Planetary Annnihilation Titans

http://store.steampowered.com/app/386070

Standalone expansion for PA. $14 for those who have the original game, free for kickstarter backers of the original game. Adds Titans (Experimentals/Striders) and 16 other new units, along with a proper tutorial, a new game mode, better terrain, and numerous balance changes.

1st thanks for the thread
2nd do you feel screwed over? Do you think this is just a paid patch? I would love an insight from PA community since so far I have found out that everybody is mad about the fact that Titans exist as a standalone.

I'll give it a shot, I have it for free from KS anyway, so the only cost is time. I'm skeptical I'll change my mind on it, though, given that mass-force RTS games aren't really my style. I play Zero-K because it lies in the middle region of RTS scale, while also providing RTT-level (or at least Myth-level) unit control possibilities.

A lot of people have lots of issues with the whole thing it seems. I have seen angry mobs on reddit and Steam forums saying that it is a paid patch etc (considering how cash grabbing Uber was in the past).

- the early access guys are being screwed over. They have donated the same amount of money for Uber to kick off yet... they don't get to enjoy the expansion for free.

- expansion is really pricey. Compare it to massive expansions EU IV style. Even they cost only 10 Eu not 15. That is part of because it is standalone so it is expansion+base. It would be nice if PA owners could get a perma discount on the TITANS then it would be all sorted out and people would be genuinely happy about the state of things. It also does not have THAT much content in it either.

Uber is uber bad at consumer managment:
1st they release an unfinished game with showing no prospects on fixing it
then they announce a kickstarter campaign just after the release
and then suddenly become quiet about all the work they are doing leaving people outside their forums that the game is a dead fish
now this crap...

People (like me) who bought PA beforehand feel screwed over because they paid the full price and now have to pay again for expansion. So the standard game is practically useless and inferior in every possible way now. I completely get that but I also understand why they did it: Steam reviews (that were totally justified imo btw).

Do you even need line move in PA? Does positioning and micro matter that much?

I guess a good concave is always a good concave though.

With projectile dodging, shot blocking, the importance of perfect kiting and the tightly controlled range differences needed to pull this off, as well as the ubiquity of AoE weapons and the importance of the Riot unit, line move is vital.

But that's really the things that makes ZK different from other TA games, we make maximum use of the physics engine and the physical nature of our units, weapons and projectiles. I always thought it was kind of a tragedy to physically simulate your projectiles and then make that irrelevant by having your battles just swarms of units chewing into eachother: Your physics engine then is just serving as random noise.

quote: I always thought it was kind of a tragedy to physically simulate your projectiles and then make that irrelevant by having your battles just swarms of units chewing into eachother: Your physics engine then is just serving as random noise.

I actually found OTA seemed to allow for physics to matter somewhat, but I definitely felt this way about SupCom, so much so that I had to think up a term to describe it (mechanical dissonance). I kinda respect that PA doesn't have much physics stuff going on, since it wouldn't serve the design at all.

As for Stuart98's comments, speaking as an Monday Night Combat(PC only, mind) and Super Monday Night Combat player, the disappointment isn't just with PA or the Kickstarter goals being delayed, but that there has never been good communication. MNC got a decent amount of post-launch support, then nothing was heard. Then SMNC suddenly shows up, seems to do okay but has some design issues (which MNC didn't have, due to SMNC having a much more powerful levelling system), gets a year's worth of support with no indication that the game is getting shelved. There was even a whole new game mode added a couple months before support stopped. Then PA gets the Kickstarter, and all of a sudden people go "So that's who Uber has been this whole time!" and throws a few million dollars at them, then the game comes, isn't quite what was in the pitch, and with yet another round of no communication and a seemingly dead game until the Galactic War patches people figure it's another MNC/SMNC situation. The Human Resources Kickstarter didn't help either (though I think they should have started with that instead of PA, since they'd probably have had a more solid and viscerally engaging design than PA had, due to the scale), as that prompted more concerns that PA would be abandoned like SMNC was.

All in all, it wasn't just PA, it was a repeated pattern of silence, then sudden halts in support followed by sudden game announcements that led to the overall distrust of Uber. The high cost of PA in Kickstarter and Early Access, along with the relatively high character prices in SMNC, does not help the optics of the cost of Titans either.

I wouldn't be surprised if Xbox MNC players (the original ones) were pissed off about support for that when the PC version was released, but I wasn't there.

Oh crap Shadowfury333 don't even let me started on MNC and SMNC.
Now you have just made me sad to be completely honest.

quote: Is that surprising? Draining the suckers who keep throwing money at you because of hype and then moving on is much more profitable than actually making sure your game is good.

Yes Sprung because both games were quite good albeit the lack of support for the SMNC was understandable since there was barely anybody playing it.

So far PA doesn't really deserve a better name than SupCom 2 or TA:Kingdoms, it has major problems in its core designs, no amount of new units would gonna fix that.

This is why they made Titans a new game: