Unit health relative to 'real' DPS

Hi,

While it has been brought up multiple times in previous threads (viewtopic.php?f=61&t=45056&p=700173&hilit=deathball#p700173) as far as I can tell there has never been a dedicated thread for this topic.

Basically, this thread asks for your thoughts on what the rough unit health to 'real' DPS ratio should be for units in PA. 'Real' DPS is the amount of damage a unit is typically able to exert per second, factoring in accuracy, projectile travel time (with regards to units escaping the blast radius), range, the effects of terrain, and any other relevant factor to help give an accurate picture of damage potential.

An example would be that TA had very high health to 'real' DPS ratio, resulting in battles that lasted a long time. Compare this to the (horrifically) low ratio of Starcraft 2, where a battle is over in seconds.

I would add that this is in terms of the general trend: one might feel that air units should have a low one (they normally do) but that naval units should have very high ones.

I now leave you to discuss your opinions and additions.

Hawksflight

This is something that will need to be extensively tested in Alpha and Beta. TA, in part had such high health to DPS ratios to allow fights to not be decided by whomever got the pathfinding to obey them fastest.

With Pathfinding being not only overhauled but practically reinvented by Elijah you create a whole new pace to the game when it comes to battles.

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If you'd like my opinion (and I know you all do); I prefered the feel of Total Annihilation's battles over Supreme Commander or Dawn of War, and much more so than Starcraft. The pacing of not only the fights but the entire game overall was so beautifully slow and methodical that you didn't require a High APM to effectively micro your units.

I enjoyed just watching the fights and issuing orders at my leasure while rockets streaked lazily across the screen and even laser bolts obeyed "Star Wars" logic when it came to light based weaponry.

Total Annihilation FELT like a 'Space Opera'. The action was just as beautiful to watch as play.

Desolate too, right? Maybe not on green planets. Did you get that too?

Your signature says you pledged $1 million...?

It's a pity the highest pledge possible on KS is $10,000.

That'd best be in a PM causeless, hehe.

And yes, give us high health to real dps so that tactics such as manoeuvring and flanking become feasible in real time.

There's some concern that low dps high health units will require all players to intently focus on microing units. I don't buy that though. It's true that if you had 1000APM over time the efficiency of focus firing (keep in mind not all units will be able to reach each other in a battle) will confer an advantage but by the same token wouldn't focusing on developing other modes of attack or new bases also? As long as microing doesn't give an advantage as great as everything else you can do in the game it will never be more important to tediously micro your battles (like it actually is in starcraft). And I have to expect that in a game like PA even with 500APM players will not have the excess APM to also focus fire their individual battles, skirmishes, and assaults.

What is more realistic for a competitive player is 150-250 APM and I would assume that the majority of these actions will be placing structures, setting up factories, positioning units, and feigning or other "macro-tactics". Macro-tactics meaning the management of entire groups of units, not individual units.

I do expect players to employ macro-tactics, e.g. retreat during a battle, stall tactics until reinforcements arrive or ambushes but this is a lot more fun and a lot less tedious than focus firing your opponents experimental. When the game comes down to a small number of powerful units (#experimentals, #starcraft) the game DEMANDS you micro individual units. And that isn't very fun in a game of this scale. So the key here will be keeping unit counts high, units slow, and a low dps to hp ratio.

Lol Starcraft has my APM trained at 250 so im cool with MUCH less.