Unit Veternacy: can we skip it?

I see no difference there. Microing your units to maximum efficiency will make them more useful, survive longer and thus contribute to the overall success of the army, whatever the army's size.

It's what you do in RTS, no matter if it's Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander or StarCraft. If you want to be perfect, you do intense micro, especially at the beginning of the game. As the game goes on the amount and especially the type of micro changes, depending on the game and map you are playing.

Skip Veterancy. It detracts from the large scale of the game and encourages micromanaging, which is what they want to avoid with PA. I think units should still have kill counters, but that's it. If you must keep Veterancy in some form, make it so only your commander can become a Veteran.

Can we at least have support for tweaking individual unit stats/capabilities/etc... via mods... if veterancy is not included...

<-- Wants to bring back the TA experience.

I'm torn on veterancy, probably because that is a mechanic that's been around for so long.

On the plus side, it encourages preserving your troops and careful micromanagement, and having elite units is pretty cool.

On the downside though, especially for a game on the scale of PA (or SupCom or TA for that matter), it really did tend to throw a spanner in the balancing works. Even in smaller scale games, if not handled carefully, veterancy bonuses can shatter balance - anybody who's played Company of Heroes and had to deal with a fully veteran'd Knight's Cross Holder squad equipped with heavy weapons knows this lesson well. When you've got infantry that can survive (with trivial damage) anything short of an apocalyptic artillery strike, there's a balance problem. As the scale goes up, and the veterancy bonuses stack, it can result not merely in imbalance, but flat out hair-pulling rage. Anybody else remember managing to build a Vulcan or Buzzsaw, watching it rack up a ton of kills - and then become ludicrously useless because its accuracy had reached a point where 95% of its shots were wasted because they were impacting the spot where your target was twenty seconds earlier?

So while nostalgia calls me a heretic, I've got to weigh in against veterancy - though as others said, unit kill counts is still awesome.

He's talking about micro-managing an army, which is a group of units, rather than micro-managing individual units for the purpose of veterancy. To effectively manage veterancy, you have to make sure 1. certain units have more chances to kill stuff than the rest of the units, and 2. that they don't die. That's a lot more tedious than telling groups of units to just kill the enemies that are the greatest threat.

Micro-management will always be necessary to a certain degree, but it should be and has been consistently discouraged.

The whole philosophy behind Total Annihilation is to create a game that lends advantage to the player that makes sound strategic decisions and not to the player who is merely fast at clicking and controlling individual units. This is done through game design and building a powerful UI to help make managing large groups of units easier.

Removing veterancy will remove yet another micro-management aspect of the game. Building a UI to make it less tedious is a waste of time.

If you want to keep the kill count for interest, that should be fine as it takes no effort to implement and doesn't affect gameplay whatsoever.

I'm actually one of those skirmish players.

My point is: Veterancy that just gives a unit a small stat buff is pretty boring and hardly noticeable in large scale battles. When I think of a meaningful, interesting veterancy system, I see units getting new skills, weapons... That's better done with upgrades imo. If Uber wants to make a really awesome veterancy system, it would require lots of thought, time and money to implement.

By all means, if Uber gets lots of money, please make an awesome veterancy system. But I think the starting capital from Kickstarter would be better spend on other features. A couple of new units, more unique weapons and upgrades... That's stuff all the players can enjoy all the time.

Veterancy is imo one of those 'nice to have' features. But I'd rather have a unit or two more, a new planet type, a unique new weapon (like the Asteroid or Annihilation).

There is still no difference. Early in all games, your "army" consists of may be one or two units, which you Micro. This was the case in all these games. In Total Annihilation, you often immediately send two or three PeeWees on their way to harass the enemy, microing them heavily, if you want to win in the most efficient and quick way (depending on the map of course, but that's the case in all three games). This is of course just one example there.

In Supreme Commander/FA, even when playing a (seemingly) mindless 4v4 Seton's Clutch game, you are heavily microing your ACU to execute your extremely efficient build order and you heavily micro every further unit that you build in the course of the game. This is especially important for the front players, who have to play even more micro intensive.

Kiting exists also in Supreme Commander, something that is very micro intensive and usually only the human player is able to do (e.g. have a few early T1 artillery attack an enemy ACU, while always keeping them out of its firing range).

It really hasn't. Both Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander are very micro intensive. The difference to (most, competitive) StarCraft games is, that you later on micro large groups of units, rather than small groups of units. But overall, the micro is still there.

Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation employ mechanics that are supposed to decrease micro. e.g. setting engineers on patrol to automatically repair and reclaim (SACUs can even automatically rebuild structures, if destroyed). But if you want to be 100% efficient, you don't (always) rely on those patrol algorithms, you queue up specific orders yourself, constantly microing different things here and there. There are alternatives to some micro intensive tasks, but it was never really discouraged.

Yeah maybe; I made a poll to try and get a better feel for everyone's opinion on it.

