Worse than Supreme Commander 2 in every way?

So, I get the impression from watching youtube videos that Planetary Annihilation will have worse graphics, animations, weapons effects and collision detection than Supreme Commander 2, what's the point of this game then?

Why is it that only Relic is capable of making superb animations and graphics, have you compared the Space Marine Dreadnaught in Dawn of War 2 to anything you created here, why is everything else so substandard??

So did you just come here to insult the game, developers, and community, or did you have some constructive criticism to provide?

I won't bother putting down counterpoints to your uninformed and irrelevant insults, because this game is quite literally unfinished. There are disclaimers everywhere telling people that the game just entered Beta stage.

Graphics dont mean crap .... and again bear in mind that this is a lower budget title .... the reason the current artstyle has been chosen has been explained to hell and back ... if graphics are the only matter for you then you are ih the wrong forum.... also BETA
and dont give me that triple a beta crap

I think it's more concerning that he's using SupCom 2 as a yardstick.

More of a reason to not realy bother with this thread then i suppose?

I was very specific in my criticism and gave an example, why do you feel the need to constantly lower every single standard? Why do you feel like progress doesn't exist and we must move backwards?

Because it costs crazy amounts of money to make games look really good. Money that is better spent on actual gameplay instead. There are far too many games that look good but play horrible already.

you may have given examples but thats not what he asked for, unless you have an idea to make it better the has logical bias behind it then dont post here

Gameplay over graphics ... the fact that you consider the developement of the game backwards is mindboggling and makes it very difficult to take you serious in any way .... are you even aware of what the focus of this game is and what it wants to achieve? What do you think does matter to this game in the first place with its limited ressources

Quoting for relevance. Also, the animations and graphics in this game are WAAAAAAAAAY better than SupCom2, but that's primarily because graphics and animation get better over time. The primary difference between the two are the *aesthetics*, you could argue that SupCom2's Aesthetics are "better" because they err more towards photorealistic, even though that's hilariously false considering how impractical all the unit designs in that game are.



This is very, very relevant.

Different style != worse. Plycount on most units and buildings is the same or even higher. Also, work in progress.

Work in progress.

Work in progress.

Work in progress.

Why are you comparing PA to this game and not at least to SupCom:FA? SupCom2 went in a completely different direction gameplay wise. Oh, wait, you don't even mention gameplay in your post. Do you really only care about graphics and nothing else?

To be a fun game to play and to smash planets into eachother.

Because of two things:
One. Relic has way, waaay more money than $2.5M Uber had.
Two. Relic only shows you the finished product, not the development. PA is in deep development. It is not done.

I hate it when people post such a vile title for their topic in an effort to get under people's skin about how "crappy" or "under developed" the game when there is so much evidence to prove it wrong.

Even if we the community provides evidence that this game is going to be something more then a "shiny clear coat" that has: graphics, animations, weapons effects and collision detection that are better then the industry standards of Relic gaming. There is much more under the surface of this game then you perceive. If you glance around the confirmed features and look at the live streams I'm sure you can find out when most of your "graphics and animation" will be added into the game.

I'm going to guess you've just watched a video of the game that was in alpha. Considering the huge scale of the game, if they would have went full, beautiful, present day graphics, no computer on earth would be able to play the game. Maybe one or two computers could manage 1 FPS. For a lot of people, graphics and detail have almost no effect on the "fun-ness" and game play mechanics of a game. Think of Minecraft, Terraria, other indie games, and the first games ever created. TF2 is cartoonish and widely loved, and I've heard literally no one complain about the graphics of TF2.

A big point of this game is to move away from those ***** RTS games today that focus on little squads and limited units, and go to thousands of units across a solar system and a planet-destroying scale. With better technology and higher limitations of computers these days, this is where RTS should be taken, and not the exact opposite like it is right now.

Dude that´s just awesome loved the video it really helped me understand better games thanks a lot for posting this

I can explaing everything

1st Why it has worse graphics?

It dosent ITS STILL BETA B-E-T-A

2 animations
BETA
weapons effects
BETA
collision
BETA
and to reasure that my friend here understood right here is from another user

1st off, graphics mean jack.
2nd, beta is beta.
3rd, SupCom2? Really? That's your comparison? The two games aren't even the same in mechanics
4th, Your definition of substandard seems to be equivalent to "different", why?

1) Relic, hell yeah, what a great comparison. you're comparing PA with games displaying a few dozens of units.
2) Supcom 2, Supreme commander, FA had a game editor putting tons of money.
3) Supcom 2 special effects can't be modded because using third party software with high license price.

Look for another game smoothly moving 400 kbots like PA does it when it's still in beta stage.
We've paid for hundreds/thousand of units and massive battles. We don't give a dam about each single detail on a unit. We all prefer Uber to invest time and money on building a robust, scalable and moddable engine.

Also bear in mind that Dawn of War II is an entirely different game. There, animations actually matter; your units are up in your enemy's face, his units are up in your face, and you're up in your unit's faces giving them orders. In PA, the primary aesthetic that matters is how everything looks from afar. Seeing a massive battery of Halleys fold open and BANG, rock off towards the enemy homeworld. Seeing a hodgepodge conglomeration of tanks and artillery form up into a well-spaced, organized battalion. Commanding that same group of tanks seamlessly to split in half, as one legion goes off to wreck the enemy power plants, while the other goes to escort the artillery into position. Hearing a battleship's guns swivel into position and pitch upwards for that first barrage on the enemy's tank line, szzzzz-BOOMBOOMBOOM!

Well, at least it's not as bad as in horrible Starcraft 2 where everything feels totally arcadey, there is no weight to anything, vehicles moving like plastic toys in a vacuum, like they have no tracks or wheels, and no 3D space for flyer units and no collision detection whatsoever.

And once I saw how Terran tanks moved and how Thor turned around I just uninstalled the game.

But it's not saying much if your game is slightly better than the worst of the worst, like Starcraft 2.

I think the ultimate goal for PA is "larger battles on weaker machines".

So much of SupCom ended up being about tiny battles on tiny maps for 1v1 gameplay. The big maps tended to just bog down and had crap gameplay even if everyone playing had good computers that didn't lag the game out, which was rare.

PA puts more load server-side, where they run the server instead of some guy's awful 8 year old gaming rig so slowdowns shouldn't be as common or as bad as in large SupCom games, and concepts like shields, which bogged down big games, are gone.

And with multiple planets, there's a lot of gaming surface and (potentially) interesting interaction between them, as if you were fighting on 5 different SupCom maps at the same time.


Of course, a lot of this hasn't fully panned out yet, but I think that's the theory.

Really the biggest thing that worries me is that anyone calls PA a "beta". It's an alpha at best. Betas are feature complete, ready for testing and ready for release as soon as the bugs are out. PA is not feature complete therefore it is not beta, no matter what the marketing brochure says. It's very rare to see a game change significantly in beta but PA still has big changes coming.

No they are not ... you still have that triple a demo type of thinking with betas .. but they are realy just unfinished prototypes .... and yet the core gameplay IS implemented it just needs to be worked on on its edges ... still this argueing about what is alpha, beta or gamma just doest help its just semantics

Your worries are of minor significance and detract from what should be focused on