What's your perspective on unit acceleration? Faster unit acceleration means more responsive units and microing, a la Starcraft and SupCom (units taking a quarter-second before they start moving doesn't count). Slower unit acceleration means more weighty and realistic unit movement, a la TA. There's also turn rate acceleration, which rarely matters because most games have such quick turn rate to begin with. Acceleration could used a balancing factor, a la tanks vs. bots or artillery vs. skirmishers. And acceleration in the orbital layer could end up being entirely different, if/when units cannot decelerate to zero speed. Currently, it just seems to me that units accelerate instantly, or nearly so, which is pretty handy for micro, but might make units feel a little too arcade-like.
Well obviously it's a balancing factor, and it seems as if it already is, the Dox for example has a Accel Rate of 720 while Ants have only 60, but I don't know exactly how those numbers relate to the actual speed of the units so it's hard to say if there is any practical effect yet. But you can do some neat things with Acceleration beside the obvious, for example a unit with High Top Speed but slow acceleration are great over long straight distances and can even do some 'drive by attacks' if you have some scouting and are generally a good reaction force but obviously suck at smaller scale maneuvers, this is the kind of thing we did in BlackOps for the Juggernaut. Mike
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/cartech/rac...ith-real-life-in-lap-of-nurburgring-50001906/ I don't think that Planetary Annihilation will achieve that standard of realism. It's probably best to think in terms of default behavior and when specific exceptions would be allowed. There are many unit designs that could take advantage of low/high acceleration or turn rate, but there will be some default values. If you think of it in terms of distribution of values, it would be artificial to force a perfectly even spread over all the units, most likely there will be some numbers that will just make sense for most units. By the way I don't think you really notice the arcade feel of any game after you're used to playing it. Keep in mind that RTS games are by definition arcade-ish since they are always symbolic representations of certain events rather than attempts at realism. If the units aren't responsive this might annoy you every time you play, but if they behave like "arcade units" you will stop noticing this after your third game, just like you will stop noticing any of the other idiosyncratic aspects of gameplay. On the other hand, some sluggishness to the units can be necessary to deal with latency and to make micro more difficult, if that's what players desire.
From what I've seen Ants accelerate slower than Doxes. Doxes are up and gone before Ants are really at their top speed.
Yeah Like I said the Acceleration rates for them are crazy different(the number itself is10-11x larger for the Dox), but until we know how that number relates to the units top speed we can't properly calculate what the effect is functionally. Mike
Acceleration: Dox 150.0, Ant 7.0 Move Speed: Dox 12.0, Ant 7.0 Turn Rate: Dox 720.0, Ant 60.0 If those are equivalent, dox accelerate to full speed in less than a server tick, while ants take a full second.
Code: "acceleration":7,"brake":7,"move_speed":7,"turn_speed":60 From the tank_light_laser json. It occurs to me that I'd like to see units with slower acceleration and turn speeds. Acceleration should do more than just be a balancing factor or unit gimmick, it should give armies 'inertia', penalizing players who disregard positioning and expect to micro their way out of any disadvantage, and making it so even death balls have vulnerable angles.
