looking at part of the sphere.

100% completely different than taking a sphere and laying it out.

It is impossible to turn a sphere into a flat surface without distortion.

Displaying a static image is also completely different than rendering a game.

You're simply completely wrong on this.

Watch that Vsauce video.

It's true that some of his information was inaccurate, but those inaccuracies stem more or less from one of his legitimate complaints - the complete lack of a tutorial. A decent tutorial could have conveyed how units interact, how to harass your opponent on single-planet and orbital maps, how to use area commands (which I'm not sure he even knew about), and how to use PiP, among other things. Launching without a tutorial was definitely a pretty major mistake on Uber's part, and I suppose we've been a little too quiet on that front due to our relative familiarity with the game.

most of my limited 'intuition' about how to play PA came from TA

i'm not sure that brand new folks got a level playing field without more in-game hints/tutorial/etc

but it's got to be hard for a dev to 'empty their minds' to be able to write an effective user manual from a new player's perspective

The game has it's issues, but he managed to miss practically all of them.
Or used well know techniques that are easy to see and point out.
So I did jsut that:
http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/20...er-planetary-annihilation/#comment-1588685314

I don't mind negative, but just repeating the troll/flamer fallacies over again? He should expect those are known and defeated by now.
I bet he will try the distraction technique on my post. That is usually the only technique left.

Ah didn't notice it tiled in the other direction as well.
Anyway this is simple tiling on a flat surface and can't be compared to 3d spheres where there is no way around flat projection issues.
http://www.jasondavies.com/maps/