New project

[1v0ry_k1ng]

seriously argh, play the game online once before posting again.

1)
GAAT out-ranges slashers and does far more damage (slasher dps is pitiful) If your opponent invests heavily in slashers to attack your LLTs or army from out of range or behind the safety of defenses, a GAAT- especially guarded by nanos or cons- is powerful enough to make slasher skirmishing nonviable.

2)
GAAT out-ranges LLTs. If your opponent chokes up his front with large numbers of LLTs, building a single GAAT on your side will destroy them without incurring return fire, allowing an attack through the resulting hole- it also stops your enemy developing too close to your own lines.

3)
the GAAT projects threat over a wide area: any combat occurring within that area is going to be supported by the GAATs dps, potentially making it nonviable for your opponent to profitably engage your units within its range. it also makes reclaiming wrecks in said projection near impossible for the enemy, giving you the chance to hoover them.


/THREAD DERAILMENT

[Argh]

Fine, fine. I'm wrong and stupid.

I love the GAAT vs. Slasher thing, btw. So, how does that work, if you don't have radar or if they jam, IK? I mean, I watched two Slashers utterly pwn a GAAT that had radar coverage, and I wasn't micro'ing them at all.

So, you basically have to sacrifice some mobiles to get full sight I take it? Why not just let the HLT see as far as Slashers, so that it doesn't suck?

And it doesn't outrange the Slashers, btw. You can blind-fire them at the ground, their 48 AOE + 600 range should give you a hit. I'm sure damage sucks at that point, but it'd work, and can't be countered even with LOS.

At any rate, meh, whatever.

[Gota]

I agree partially with you Argh on the case of the LLT.
It really shouldnt be worth making on maps where scout rush isnt very dominant.
However,on those smaller maps T1 laser towers in BA have an advantage over units,they do 2x dmg to commanders.
In small games the commander becomes mor eimportant thus countering it also becomes a bigger advatage.

The LLT has another advatage on smaller maps over all other defences.
It is the only land shooting turret that the Commander can build.
This does not make the LLT more powerfull however it does make it more usable in your average BA game when you need to immidietly have more power at the front or to save your commander from impending death.

I do agree that the beamer and the hllt are not really effecient enough to be made and are only made(IMO) in cases where a player has the momentum and if they are made in other cases the player wins despite building them not cause of building them.

(another thing is the fact that the llt,beamer,hllt and especially the HLT can all shoot above most units and wreckage)

Argh I suggest that if you really want to help PA/BA you spectate just a few top tier 1v1 games and than i am sure you will have a lot to contribute.
There are many of them available,some in the form of downloadable replays some in the form of video streams with commentery.

[Pxtl]

If you don't want static defenses to work, take them out of the game entirely and just make T1 counters to rushers that totally pwn them for cost and are worthless vs. buildings or a third RPS unit- that's pretty much what CA did.

In CA defences are the most cost effective units beating many times their cost. CA's progression to heavier units works partially with defences that make raiding unviable past a certain point. It staggers me how Argh can be so wrong so often.

I think a game needs a way to cement territory if costly tech is going to be viable. PA is probably planning something like that so I'll stop here instead of looking stupid like Argh.

Too bad Argh completely missed the point of CA, since imho CA has an excellent approach - LLTs are OP, which means raiding an LLT-defended target is tricky without a substantial force (a small team of Kodachis is good because they can kite very well). On the other hand, the metal-extractors are expensive, so that means you can go raid them instead of the home base. Thus, you have a target to raid, but you also have real defenses. You get your cake and eat it too. However, this does not extend to the larger defenses - only the LLT is overpowered, so when the game hits larger scale, the fragile and small LLTs get ground up like everything else that small does.

[TradeMark]

viper should get fixed, it has severe disadvantage compared to pitbull, it shoots like laser, while pitbull is ballistic.

[Llamadeus]

And I'm sure there are many other things in T1 which eat LLTs for far less than real cost. The point's the same- at T1, there aren't any defenses in BA that can't be very easily countered without having to lose units.

Meh, I just tested, and 2 Slashers utterly pwned a GAAT and a HLLT- supposedly T2 defenses.

So it's basically rush to weezl or whatever-is-slightly-op-cheap-and-fast-today, since that changes slightly every release.

A fascinating series of posts apparently concerning the balance of an alternate universe Spring mod. Bizarre.

[Argh]

I apologize, I said some stupid things.

[Pxtl]

FYI, for future reference Argh: in all AA-based mods, radar towers provide very long sight-range. After L2 radar is developed, L1 radar towers remain useful as spotters. They're cheap and are a necessary accessory for any defensive line.

