We already know that PA will not get different stock factions. Indeed it was pretty much said back in the kickstarter trailer. Still the engine does support multiple factions for server side mods. And people are working at different faction server side mods. I had some thoughts about the two types of asymetric factions recently and thought I might write them down for anyone who wants to make a faction mod for PA. It also might give the dev some idea about what features to put into the game later on based on wich ones the players/modders would think most interesting. I see two basic types of asymetric factions: Truly asymetric and pseudo-asymetric. Truly asymetric: Examples: Starcraft 1+2+Addons. Warcraft 3. Earth 2150+2160. In this case the factions are different down to how the base has to be build. Terran are the most mobile (build where ever you want), Zerg the least mobile (need for creep to spread/be planted first) and Protoss the medium mobile base builders (can place pylons everwhere, but need pylons for everything else) in Starcraft (All versions). Each faction might implement the same game concept very differently. Just compare Protoss (Dark Templar, Observer, Arbiter), Terran (Ghost and Wraith) and Zerg (most land units via burrow) implementation of Invisibility for example. There might even be game whole game concepts (teleportation/mind control) wich are only avalible to 1-2 factions (Protoss Recall vs Nydus Worm vs Terran nothing; Dark Archons vs infestation). Pros: Very different factions Con: It seems impossible to make more then 3-4 factions this way. I know of no game where 5+ fully asymetric factions truly worked out. Earth 2160 and Warcraft 3 were the only games I know that even tried 4 Factions. It seems as if you run out of concepts to differentiate the factions by when you hit Nr. 3-4 or end up in balancing quagmire. Pseudo-asymetric: Examples: Supreme Commander+FA. Total War series. Dawn of War (not sure about DoW 2 here). Earth 2140. For this case building the base is exactly the same thing for every faction. There might be some minor variation in wich factory you choose when or what defenses you can rely upon (have high tier variants of), but round about the only areas of difference are presentation and some unit abilities. Perhaps no game makes this clearer then Total War Shogun 2, where each faction literally has the same units with a few buffs here and there (I am not even sure why they choose to make faction units a seperate Codex/game engine entry in the first place). This kind of variance of relies on special abilities/a deep Rock-Paper-Scisor approach between units. Between Melee Attack, Ranged Attack, Melee Defense, Armor, Speed, Morale and special abilities like "strong vs armor/strong charge/strong vs cavalery" there are hundreds of possible different units for every Total War game for dozens of factions. Yet there is no truly asymetric faction. Pro: You can make tons of factions. Dozens have been realised. Con: The factions are not quite as different. Presentation and carefull management of game concepts you can differentiate them on play a huge role. Planetary Annihilation has a bit of an issue here: There is nothing to make truly asymetric factions by. The game engine has to be designed for those things at a much lower level. It might still be possible to be added later, but it likely has a really low priority (as the stock game does not needs it). But there is not enough to make pseudo-asymetric faction system either: At the very least the engine would need Armor stat (that just blocks a certain amount of damage per hit) and conditional damage bonuses (+X damage vs bots/vehicles) for units. A lot of other things would be nice (radar cloaking, submerging naval units, multi-unit transports especially for orbital), but I think those 2 would allow the most amount of diversification for any factions ideas moders could come up with. Jet those are also the ones TA and SupCom have always shied back from, so they might never make it into this engine either.
While balanced asymmetric factions are always fun (or rather much more fun than only one faction), i think its too much to ask for now. Maybe for PA 2.0, or some mod. Those things tend to be difficult to balance, just look at WOW and blizzard struggling to balance all classes for PVP and PVE for more than 10 years. For PA 2 or even 3 factions would be much, much easier to balance, but we do not have yet balance of units for single faction. Also look at Blizzard (at least few years back) when they had game in beta they kept it there until balance was done, Uber cannot afford that luxury. And community done balancing (in mod) will at best give us balance like in Zero-k (or SpringRTS), which is great for mod project, but messy compared to Starcraft.
Why hate them? They are a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. If you add Armor to the game, HP can be lower and how much damage a unit does per shoot can have a much higher relevance then pure DPS, thus allowing finer grained Roles. i.e., Dox could be made useless agaisnt vehicles (give vehicles some armor and Dox more but lower damage attacks). It does not need to be used in the stock game. It just needs to be an option for Modding. I am not expecting any stock factions. That one is clear. It was clear to me since I first heard the words "technology has been captured, assimilated and transformed" in the Kickstarter Trailer. Asking for Stock faction is like asking for FPS elements in a Total War game. But the game engine can still handle factions for Mods. Modders now just need the proper tools to diversify the factions. Right now I don't think the engine provides nearly enough concepts for diversification. Most Multi-Faction ideas are about just buffing some units. Wich doable, but rather primitive.
The only thing PA lacks for multiple factions is the AI. As someone pointed out in the modding forums galactic war already uses the functionality required to limit what a given player can use. You could easily create a second set of units and make them only available to one set of commanders while the existing unit set is only available to the other. Related post If you're only interested in multiplayer then balancing the new units would be the biggest issue.
Indeed making truly asymmetric factions (not just some units reskinned and buffed/nerfed) requires more tools than we have now. @cynischizm: real fun from asymetric rts when you have different rules for economy and production, also some units with totally different mechanic. Less than that and it kind of makes more problems than it adds fun to game.
