Why upgrades are important

well here goes nothing. my first post on this forum.

I have played many strategy games at the whole range of RTS and TBS (though TBS don't belong here) both macro and micro and I have played most of them, if not at least tried most of the game that is mentioned here, minus Zero-K.

And in macro games I just find it to much to think about when I am battling on several fronts. I want to see what I am battling and not make a half a guess of what it is. Nor do I like to have surprises as others earlier have compared with SupCom2, were a land unit mid fight get the ability to fight air units. And I like to base my strategy around that.

when I encounter tanks I want to send in gunships. if I get enemy air units in my air space I would like to respond with anti air units/turrets, if I am encountering gunships would like to respond with aircraft, and so on and so forth.

I have both SupCom and SupCom2. and SupCom is a masterpiece by its own right. (or so do I liek to think) but its successor SupCom2 ruin everything with the addition of upgrades. Upgrades belong in micro RTS games like Starcraft or Starcraft 2. Were I only have set few units wit a limetid unit cap and not a broad aspect of units with a 2000 unit cap.

and PA is already going to be a complex game by it self. thus I really don't want upgradeable units. I can understand a limited upgrades on the commanders.

but I generally think upgrading is bad for PA, at least from what I get from the game concept of PA.

-FC

I just wanted to throw another example out there. My favorite RTS of all time is a macro oriented RTS called Empire Earth. They had a pretty cool upgrade system where each unit had 10 slots and an upgrade for a unit filled up X slots. So you could basically spec your unit to have different strengths and weaknesses each game. You could only upgrade their range, defense, attack, and speed. So it wouldn't be like you couldn't tell if they had some special ability that you may or may not have to deal with.

This completely fits with a robot RTS. If I were designing robots for war, they would be modular. There are still weight, power, and mobility issues to consider, so you really can't just add every piece on, but you could have a targeting system (to increase range) in place of holding higher caliber shells (which would increase attack) for example. You can't have both, because both add weight. Or more powerful engines (for speed) would preclude a targeting system because the stronger engines require more power that the targeting system also needs.

The Empire Earth system always felt a bit tacked on, if anything. Plus, there was almost never a reason not to pick +range and +attack power because they were by far the most effective of the bunch.

Also, Empire Earth wasn't all that much of a 'macro' game, as it had a hard limit of 1200 units in a game, which meant that at most each player could have 600 in a 1v1. And you'd hardly ever get there unless you were really turtling it up.

Empire earth had a real case of "Close but no cigar".

Resurrecting a dead horse.

Upgrades via a tree is not going to be happening in the vanilla PA.

What is the status of upgrades of
-Matter extractors
-Commander upgrades (vanilla SC/FA)
-Factory upgrades

Thank you.

Later Edit,

The upgrade style in Supreme Commander 2 I assume is the one that Mr Mavor declined in the last live chat, where large number of active units will be upgraded simultaneously.

There is the Total Annihilation model where units are completely static and upgrading factory tiers requires a level 1 constructor of that engineer type.

Or we have the Supreme commander Vanilla & Forged alliance style where the:
ACU, Radar, Sonar, Factories & Mass extractors can be upgraded.

I must admit I am partial to the SC1 & FA style.

I apologize for any confusion, due to my sub par communication skills.

DO we have confirmation of those?

Commander upgrades are out. For the rest, I don't think we have confirmation yet.

The whole upgrade stuff in RTS games was only done to "streamline" the gameplay because the core gameplay isn't streamlined. Upgrading costs time and resources. Because upgrading costs time the developers are always sure that certain abilities are only available after x-time in the game.

TA overcame the need to introduce "upgrading" due to the introduction of metal, bigger and better units costs much more metal to produce. There are only a certain amount of points where you can extract metal and that "slows" down the player.

So why is the no-upgrade option better then the upgrade option? Because in TA the player controls the upgrade speed of himself and other players , more metal extractors = faster bigger units. SupCom2 was not broken due to the introduction of upgrading options but upgrading options where introduced in SupCom2 to try to fix the things broken in SupCom2!

That is why I feel the no-upgrading in TA is far more superior then the RTS games with upgrading.

TA did not "introduce" metal. A metal equivalent resource is in every RTS. It is also almost always mined from some limited amount of deposits.

You know what I hate?

Games that FORCE you to waste resources to upgrade a unit to stay on-tier. Games without upgrades are games that excel.

Yes daddie's post was not worded well. What I think daddie was talking about was the way that resources were handled in Total Annihilation with a streaming economy which was different to many if not all RTS's at the time. Most RTS's at the time (and since) have worked with discrete resource acquisition and spending. These two kinds of resource system require fundamentally different ways of looking at economy management.

They really don't. At least not on the player side. The design side may be different, I'm not sure, I've never tried to design a streaming economy, but you can do just fine treating the streaming economy the same way you treat the "discrete" one.

The steaming one allows a different approach if you want to take advantage of its differences. I love the streaming system, but to say they are fundamentally different is complete overkill. They are slightly different. But we're off topic now

A streaming system finishes units the instant that money is harvested.

A payment system harvests money, builds the unit, and then it's ready to fight.