I'm hoping for it, but at the very least, I'd like to be able to script that in later...

no for veterancy!

why? for me the worst think in RTS games is situation, when you see unit and you dont know how powerful it is. You see 2 tanks on map. When i send 3, that same tanks on them this will be enough or no? I dont know becouse it can be that same unit, with that same look and stategic icon etc. but be 2x more powerfull becouse of upgrades or veterancy. So we need to check how many hp have every unit in enemy army to know how powerfull his army is?

Let's be consistent, is this is that kind of unit it need always have that same statistics. Changing this in gameplay creates confusion. This is why units upgrades in SupCom2 was just bad for me

In supcom veterancy for units t1,t2 and t3 is irrelevant. Only for experimentals change something, but look at this: Exp kill 100 t1 engies and now have 2x better armor, 2x regen, 2x demage? wtf!

I think that there are a lot of straw man arguments here. In Forged Alliance veterancy does three things: increase total health, increase health regen, and boost existing health. The only one of these that causes enough difference to be a problem is the instant extra health. On Commanders and experimentals this health boost can and does turn the tide of battle, often to the point of victory.

PA won't have experimentals, so the only potential problem would be your commander suddenly jumping from 2% health to 22% health.

Leave the other bits in because it's kind of nice to have them and they don't do anything to imbalance the game.

While Jessep convinced veterancy should not be a priority, I don't find veterancy really confusing, if done well. You should not have to look at the unit's stats, a chevron/star like in C&C should be clear enough. the same goes for unit upgrades, of which I still believe they could be quite cool in the game.

If upgrades are clearly conveyed to all players, visible by glancing over them (a model update or an FX aura or smth and maybe an extra icon on the strategic view), then they should not be confusing and should be enrichment to the depth of the game.

In this game, I do not want to have to be constantly glancing at individual units to pick out individual icons or other such things. Especially not if I have hundreds of units on a battlefield. Definitely not what I want to be concentrating on. Definitely not awesome!

It's not the kind of thing you have to pay attention to if you don't want. It just slightly improves the efficiency of some of your units.

Not true, you have to manage it if you want the advantage, and you have to look closely at other people's units to know which ones are stronger. It merely complicates the game.

Which gives an advantage to people prepared to spend focus on that area. The same way someone focusing on running an economy get an economic advantage over those that don't.

I don't believe it over complicates the game.

If it just "slightly" improves the efficiency of some units, and if you don't have to pay attention to it, what's the point of having it in the game? If it doesn't create better gameplay, I don't think there's a reason to include it.

If I understand the philosophy of this game, it is meant to focus on grand scale combat. Nothing is less grand scale than zooming in on individual units and worrying about their health, microing them in and out of combat, etc. There are plenty of other games where microing individual units is important. In contrast, the spirit of the game should focus on large scale strategy. If it doesn't contribute to that goal, I don't see a reason for it.

^^^ Because it gives you that near-indescribable feeling of satisfaction that you get from knowing that a given unit has done very well for himself. A slight (total) hp boost and/or a slight regen boost makes the player feel they've achieved something.

If you don't believe that largely cosmetic bonuses improve the player experience, look at the market for hats in Team Fortress 2 or *ahem* Super MNC.

The only indescribable feeling of satisfaction I get is from watching my opponent's commander become a nuclear fireworks display.

I honestly think "I beat that guy" is better than "one of my innumerable peons did well."

If you want a feeling of accomplishment, will a kill-count appease you?

One feature I like from Zero K is that veteran units don't get stronger or better, but when they hit a certain level of veterancy they are able to "morph" into a different (more expensive, larger, vaguely similar) unit. Morphing costs resources but it happens quickly and doesn't need an engineer, the unit does it on its own. While morphing in ZK units are unable to move or fire.

What this means in practice is that your scout/raider gets behind enemy lines, kills a couple of structures, becomes veteran, then runs to some corner and morphs into a stronger unit. If it's not stopped it can keep doing this via hit and run attacks until you have some huge tank behind the enemy base.

It's not often that this happens and it takes some skill/luck/enemy neglect, but when it does happen, it's awesome. In fact just knowing that it's possible is awesome.

There's also the possibility of having units that can only be constructed via morphing, which adds a bit of fun to the game, as getting hold of one of these units would be a bit of a special event.

P.S. First post here. To introduce myself I started out with TA and now play Zero K most days. I think ZK is absolutely fantastic, but PA brings some really imaginative new ideas to the table and look like it will be pretty darn amazing too. I backed the kickstarter at $100 and look forward to seeing this game come together. I really wasn't into SC though for various reasons (I found it boring and too much drab grey) so personally I hope that PA won't draw too much inspiration from those games. So far it looks like PA will be way more fun than SC.

I like this idea. Veteran status could be determined in terms of multiples of its own unit cost in kills instead of just a raw number. So big powerful units would take ages to gain any kind of veterancy, but small units can make big gains in veterancy if they, say, infiltrate an enemy base and kill a factory and stuff.

I remember in TA, killing your own units counted towards veteran status, so you'd "train" your Bertha to make it more accurate by using it to destroy your own massive farm of wind generators. :lol: