Experimentals What WOuld You want to see!!!

Discussion in 'Planetary Annihilation General Discussion' started by sturm532, September 19, 2012.

  1. sturm532

    sturm532 Member

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    Goodmorning/Goodday/Goodevening

    I'f been a TA Player From old and played the lovely Core COntingecy to its fullest and one of my favorite unit is the Doomsdaymachine from the core a Multweapon LAyered Defence Weapon/turret wich would make for a nice level one experimental or a nice Level TWo experimental defense turret

    Yes you might have noticed i speak in levels of experimentals like units built by a level on construction bot building a level on experimental K-BOT

    likewise for level two and three constructors

    and what about a experimental wich can build aswell that would be an Experimental that could build forward or fallback bases even under assault, and it could even fight off assaults.


    another something was early small experimental's at level one and two wich could serve as commmander gaurds, heavy base Defense , construction assistant with a strong Nanonaletor and maybe a small selection of defensive buildings like turrets and radars/stealth towers , Heavy Recon if it is a rather fast unit like a six or eight legged insect exp.. for example, Heavy anti Air Unit experimental for clearing out Gunship CLouds or bomberclouds


    Well These are some of my ideas for experimentals

    And like me their are many who like experimentals in a RTS thats gonna be a Crown Jewel in Gaming..
    I'm Planning to Spam this Thread with Experimanetals and hope others will Joyn Me in this as i set no restrictions on experimentals ( I say let the developers set restrictions if they are going to or not) and in my vision experimentals are like in Supcom 1 and Forged Allaince and not Factory made as in Supcom 2, but thats my opinion about experimentals..

    I got the leveling system for experimantels from the mod Experimental Wars for Forged Alliance but i like the system and if your taking over planets with armies and/or drop somewhere on a planet then i would want to build some low level Experimentals for protection or eraly assault purpose or other useful purpose...


    Cheers

    And Now Let The Experimental Wars Begin :mrgreen: :evil:
  2. BulletMagnet

    BulletMagnet Post Master General

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    No experimentals please.

    Or, if they must exist no more than a couple.

    Nobody wants the game to be about them. The more there are, the more the game will revolve around them.
  3. torrasque

    torrasque Active Member

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    I want a few fun experimental like the Krogoth.
    But with an high energy upkeep like -5000.
    That way you couldn't not stack them and have an incencitive to use it as soon as possible.
    ( And if you can afford -30'000 energy for 6 of them you certainly have already win )


    edit: or perphaps with an other idea to not have stacked experimental. But I think the energy upkeep ( metal too? ) is a natural concept of TA/Supcom. And it respect the rule of no arbitrary restriction.
  4. dffmmm

    dffmmm Member

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    I'd want to see no experimentals
  5. opinions2

    opinions2 New Member

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    Experimentals are fun, don't get me wrong, but I do fear that I make them the be all and end all in games that I play.

    I prefer experimental structures more than units. The Aeon Resource Generator in SC:FA or the Aegis for the UEF in SC2 are good examples. These are either INSANELY expensive to start with and can take a stupid length of time to build or you have to monitor them constantly.

    Once you start rolling out Fatboys etc, it stops being a HUGE number of small units, just a smaller group of larger units. Nothing changes, just the scale.
  6. BulletMagnet

    BulletMagnet Post Master General

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    This. Exactly this.
  7. torrasque

    torrasque Active Member

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    That's why I have proposed to have an energy/metal upkeep.
    If your experimental takes -20 metal/s and -5000 energy/s, you would try to get ride of it as soon as possible.
    ( keeping it 5 minutes would be a waste of 6000 metal )
  8. jurgenvonjurgensen

    jurgenvonjurgensen Active Member

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    One that hunts down Internet users who think it's appropriate to use three consecutive exclamation marks in titles. Calm down, nobody's ever that excited once they're over the age of five.
  9. brandonpotter

    brandonpotter Well-Known Member

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    Maybe 1 Experimental? And make it expensive and hard to maintain.

    And not an Invincible experimental either. A Big bot that has more fire power and armour then a normal unit, but slower. :ugeek:
  10. menchfrest

    menchfrest Active Member

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    Experimental should be experimental, as in they have some significant draw back or reliability issues. bad example, really pwns at combat but has no emp protection, so it goes all nuke when it get hit with an emp or something.

    Point is they are super specialized at something, have serious drawbacks that you must invest in protecting. They should not just be the super units, otherwise why are they experimental instead of T(N+1)? They should be a risk, besides just the huge investment.

