Why upgrades are important

I think upgrades are great in small scale RTS games like starcraft and warcraft, but there's a reason why TA and SupCom (FA too) didn't have upgrades. SupCom 2 had them, but the scale was MUCH smaller. It's just an extra thing to think about, and it hurts when somebody who has a better strategy and more units loses because he forgot to upgrade units. It's a micro thing, and it becomes VERY hard to manage and VERY annoying in large battles with lots of units. I don't believe in veterancy either, since these units are the best (as Mavor stated). If they're the best units, how can they be upgraded anyways?

You want me to go over why adding more depth to the game is a good thing? I honestly thought that response was ridiculous. You presented your counter arguments as absolutes as well. There is no way that there is such a thing as too many strategies. A high variety of play is the biggest thing that keeps people coming back to a game to play it over and over again. The mention of the "egg" in the video proves that the devs recognize that doing that same start up build order for the 1st 5 minutes of every game is boring. Having different tech paths to pursue each match alleviates doing the exact same boring build order every game.

You say unit progression is bad but don't say why. Unit progression is good because it changes you will approach a given battle over time. Early on, one strat might work better than later on. This also leads to more variety in the game play which increases replayability.

If rewarding good players is toxic, then maybe every match should end in a draw. Everyone wins and the robots all hug at the end.

How would one immediately copy an idea he heard of?

You see it, you replicate it and produce a unit that is most effective for the role.

And really your argument is based on the idea of expanding stratigy by having upgrades change the way the game is played.

But that is the point of having more then 1 unit factory, to produce a choice for the type of units thay wan't to unlock first, do I go bots or tanks first? what about planes and gunships? Or do I want to head streight to T2 and build heavy tanks? What about static defences?

Insteading of upgrading forces on the battlefiled (What is one of my biggest gripes with SupCom2 is how your tanks on the frount lines could suddenly use shields even when they were built 30 mins ago) you would be supplimenting them with units that would brouden your stratigy.

Mediem tanks are good on the field but lack the armor and punching power to take on a base? Support them with heavy tanks to adsorb enemy firepower giving my medium tanks a chance to swarm into the base.

Stratigy has then changed from me avoiding the static defences to being able to hit them head on.

The same way the Chinese do it. You get one, scan it, and then copy it.

I liked very much the ability to upgrade the commander by choosing different type of upgrade (economy oriented, combat oriented). I think this was servicing the strategical perspective. I mean, since there's only one faction, for obvious reasons (no balance meaning saving time and money), giving more abilities the player can choose from brings more variety and strategies.

One of the most important concern i have is the following : what in PA is going to bring strategical diversity, considering we only have one faction ? This may be a stupide idea but i wouldn't like the game to be boring simply because of a lack of strategy. Is there a single RTS game ever made with a single faction ? Warzone 2100 afair, but one could build its own units. Any contradiction is welcome

I'd say there are a couple problems with unit upgrades:

1) For the upgrade to be a real decision for a player, its cost must be substantial relative to the total economic income and total military advantage gained over the course of the entire game. Given that Planetary Annihilation games will have highly variable lengths, much more variable than say StarCraft, finding a correct balance for unit upgrades will be nearly impossible. Unit upgrades will become automatic at a certain point, thereby making them a chore more than a critical strategic question.

2) Upgrades will play a very different role in Planetary Annihilation, where both sides expect to use every unit in the game, compared to StarCraft, where focused builds appear to be the norm (don't know this personally, more of an observation gathered from watching shoutcasts on Youtube) This idea of specializing in one unit type or one unit subset, and having that specialization supported by targeted upgrades, goes against the very core of the TA / SupCom / PA style game. The game isn't supposed to have min-max armies, so upgrades which support a min-max strategy are antithetical to the game's very spirit.

