Tiny Infantry Mechs

having actual units being 10 to 20 times smaller than a tank is a little ridiculous considering that there are multiple planets. I think they would take much too precise mouse clicks to use effectively and build. The drone carrier is a much better idea.

Yeah, IFV's could also be a good idea, so that the carrier unit can have some defencive power as well.

This is where I start calling BS, this is the same kind of thing the original C&C did, that big ole Mammoth tank took ten or more shots to kill a single, basic infantry unit and even as a kid I knew that wasn't accurate. If they are as small as you make them out to be(and based on pics Uber has shown so far and how small you say they are, they couldn't be bigger than a meter tall) even basic weaponry would be taking them out in handfuls.

Honestly, it's not that an 'infantry' system/unit class couldn't be integrated, just more so that there isn't any point, it doesn't add anything to the game, there isn't any need for them, capturing things is done via Fabbers/Commanders via hacking(essentially) and the size suggested is just such a huge jump from the sizes of the unit's we've seen so far.

Mike

Yeah, tanks not hitting the infantry is fine becuse they could be behind cover and the like, but getting hit in the face should always be an insta kill.

I'm pretty sure that was the idea here. Any hit from a tank is going to kill them, it's just that who cares? There's 200 more for the cost of that tank.

What if they'd further the miniaturization process and develop clouds of Nanoscopic Infantry Mechs? I think they'd be pretty effective. Beams and bullets go right through. Hard to kill without a Pullinsmash.

Can we then zoom in on Nanometerscale and individually micro these Bots to destroy important molecules of the big bots?

LOL, now there's an awesome game concept!

House MD: The RTS game. You're a virus/bacteria/parasite, bring down the patient!

Scale is relative, that is true. If a tree is 10 times smaller than the unit we know that the unit is huge. If the unit is 5 times bigger than the mass extractor that is 2 times bigger than trees we know that the unit is huge. My point: we don't really need cannon fodder units to make the huge units feel huge because we can compare its size to other things for example trees, mountains, etc. So I don't really see any reason for the cannon fodder other than opinion.

Yes, the weapons used in this game can destroy whatever hyper-armor the enemy is using, but rocks and trees somehow provide effective cover.

The reason big weapons are ineffective against small targets is because there are so many of them, not because it takes ten shots to kill one.

A tank cannon might massively overkill one, or even splash and kill multiple of these infantry mechs. But the player using the infantry does not care because they have so many individuals. A group of 500 units with 1 HP is actually very good against a big weapon that does 1000 damage, where a single unit with 1000 HP would be very bad. That one infantry mech that gets hit by the big cannon is just going to be very dead.

I agree that having cover such as for modern small arms is probably not a good idea for PA. But having small units be more difficult to see when in forests or very rough terran could easily work. It would indirectly provide protection, although the weapons will rip any sort of cover to pieces, if you can't see the target you are likely to miss.

Wait, now we're talking 500 infantry units per tank? I thought you were working with numbers more like 10-20.

Mike

1) It really seems like a waste if it takes 500 to take on 1 tank.

2) How rare will it be to have only one tank?

3) With such large numbers, computer performance has to be taken into consideration.

Sounds vaguely like the carriers of starcraft. I have seen a game where some thing like this was done, Dawn of War (warhammer 40k rts). It was part of the focus of the game play, squads instead of individual infantry units. It worked well there, but the game was designed from the ground up with that sort of gameplay in mind. Squads were reinforced mid battlefield (on a slight cooldown). They behaved a lot like you seem to describe, heavy hitting weapons that targeted single units where weak against the squads, but softer hitting weapons that fired swarms of bullets were strong against them.

Not sure though if they really suit this game though. Masses of Tier 1 units in a control group sort of accomplish the same thing, particularly if they use a similar control scheme as TA. They make sense in other games where there's a hard cap on the unit count and a carrier or squad unit lets you get around that unit cap, but considering the that TA could raise the unit cap with an edit of a text file, and PA is looking to be handle masses of units already, this seems like something that would be accomplished with proper UI rather than a dedicated unit.