    I'd almost be more interested to see experimentals on the level of like T3 from FA, size and combat ability. They are better at one job, but have serious issues.
  11. gmorgan

    gmorgan Member

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    I'd like my experimentals to be cost prohibitive. They should be "get out of my game" signals. Not core units. Essentially if you are ever far enough ahead that you can waste money on experimentals your opponent has lost and should feel bad for not GGing.
  12. BulletMagnet

    BulletMagnet Post Master General

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    If it's a specific weakness, for example; lack of AA then this is okay. But the question remains why is it experimental? Why isn't it just a mainline unit that happens to no have AA? After all, regular tanks are exactly like this.

    If there's a random chance element to it, then; no way, it'd turn PA from a strategy game to an over animated game of roulette. Gambling and random chance (with the caveat that your random chance std-dev's out to average values within each game, not over many games) just doesn't belong in RTS.

    And for what value of N do we stop at? Unless someone puts their foot down, and says no more unit progression from this mark here, then people will always cry for bigger and more awesome toys to blow up.

    I'm going to agree here, if you were to have some very limited in variety tier of units in the late-game, then it might be best to limit the total number of tiers to 3. Any more and you risk making early-game units obsolete.

    The problem with this is that many players will intentionally go for those units at the expense of other units and of actually playing the darn game.

    SupCom has this problem, with many games turning into Experimental Football Scrum where experimental after experimental is thrown into the fray with little thought for strategy.

    It's not a problem of the unit itself, it's a problem with human behaviour.
  13. menchfrest

    menchfrest Active Member

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    I had not meant random chance, I meant an exploitable serious flaw in the unit. I'm not a huge fan of random chance for experimentals. Yes I said reliability, but as I think about it I'm liking it less and less.

    N is chosen by the Devs, in this case it's 2. And yes, people will always want more and bigger, but people don't always know what they really want. Also, mods can give them their crazy giant big unit fix I feel.

    I agree you need to be careful about making T1 useless. My thought is that T1 is general and cheap, T2 is specialized or extra capability and medium expensive, and experimentals are crazy specialized (to the point of detriment in other areas) and fairly expensive. Not so much an exponential scale but more like a linear cost progression (ish, I'm not economy expert)

    Example unit, experimental mobile artillery, there are 3 parameters I'd want to play width, cost being fairly fixed. DPS/cost, range, mobility. for the unit design everything would be compared to the lower level artillery units. Lets say the goal is max range, well you give it the highest range, but it has a non trivial setup time and lower DPS/cost than lower tier units. while the T1 is ok at all 3 stats, T2 may have good 2 stats and bad at 1, and experimental rocks at one stat, but is truly awful at a the other 2.

    more example: T1 arty is fairly mobile, not "bad" overall. T2 arty(or missile?) Has DPS/cost and range over T2. Experimental is super ranged, but has less DPS/cost than T2(maybe T1 also) and has a significant setup and packup time. If it's still OP then add detriments.

    Yes balance is more complex than presented here, but I think I'm getting my point across.
  14. dffmmm

    dffmmm Member

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    If you are far enough ahead that you can waste money on experimentals you've either as good as won the game already or you're not managing your recources good enough.
  15. thedbp

    thedbp Member

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  16. cptkilljack

    cptkilljack Member

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    Or you know how to manage an economy and make the resources required to spam them. But I dont think that they should be uber powerful either. They shouldnt be a one man army but should be something that needs support as well as being able to take care of itself. The Seraphim Giant humanoid experimental is a good example.
  17. 6animalmother9

    6animalmother9 Member

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    I would prefer experimentals to be units that fulfill several roles at once or excelling in one role, not necessarily a unit that single handedly steam roles through an entire army.

    Ideas for example that was bought up was an orbital unit constructor/storage, that could put the units into the battlefield via droppods but can only build tech 1 and store x amount, or an interceptor that can fire missiles at several aircraft at once, but at significant drop in DPS.
  18. cptkilljack

    cptkilljack Member

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    I would be fine with an experimental being an orbital weapons platform with a long reload too.
  19. 1158511

    1158511 New Member

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    Experimentals as used in FA were the way to reduce unit count and use that exponentially growing economy, do we want to limit unit count?
  20. Regabond

    Regabond Member

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    I like the idea of experimental-like units being primarily structures. Things like those giant thrusters, nukes, unit cannon, interplanetary artillery, crazy resource generators.

    I actually kind of think there should only be 1 offensive mobile experimetal unit. One which pretty much fills the role of the Krogoth.

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