What do you think of the scale of Ubers Mega-bot.

Just a poll about the size, because i really cant read the distribution of opinions from the original thread

The size seems good.

Very impressive unit.

It could even maybe be a little bigger.

Cant say anything yet, but it looks like the whole raging and discusion distorts the view of community's opinion in the original thread.

... or that a lot of people think OMG LOLZ ITS HUGE = Good gameplay.

To clarify, if you look through the original thread at the people who think it's the right size or too small, most don't give any explanation, they just seem to think bigger = better, and a few of those think they should be completely OP (target everything, crush smaller units, have a shield and be transportable ... all at once, was one suggestion). Polls hide this fact and aren't a good source of qualitative data. If Uber thought a poll was a good idea, they could have added one to the other thread.

Well i think its hard to talk about gameplay stuff from a picture of a not doing unit at all. Also one of the main foci(?) was for the scale. And that got somehow overwhelmed by the other discussions going on. And this here is purely for scale.

About the quality of some posts, i dont want to discuss, you could rip some of them appart. Mainly the longer ones, i dont exclude mine here either.

Good idea syox. I think this a much better way of doing it!

I voted for just right.

Oh good, I can post this again.

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What is a Mega-Bot?
To put it very simply a Mega-Bot would be a larger than normal robot. If there were no implications to that, I'd leave it here. But there are fundamental differences between a "Standard" unit, and a "Mega-Sized" unit, in the eyes of the player. An increase in size comes with an expected increase in Firepower, an increase in Ability, an increase in Durability and an increase in Power-level overall; a big robot is better at shooting things, than a little robot. It has a bigger gun.

We see this rough equation of Greater Size = More Powerful in the real world. A jeep is not as powerful as a tank. A jeep can only carry a man-sized, mounted gun. A tank is not as powerful as a Battleship. A tank can only mount a Tank-sized gun. A Capital ship can effectively mount any sized gun it wishes. It makes do with heavy cannons that rival any land-based artillery.

So, in Planetary Annihilation this will also be the case. A small assault bot built from the K-Bot Factory will not have the same power, weapon-wise, as a Heavy Capital Ship built from the Naval Factory. And this seems reasonable.
After all that why would I oppose the construction of Mega-Bots? After all they are but the Capital Ship of the Land, right? Well, yes and no.

The Size and Scale of the Mega-Bot.
Consider the Battleship's size. Why is it so big? To my mind, the Battleship is so big because of several reasons. Firstly, it mounts guns of such size relative to the tanks in the foreground of that image that it must have a chassis large enough to accommodate them. Second It must have some kind of engine inside, and just like todays ships I can assume that that takes up the vast majority of the length of the ship. The ammunition and production facilities needed to Lathe enough shells to allow this ship to fire without ever running out of ammunition takes up most of the rest of the space, and finally the tower or bridge is where all the sensors are kept to allow the ship to "see" and mount some kind of radar/sonar, not to mention the mainframe that would store the ships "limited" intelligence to seek and destroy targets of my choosing. So, even though "in universe" this game is about robots, who have no need for decks or bridges on their Battleships, I don’t even really need to suspend my disbelief at the size and hold-overs from a human ship designs because I can fill that space with new requirements of the ship.

Now I consider the Mega-Bot. Certainly is large. But immediately I have a problem with the scale of this Robot. No fast moving motive structure exists on land that size, and certainly not bipedal. The relative area the Mega-Bot takes up in size compared to its footprint is completely unreasonable. When I look at the trees and compare the trees to the Battleship I come to the conclusion that these are probably medium sized Pine trees of some sort. In my mind I have given these Pine trees a rough height of about 25-30 feet, or two to three floors. This seems reasonable in my mind. That makes the ship several hundred feet long. Again, perfectly reasonable. The Mega-Bot is roughly 3 to 4 times the size of the largest tree, or 75-120 feet tall. This does not seem reasonable. The weakest part of such a Mega-Bot would be the knee and ankle joints. How do they not buckle under this things weight, even when standing still… let alone moving.

"Nanolathe,", I here you cry, "It's the future, they have a super-strong metal that wont brake as it moves.". Right, understood and that's predictable. A super-strong material in the future isn't all that unreasonable, but it is asking me to suspend my disbelief with a placation,
"Believe me, it's fine," says the Mega-Bot, "I'll walk just fine!". Right. Disbelief suspended.
Strike One against the Mega-Bot.

Looking back to our Battleship. I notice the weaponry. Two heavy guns on the prow, one at stern. I've seen that configuration before in ships today. The cannons themselves seem very slightly oversized in my mind, but I'm completely willing to ignore that for readability of the unit. Without guns that size it would have a less recognisable silhouette. The Guns themselves take up less than 10% of the total volume of the ship. That feels true in my mind. Most of the ship is actually dedicated to moving it around, stopping it from sinking and producing the truly epic sized shells that such a cannon might fire.