Factions actually limit variety, as then special units are only available to certain groups. If all the units included were in one group... Woo boy, that'd be quite a bit of variety. Imagine if FA had all four factions be one? That'd be... A lot of units. XD
One faction having a ton of units wouldnt actually add as much variety to a match as you'd think, because only a fraction of its units would be useful in a single match, whereas 2 different factions would be likely to have a bit less than twice as many types of useful units on the field. the only advantage in one huge faction is that your prefered unit and base composition would shine some light on your online personality more than picking a faction would, supposing you give a rip, I do anyways.
Just want to add to the OP here a bit. Armor and radar AND cloaking are all available to us in the modding tools. In a limited sort of fashion, that is. There is only one armor type currently, and Cloaking is just super-invisibility because it doesn't depend on energy
No not exactly - I don't think you can make cloaking energy based - I don't think you can make your own armor types
Armor types are based on unit types. So every unit type is also an armor type. ...and no, you can't make unit types, so technically you can't make armor types, but it doesn't matter because you have most combinations of unit types and even some freed up unit types not being really used (fabbuild and basic overlap, and tactical is not really needed where used) Also, cloaking can't be energy based, but the unit it is tied to can "consume energy". He will stay cloaked when negative energy, but he will still crash your eco which has negative effects itself despite the cloaked thing remaining cloaked (loss of fabrication and radar)
So a "strong vs" approach is possible. Good to know. How reliable are the functions behind this? Can you define multiple unit-types for one unit, i.e. a "heavy", "ranged", "cavalery"? It is also interesting that the engine at least has basic code for cloaking. Based on how buggy Radar functionality and "Energy during build" was, I guess actually making it energy dependant might need a bit more time. Accidently getting a unit "stuck" on cloaked (the same way it could get stuck on "no radar state") would be an issue. Not to mentions Sorian has to teach the AI how to use cloaking. Or rather when not to use cloaking (because like running away, it is rarely a bad option).
Hate to burst the OP's bubble, but I'm not sure how you could translate those game choices like Terran buildings, protoss or zerg into a PA setting. Although I'm severely lacking in the creativity department. But I think asymmetric balancing is the correct way to go. What I like about Ubers choice was to cut away the facade of every faction using the same units but different names and slightly different appearances. For what my 5 cents is worth, the closest solution I came up with was to create a faction based on the various commander frames, one faction being only tanks, another being raptor legs, another being imperial legs etc. But I feel like that doesn't give enough variation for the amount of different commanders there is. Although I do like the idea of seeing how far I can take a faction of just mobile weak units, against a faction of just tanks. Hope it helps
You are not bursting any bubble. I already said it is not possible with the engine we have now. Or at least not as possible as it would need to be. Fully Asymetric Factions are not possible. And the engine somewhat lacks the concepts nesseary for a Pseudo-asymetric factions like in Total War.
True point, I feel like the engine would support it, but the approach taken by uber kinda negates enough real variety to create another faction, and i really don't want the facade of total war/ sup com type factions where everything is pretty much the same with a few unique units, to me the unit roster was one of the selling points, albeit a very minor one in the grand scheme od things, I just really respected the practical realist approach they took. Still, it's nice to hope, maybe theres enough creativity around to allow for some deliberate holes in unit rosters when creating multiple factions so your forced to take a particular style of strategies, or abandon them. On the surface though that might detract from the fun, on the otrher hand the only heavy hitting units zerg have are really lategame units, and the average zealot in combat is scary.
Actually truly asymetric factions start with base building: Terran can build anywhere and re-position production buildings. In turn the worker is "tied up" during building. Protoss need the "power network" of pylons. If those are lost, buildings go offline. thier building is "start warp and forget". Zerg need to plant thier creep and wait for it to spread. If they loose the connection, buildings just die. In turn the Drone is "used up" during building (so technically it cost 50 Minerals and a drones spawntime more then the list price). Since Human Resources will use the PA engine and has asymetric factions planned, chances are the PA engine will learn a few new tricks once work on HR begins. Hopefully stuff like "emits area of effect" and "must be in area of effect or else" will be among them.
Well, I'm fairly convinced that firstly asymmetric factions isnt exclusively down to the buildings, army type/ function also plays a part. This should be demonstrated by the human resources KS pitch, how we saw very little of 'buildings' and it was mostly how the robots/aliens(ancients) interacted with the human resources differently, and how they fight in different ways. An example of this would be to have a faction of totally bots, vs a faction of totally vehicles. That's impractical based on the current game, but no vehicle moves quickly and is highly maneurverable, and no bot is tanky and with the exception of the sniper bot, no bot is heavy hitting the way the average tank is.
People are too hung up on what other games did to create asymmetrical faction by making every sing little thing about each faction different. Back in my day, asymmetrical factions came down to each side having a unique unit, and the lack of access to a standard unit. Like: The Totalitarians Have the uber-Slammer unit. Have no access to Bolos or Levellers. The Destructor's Have access to the Hover Bolo and Hover Leveller Have no access to Bombers or Gunships. Boom, asymmetrical factions.
