Planetary Annihilation x FAF

[Stuart98]

1. I have a playable experience with 6GB ram. Define medium sized map? DXDiag please?
2. Call me crazy, but I prefer the cartoonish art style over that of supcom. Nothing wrong with an art style.
3. Play MP. You're on a FAF forum so I assume that you play FAF for the muliplayer, so why even talk about the campaign? The supcom one was often more boring than the PA galactic war (not that the GW isn't boring).
4. That's what balance mods are for.

[ColonelSheppard]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq9kBbk ... ZHTwWvrKEw

I had to lol at this...

[belatedcube]

4. That's what balance mods are for.

doesn't that mean the balance team is incompetent?

[Zoram]

I tried PA, because the price fell so low that I hadn't much to lose. (I got it at 10 euros I think, or 5 ?)
I didn't think it was that a good sign to see the price plummet not even one month after "official launch" though.

I kinda agree with all the lukewarm reviews out there. It feels half baked. Actually, I think they invented the DIY game. There seems (to me) to be some kind of will to make things needlessly confusing. Icon for iddle fabricators (engies) ? why, just hit F (at least this one kinda make sense). Wanna see if you have idle factories ? Well I suppose there is a key binding for that too, I have to go back and check.

Wanna select all Lands/Air/Sea ? forget about ctrl L/A/S. It's ctrl+shift+F(X). Granted you can change those, but what was the logic there ?

I find the hotkey I use the most to be F5, that one refreshes the UI when it crashes, which to me, happened quite a lot on the very few games I plaid. (example, everything else is fine, but the ACU/fabs will refuse to build mass exctractors, I had to google my way out of it).

I finally decided to check out the "tutorial video" of zaphod x listed on the welcome screen. About the very first thing he recommends is to download some mod vault and get UI mods. Because having a mod vault in the game was too hard to implement ? So you have to go to a forum thread full of geek speak about an app that seems to be quite buggy according to the pages of discussions there. The intent there might be to scare away the casual players.

All in all, I see a game there, hidden behind the horrible UI, and I might give it a few more tries, I can kinda understand the awful graphics (small teams of indie devs, low budget and all) and the lack of polish, the UI choices I have a really hard time to get past. While I'm sure there must be a way to make sense of all those colorful thingies moving arround on my screen, I find it needlessly cluttered, messy, and unfriendly, and I don't have the motivation to download a fan made mod vault to download extra UI mods in hope of having something usable nor do I want to encourage a business model where a game company relies on an unpaid "community" to provide support for their game, I don't want to have to "google" things that should (imho) be plain obvious.

At 10 euros though, I can't complain. I wouldn't pay more for it.

[Tremarl]

The biggest issue currently with PA is that the developers don't understand the basics of perspective.

When you Zoom into a Curved object it should flatten. :/

Also the scaling is fucked ._. (but you say they will fix this)

.youtube /watch?v=Eq9kBbk46XQ&list=UUY75Oc9isHEPZZHTwWvrKEw

I had to lol at this...

I don't understand... All he is doing is spamming units, then complaining about being out micro'd and out spammed....

[Vashon]

They had one job. Smash Planets and live up to the trailer.

They had one goal. Correctly modeling the horrific destruction of planetary collisions.

They failed. Period.

These same guys chose giving us ShitCom, the Plagiarization of its own brand name, rather than simply letting it go. There were admittedly a few things, like the movement code, which was appealing, but frankly, they should have simply not made that turd nugget which has no right to claim itself a sequel.

Arent you the one that when I say something bad on the PA forums about your terrible game that PA is,you tell me to go back to the crap FAF?

yeee-NO.

want links ? have some links :

Yeah, I can sum up the fix to that complaint about unlimited assisting quite quickly.

1. Jack up the production rate for factories. Possibly even include two more upgrades, which are far less expensive than upgrading to tier 3 because their is zero hp addition, but these upgrades do nothing but triple the production rate, and then triple THAT. 60 seconds on bog standard T3 Factory becomes 20 Seconds. 20 Seconds becomes 6-7. BAM Massed Armies of T3 quite quickly, T2 armies produced instantly. Even better would be modifying the Factories in these upgrades to have two building spots, so that as one unit exits the factory, another can be built at the same time, avoiding the lag when units are exiting.