Given those two problems, there is one final issue with upgrades in Planetary Annihilation: they represent a waste of developer time. Adding upgrades to a game which is perfectly capable without upgrades detracts from developing or polishing more important and more promising areas. This is especially critical given Uber's relative lack of resources and time. I'd rather see the time spent working on a better space / aerospace interface, or get some new unit interactions into the game. (personally, I'd like to see special 'commander' units. For example, a flying radar plane that dynamically guides any interceptors that are assigned to support it. This is a conversation for another topic though.)

I don’t see how not having upgrades precludes any of this. Everything you have mentioned here is included by virtue of having more than one tier of units.

Blanket upgrades across all units was one of the things I disliked the most about SupCom2, it greatly reduced the readability of a game. When players engaging the enemy neither side knew if the units they were fighting were suddenly going to gain shields, extra guns and anti-air. This reduced the payoff of strategy because upgrades made them irrelevant mid battle in a way that players couldn’t read or attempt to predict.

Firstly a good player should have been planning ahead to tier 2 units and if the opponent survived, built tier 2 units and is now winning? Well then. I wouldn’t call that a poor player I would call them a good player for recovering so well from a poor start. Secondly as I understand it tier 2 is not going to be a replacement for tier 1 units. It has been repeatedly stated that they do not want to have obsolete units on the battlefield and that tier 1 units will retain their utility into the end game. Tier 2 units just serve more focused roles than tier 1 and are not there to replace, more to allow more focused strategies.

I am pleased you noticed this. Did you also notice that you painted your arguments in the same light?

Well actually, there is. If you have so many strategies, then you have to spend mental energy to decide which strategy to use. The time spent deciding is time wasted that could have been doing. If you decide quickly, then you're not deciding; you're gambling. Picking an option out of the hat isn't strategy at all. So with more strategies you end up with none.

Am I saying have no options at all? No, sir. All I am saying is that piling on more strategies for the sake of having them is naive at best. There's a happy balance between too few and too many. I don't believe we need upgrades to find that balance.

So you want to change the performance/dynamics of a unit with time, just so that you can change your approach to a problem? Why not use a different unit that was available from the start? Just because a unit is there to be built, doesn't mean you should.

Personally, I'd much rather have all my cards laid out in front of me so that I can play each one when it's needed. I'd much rather have that over a small number of cards that I need to replace later on.

The problem with the outright of rewarding good players is that small advantages early on spiral uncontrollably into massive advantages later on.

Victory is reward enough for being a better player. You don't need to add any more to that, which is what your argument proposed. Winning a few skirmishes does not make you a better player, and it does not mean you're worthy of victory.

The mark of being the better player is being able to seal the deal by blowing up your opponent completely.

If I am punished instantly for making a mistake, I am less inclined to continue playing after my first mistake. This is why punishing bad players is a bad idea.

This right here, i am generally a bad player of video games. But if this game has a system that outright makes me have a tougher time and makes my units inherently weaker because I cannot figure out some form of micro instead of me being outwitted by the opponent there is no reason for me to come back. I have never had fun in a game when I have been absolutely curb-stomped because I couldn't figure out something like upgrades. The versatility of a unit should be inherent, making them tougher makes any form of strategy against them ineffective leaving it up to more of who can field a more powerful army, not who can play the game more tactically.

So with no unit upgrades, and as a consequence, limitations in terms of strategy choices, how do you bring enough strategy in a game with only one faction ?
Isn't a single faction going to limit available strategies ?

I can't remember any game where people are playing the same faction, with no strategical choices (about the units themselves) and where there are many different strategies to keep the game fun on the long term. Isn't it going to be in the end a "map control" game where faster players will win just because they are able to control the map faster than the opponent ?

Well i can remember Z where all players where controlling the exact same faction. But there was a nice system where if you lost the control of a piece of the map (zone) then you were owning all existing structures and this gave you a good advantage. you didn't have to destroy everything to own the factories available in the Zone. You simply had to control the zone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX5QBtkhQ6w

to skilled modders : Hope you can bring to life a Z mod with crazy robots and a zone control system

A single faction won't limit strategies, because that one faction has ALL the strategies built into it.

