Will we get intense frontline battles?

Frontline struggle is something I missed the most in Supreme Commander. Battles between teams about every single inch of the map with a very tight 'dead-zone' between said teams.
I loved those long lasting battles at the front, with your defense towers and engineers while the enemy throws everything he got into the fight, and you in return try to do the same while changing tactics as well as units and adapting to the enemy. At the front you rarely got a break. Most of the time you were busy adapting and changing tactics. If you made a wrong move then you lost several inches of the map and the enemy thankfully took the metal your defenses left behind.
And while you hold the line and fight for every inch on the map, some of your teammates provide reinforcements and resources by building a strong infrastructure. They do what you can't because you're busy holding the front.

Supreme Commander was a lot more distant.
Build factories, zoom all the way out, set waypoints. Take a bunch of vehicles and ctrl + rightclick at the enemy -> forget about it.
It had it's own style and I played it for hours as well but I prefered TA a lot more and played it competitive for a long time.
Meanwhile in SupCom, I played with friends, throwing Aeon-Donuts at their bases.
(And by throwing I mean self-destructing mid-flight right into their base).

Let's take a look at SpringRTS(Balanced Annihilation). Those guys tried to rebuild the exact TA-experience. With success, if you ask me. They put up to 16 players in one match, 8 on either side.
4 of them start at the front, securing as much ground as possible, the other 4 try to reinforce the frontline with additional units, get as much resources as possible or even concentrate on assembling new tech faster than the guys on the other side. Every average player knows his job. Someone has to provide air-defenses because sometimes the enemy uses bombers and if you don't have fighters when they attack, you're screwed. Another one goes for heavy mechs and the third builds anti-nuke for everybody. But that's just one single strategy.

I don't judge Supreme Commander in any way. It got its own style and I believe there are many players who enjoy it as well as myself. I just tend to like the more micro-oriented style of Total Annihilation but that's purely a matter of taste.

I bet some guys at Uber Entertainment know about SpringRTS and what I'm talking about as well as some of you guys who actually read this wall of text.

Which way will Planetary Annihilation go? That's something I'm eager to know.

Surely a lot of what you are describing here is down to two things:

Player choice and map design.

It is up the the way players choose to engage one another and this will partially be decided by the size and design of the map on which they are playing.

SC concentrated on massive maps, creating many options for players in terms of teamwork, logistics and how they choose to engage the enemy. There is no reason SC could not be played in the manner you describe. It is just that the players you played with chose not to. I played online with players who did.

For me, what you are asking for is a game that will allow for different types of gameplay and I believe that PA will cater for a vast array of needs. Simply by using the procedural generator to create worlds that are diverse in both their size and terrain. This way, not all games will the same and players will be faced with multiple options in every game.

I believe I coined the term "robot meat grinder simulator" for the style of play the OP describes, and it has a selection of problems. When every inch of the map is choked with units, there's no room for stealth, trickery or manoeuvring, and it creates a static game that's not very interesting. When you contest every inch of ground you lose, you're removing the decision of deciding if that particular area is even worth contesting. Whether to stand and fight or fall back to a better position is part of strategy, and if the answer is always "stand and fight", the game is shallower because of it.

Many of the high-level FA games that I've watched (or attempted to play in) have very heated frontline battles. In fact, I consider them to be more intense than TA, if only due to the lack of the huge number of exotic defense structures that TA had. This resulted in battles that focused more on troop placement, so it seemed to me that the battles tended to be a lot more dynamic.

And battles with multiple teammates are no exception. There are tons of Setons Clutch replays that showcase this quite well.

But wolfdogg does have a point. It's very much dependent on how the players choose to play. There's no reason these styles shouldn't be interchangeable between the two games. But I think the difference in play found in Supcom really boils down to what the strategic zoom feature did to battlefield awareness and control. Now instead of focusing on one, relatively static frontline, the frontline was always changing because players could more efficiently adapt and implement different strategies. It's very indicative of the evolution of modern warfare, from the static trenches of WWI, to the very mutable lines of WWII. (The Battle of the Bulge is the perfect example.)

In any case, I suspect that PA will play more closely to FA with regards to frontlines, ESPECIALLY considering the spherical maps. Why hammer at the frontlines when you can take the back door? Add to that the multi-planetary aspect, and now you have many frontlines.

All in all, it evolves the way we think of how to play RTSs, just like Supcom/FA did. It requires a new way of thinking about strategy, and I would say that's definitely an exciting and intense thing.

Actually I managed to have some pretty intense constant front line skirmishing in Supreme Commander, mainly because of how you could automate factories.

First you could give factories patrol paths so the units they produced would go on the patrol path. I used to set up distraction factories that would churn out a string cheap units that would get patrol paths that lead them directly into an enemy's expansion bases then their main base. Maybe it wasn't the most resource efficient strategy but it sure kept them distracted while I build a bomber wing or a bunch of battleships.

Then there was the ferry command which was amazing because within a few clicks you could set up an automated invasion and then just drag the drop of point around as stuff needed blowing up.

It really does come down to play style, and I have seen a lot of SC matches where people will put the pressure on someone and keep it up the whole game.

It's not quite the same thing IMO.

There was a time about 4 months ago, when a particular set of coincidences came together and I got to play a 5v5 ZK battle completely filled with experienced players.

In that sort of game, you did not throw suicidal attacks to "distract" your enemies. That just gives them metal. With 5 a side, and all knowing what they were doing, there was no way to distract the enemy at all. There were no flanks, we had enough people to cover the entire front with microed scouts.