Especially air factories and Strategic bombers. OMFG.

2. The main argument against Game Ender's, is that save for the Paragon, which is the most OP thing in the game, it is simply uneconomical to build them unless you already have a powerful mobile army to hide behind while you turtle. Otherwise, 4 Experimentals plus the armies behind them are going to break into your shit. 5 Asswashers Carpeting your base or simply piling in one after another WILL break through. And without 20 plus SCU's, its impossible to utilize that mass fast enough to counter someone who has full map control and all the t3 mexes and SCUs and Massfabs themselves.

3. Build two nuke silos, then keep an eye on your economy as you build your own experimental army, and use the Nukes for point defense. (Gyle, you there?)

[colonyan]

I'm returnee to fa from 2011 or around so. Played faf for 3 weeks and now played pa around 20 matches which I bought last year and left on untouched after few dozen hours of play. (I also was playing TA before and other rts like age of empires, star craft 1 and 2, rise of nation, and so on)

I've remarked few things. (2015 FEB Last week of)
In short those two are different games.
(but which I slightly preferring pa now than fa)
Here, I will try to defend PA's position.

1. Commander
-Repair-
PA commander is prohibitively expensive to repair. To do any significant repair, it takes away enormous amount of
energy. Any attempt at early~mid stage economy will clipple the whole eco. I like this because it gives more meaning
to each damage done on foe commander. Also they do not regenerate. (So far none of unit seems to do though there
are fast repair unit)
-Slow Movement-
They are litteraly turtles. So, where about of commander is crucial. Also intel is equally important as in FA.
-Resource gen-
They give 30 mass and 3k energy from the begining. It allows building and running more than one factory right
after the start of the game. Also given there is bot factory to normal mix, which mix to build becomes another choice
right after game start.
-Upgrade-
No upgrade. Late game commanders becomes purely objects to be well hidden and well located.
I don't see this is a bad things as now they have nukes, unit cannon(orbital), harley and catalyst(fixed point game ender gun)
offers different choice. After all late game is too dangerous for commander to stroll out for commanders in FA too.

2. Economy and Tech
-Mass Fab-
There are none. Only mass deposit. Ground control becomes little more important compared to FA.
-2 level-
T1 is useful throughout the game though late game needs to have some T2 to get some edge. But it doesn't mean
T1 units suffer against T2 units neither in direct fire combat. Right composition of T1 can win or economically
counter T2 army. This is my favorite point of PA over FA. In FA, it becomes inevitable that late game is dominated
by T4 experimentals in most cases.
-Learning curve-
Less hard than FA as timing to transition in to t1 to t2 and t2 to t3 could be an another matter to tackle for
new and learning player.

3. Orbital Layer
This adds another layer of game play. Commander can also free to this layer given it is safe.
Also too early or too late progress into orbital warfare can mean lost game.
-Star System-
Multi planet game is overwhelming or it needs some patience and repeated attempt to get used to it.

4. Bot vs Vehicle
FA's units has various function of its own and it is expressed with race specific attributes and difference on
units. Meanwhile, PA gives bots and vehicles distinct roles worth while to separating into two.
Bots are more for tactical maneuver and Vehicles is designed to be the back bone of the land army.
Bots can also become main land army but with resilience of vehicles and how they are more sturdy, bots will
suffer on that aspect.

5. Art Style
I think this is personal taste but there is nothing wrong with PA's art style. It delivers old TA feel in modern way
with more clean and approachable style to potentially larger audience(well this is again matter of taste and perspective).
Some might argue it is childish, yes it is but it is right in context with game which smash planet into other planet and
machines wage war each other forever without any specific back story.

6. Mass deposit - balance issue
Current PA planet has too much mass deposit that it becomes hard for many players to catch up with the
pace at which players can consume.

Off topic
FAF's lobby got nation flag and ping/latency. Although the help giving some character and useful info but
it certainly did negative impact on me which starting to alienating from FAF which is still a great game.
Although I wish better map from FAF. Something comparable to seton which involves all land air sea battle.
Game's are getting same-ish.