Games

[icycalm]

As for the currently existing orbital layer itself, I can't believe that I have to sell it to you guys, but that's how much the videogame-playing crowd has degenerated. It's basically the best thing ever. Remember when battles in Dune 2 consisted of building a bunch of tanks and sending them out to clash with another bunch of tanks in the middle of a desert? That's pretty much all the "strategy" there was in that game; even all the "tactics", almost. It was even a retrogression from Herzog Zwei, since there was no naval layer at all; but, you know... Dune. Well, that's why we all pissed our pants over C&C and WarCraft II, back in the day (the day in which you hadn't even been born yet, I mean), because they introduced the air layer while also bringing back the naval one — AND THAT'S WHERE THE GENRE HAS BEEN FOR GOING ON 20 YEARS NOW! So the orbital layer suffices on its own to earn PA the "next-generation RTS" title that Uber has claimed for its game, even if all its myriad of other innovations didn't exist. It is insane what this layer does to the game, how much more complexity and depth, how much pure awesomeness it adds to it, even in this early rudimentary stage, where it barely adds half a dozen new units and buildings to the game. The way PA essentially works, at a more abstract level, is that the commanders land on an uninhabited planet in the middle of a solar system, and start harvesting all its metal and pouring it, via the use of energy (which again they have to spend metal to generate), into the world's 4 basic layers. Each layer is a battlefield, a meta-battlefield in a sense, to be fought over, with the goal of penetrating the enemy's defenses in at least one of them in order to reach the commander who's sheltered behind them and destroy him. So even if you are dominating in, let's say, 3 of the 4 layers, as long as an opponent manages to pierce through the 4th layer that you are neglecting, he will fry your ass and win the game. But if you pour all your metal in all 4 layers equally, so as to have all your bases covered, so to speak, your commander will certainly be safe — at least for a while — but you won't be sufficiently strong to pierce through the OTHER guy's defences in any layer (at least not if he's any good at the game and doesn't commit any obvious blunder). And this is where scouting comes in. Scouting is unbelievably important in this game, so important that I can't believe how important it is. Which is why I said it's unbelievable. I fucking hate scouting, and I suck at it because my mind is focused on production first and above all, and every second spent scouting the enemy feels, deep in my gut, as a second taken away from producing a bigger and stronger army with which to crush him. But you can't fucking survive in this game, much less dominate in it, if you are not 100% serious about scouting, precisely because one wrong decision into which layer to pour your metal into can cost you the game in minutes. So, no orbital presence? Then a single orbital laser platform or even merely an orbital anchor can destroy your commander in seconds, even if you have the entire planet covered in wall-to-wall T2 machines. No significant air force or air defenses? 20 T1 bombers will snipe your commander out of nowhere and it's game over. If, on the other hand, you are doing strong scouting, and assuming you have enough build power laying around, you can prepare for almost anything given sufficient advance warning. Right from the first couple of minutes of the game you can tell if an opponent is going for heavy bots or tanks or air, and adjust your own build accordingly, if you are doing a decent scouting effort — while he, in his turn, will be doing the same to you if he's any good at the game, and so on and so forth in a continuous struggle of initiative, adaptation and counter-adaptation to the initiative of others until the end of the game. Supreme Commander had also a strong scouting aspect, as I am told, compared to all other previous RTSes, but with one layer fewer, and a single square battlefield where you pretty much know where your opponent will be (i.e. straight ahead of you), it still remained in the background compared to the traditionally dominant production and fighting aspects of the genre. PA, for the first time in the history of the genre, achieves the incredible feat of putting scouting on an equal basis with any other domain of activity you will be pursuing here. I can't tell you how many games my team and I have lost because I keep underestimating it. Five months in and I STILL forget to build a basic radar when I start a new base, and mentally (and sometimes even verbally) scoff when I see someone taking time off of base-building to fly a Firefly around (or, even worse, an expensive radar satellite), to check on what our opponents are doing. And yet how many times we've turned the tables in a game merely by doing precisely this! It is a giant mindfuck to adapt to this new reality — this new level of complexity that PA introduces — and it makes going back to any previous RTSes an impossible proposition for me. Here is a brand-new skill that I am called upon to develop! Here is a brand-new dimensions (and a very strategic dimension at that, since the whole idea of strategy revolves around making far-reaching decisions based on gathered intelligence, which is precisely what scouting is) that I am challenged to master — and you seriously expect me to do anything else when you talk about StarCraft II or whatever than to laugh?

