Unit Veternacy: can we skip it?

Ok I’m Pro veterancy and im going to attempt to explain why below (Long post given that Ive just read 14 pages of anti-veteracy points that I’m attempting to counter, and as the devs have had their say many pages ago feel free to skip to the last 3 paras if you’re not interested in my retorts and would rather skip to may acceptance stage lol):

1. Micromanaging to preserve units is a pain and not in keeping with the explosive action:
This maybe true but just because as a player you don’t enjoy it and/or it leaves open the way for people to counter your strategy doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, If you would rather lose a few more troops than bother with the strategy surrounding veterancy, that needs to be possible but it’s a choice that YOU make. Why shouldn’t people be rewarded for being able to look at unit development and overall strategy simultaneously? Multitasking in real life in such a way as to avoid the whole ‘couldn’t see the forest for the trees’ issue, is an admirable skill. Im not the greatest in the world at it and indeed I might also find micromanaging troops a bore but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be rewarded for those who can and are willing to do it. So long as the gains are balanced it would be good
2. Balancing: it seems that a real bug bear is that veteran units are, in some games, so string as to make non veteran useless, this is clearly an issue, and reflects a failure at balancing. However just because something is difficult to implement doesn’t mean it’s a bad concept. It may well be that we can’t do it properly, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. It being tier-able and related to the quality of the unit’s you’ve killed May also help. It seems most issues with broken systems in the past focus around a sudden heath boost rather than the marginal increases in damage and max health. Just avoiding 1 off jumps in health would probs counter a lot of the practical issues? Also if it was to be attempted a toggle on/off feature at mission start would help a lot at alleviate the concerns of both camps, though this would obv create a 2 tier system of battles for those who care enough to seek out/avoid a veterancy mechanic, so I’m not sure the pros outweigh the cons.
3. Its unrealistic: basically this argument goes that these futuristic machines are near enough perfect and therefore are optimal from ‘birth’. I disagree with it for 2 reasons: Firstly if all things behaved in a perfectly optimal way their behaviours would be predictable which is a weakness. The ability to learn and therefore to surprise the enemy often more than makes up for having chosen the 2nd or 3rd most optimal initial approach (element of surprise). Basically this means that the truly optimal approach depends entirely on what is expected by the enemy. And is therefore dynamic, and changeable even via the weirdest and most apparently-ineffective influences, so the inability to learn (gain veterancy) is in itself a mark of being less-than perfect (you’re never too clever to learn). Without delving too deeply into credibility and game theory, chess-bots illustrate that no sooner have you arrived at an optimal solution, than the opponent changes the dynamics of the system, perfection is therefore essentially unobtainable you can just get infinitesimally close via continued observation and learning.
4. Smart units would be more expensive. Ie those without the ability to learn will always be cheaper, so why bother with the investment? I feel the best approach to answering this is a comparison to DVD players and Blue-Rays. DVDs will always be cheaper and do most of the same stuff. But the nature of technology is that when Blue Rays came out the price difference was phenomenal (orders of magnitude greater) but over time this reduced both in nominal and real/proportionally comparative terms. So that now there’s like $30 difference, its negligible. Similarly although robots are mass produced, given that we are working towards learning AIs now (again the chess-bot example) and that PA is set so far in the future, it is entirely reasonable to assume the cost difference between bots that can learn and those that cant would have reached such a small level that the need to mass produce would not represent a real cost obstacle. It would always be worth the investment.
5. Its not in keeping with the large scale approach: The primary issue with broken Veternacy systems is that they are OP. But if you had veterncy of a smaller scale then large battles would be the ideal way to make it worthwhile without the system needing to be so broken as to make it worth the effort. So the idea that a smaller influence makes it a worthless mechanic just doesn’t tally with the whole large scale approach of the game.
6. Inability to judge the strength of a unit at a glance; there’s no doubt that this could be of note in game, but that’s war. Failure to spot a chevron for example is perfectly in tune with the real issues militaries face without in depth research on enemies. It also influences their decisions on weather to strike to kill off the valuable assets or avoid the associated dangers, its part of the whole strategy, which if overlooked should make things slightly more difficult.
7. Were not shooting for realism were shooting for awesome! Simply enough some people love veterancy some don’t u cant subjectively call it either Awesome or tedious. Although there does seem to be general support for a kill counter. Also people like the sense of achievement even if the effect was minimal having an “elite death squad” of troops appeals to lots of players.

I feel the real issue is not weather it’s a good idea but weather the developers have enough time to implement it when its complexity may well outstrip its Pros, I Genuinely believe it would be a good thing, and in a perfect world part of PA, but with limited time and money I can totally see that there are many more important t things to be included. A better solution would probably by to have it as a post release update (given where we are now) or maybe have it as a mod? That Uber are storing this info for potential external use is fantastic.

And RE the idea for a motivational feature with no actually measurable impact for those who love it how about medals? They could do nothing except instil a sense of pride in your men. Or alternatively in the event that a no vote is cast as the consensus, a purely visually upgrade for veteran troops would also do the same thing and help satisfy some of those who would be otherwise disappointed.

On a related note to the kill count for units, and in a vein which I hope will be similarly popular, I would also love as a player to have a visible head count of defeated commanders (its all about the bragging rights lol).

That's the only reason I need, and that's from my 300+ hours of SupCom2!

Players that micro to preserve their units already gain the advantage of losing fewer units. Veterancy just adds bigger advantage of preserving. Making preserving units more important can be derived from automatic regeneration of health and cheap repairs as well.

