Asteroid Annihilation.

[Ze_PilOt]

http://forums.uberent.com/forums/viewto ... le#p711409

The scale in SupCom for example was bigtime screwed up.
Basically things are way off compared to real life.

That something I agree on, but the scale of supcom actually feel right. Rares are the games than have a good sense of scale.

Some RTS more focused on squadron (like CoH or DoW) have a nice scale.
Some RTS like starcraft doesn't care with scale, and a marine barely fit in a battlecruiser.

A pine is usually 15 to 45 meters high.



That make the ACU between 20 to 60 meters high.

I don't know what is the plant behind, but it's really huge (7 to 15 meters high) for that kind of plant pattern.



So that mountain about 5 ACU tall. So between 100 and 300 meters.


We actually know the size of the planets. Between 450 & 750 meters.
We don't know if they are talking of radius or diameters.

the surface of a sphere is 4*pi*r².
A 450 meters radius planet in PA result in a 2.544 km² map (+- 1.5x1.5, 2.5*5 is winter duel).

Now you may understand my problem with PA scale :
Either everything is over-sized (while they look tiny), or the planets are more like a little asteroid.

The numbers are actually not important. The numbers are off in supcom too. But the feeling is really important.



What do you think when you see that sea? It must be a big area of water, right ?


This is a destroyer on it.

And a Battleship :


Meanwhile in supreme commander...


Do you recognize the place ? Look at the minimap...



PA don't feel right. At all.

It looks actually silly/funny to me.


And I'm just talking of the feel of scale. Not real life units numbers or even gravity on such small planetoids.

For me, it currently feel like supcom 2 (toys on a model map).
Or .. Hmm..

[Ze_PilOt]

How can they solve it?

They probably can't. If they make the planet large enough (or the units small enough) so they don't look like tennis balls, the map will be enormous.

Look at my supcom -> PA numbers to get how big it would be with the same feel of scale.

I won't post my concern about scale on the PA forum. I don't want to argue with fanboys or even Neutrino. They have their vision, it doesn't fit mine. I'm just disappointed.

My first feeling when I saw the kickstarter video was "oh my god I want !!!" to "hmm the planet looks tiny".
They assure us that planets will be bigger. I believed them.
Reality is : They are not close to be big enough to get rid of the tiny/toy feeling.

[Astrofoo]

I completely agree and this was my issue with the game when I saw the kickstarter trailer a year ago. It looks wrong, in SupCom the scale feels right. In SC2 it doesn't, in SupCom2 it doesn't, and in PA it DEFINITELY doesn't feel or look right. I don't think they can fix it. The whole plan was to fight on planets instead of flat landscapes and I think that is just too hard to do. Either that, or a game design company hasn't figured out the secret to doing a 3D planet rts yet.

[FireMessiah]

that 2nd to last picture says it all.
a battleship that sits on the curve of the planet? ewww that's horrible.
that would make the planet smaller than our moon, or the battleship is the size of China

[Ze_PilOt]

The problem is that they are trying to take a game that works on a 5x5 / 10x10 km² map (TA) and translate it to a sphere.

That's something Chris Taylor do right, giving a game an epic scale. (well, let's forget supcom2:)

http://www.faforever.com/?p=571

They are missing him so far..

[Kamicase]

We need to keep in mind that Planetary Annihilation will have planets of varying size. I think at the moment they're just showing planets of size 3 or 4 out of a scale from 1 to 10. I'm sure size 9 or 10 Planets will give you the size you're looking for.

[Ze_PilOt]

You realize what it means for gameplay right ?
The current size is already big (feel like a seton-size map - and it's probably actually about the same size). But the scale is off.

Again, it's a matter of feeling VS gameplay. They can't get a big enough planet to have a nice feeling (or you get a really, really slow game).
You have to take in consideration the speed of the units.

Or the planets are waaaay bigger, but the units must be so faster that it will look funny too (actually the speed of the units in supcom are already stupid, but it's nowhere near what it would be).

[eXcalibur]

edit: zep mentioned the speed of the units already, while i were writing this...he was faster!

yes they could fix it: make all units much smaller (so that the smallest planet has the same planet/unit ratio as they have now), but make the units much faster. this way the game does not feel extremely simple, boring, and slow. but you need the same time (or less) to go around a planet, therefore you can expand faster and the map becomes "smaller" (at least it feels that way).

but that does not change my underwhelmed feelings towards PA: they made the same mistake as CT did with supcom2: they want to make the game "easily accessible".

[Ze_PilOt]

Maybe it won't look silly, I don't know.

I hope they will try to fix it, but for that they must realize -and accept- it's kind of broken.

[Swkoll]

Supcom scale at vanilla release wasn't very good let alone Supcom in alpha. Scale was way too big and boring. I don't think we should judge PA until release on scale.

In SC2 it doesn't.

I'd argue that starcraft's scale is perfect for what they are trying to do with it because it allows for quick, fast paced battles which is a lot of what starcraft is about.