Now I look to the Mega-Bot. This thing is practically bristling with armaments! I count no fewer than 36 shoulder-mounted rocket pits, Two Neck-Mounted (… ok, I'll role with it) quad cannons, Two Hip-Mounded (again... Ok...) heavy cannons that seem to be comparable in size to the Battleships' cannons and finally One right, and One left, Elbow Mounted Mega-Cannons! Those things are bigger than the trees, must be at least 40ft long! This… just… doesn’t work. Without even going into the design at all, and focusing purely on scale ratios the relative percentage of weapons to chassis size that this thing wields is close to 50%! The relative ratio of guns to space that this thing has access to is five times that of the Battleship… and it's Smaller in size than the ship?! Where is the space for both continuous resupply of the weapons and all the power this thing must need to walk? What kind of power core must this thing have to power all of those weapons and have enough motive oomph to walk?

"Nanolathe," I hear you cry, "It's the future, they have a super compact reactor in there that gives it all the power it needs!". Okay… so is that the same generator that's in the ship? All technology in the Planetary Annihilation universe has been refined and integrated into almost everything, right? Does the ship have that amount of power too? What is the ship using it for? There are ships that big today that move around just fine with todays engines. If it's using the same power reactor, why does it have less guns than the Mega-Bot? The Ship is almost twice the size of the Mega-Bot. Why is it sporting only a fifth of a relative ratio of weaponry? The Ship must have loads of excess power that's doing nothing… or has an intentionally weak power reactor for its size. The Mega-Bot is half the size, but mounts Five times the weaponry. You're telling me that the reactor in the Mega-Bot is at least 10 times as efficient? Why would you not put that in your Battleship?
Strike Two against the Mega-Bot.

The Battleship has enough space for loading mechanisms and Lathe-bays that let it pump out a continuous stream of heavy-cannon fire from its 3 main weapons. Where does the ammunition get created for the Mega-Bot? It has more guns, and less space! If we assume the same technology within the two Chassis then where is the Lathing taking place to fuel the Rocket Pods, Quad-cannons, and Hip… cannons? Where is the space? Is it in the chest? The massive shoulders? Where are you making all of the guns' ammunition? Are the main guns Ballistic Weapons because they're very big, or do they fire plasma or Lasers? That would save some space from Lathing, since your just dealing with energy. But if so, does the energy all come from the main reactor? Just how efficient is this thing? And why aren't you using the same power reactor technology in the Ship?
Strike Three against the Mega-Bot.

I don't understand why the Mega-Bot has five times the armaments of the Battleship, and Two main weapons that are obviously bigger and therefor, more powerful (as we saw at the beginning of this post) than the Battleship, but is half the scale. Either the Battleship;
Is woefully under-gunned for its size,
Is wasting energy by the bucket full,
Is using outdated technology,
Or
Is wasting space.

The internal logic of the Planetary Annihilation Universe has broken because of this Mega-Bot. All technology is supposed to have been captured and refined to nigh-perfection. So why is the Mega-Bot packing 5 times the power of the Ship in half the space?

Is it that the Ship needs to stay afloat? Is the Ship wasting space to increase buoyancy?

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So I think the Robot is not "Too big", not "Too Small" or "Just right". The robot is not correctly scaled with itself, let alone against other units.

Oh, and by the way syox, it's "too", not "to".

I still think it looks too big.. Comparing it to the other bots, tanks, commander, and factories it looks out of place... The mega-bot does not need to be scaled the same way experimentals were in SupCom.. With the current size it distracts my eye, which i do not think is a good thing.

Nanolathe, could you posts a TLR version of your above post? :lol:

It's too long, so I don't want to read it.

No. Stop being lazy.

Edit: At time of writing we're at 65% of people rating this thing: "perfect".
You've had almost a week to look at this thing... and you're still saying it's perfect?
What's wrong with you?!

Scale and Size are not the same thing Damn It!

My opinion is that I trust the Uber team to make an awesome product and we waste their time making posts about something as minor as the size of a robot.

How true... But I think them wanting to get our honest opinion is great. But when we abuse that, it's bad for both parties.

Right, but 42 pages about the size of a model? Seriously? It becomes counterproductive.

It might be better for Uber to show us something near final and then get feedback there rather than early on.

I'm not sure about withholding information from us until near the end (although it worked for the Delta) but they need to come to the table with information, not just pictures. Especially when so much of a brew-ha-ha was made in the "Super Unit" thread, they knew anything they released would be controversial, finished or not.

Honestly I have no idea why Neutrino and Garat did it. By not outright telling us that they would be "in" or any information on how they might balance and refine the questionable implementation in SupCom, it just added fuel to the flames.

People who backed this project because of Total Annihilation, rather than SupCom, feel betrayed. Since we were given no inclination that the game might lean towards SupCom, rather than staying true to the description "Total Annihilation inspired gameplay on a planetary scale", we are annoyed at the sudden acceptance of Mega-Bots as a potential thing.

I use the term "we" to represent those that share this view. Anyone with a different grounds for disliking Mega-Bots obviously isn't included under the same umbrella.

+1

No reason to feel anything like that until the game is released.

I felt this way. But all I can do is hoping that in the end everything will be alright.

I am a TA fan and ther was a megabot called kragoth so I don't feel annoyed

I appreciate how, and why, you feel that way.

They might have assumed we had more faith in them! :lol:

You forget that there has been very little actual playing of the game... It's sorta' hard to pin that stuff down, without actually playing the game... (Assuming that they are only playing short pre-alpha games.)

The reverse actually. They had too much faith in us.