[icycalm]

A funny example of what a huge mindfuck the existence of 4 layers is, and how they interact with the multiple-battlefields aspect that is, again, unique to PA, to create scenarios that no one could have predicted before the game was up and running and we could stumble onto them (they are emergent!), would be what happened in a recent fight between my clan and some Team Burning guys (southern hemisphere represent!) on a war that began on a water planet. After all 4 of us in our team concentrated all our efforts into kicking the BRN guys (along with some randoms) from the water planet, we turned our eyes to the moon and the metal planet that they had in the meantime expanded to and now completely controlled, and began thinking about an invasion. And it was then that we realized that all we had were naval units, which meant we couldn't invade shit. What would we send to the moon, after all, a fucking boat? We did have significant orbital presence, however, since we had needed it to capture the water planet (precisely because the BRN guys were good, and countered our huge naval and air fleets with a heavy investment in the orbital layer), so I used that to personally take the gas giant from them, but our invasion efforts on the moon and the metal planet stalled because of lack of foresight, and they ended up frying our water planet with their annihilaser, and winning the game. All those glorious naval victories supported by orbital warfare were in vain simply because the scope and design of the solar system were something we were not prepared for, causing the BRN guys to outthink us on the strategic level, even while we routed them on the tactical level in every single engagement we fought, out of dozens. Do you see the difference between strategy and tactics now? Do you see how complexity, in the form of all these layers and battlefields that interact to create a gigantic, previously unheard-of possibility space, is precisely what CREATES the POSSIBILITY of strategic thinking in the first place? If you can grasp that much, it shouldn't be that much harder for you to grasp that it is no exaggeration to say that Planetary Annihilation is more or less the first REAL real-time strategy game ever. All previous games in the "genre" were merely experiments and rehearsals leading up to it, and all future efforts in the genre will necessarily start out from it and expand from there, if they aspire to be any good. Which is precisely the definition of a masterpiece; what, in this artform, I call Videogame Art.

[icycalm]

As for PA's last major innovation, its "infinite everything" design philosophy, this is the hardest one to analyze, because as we remove the limits from each dimension (units, players, teams, fronts, planet numbers and planet sizes) we change the nature of the game in numerous mutually influential, fundamental ways. The lack of a unit cap is the first such dimension that a new player is faced with, for example, and the vast majority of them have not the faintest idea how to deal with it. I would even bet my right nut that most of them are not even aware of its existence. So they are expecting either no confrontation at all until both sides have reached the cap that doesn't exist in this game, or at most an early rush that can be countered by whatever small number of units their pitiful couple of factories have managed to produce before it comes — and they make a pitiful number of factories PRECISELY BECAUSE they think that there's a unit cap. But if you leave a player alone for 5 minutes in a metal-rich area in this game, next thing you know there's a teleporter on the back of your base streaming an unstoppable horde that flattens everything. The speed at which things ramp up is frightening here, even to old hands like me, never mind to new players in the genre. And this is what players who try this game out and quit because "it's all bot spam and zerg rushes" mean. They think that there's no strategy because they get knocked out in the first 5 minutes by the oldest and most basic strategy in the book, which is so basic that Sun Tzu didn't even bother to include it in his instructions: "HAVE A BIGGER ARMY THAN YOUR OPPONENT". The casuals REALLY DO believe that this is a bad strategy. They are not pretending to be stupid, they really are that stupid!

[icycalm]

It took my clan a while to figure this out too. I think recoil was the first to verbalize it; probably because he was in charge of the economy, which is the most fundamental building block in the game. He is also the most strategically astute player among us besides me, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that the idea for our very first strategy ("outproduce the opponent") came from him. He said something to the effect that "size is the key to this game", and, once I heard that, I made a point in every successive game to build more factories than in the previous one (as I was, and still am most of the time, in charge of the production), to discover the limit of production, that absolute highest speed at which units can be churned out in this game. Of course this limit depends on the speed at which the economy grows, which has its own limit that recoil was tasked to discover; so from then on his task was to ramp up the economy as quickly as he could, while I tried to do the same with production to make sure that his economy was being fully utilized at every step of its expansion. And even more: I was actually trying to choke his economy, to make it crash again and again, in order to spur him on to expand it quicker; while he was trying to grow it faster than I was spending it, which would result in excess wasted resources, which would in turn spur me to build shit faster, and so on. A dozen games later and we were consistently beating most other beginners at the game, and had said goodbye to the "utter clueless noob" phase of our development as players of Planetary Annihilation (and all without reading any guides or watching any YouTube videos, please note!) — a phase which the vast majority of new players never get past.