[Argh]

Meh, I will do some looking at replays. I still don't know why you'd buy a LLT except when you have good enough terrain, or why you'd ever bother with a HLLT. The GAAT, I'll reserve judgement, I know that IK doesn't suck, so I assume there are ways to kind've make it work.

One thing I thought about, though, when I was puzzling over the numbers, is all of the bizarre and arbitrary sight-distances in BA. This has to really warp the balance of each unit- perhaps normalizing that and a few other things might be a good (if radical) step towards actually making it all make sense. A lot of these values were inherited from OTA, where it was mainly about performance, not balance- wherever possible, they needed to keep LOS low, because it's CPU-hungry. But in BA, it has some very strange effects on things, and gives a lot of units really artificial-feeling advantages, when I compare it to the experience you have with P.U.R.E., where practically everybody sees farther than they can shoot, and you can actually react to enemies before you are in combat. I know that it was this way in OTA as well, but in OTA, radar dots didn't wobble, so radar was effectively sight, you just couldn't auto-target until late game with the Targeting Facility.

[JohannesH]

Low los makes it important that you have spotter units for your army.

[Argh]

Most RTS games don't have this feature, does it improve gameplay? I don't think so, personally. It feels stupid to me, to have a game that's about the "future", where half the units are blind and you can't see where you're being attacked from. That feels very counterintuitive to me.

I'll do a mutator and try normalizing it, see how it feels. At worst, it's a waste of my time. But it's one of several things that are bugging me, along with KBOTS being really underpowered atm. They were the stars in OTA, it feels totally wrong to me that a KBOT start doesn't seem to make much sense on most maps.

[Nemo]

Argh, not to jump on the bandwagon of criticism here, but competitive OTA revolved very heavily around vehicles (specifically flash and samson/slasher). Kbots became important mostly (very weirdly) on water maps, and even then only the pelican (and then due to a blatant bug in how targetting worked made it unhittable by automatic targeting from missiles, requiring micro to nail it if you were using MT swarms, as most players did in most situations).

[Argh]

Sure, Flash spam's always been a part of the game. But I remember when you could do fairly serious things with Jethro attrition swarms and other tactics, the Fido was a really serious threat, etc. Not saying that every KBOT was useful- many weren't.

Just saying, going KBOT seems like more of a waste of time now, and if I was doing a thorough attempt to fix everything, I'd want there to be equally-good reasons to pick either start. I mean, what's the point of having an entire unit tree that is full of cool animated robots, if they hardly see use?

[Llamadeus]

Most RTS games don't have this feature, does it improve gameplay?

Starcraft makes extensive use of this feature and it's sort of a standard feature in modern RTS games with artillery in general (eg Company of Heroes).

Most units in BA can see as far as they can shoot and it's generally units with well above average range that can't (HLT, Rocko, Artillery).

It feels stupid to me, to have a game that's about the "future", where half the units are blind and you can't see where you're being attacked from.

I'm sure future wars won't be fought by humanoid robots in 12 by 16 mile rectangles for patches of metal either. To me it's just another example of simulationism being sacrificed for better abstract gameplay mechanics, or for aesthetics.

Taken as a whole TA (and its derived mods) are really quite far removed from modern warfare, let alone a reasonable model of some hypothetical future warfare.

[TradeMark]

again: dont think realism while making a game.

[Pxtl]

Iirc, Starcraft's siege tank actually did have a sight range slightly shorter than its firing range. I think the problem in BA is the Rocko, which is the de-facto standard L1 combat kbot - that's a place where you really, really notice the short sight-range, particularly since the spotters tend to be fast, weak units that get blown up quickly if they accompany the rockos.

And Argh, we've been over the "kbots and vehicles aren't both viable starts" so many times in BA it's not even funny. It may or may not be a valid complaint, but you're not going to break any new ground on that subject. You want kbots and veh to both be viable on flat maps? Play CA.

[Achilla]

Most RTS games don't have this feature, does it improve gameplay? I don't think so, personally. It feels stupid to me, to have a game that's about the "future", where half the units are blind and you can't see where you're being attacked from. That feels very counterintuitive to me.

I'll do a mutator and try normalizing it, see how it feels. At worst, it's a waste of my time. But it's one of several things that are bugging me, along with KBOTS being really underpowered atm. They were the stars in OTA, it feels totally wrong to me that a KBOT start doesn't seem to make much sense on most maps.

