More tech 3 land units
Grokmoo literally stole* my idea of writing about the lack of variety of tech 3 land units in his most recent post, but he didn’t cover everything I wanted to say on the subject. Hence this post.
Tech 3 is barren in the land department. Really, really barren. As barren as the current Sahara Desert, or the Amazon rainforest in, say, two decades. There’s just nothing there. Each faction gets a siege assault bot and a mobile artillery. That’s it. (For the purposes of this discussion, we aren’t considering engineers, which don’t count uniquely as a land unit because all three types of factories can build them). It’s boring. Late game battles just become siege bot versus siege bot, with the occasional mobile artillery thrown in if an opponent has tortoiseshell defenses. All of the other units used aren’t tech 3.
The game does a better job with tech 3 variety at sea and in the air. On the waves, we get to play around with battleships, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines. In the air, we get the pleasure of playing around with strategic bombers, air superiority fighters, spy planes, and the UEF’s tech 3 Broadsword gunship. Yet somehow land warfare, which is the main part of battle on most maps, is ripped off and left with the poorest variety of tech 3 units.
The main problem, as Grokmoo identified, is that siege bots are a jack of all trades. They are fast, powerful, and tough to take out. They’re everything one could possibly want in a unit. Which is, of course, their flaw: if one unit’s capabilities satisfy all of the late-game tech 3 land warfare requirements, there’s not really any incentive to use mixed arms. Here’s what I would do.
Tone down the power and hit points of the siege bots. Their speed would be left intact; it’s just that they shouldn’t be fulfilling the role that is traditionally occupied by the main battle tank. Make them like the Fido from Total Annihilation (if anyone remembers them). Speaking of main battle tank, add one. Tech 3 should be graced with a tank. It’d be slow and not particularly graced with maneuverability or rapid targeting speed, but it would be the tank that so many people are clamoring for. The tech 2 offerings just aren’t cutting it.
Tech 3 should also get scaled-up offerings from some earlier tech levels. A mobile anti-air missile launcher would be nice, as would a better mobile shield generator, hover tank, and surface-to-surface missile launcher. Tech 3 occupies the position of pinnacle of traditional land warface (not including experimental units). It should have the most variety because it is used in the end game. In the end game, the players have large economies and the capability of fielding massive armies, so the use of mixed arms and unit variety should be essential. The current siege bot spam just isn’t cutting it.
Luckily, I’m sure that Chris Taylor and the folks at Gas Powered Games are well aware of the lack of tech 3 land variety, and are already working on something for the upcoming expansion. Logically, tech 3 would be the place to put more units. I’m also confident that 3rd party developers are capable of creating awesome tech 3 units that fill the current variety void. I’m really enthusiastic about where this game will be six months down the road. Hopefully the tech 3 situation will be rectified. Because it’s just infuriating that, right now, there’s more variety in land experimental units, which are almost never seen in competitive multiplayer, than in tech 3 land units, which are what most often end up winning games that go past twenty minutes.
*Okay, so he actually took my draft and expanded on it upon my suggestion after he couldn’t think of a topic to write about himself. But saying that he stole my idea appeals better to my aesthetic writer’s sensibilities.
March 26th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
So, basically what you want is T2 all over again but more powerful? Isn’t that the entire problem, that siege bots obsolete the other units? If you make siege bots into powerful versions of the light assault bot (low health but high damage for what they cost) all you’ve done is create a need for more support units. If they add those support units to T3, T2 is still worthless. Online people would still skip T2 in favor of the more powerful counterparts.
T3 land lacks variety because it has to. If it has all the units you mentioned, T2 might as well not exist, which doesn’t change anything compared to how people play right now. The better solution, I think, is to keep the siege bots slow. Slow movement, slow turrets, and a short firing range. And maybe make them expensive. They shouldn’t be mobile artillery slow and they definitely should shoot while moving, but they should be slow enough, both in movement and retaliation, that T2 units become a threat to them. They should fill the role they were intended to: if they make it into your base, you’re f**ked.
This solution leads to armies full of T2 units with siege bots mixed in. There’s your variety. T3 itself doesn’t need variety, because T2 has plenty. T2 just isn’t used because siege bots do everything well. Take this away and you kill two birds with one stone – T2 becomes viable and T3 armies have more than just siege bots in them.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
I don’t agree with the argument that T3 doesn’t deserve variety because T2 has it. T2 is merely a stepping-stone that is skipped within minutes. Its variety largely doesn’t matter. The lack of variety in T3, on the other hand, does.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
You’re missing my point. If you add variety to T3, T2 still won’t matter.