A similar system exists in Starcraft 2 with Warp Gate, which allows units to finish after the money is harvested. In fact, it's been a huge balance issue because streamed production works so fundamentally different from queued production. The streamed units are faster, easier to manage, and less liable to be disrupted. Four gate is one of the biggest strategies that dominated for nearly a year. It's premised on, and owes much of its success to the fact that a WG economy is fundamentally stronger than the queued production of its twin.

Of course, there are so many other factors that go into play with SC2. But this one is being addressed by the MS core, which exists explicitly to bridge the gap that occurs between Gateway -> WG production. It is also an excuse to do other cool things.

I would argue they do require different styles of play because of what each style of economy allows the player to do. In TA and SupCom, nothing stopped the player from queuing up more construction orders than the economy could sustain efficiently and factories let players set unit building to infinite. This allowed the player to stall their economy if they were not careful or did not understand how to manage streaming. The consiquences are compounded with energy working on this streaming system as well as metal. The player over extending their resources in construction could result in defences without power. The player also is left responsible for managing their resource and energy storage.

By contrast a discrete economy does not let the player build any building or unit if they did not have the required resources already. The player isn't given the tools to stall their economy like they are with a streaming system. They do not have to manage the storage of their resources and over extending the economy does not result in static defences and construction buildings to shut down until the player meets the energy deficit. These to me are fundamental differences and require the player to consider these differences.

A streaming economy allows for saving up of resources only to start purchasing a unit when a player has enough to afford it. This is obviously not the most efficient way to use it, but it is possible to play this way. Although, sometimes it is desirable to play this way, as proven by the storage tanks. It's not uncommon to save up a massive amount of resources and then start pumping out 20 units at once out of 20 factories. These units are not completed instantaneously. This is also a common way to play non-stream based economy RTSs.

WG is not a stream based economy. I'm not sure what to call it. Maybe a reverse queue or front loaded economy? I agree that WG is definitely stronger than the more standard build system since you don't have to wait very long for your unit to be ready.

If played perfectly, the streaming economy can function similarly to the WG economy, but streaming still forces you to wait out the build time, which means you can't have an instant army to defend a surprise attack.

BUT with a streaming economy as implemented in TA and Supcom, it is possible to assist construction with more engineers, increasing rate of consumption but also decreasing the amount of time required. A big part of gameplay is balancing your income and consumption for maximum efficiency.

You are placing too much emphasis on the similarities and underplaying the different things that each system allows you to do. Yes they are both economies for RTS games so they are likely to share similarities and thus you can use them in similar ways, but you are leaving out the key aspects that make each system different and allow players to play differently and saying they are the same. Just because you can play it the same way does not make them the same

Even if you decided to not take advantage of the features that a streaming economy has and play it like other RTS economy models aspects of it cannot be ignored. Players still have to manage their own storage and that requires paying attention even when the player is obtaining resources faster than they are spending them. This is not something that other RTS economies require as the vast majority of non streaming economy games let players stack up infinite resources without any management. I assume you are referring to someone else's argument when you mention instant building because none of my prior arguments mentioned either system having instantaneous building.

In addition, it is not my experience that players will save up resources to suddenly spend all at once, it is actually a rather absurd notion. Players are better off building units as they are able (regardless of economy model) because the player winds up with the same number of units and has gradually increasing defensive capacity. If they wait until they can afford a bunch of units before building them, they are afforded no defence or attack capacity in the mean time. Once you get to competitive play it becomes critical to operate as close as possible to your economic capacity in order to have a shot at winning.

Very good point! I neglected to mention that.

This is one of my favorite features about this RTS series

Sooo. I read the first two pages of the post and the last. Interestingly enough you're kind of off topic lately :>

What I wanted to say: I really do not like teching in RTS. A thing that could be implemented is unlocking new types of units (if this could be done storywise I don't know. I guess it could be done by requiering to have certain kinds of buildings to create certain kinds of units which are vastly more expensive so you get a sort of Tier system.)

I think it's a good idea to leave this part of the RTS genre out - the thing is that this will be very very large scale and incorporating another layer of things you have to keep track of or divert your ressources to isn't a good idea.

I'm all for leaving them out thus disabeling techrush tactics and such.

There is only one special case where I feel that upgrades have a specific merit in PA. That case is Metal Extractors. In TA, it was particularly tedious to have to swap out a low-tier ME with a high-tier ME, necessitation finding a free engineer, telling it to reclaim the old extractor, waiting for it to finish, then telling it to build an upgraded one.

By comparison, SC had one click upgrading, and allowing engineers to assist if you wanted to speed up the process. There were other issues with SC extractors, in that they were tough/expensive, rather than TA's fragile/cheap, but the upgrade part of the system was an excellent example of filling a niche whilst trying to minimise micro.

If PA has a two-tier extractor system, then I would hope the upgrade system is simple. If the devs didn't want to have an upgrade mechanic accessible directly from the ME, then an option would be to allow advanced ME's to be built directly over a basic ME by the appropriate engineer, removing the reclaim-and-wait step.

As for the "research this doohicky and then 1 min later, all your tanks get an extra 10% health" style upgrade, I don't feel this has any place in PA, as has been brought up numerous times in the thread.