[icycalm]

"But isn't what you are saying proof that spamming units is all there is to this game?" — No, casual. I said we were beating BEGINNERS with this strategy, not decent players, never mind good ones. Maximizing your economy and production is merely the first step to being a competitively viable player in PA; the first BABY step. And the game really only begins once you've done that. After all, there's no point devising strategies if you lack the army with which to EXECUTE them. And that's why the casuals don't (devise strategies, that is).

[icycalm]

So in other games the term "build order" refers mostly to the order in which factories build units. In this game it refers to the order in which you build factories. The casuals want to make 4 or 5 factories like in StarCraft and then stop making factories, and spend the rest of the game moving the units around (so they really want the base-building and tactical aspects of the game to be SEPARATE, because they can't handle both at the same time). In this game, meanwhile, you are building factories from the first second to the last, ALL THE WHILE figuring out how to use the exponentially increasing army they are churning out. Casuals can't handle that (in fact they can't even conceive it, even after you have explained it to them), and that's why they try to slander it with their zerg insult. We are talking HUNDREDS of factories here, THOUSANDS even, if you account for all sides in huge team games with multiple teams. We are talking so many factories that you're strip mining entire planets for them, to the point where you run out of space to build more factories and start thinking about how wonderful it would be to be able to build factories on top of other factories, like those quaint little car elevators the Japanese have where you can park a car in your driveway on top of another car. I have no doubt that, as engine performance and computer tech improve to allow bigger systems and unit counts with no lag, we'll get to the point where we'll have entire planets covered with a single building type. You'll have the energy storage planet, the metal storage planet, the bot factory planet, and so on. Just like it'll work some day in reality.

[icycalm]

So the lack of a unit cap changes all the mechanics. The key is spamming units WHILE concocting and executing strategies. You can't do this in any other RTS, because in other RTSes you are always thinking about the unit cap, and all "strategies" (i.e. the 3 or 4 basic plans that everyone else on YouTube uses) have been devised with that in mind. You got 200 units, and that's it. While your strategy here will be vastly different if the crucial confrontations happen at 100 units or at 1,000 or 10,000 (not to mention other factors, like the number of planets available, or the existence in the system of gas giants or smashable planets or annihilasers, all of which do not exist in any other game).

[icycalm]

Which nicely segues into, ultimately, PA's by far most important innovation: the lack of a PLAYER cap, an utterly unprecedented, unimagined even, innovation in the genre. People really don't understand that we are almost talking about an MMORTS at this point, the RTS equivalent to PlanetSide, if you know that game. Or they don't realize that the current official 10-player cap is a temporary, and easily bypassed, expedient. People were playing 40- and even 100-player battles back in beta. It's just that server capacity to run these games is expensive, and once the game was released Uber put the cap in so that huge games wouldn't cause other people's games to lag and give them a bad impression of the game. But you can already run your own server and easily lift the cap. Of course you'll get huge lag if you put 100 players on a large system, but the lag comes from the number of units running around, hence from the AI needed to run them, not from the players. The server, for the most part, doesn't care how many people are giving it orders, so if you don't mind playing on a small moon you could conceivably put several hundred players on one right now. What determines the number of units produced is the size and the number of the planets, not the player number. On a small planet there's simply not enough metal and space to significantly expand before the first confrontations happen, so small battlefields set their own, natural "unit caps", in a sense.

[icycalm]

So, at the very least, PA should be regarded as the first fundamentally TEAM-ORIENTED RTS. PA is the Counter-Strike of RTSes. One day it will also be the PlanetSide of RTSes, but for the time being, due to technical constraints, let's just think of it as the Counter-Strike. And this changes everything, it changes so much that it is time we grasped that we are talking about a NEW genre here, which explains nicely why so many players who came into it from the OLD genre have such trouble understanding it — or even liking it at all ONCE they have understood it — and end up abandoning it in disgust and going back to the old genre. These players simply lack what it takes to enjoy the new genre, hence this new genre is, conclusively and definitively, NOT FOR THEM.