Think about it. Why have T2 at all? It’s got to be there for a reason, right? Just because it’s currently skipped by most players doesn’t mean it was meant to be skipped. Indeed, why would GPG waste their time designing all those T2 units if they wanted T3 to eclipse them completely? T3 doesn’t have variety because T2 does.
You can add all the variety in the world to T3, but you can’t simply make them more powerful versions of what’s there for T2. If that were done, they might as well just get rid of T2 altogether – just have the factories go from T1 to T3 and delete all the T2 units from the game.
I understand that you want T3 to have more variety, but what I’m saying is that just because your factory is at T3 doesn’t mean it should be producing all T3 units. However, this is how the game is played right now because T3 bots are too good. If GPG makes them less good, T2 units come into play, and then the game has plenty of variety with no need for extra T3 units.
Either way, you end up with the same variety. If siege bots become less good, T2 gets used. Variety. If you add T2-style units to T3, the new T3 units get used. Variety. The latter, however, makes T2 completely pointless, even less so than it is now. At least now you potentially have some use for T2 mobile AA and stealth/shield gens. Your wish for new T3 units would make it such that no T2 units would be used. Ever.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:40 am
The problem is that the economy curve isn’t laid out well. Going to T3 from T2 isn’t significantly more expensive than going from T1 to T2. Thus, the variety of units is irrelevant; T2 is always going to be skipped. If T3 was significantly more expensive, it would create a middle game where T2 units were used extensively. As an example, think of the game Empire Earth. There’s 14 different ages, all the way from Stone Age up through Future Age. However, they’re well spaced out, so that you can’t go from Stone to Future quickly and never need any of the units inbetween. All of the units from every stage are pretty much needed because the stages last long enough.
So the real problem is that T2 doesn’t last long enough. It doesn’t have anything to do with the variety of units. And I don’t think that the variety of units at T3 should be gimped just so that T2 units get some play. That’s unfair to T3. T3 should have a wide variety of useful units just like all of the other tiers. Of course T3 units are going to be better; it’s a higher tech level and the units are more expensive.
March 27th, 2007 at 1:49 am
They’ve promised us downloadable units at some indistinct point in the future, which will presumably fill out the roster in much the same entertainingly random way as they did for TA.
In the meantime, I don’t think it’s a big problem. I think it also makes the game more approachable. When I first started playing SupCom I was somewhat overwhelmed by the variety of stuff on offer, even considering sensible rationalisations relative to TA, like the deletion of sea and air engineers.
Add another 15 units and the new-user experience will not improve :-).
March 27th, 2007 at 1:54 am
You’re only overwhelmed by the stuff on offer if you start with skirmish and multiplayer right away. But that’s like trying to learn to swim by jumping into the deep end of the pool. The campaign mode teaches new units slowly but surely, starting off with only power generators and ending up with the full arsenal. I wouldn’t want to reduce or limit unit variety merely because newbies might get confused, especially because the units are already introduced in the campaign. That’d be like removing all of the controls in a car except for the two pedals and the steering wheel because a first-time driver might get confused.
March 27th, 2007 at 6:19 am
I agree. There should be a risk involved with skipping T2 entirely. Or at least more risk than there is now. As for T3 variety, I think that will be fixed in time.
March 27th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?p=68656 :)
March 27th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
> The campaign mode teaches new units slowly but surely
The campaign mode teaches SupCom like your drunk uncle teaches driving.
I’d been playing campaign for a week, then had a few 3-way games with friends that I usually used to beat in TA, and they stomped me like a flaming bag of poo. I’m pretty sure campaign made me dumber :-).
March 27th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
The campaign is more like a (slow) easy puzzle each time you play it.
About T3: nerf it like hell is all I can say, and provide different unit roles than in Tier 2. No RTS remains interesting if so many “lower-tech” units are made obsolete that fast/easy.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
They should have just done like TA and had two tech levels. Balancing four is difficult. Either you have people skipping levels, or you end up with slow gameplay that drags the matches out for hours.
Frankly I think the frantic teching in this game is quite hard to get your head around. The economy management is much more complicated than TA, which wasn’t a cake walk by any means.