Thoughts and first impressions of PA

This is a post of things I noticed when I first played the game.

1. I walled my base off, and late tried to kill the walls, they wouldn't die..

2. I feel all the different fabricators add quite a wild dynamic, which is good, but they could be balanced. Air fabs are insanely useful with their speed.

3. I feel like for someone to tech to advanced factories they should need a lot more metal extractors, it seems pointless to build any low tier units as they get easily beat quite early in the game. The jump from tier 1 to 2 should require more resources.

4.Is it possible to crash a planet into the sun, that should be an option too as 2 planet systems require the death of both players in a 1v1 to achieve a planetary annihilation.
Those are just some thoughts I had on the game after playing a few games. With that this game is super awesome, and those are the only problems I can think of with it.

I can only comment on number 3, and I might get corrected on this but, the Devs have stated that tier 1 factories will end up being the grunts of your army while tier 2, not necessarily have stronger units, will have interesting units. I'm guessing that means that in tier 2 is where you will find your specialized strategical units. So, it sounds to me like some of the current tier 2 units might be moved to tier 1 as the grunt force.

1] In those situations you'd want to reclaim them with a Fabber, I don't think the way friendly fire is set up currently allows you to shoot your own stuff like that. Also worth noting is that I'm honestly not sure off hand if reclaim is fully working yet......I should prolly check on that.

2] I suggest you take a look at thier stats on pa-db.com, Air Fabs might have speed and such, but they do have some pretty big downsides, but all in all keep in mind that the game just really hasn't had any serious balancing work done on it yet.[

3] See Above about the Balance comment. So far the balance between Basic and Advanced stuff just hasn't really been developed and combined with the incomplete Unit Roster(Neutrino has said that he'd like to get 4-6 units per factory for release) and it's easy to see why what we have so far isn't really indicative of anything yet.

4] I don't get people's fascinations with the sun to be frank. Trying to crash a planet into a sun just seems very counter-intuitive. [sarcasm]Yes, I shall simply build these GIANT PLANET ENGINES on my enemy's planet without noticing them and somehow fortify them sufficiently to prevent my enemy from destroying them prior to colliding with the sun![/sarcasm]

Yeah, I wouldn't expect anything like that to be honest.

Mike

Last I checked you cannot reclaim your own units unless they are destroyed...I haven't checked in the recent update thou.

You can select your things and press delete.

That's why I mentioned it being only a 2 planet system. Without having the sun as an option the game would end as a draw if another player crashed his planet into the original starting planet. Besides that I think the non-competitive fan base of the game would enjoy that as an option also. The atmosphere of the game seems to be fun and casual, so doing stupid things like that would definitely fit in. Either way it's not a huge problem, but it is a more noticeable detail "Oh I can fly my planet into another planet but I can't fly it into the sun? sigh*". If it's not included, it could leave some disappointed, and that's why I mentioned it.

-Thanks for the reply

But the game isn't being designed to work on a '2 planet' map, just look at the visualization, you had a planet with a moon along with an Asteroid Belt and that's the basis for a small game, never mind bigger games!

Mike

Last I checked, you've been able to reclaim your own units for as long as I've been playing. You just have to manually reclaim.

I tried that a few times and (maybe my game was glitched) it wouldn't work. I might have done it wrong though.

Realistically, most of a nuke's destructive power is due to humans being made of meat, and infrastructure that isn't solid military grade blocks of steel. Once you take human frailty out of the equation, the only lethal part of a nuke is the fireball.

If launching a 50 megaton bomb at a robot army seems like a waste, it's because it is. The flash burn isn't going to cut through several inches of steel. The EMP isn't going to hurt anything that's shielded. The shockwave isn't going to carry away any unit with proper aerodynamics(building some trench cover is as easy as shooting the ground a few times and rolling in). Any aircraft that isn't already flying directly into the blast can outrun it by flying mach 1. Add in sci-fi tech like heavy armor or structural fields, and anything less than a 10 kiloton ball of force-fielded plasma applied directly to the face is a joke.

Again though, without the sun as an option to collide, it could leave some people disappointed.

I just found out that you can only fly small bodies in the game around with halleys, not any planet. With that big planets are just fields of war and asteroids are strategic fire bases/ nukes. With all of that the option of flying things into the sun really has no importance.
If PA ever has a set up where the starting planet is a moon or asteroid though, the sun should be an option that you could fly into by defending your halleys and obliterating your opponents main base. So I stand by my statement to have to the sun as an option to fly into just to have it as an option as the casual fan base will love it.