Or,
Suggestion Thread the Third.


This one is geared toward people who don't play CA often, with the aim of identifying reasons why CA is losing players, the source of CA devs' bad reputation in certain circles, dispelling common misconceptions about CA, and fixing problems with the game, along with CA dev attitude.

CA devs: Be humble and encouraging when posting, please. Accept all suggestions with an open mind.

Post away!

It has no players!

Some discussion in the lobby yielded the following suggestions:
Thoughts?

Edit: So, we get more players by...

...having more players?

Edit 2: Just FTR, None of these suggestions are mine.

Speed modifiers.

I'd like that.

dont think units are too fast,i think the pace is too fast.
Units should die slower,and overall area of effect of weapons should be lower,a bit slower build time and if your gonna reduce overall dmg or increase overall hp you'd have to buff defenses a bit since moving units will be better.

modifying speed using the mod options will result in utter fail,since it will effect turret versus moving units balance.
Also replace these modifiers with 3-4 presets.
when there is too much choice people tend to not choose anything.
Idea for presets:slower paced,tougher defense/stronger com,expensive labs.

I personally don't let it interfere with my judgment/appreciation of CA's gameplay but i know some people are less interested in CA cause of the attitude of some of the devs.

more suggestions?change the impact effect of the annihilator's weapon,Last time I played CA it was gigantic.

Being humble is not how you get players, insulting your playerbase is, see BA.

You'll just get the regular trolls posting here (Basic, trib, etc).

The #1 thing we should do to get more players is get SD back into the spring install since springlobbies downloader is so broke.

MidKnight, who the fuck has told you all that crap?
Really, you shouldnt ask noobs who have no idea how to play.

Flanking? Arent we trying to DECREASE the amount of unit micromanagement here? Go play Red alert 3. EVERY fucking unit there has a special ability. And then your commander also has special ability you can use every once in a while. Soooo cooooool. Except the game sucks balls. I dont want any features which will require me to do more than select my units, click in the general enemy direction and order them to fight.

Slower speeds? If you want shit to move slow like hell and take 5 minutes to kill, go play XTA. It's all about stuff being slow.

The phrase bout proper rps shows just how much of a noob the person you were talking to was. Prolly got pwned by a tactic not used in BA and gave up CA.


What CA really needs is more noob friendliness. And advertising. Noobs must NOT need to do more than 2-3 clicks to be able to play CA (what sak said), and when the game starts they must NOT have to spend 5 fucking minutes fixing their widgets because half of them are either incompatible with something, insanely ugly, or just full of bugs.
The widget-blocking gadget may have been not the perfect solution, but it improved that part by standardising what widgets everybody has.
Cleaning up those widgets, making sure they are all comfortable and work smoothly for everyone is what needs to be done. And then the only thing needed would be to get noobs to try it. For which you must use advertising. Making planetwars or whatever other metagame is cool, but it's useless if nobody fucking knows about it. You need to advertise and to attract the newbies to try the mod. But first, you need to make sure they dont run away in disgust, because first impression is the most important one.

Units with interesting movement dynamics.

Fixed arcs

fix position weapons

Bouncing grenades

Interesting effects

More weapon variety on a per-faction basis

More lasers even if they are shitty damage

Cluster bombs, cluster grenades

fuck, hell, laser bombs...

A unit that dies and spawns smaller units on death

teleportation building

Unit that latches on and if is not killed oh so fast will blow it's self up on the designated building.

1faction already has bouncing grenades!

Regarding bullet speeds - I agree it looks retarded. However its needed for gameplay mechanism (so that raiders can beat heavy HP assaults without special damage cost effectively).

It makes assaults only good at what they were designed to do - pushing through lines of defenses, since their weapon is good only vs static or extremely slow units.

Regarding unit movement speed - 30% is INSANE! 30% is much slower than BA...

Also I agree with basic that its unit damage/HP ratio that makes it feel so frantic.

However changing that significantly would invalidate balance completely and break unit roles.

Regarding advertising - how do you want to do it? You can advertise as well as anyone else.

Also even with advertising if your game has 3 people, you attract 1 person and game wont start in next 2 minutes he leaves and never tries again.

It would be better to have arranged hour when CA players meet to make giga games that attracts more people naturally without need of spam.

I hate every single one of those. Well, maybe the projectile velocity one.

The only one is that there are a few cases where a unit's role is really ambiguous - it takes a lot of feeling out to figure out how to counter certain units, and to know when to use them. I could see that coming from desiring clearer RPS. However, I *like* that CA's units aren't in 100% RPS gameplay. I think that's the biggest problem with many mods is when they devolve into pure-RPS (BA sea is terrible for this).

edit: perhaps the problem with bullet speeds is that they're bullets. Maybe if more units were given "machineguns" instead of laser-beams, and then you made the "cannon" units into something more zany-looking like a plasma-ball or a rocket, then people wouldn't be so grumpy about the slow-moving projectiles.

Either way, I think the fact that the game has so much emphasis on *dodging* is an important and interesting gameplay mechanic of CA.

Once CA is IP free then we can advertise outside of the spring community. Trying to piddle the occasional BA player is not the solution; it just makes people hate us and usually the guy is so corrupted by 8v8badsd gameplay that he has a hard time adapting his play style anyway.

Tbh thats why I strongly defend the merits of 1fac despite my own misgivings. Current spring players might not like it but it has the potential to market to the much larger audience outside of spring.

Yeah, once 1fac is a free game that can be pimped on ModDB and Happypenguin and all that stuff, it might go better.

No way, KP, EvoRTS, PURE or S44 are free and advertised and what they get?
Even less players than CA..

3 most successful mods are based on stolen content.
BA, XTA and NOTA.

CA has less than XTA and NOTA these days? haha ow

Yes, it started losing players when springlobby replaced tasclient (no downloader) and then it went doown rapidly when mod stopped changing and stable was same for 6 months.

These arent reasons for not playing the game, they are 'What cool stuff/sweeping changes you want to see in CA!'.

We want to get CA played: Easy setup and download, a nice, clean attractive gui that doesnt crash, singleplayer content (just chickens is fine but thats broken), SD in spring install, advertising both inside and outside the community.

Hm I thought CA was all about microing shit

Since the economys so simple

But oh well im CA noob

Widgets micro for you. Just set factory waypoint to fight command and then observe flashes and adjust when needed.

Hi,

the reason i play only rare CA (alone against AI or on LAN - more rare
on Internet[not one time ATM] ) :

I like the "tech-tree" (or the no tech-tree here philosophy) not to much .. i like to build first this and then get this and so one ...
But from time to time i like it to play again ..

Have serious dislikes over the UI and widgets horror (first the silly thing with the "i know wat i am doing" files in different paths - that was very
annoying ! and then the dislocations who the user musst made to get the UI he like back - like in all other TA based spring games ...)

I like very on spring ->
To have THE UI I LIKE on all different Games (if it makes sense !)
And i have on all TA based Games the same and dont see the point to
force the player to another UI.
(on Gundam and KP and S44 i understand the need of different handling from resource bars and additional build options,but mainly i can have on all games big parts of the same gui ...)

I like in CA the very nice GFX and good effects - it is most time the most advanced spring mod on GFX things.And i like the terrform thing.

Regards
R-TEAM