Unit Cannon & Asteroid Belt Discussion?

To be honest, I think that PA Kickstarter video is a kinda unfair advertisement, especcially when trimmed to contain gameplay visualization part only. It contains too much direct homages to Supreme Commander to not get its community extremely excited. No one, including me, really noticed at the moment that Uber never aimed at making SupCom spiritual successor, we all were in "shut up and take my money" mode. Me and my LAN party already pledged 90$ each by the time when that unpleasant truth began to surface from reddit comments and forum discussions. Now we've got what we've got, and I don't believe there's something can be done with this - after all, it's us who haven't paid enough attention to details. The game may (or may not) be actually fun to its real target audience of hardcore TA players and esports pros. We, however, are not its part in any way - we can't even play something as fast paced without getting completely exhausted. Our expectations, induced by misleading ads, were false from the very beginning. The question about confusion caused by ads being intentional to increase funding I'll leave for discussion.

"[...] I see Planetary Annihilation as basically being kind of more the [...] spiritual successor to the [...] Total Annihilation kind of side of things"
- Jon Mavor in the PA Kickstarter Trailer

It was indeed said from the start again and again that PA will try to directly follow TA, not FA. It's the reason why some people now are unhappy, as they relate TA to sidegrading t2, not upgrading t2.

What exactly defined SupCom for you? I see PA following a lot of things that SupCom did, as well as following a lot of things that TA did. I don't see how TA was not a game for slow paced ai-stomping or slow paced base building, as that was the only way I ever played TA myself.

Yes this is a major factor, but there is a gazillion other things that made TA awesome which people expected from a successor as well.
Be it very well designed units which had a lot of character, heavy terrain impact on everything you do, a more diverse ressource system, absence of metal which forced you to fight over ressources, great sound effects, great projectile effects and diverse explosions, friendly fire, wreckage, the need to reclaim said wreckage, non-popcorn units which actually made tanks and bots feel different, ...

I could continue this list for quite a while, but those are my personal highlights. PA is lacking in every area which made TA a truly immersive and entertaining experience. It simply doesn't draw you in as much as TA does.

I always played metal maps in TA, building fortresses on over crude sea (or was it over crude water?) :>

I've initially seen trailer in a trimmed form that included only gameplay visualization. For a pretty long period of time I've not even knew that any other form existed.

Original TA wasn't. However, by the time of announcement remaining active TA community were conspired of people with years of multiplayer expirience, and probably suffered from an intervention of esports crowd establishing their vision of RTS genre by fire and sword. Either way, feedback of some overly active part of resulting playerbase forged PA into another Starcraft-like RTS that's cannot be played without capral tunnel syndrome-dangerous clickfest even vs AI, unless you're playing in a system with no more than 2 planets and altered economy factors. Result - a semi-empty lobby like in Zero-K with 2-3 matches played by mentioned contingent - is kinda predictable. Original SupCom - and I'm not speaking of FA here - managed to escape that fate somehow. That drawed my attention to it, and to PA as its mistakenly identified spiritual successor. If those video weren't so SupCom-like, me, my buds and, I guess, a whole lot of guys could save some money from wasting, another generic clicky RTS from happening, and uninformed random people from being trolled in multiplayer.

It's funny, when I first saw the kickstarter pitch I first noticed the green nanolathe from the planes. It made me think of TA so hard I was about to cry for nostalgia. Funny how others were reminded of other games
Anyway I think you did not watch the kickstarter pitch but some other video that only features the visualization? Then I can understand your misunderstanding, as you missed the informative part of reading every bit of information in the kickstarter?

Yep, exactly so. At the time many gaming sites featured only that part, and that's pretty much a common practice for them to rip gameplay or cutscenes from podcasts. At the moment of discovery I haven't enough free time to dig into the details, so I just backed PA and recommended it to my LAN party that don't even know english. I cannot say that it was completely bad decision after all - we've got an engine that works with decent performance on modern hardware - FA doesn't, BTW, it crashes after 45 minutes of play on all of our PCs - and some minimal chance that someone will eventually replicate FA+BlackOps+TVg+4thD+TM combo over it at some degree, like it happened with SupCom2 and RVE, which manages to shine in skirmish, but unfortunately fails in coop with desync.

those are impossible by design in PA

That must be specific to your hardware setups then because with my current rig(about 2-3 years old at this point)I can play FA with multiple Sorian AIs on a 20km map for well over an hour before the sim speed drops into the negatives at all and it remains playable for a fair bit of time after that before the slowdown because too much of an issue.

Heck, it can even handle 1000 Basilisks at once;

Althought there was a bit of a slow down when I made them chain react using thier death blasts! xD

Of Course, FA had it's problems and "eccentricities" when it came to performance but it was always fairly heavily dependent on hardware, it wasn't really case of FA having "Universally bad/good" performance.

Mike

To be fair such a screenshot tells not really all that much if you don't show it in movement.

It was a bit jumpy when zooming but when you weren't zooming it didn't have any noticeable effects on the game's performance.

Now if they were to all go into Artillery mode and shoot at something.....lets just say that the 20,000 missiles and 1000 Plasma shots every couple of seconds would probably have caused problems! xD

Mike

b-but muh asteroid belts

It never looked like performance issue - by the time of crash FA have decent performance. Hardware of our rigs is not identical, with both AMD and NVidia GPUs, different series of Intel CPUs, ranging from a mid-performance laptop with 6 Gb of RAM to a full-fledged top gaming PC with 32 Gb (3 years old by now). I've even tried it on VMWare virtual PC with GPU emulation just to get the same crash. Problem persists everywhere, both in skirmish and multiplayer. My only theory is that some Windows update caused FA memory bloat, and with full modpack loaded it surpasses 3 Gb LAA memory limit for 32-bit apps - on tests, it's about 2,8-2,9 Gb by the time of crash and Windows cannot estimate requested memory. Without Sorian AI and/or other mods it tends to last longer, but still crashes in the end after 2,5 hours, if match is not over by that time.

UPD: PA, by the way, have no performance issues at all on our rigs, including huge matches with locally hosted server. The only exception is the poor laptop that just cannot fit the thing in its memory.