A lot of people are feeling like unique roles and non invalidating tiers require units that behave completely differently. E.G. The Leveller has to be changed so that it doesn't work exactly like an ant with more range and firepower. I myself was of this opinion until recently, when I played TA. The Bulldog/Reaper, Triton/Croc, and the Stumpy/Raider were all mostly useless (Although the lattermost was rather HP effective). They also all used the same weapon type: ballistic cannons (Which were the primary reason for their being useless). After a little rebalance modding though, you find that they can easily have different roles despite their near identical design philosophies. The T1 medium tank doesn't do a whole lot of damage, but it's armor can soak up anything. If you build them to do damage, you won't get your money's worth compared to a flash/gator. If you build them to take the hits for your flashes/gators, sams/slashers, rockos/storms, or jethros/crashers, you'll get your money's worth. The T2 Heavy Tanks are designed for a defensive role against hordes of oncoming T1 units. While not as efficient for their HP as T1 medium tanks metal per metal, they can decimate T1 units with their powerful cannons. Don't expect them to be able to carry out a decent assault on enemy defenses though... The amphibious tanks are high damage units that are slow but are able to take out enemy defenses due to their high damage and HP per unit however their a bit inaccurate against moving targets, meaning that vs the flashes they'll fall easily. If you can get them to the enemy defenses though, they'll annihilate. How can this be applied to PA? Think about levellers vs Ants. Levellers and Ants can have very similar mechanics. It's all in how many you have. Levellers simply aren't cost effective vs T1 bots, doing massive amounts of overkill that would have been distributed more equally across the doxen had that metal been put into ants. Add to that significantly longer reload times and you have a unit that's generally for hunting other T2 units but rather weak against T1. Slammers could lose a signifcant amount of their DPS in return for increased HP. What is their armor doing anyway if it's not increasing their HP? If they become less efficient DPS wise than doxes, they become better for assaulting heavy bases but for unit vs unit encounters you'd get a lot more damage out if you pumped your metal into doxen than into slammers. These surely aren't the only examples of how we can apply these types of things to PA. They are merely two of many. Some units are more than units that behave the same with better stats and have additional mechanics which make them quite OP(I'm looking at you, peregrine), and others are already fairly specialized either way and the T1 version needs to be removed with the T2 version nerfed (Looking at you, infernoguard). However, for a majority of the units in the game, T2 units can be made to behave like T1 counterparts without breaking the game if they're simply balanced right.
I think it's a matter of wording and interpretation. I get the gist of what he was trying to say with that opening paragraph, but he could have worded it a bit better! Although I'm rather annoyed at Zero-K right now (MadSci pulled off a horrible win against me last night that shouldn't have been possible) I'm going to draw on one of the concepts which it uses extensively to explain the sort of thing Stuart is talking about here. Basically, each factory is able to build a 'riot' unit (examples 1, 2). These are units which specialise in dealing with swarms of individually weaker units (like these little buggers), usually with a high fire rate with lower damage-per-shot to minimise overkill. These units usually fare quite badly, however, against smaller numbers of individually stronger units. Conversely, there are other units like this and this, which have high-damage, slow firing weapons, and fall easily to swarms of smaller units unless suitably assisted. What Stuart was attempting to convey, I believe, was that Ants and Levellers could take on similar roles. Ants could be more adept at dealing with larger numbers of weaker units, whereas Levellers could specialise in dealing with slightly more heavily-armoured targets like Shellers and Vanguards.
Thanks for helping me out here. I, too, did catch the meaning of what he said but I got hung up on the behaviour part. Since there is no advanced unit behaviour to speak of in PA all units' behaviour is determined by their statistics. So changing those inevitably changes how a unit behaves in the game. Independent of whether that change in behaviour was aimed for or not in the first place. So all that leaves us with is diversifying units is awesome and should be looked into. Which is a notion I can definitely get behind. edit: English is very, very hard...
