Unit Veternacy: can we skip it?

One mechanic that I've come to dislike is unit veterancy. I understand how the theory behind it is cool, keep you units alive and you'll be rewarded because they get better. The problem is in practice, I don't think it works as intended. It makes it way too easy for one or two high tier units to kill off a swarm of low tier units as they rush forward into a low tier army. In general it makes low tier units useless at a certain point. And in some cases in SupCom where an opponent sends a t4 unit at you, it usually makes more sense to simply self destruct all of your lower tier units rather than try to throw them all at the experimental in an attempt to whittle away its health. That just doesn't seem right.

I know it was a staple of TA and SupCom. But as we look at playing an RTS on a larger scale, do we really need the concept of unit veterancy? Do we really need to be worrying about units at an individual scale? I don't have any desire to be checking my units one at a time to see which ones are more valuable. I'd rather know at a glance what kind of effectiveness to expect from a unit or group of units.

The only unit I could see veterancy still being important for would be the commander. And that's the only unit I'd really have any desire to be micromanaging anyway

I liked unit veterancy. Small reward for doing well with a particular unit. Maybe scale veterancy based on the difference in power level of the units involved may sort your problem.

sup com had some issue with veterancy and experimentals, like the massive healing that happened. Regardless veteran troops are a resource, one generated by combat. if there are ways to make this resource management easier rather than picking out every unit then that would be nice but noting usable comes to mind.

Vet can be left out, but PLEASE keep unit kill counts. It's always fun looking back at your surviving army after a battle and seeing some tank with 10+ kills. You of course either send it out in an epic and daring raid to honor its skill, or you pull it back to your base and assign it to some other cool duty.

The amount of veterancy one unit gets should simply depend on what type of units it killed. High tier units killing low tier units should simply get less than the other way around.

My biggest issue with Veterancy is the fact we're dealing with ROBOTS! Even then you can still do some justifications like based on combat records accumulated over the course of many battles you can program better aiming algorithms to take advantage of weakpoints and such, but these would be based on particular units fighter other particular units, so If you keep using tanks they will over time get better at fighting other units but considering there is only 1 set of units it doesn't make as much sense, even in a campaign setting.

Frankly I'd say just drop the idea of Veterancy all together, keep the Kill counter, but leave it at that.

Mike

Same, I liked it, and I'd like to see it developed more, if possible...

There should definitely be a motivating reward/incentive for keeping your troops alive and resupplied/healed... nothing necessarily game-changing, but having a crack battalion of extreme veteran heavy tanks with 30+ kills each go against an equivalent force of greenhorns should net you a distinct advantage...

Agreed.

Also, the veteran counter went up really fast in TA... I mean, something like 5 kills or such.

I'd rather that there be some kind of scored system where veterancy points were awarded as you suggest (maybe some calculations on enemy unit HP, how much damage the enemy unit can do... range...etc..)... and maybe more to unit proficiency rankings than "none" and "Veteran". e.g.:

• Green - Lesser accuracy, lesser individual unit 'intelligence', slightly less damage.
• Ready - Base stats (e.g., after the equivalent of 2 - 3 kills of the same unit type). 60% chance of surviving an encounter with a single equivalent green unit.
• Proficient - Slight increase in accuracy. 65% chance of surviving (against a Green)
• Expert - Slight increase in damage, slightly more 'intelligent'. ~70% chance of surviving (against a Green)
• Veteran - Accurate, significantly more 'intelligent', slight range boost, slight damage resistance. ~80% chance of surviving (against a Green)
• Legendary - Very accurate, small range boost, most 'intelligent' units, small damage boost, small damage resistance. ~90% chance of surviving (against a Green)

(Note that surviving means that in a fair, 1:1 encounter, the surviving party will have 1 or more hitpoints left. Possibly just 1.)

Naturally... each rank should be progressively harder to obtain, and likely the only things that would ever obtain 'Legendary' status would be stationary guns that have managed to taken out entire armies.

Maybe combined with intelligence units, enemy unit proficiency can be ascertained as well..

Edit: Missed a post

Well.... realism aside... you could very well have AI that adapts and learns from experience. Granted, ideally, if you had a bunch of exactly-the-same robots, you'd probably want to update all of them to Veteran status after one of them got there... but... yeah.