Multiple times I tried to sneak a small cloaked unit into the enemy base just to spy. Got caught every time. Buried emp mines all over, sent light forces to help allied fronts. Watched helplessly as atomic bombers ripped through an allied force only to get destroyed by a wing of fighters.
Many of the back and forth tactics, I would have considered to have "won" the game if it was a standard pub game in spring, but both sides just bounced back, rallied and retook the ground. We covered each other's backs, made up for allied weaknesses, often without even explicitly deciding on roles.

We lost eventually (they managed to sneak a cloaked bomb through the mountains and destroyed a moho geo), but it took over an hour.
One hour of constant alertness. You had to continuously try to scout out enemy ploys, while hiding your own and responding to theirs. It looked like a stalemate, but just one or two major mistakes (like that moho geo) and you lose the game.

I'd be interested in seeing that replay, so I have reference.

Here's a Supcom replay that shows a bit of the dynamic frontlines I was talking about:
http://youtu.be/pC1lHqMTw_I
(Not the most amazing commentator, but he does all right.)

jseah describes it really well. Way better than I did.

Even on spherical maps you can establish one single frontline around the globe (depends on mapsize).

Most TA maps are small to mid-sized which means with a 5-8 people in one team you can cover your line very tightly, making it impossible to rush through with just some transport-planes or other units. (Transport-planes in TA are to fragile to spam them efficient).
In FA you got HUGE maps, which means there is practically no way to defend it properly against a bunch of T3 UEF-Transporters for example.
Setons Clutch was indeed special regarding ground battles. The bottleneck just enforced it. Very small space and enough players to cover it.
But you still had to control the waters somehow.

And just spamming units into an enemy outpost was something you never did in TA expect in some rare cases.
Usually you kept an eye on every single unit early on. Samsons are so much more viable if you try to keep them alive. You don't have the resources to just waste them at the enemy. Your first two bulldogs were something you cared about like diamonds. Losing one single bulldog early in game not only meant you just lost a lot of potential damage, it also provided your enemy precious metal and a lot of it.

The factors which decide how a game is played are the following in my opinion:
- Mapsize
- Strenght of defense-towers in comparsion to mobile units. (aka balance)
- Amount of available resources
- Playercount
- Transportation-System

Since mapsize, resources and playercount can be controlled directly by the players it would be in fact possible to have several ways of style, suiting a wider audience than SC and TA together.
I just hope the balance gets done right. Which means the enemy can't spam about 30 transport-planes into my territory flying right over my defenses rendering those practically useless. Same goes for interstellar-transport. It would really suck if the enemy could just launch rockets from a moon, offloading units right into my base, without a way to shoot them down before they reach the atmosphere.

ADDITION:
I would love to watch that replay too @jseah
If you like I could try to record it with fraps and upload it to youtube for everybody.

I think I found it. Search replays for a 10 player game with jseah. It should be about 5 months old, ~56 minutes in length. Licho and several other top level players are in it. However, jseah was only a spectator, so I suspect I may have found the wrong one. Still, I think it makes the point he was trying to get across, about that frontline.

However, I did find it rather bland on a strategic level, whereas the FA replay I linked to had a lot more in the way of dynamics and territorial control.
I'll leave the debate about air power in FA to those more experienced than I.

Freudian slip much?

a bit. It should be UEF of course. :/

Mind linking me to that replay you found? ZK's database throws up games even when the player you are looking for was a spectator so even I can't find that game anymore since I spectate 3 to every 1 I play.

It doesn't help that there's alot of crappy replays and they're ALL saved.

EDIT:
Found 2 from the time that elo-split in large rooms was still active.

http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/2654
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/82279

I think the 2nd link is the one I was talking about but they weren't an hour long.

Hmm... It sure felt like an hour. =D

The video on Zero-K just reminded me of the fact that most unit shoot at everything including planes. Only an anti-tank laser equipped? Wayne! Every bit of damage counts!
I would love to see that in PA as well. I mean hey! You've got a freaking laser and you would surely use it against incoming bombers if there's nothing else around instead of thinking "Oh! I'm just an anti-tank unit, I don't care." while getting his *** bombed.

Man, watching the replays again.

It sure feels less high-pressure from a birds-eye view than when I was a player...
And yeah, I think we lost because of me. =(

i believe i coined the phrase "L2P you fvcking muppet".

it is truly amazing to me that you people even claim to have played FA. clearly we were playing a different game. i played well while you guys played like chumps. ffs, lol.

Or this stupid artillery that you have to force-fire against some patch of ground to shoot the Czar down from right above it.
I personally shot a few helicopters with a tank cannon in the Arma or Battlefield series, so why couldn't they at least try?

Given that I neither described how I played any game or how FA played, I have no idea what you're talking about here, maybe you should try reading people's posts before making yourself look like a massive fool. If you just wanted to insult someone, there's no shortage of people who actually talk about how they played like noobs. And you should learn to unicode homoglyph, if you want to say "fυck" that badly.

well, if you weren't describing supcom which game(s) were you talking about exactly?

i am also far too old to care about new and interesting ways to beat swear filters. as long as i avoid ambiguity, that's all i care about.

Which, in the OP's first paragraph, he notes that his preferred style was absent from SC. He claims that Balanced Annihilation plays like that, but I only played Balanced Annihilation for a couple of games before deciding that Spring was far too clunky and Free Software and went back to FA.