It doesn't mean we must try it either.

Units might behave predictably but the commanders strategies and tactics might not.

There is one unit that learns. It is You, the Commander that learns. If any unit would be able to learn it would be able to transmit this information to the commander who could then use this information to increase its' knowledge and develop new subroutines for his units to improve their behavior.
If specific unit finds an improvement in a new terrain on a new planet in a new situation it would be able to upload this improvement so that all other units could benefit from it as well.
I guess you could justify that all units would gain veterancy and improvements the more they fight on the same planet, in the same terrain and in the same situation.
On the other hand the war has been lasting for thousands of years. Armies would surely have evolved the optimal solutions to most types of planets, terrains and situations.
There is just the commander that must decide how to fight the battle and counter his opponents strategy.

I expect all future robots to have some sort of autonomy. Analyzing the best tactic or strategy have to be done on higher level than individuals. What might be the optimal for one robot might not be optimal for the battle. Robots would be able to communicate flawlessly by telepathy. Question is how possible it is to have decentralized hive mind style that controls the robots behavior or if the command chain should be centralized. It looks like it will be centralized in PA in the form of the commander.

Sure. Let people mod it in and see how popular it is.

I believe uber have confirmed storing that information for modders to use.

I believe this is the best option. Those that want it, can make a mod and play. Those that don't, won't be exposed to it. Uber can save time and monehz by not worrying about an extra thing to make sure is balanced.

The secondary benefit with it being a mod is that the community has the ability to fine-tune the balance and come up with a product that shows that veterancy can work and be fun. I highly doubt that the community will manage to do this, so I won't be holding my breath.

I feel vet is a pointless mechanic that adds nothing in particular except confusion.

There seems to be a general leaning to not having vet but including a kill counter, i think both have value. they create an attachment to a group of units & i've had plenty of experiences in TA where i would have a rag tag group of vet survivors from the various battles during play that i would become fond of.
i'm not saying vet should apply heavy bonuses like in the c&c series but say a small percentage boost to health, damage & accuracy would be nice. for example say there are 3 lvl's of vet each conferring a 1% boost to the 3 previously stated attributes that would mean that a full vet unit would only have a 3% bonus each on these & say that lvl3 is achieved at 100kills, it provides that feature for people who want it but wont significantly affect people who ignore it & focus on just producing more units.
Also it's nice to look at look at an army that's just look at all the kills a unit has & know it is even just slightly better than one with less.
anyway this is probably something that should be looked at later on, its more a balancing issue & while it would be nice to have, there are more important things that i'd like the devs to focus on for now.

Seriously? If it doesn't do anything what's the point of putting that system into place to begin with?

EDIT: To Quote Neutrino from another thread with my empahsis;

Should give a good basis for why inconsequential things liek you suggest for Vet is not worth it.

Mike

To quote the venerable nanolathe:

They're Robots. They Don't Become Veterans. They Don't "Get Better"...
They Are Already The Best.

Venerable now?

:|

Sweet

Just to weigh in. Veterancy should not be tied to unit stats.

I like the kill counter.

If the fluff said that the robots were piloted I would feel differently.

veterancy was a nice reward for using units exceptionally well - at least that was the intention. something in the same vein that would reward players for keeping units alive would be good. for example, a repair tower that repaired for only energy cost would reward players who keep units alive after a battle.

That is an interesting alternative reward. Certainly the issue with veterancy was the side effect that it encouraged micromanagement around veteran units when the focus should be on the higher strategy in a macro RTS. This neatly sidesteps that tendency by applying that benefit to any surviving unit regardless of age (if you want to have a reward mechanic for unit preservation)

I like this.

just a random thought, not sure if already mentioned

but what about a "Unit Class Veterancy" makes more sense for robots as can share "experience" and should be a lot easier to manage for low cost expendable units, than individual veterancy.

may be a stupid idea, not sure

It's been discussed. Conceptually, it's certainly one of the more plausible ways of having robots with veterancy.

I don't think it's ever been done in a game before, so few have a good idea on what effect on gameplay it would have.

Assuming that newly produced units inherit/download veterancy from the rest of the kin, you wouldn't really worry about keeping units alive; only getting them into battle to get experience to share. I'm guessing that it would promote spamming of a single unit type, or very few unit types. But that's only a guess.

I low balled, just to give an emphasized example of something that may provide a "small" boost to individual units & in a game that will have, most likely, unit counts in the hundreds & thousands could easily get out of hand if too big a bonus is conferred.

Which is why i stated at the end of my post that there are far more important things for the devs to be concentrating on for now, what i was suggesting was something that could come later, either from a mod or from the devs after release, since they plan on supporting the game for a while.

If vet units are implemented at some point, i feel they should only get a stat boost that will allow them just enough of an advantage that they will come out on top of a non vet unit.

Note i am not saying that this should be priority number one or something, just saying that there is some value to unit veterancy & providing an idea on how i think it could be implemented without causing massive balance problems.

I'd say that's a safe assumption so long as the cost for the unit doesn't change, you end up where Tank A is more powerful for cost than Tank B is(unless you force yourself to build it to get it vet) and while You might not be spamming a single unit all game(you might still need AA and what not) it does pretty much spit in the face of unit variety and kinda locks the player into certain unit selections over time.

Mike

I like veterancy because it allows your units to attack little further rather than back off for heals.

Why is Unit Veterancy even being discussed? It will not be in, look here:
Confirmed Features List 2.0