Basically, it's a feature from TA. Blame Cavedog for having veteran AIs

anyways... just some ideas.

This makes me think of games that did have veterncy and how it changed the games.

Total Annihilation's vet status made them slightly tougher. A group of them was a bother usually (brawlers!). Infact sometimes strategies would be setup to get them vet up because they could harass and become unballanced.

Red Alert 2 had vet status with a three star level. It was a major part of the game as a three starred vet unit often had a new special feature and fired quicker and took more damage. For example the blimp things dropped bombs very quick and had a larger area effect, infantry could build sandbags anywhere etc. They planned for their upgrade.

No real point of this post, but my personal opinion is to not bother with them besides giving a warm and fuzzy kill counter.

I don't like changing unit intelligence with veterancy.

This is still a material battle, not a tactical battle. Meaning units die all the time. Meaning you'd always have dumb units.

And you know what, units are always dumb, even the smartest ones. So keep their AI capabilities maxed out at all times, so you don't have to babysit a horde of units that makes intentional errors based on their programming.

I do like to see a buff system for units that have seen combat. Ideally more than the tiny amounts of veterancy boost most units in SupCom got; including some freaky stuff like improved rate of fire, improved projectile speed, improved armor.

A unit like the Maverick might get higher firing rates, while a unit like The Can would get significantly tougher. Bombers might get more Damage, fighters more Airspeed or Missile Range.

I like veterans. Rewards those ppl who dont sacrifise all their units in useless attacks.

"We're not shooting for realism, we're shooting for AWESOME"

I guess it depends if veterancy is determined to be awesome.

We're not shooting for realism, We're shooting for VETERANCY.

fixed.

This, and this.

Veterancy isn't awesome. Awesome is having stuff blown up. Un-awesome is keeping them from being blown up.

My favorite veterancy mechanic is from Spring RTS. In Spring, there aren't levels of veterancy. Instead, as experience is accumulated, the unit's health and damage output increase. Also, instead of gaining experience from a kill, units gain experience from damage done to the enemy. This also automatically causes higher level unit kills to give more experience than lower level unit kills, as they have more health.

Actually, you got me into a great mindset now.

Is the feature positively AWESOME?

Yes -> put it in
No -> discard it


Veterancy is not positively awesome. It's maybe marginally awesome, or just a little bit awesome. Cut it.

Conversely, kill counters are basically free to implement and these actually ARE awesome, because they show how much awesomeness was created by a certain unit.

If you base veterancy in unit kills it won't mean much, since t3 units would kill lots of t1. Even if t3 needs more kills to reach he same of level of veterancy of a lesser unit, t3 killing t3s shouldn't need as many kills as t3 killing t1s.

So, this concept a lot like the leveling concept in RPGs, which instead of unit kills, it is done in experience points. This means a t1s give a small amount of xp, t3s a lot more xp. T1s also would need less xp than t3s to go up one level.

2 units damaging and killing the same unit should share the amount of xp gained, so you have to keep a table of which unit damaged which one, which is kinda expensive to calculate with 40 player frag fests with 100k units per side.

Veterancy does get really complicated if you go on.

Veterancy was nice, and I'd hate to see it go...but I can see how balancing it would be troublesome. It's also an element that would see most use in a more micro-heavy game, which this isn't.

The one thing I did like was the ability to lead a target better. Provided some humorous results in TA where I'd have a Bertha taking out bombers and stuff. But it wouldn't make sense then that a computer program wouldn't then update all the units with the same information...and leading is kinda a micro thing...so perhaps the units will already be able to lead pretty well?

I definitely agree with keeping the kill counter, if nothing else.

Assuming veterancy is in, would it be easier and fairer to base it on total damage meted out? So a 200hp unit would level up for every 200 damage it caused, but a 1000hp unit would need to do 1000 damage to level up.

Proportional to how much damage it doles out is probably best. There has to be tuning because some things damage lots, but have little health.

Yeah... no, we have that in Forged Alliance Forever and its horrible.

Imo they should skip veterency, its just an additional thing that can smash the balancing. To make "keeping units alive" more viable, they could implement auto- and freerepair for the engineers, like in supcom2(yeah, thats another thing they made right).