To my understanding KBOTs are about making use of hard terrain as well as other situational utilities, while entire point of vehicle existence is heavy armour, good range and good damage. Depends from map to map, from player matchup, whether solo or team game. You would want it to be 'equally useful', but how do you measure this 'usefulness'?

Do you measure usefulness as stat-to-stat balance (ok, leave kbots weaker but make them build even faster and cheaper than now) or as sum of viable tactics to both? Don't you think that this sometimes obvious but often perilous choice of your first t1 land factory matters a lot, for the good of the game? Also, can't you have both at the same time or maybe even you should?

Well, let's leave KBOTs for now (personally I feel ships need more serious balance overhaul as they seem like upgraded hovercraft and not ships atm ... not like it wasn't in OTA like that, but we don't have to follow slightly failed design decisions).

What really got me interested was your comment around Radar and LOS, especially the LOS.

Don't you think with way too high LOS it would make games more porcy and less dynamic due to worse gain/risk ratio? I can already see many good players loose by failed early rush as well as not paying enough attention to enemy scouts filtering your base, or even not expanding fast enough to gain ground. Everything in RTS games is a resource.

You not only have metal and energy here, you also have your time, your focus, information of the enemy and your 'false image' in the eyes of adversary. It's all guessing game all the time, even if both players tend to start exactly the same base building order it's all down how effective they handle combat, intelligence and economy at the same time.

For some, LOS lower than attack range seems ridiculous especially in modern times where each artillery unit is semi-independent. From gameplay value, it encourages scouting as well as spending more resources to intelligence (mobile and stationary radars to gain information, jammers to hide it). For BA case, I would say we still see too less jammers opposed to getting radars and anti-nukes up and ready way too easy.

You don't even have to manually pick targets and lose your precious time and focus from other things, units will fire on their own. In normal OTA multiplayer game your units not firing to the enemy for even as low as 10 seconds could mean a disaster! We talk about gameplay style, each player has different expectations in terms of it. Of course it matters a lot whether you manually pick targets or not, scatter your artillery units or not, scout the area or not.

But let's go back to LOS again. What would be the point of building a radar if it's only use would be early alarm system against incoming aircraft and extension of sight for stationary long-range artillery? You could basically roll over a base with your XXXX range mobile artillery units without having to even bring mobile radar on the place. Now, that would be no longer about guessing game, it would be mainly about your economy for unit spam and micro skills.

Pretty much the impression I was given by both Supreme Commander games (especially the sequel), where the 'easy porcy start' combined with not enough incentive to rush and powerful defenses gives more ground for 'safe, not stressful play for many hours' up to 'ridiculous match in a stalemate for over 3 hours'. So again, we comment about type of gameplay game provides to certain types of players which like it, we don't arbitrary mark it as better or worse choice for making the RTS game.

Though, I can't say, fooling yourself that Spring is not TA derived and players here don't have similar expectations like they would have in OTA or SC (starcraft) in terms of gameplay can lead to questioning validity of small LOS of the units. It's design decision of which I approve, as in my opinion it improves the game. Feel free to have a different say, though. Personally I wouldn't mind if non-artillery units got their LOS extended a bit, but with the way BA is designed I can see more bad than good done, in a way, especially in the early game.

[Gota]

I dont think anyone can argue BA is completely fine tuned to be as awesome as possible..
chances are none of the mods/games here will be as fine tuned as say starcraft just cause nobody is doing this as his job and nobody has anything close to the amount of test subjects commercial games have.
It would be interesting to try a BA with every unit having more or equal LOS to its firing range.
It would be interesting to see how the focus of the player shifts from certain gameplay aspects to others but i dont think any modder here has this ability to fine tune his mod/game(with constant changes and truly wholesome testing) and nobody would tolerate BA doing such tests(it would also be hard to find people willing to test these things just for fun).

It would be interesting to explain and reveal all these small issues and explain to ourselves how different combination of elements effect gameplay and what exactly they do to the game.
Just so it would be possible to say before you start development what is the type of gameplay you want to create and to know how exactly you are going to achieve this while being able to take into account and think of every possible element of gameplay the spring engine or any engine can provide.

[zwzsg]

competitive OTA

But I remember when you could do fairly serious things with Jethro attrition swarms

Now I can agree with the crowd here: You know nothing about TA balance Argh.

To sorta back up my point with something else that personal beliefs: I dare you to find me a replay featuring Jethro swarm at http://tadrs.tauniverse.com

[Forboding Angel]

One thing I thought about, though, when I was puzzling over the numbers

Keep in mind that with lasers in BA, none of them have minintensity=1, which means that their damage output is all over the place.