To use a Starcraft analogy, the Single PA faction doesn't mean everyone has to play as Terran, it means Everyone can play using any mix of units/structures from all 3 races(Terran, Zerg and Protoss).

Mike

Think of it this way then, In terms of say starcraft a single faction would be the equilivent to playing the terrain, protoss and zerg at the same time (Of course in a way that prevents unit's from being useless and the need for 3 supply types)

Upgrades don't really increse stratigy much at all, in essence they allow a unit to still be useful throughout a game.

In a game like TA instead of upgarading what you have you simple build more of what you need (Quality vs Quantity) and with the scale of games like this you need more quantity then quality to cover enough ground in any given game.

Smaller games like starcraft have units with many unique roles and uses, this is mainly due to the unit limit and cost, turining units into swiss army knives inorder to be ready for any situation.

But games like TA and SupCom have very specilised units due to the cheap cost of producing them and with unit limits usually going up to 1000, turing units in to specilists in their given field but kinda capar out side of it, relying on a mix of units to achive the same goal.

Leaving aside what mouthbreathers think about the scale of Planetary Annihilation being incompattible with whatnot.

I don't think upgrades have ever done much to enhance strategy, in any game for that matter.

In games they are just added buttons, which you must activate during a certain window as part of an optimised build order. They don't radically alter games in any meaningful way, they are just added filler. And I don't think they have ever been fun.

Just like with factions and special abilities, they became a habit for developers to implement, an expected of from gamers.

Leaving aside the petty insult I agree completely.

Traditions left unchallenged can become useless baggage we all feel compelled to lug around with no good reason.

From what we have been told so far I would say there is going to be a decent sized unit pool. There are likely going to be more unit types than someone can realistically build within the space of a single game, sure if you are playing a game that lasts long enough then people might start bringing out more and more unit types, but if a game has lasted that long it has turned into a slugging match of attrition anyway. People will decide what strategy they are going to run with, and pick units to build that play to that strategy.

To use yet another StarCraft example, most people playing a game of StarCraft won’t build every single unit in abundance, they will decide on a strategy and devote their resources to it. This will be similar but with a larger unit pool there is more potential for changing strategy in the late game, or even using a different strategy on each planet. I don’t think we are going to have an issue with homogeneity of strategy.

Very nicely put. Simply because something has always (or most often) been done one way, like having upgrades, doesn’t mean it is the best way. It may even be the best fit for certain kinds of game but the way PA is shaping up I don’t think it would benefit from upgrades.

I would do away with upgrades for this benefit alone. If I want to compete against the stopwatch laying on my desk, I'll go jogging or something. Timing attacks are the bane of strategy games.

In the form of upgrades and game time I agree.

But timing an attack to go with somthing else the player has done is really a good thing, like assulting a base after an artillery or air strike.

Or hitting the enemy before they can recover, things like that are really what RTS is about.

But a timeing thing like "Getting to T3 in 20 mins" or somthing is kinda bad, but that might be a symptom of balance that is best discussed else where.

Yeah, timing is a good thing. People making a plan that doesn't really involve what the enemy is doing at all is a bad thing. Anything that doesn't involve playing against your opponent should be automated.

A starcraft timing attack shouldn't take all of 3 clicks to pick one and the rest can be handled by the game. Getting rid of that kind of "strategy" is one of the great things I'm hoping to get in PA and one of the main reasons I stopped playing Starcraft.

(And of course, it's the only type of timing attack that is impossible without upgrades, so good riddance. All of the others will still exist.)

Perhaps because you're being too polite? I found that I don't get ignored nearly as often when I am skirting the line between being a troll and just being direct and calling people out on every level their argument is flawed.

Had folks like you, BulletMagnet, igncom1, knight and consili not still been keeping up the good fight, I'd be inclined to write more, but you've all been hitting the good points already.

:roll: At least someone read it and thank you for the praise.