Planetary Annihilation

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PC|MAC Planetary Annihilation

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PC|MAC Planetary Annihilation

Unread postby Adjudicator » 10 Oct 2012 16:12

http://planetaryannihilation.com/
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/65 ... ration-rts

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation

Planetary Annihilation is an upcoming real-time strategy computer game in development by Uber Entertainment. It is being developed by much of the team responsible for Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander.


Planetary Annihilation is planned to feature a planet-based map system, including multiple star systems, different types of planets and asteroids. Players will be able to conquer other planets and even entire systems on maps said to include "hundreds of worlds". These planets are also planned to be dynamic in that they can be 'annihilated' using asteroids, a major focus for Uber Entertainment.


The game's creators have also stated that Planetary Annihilation will resemble something of the 1997 RTS Total Annihilation as its focus is more towards 'macro' gameplay as opposed to 'micro' gameplay.


The video trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhEYvOYceNs

The large-scale, complex battles remind me of both Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, two real-time strategy games I enjoy to this day.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Oct 2012 16:26

Meh, real gamerz play StarCraft dude. It's been out since, like, the '90s, which means it's better, and has, like, a 200-unit limit, which is, like, more complex and stuff. And StarCraft 2 sucks because it's new and my computer can't run it so fuck this shit and play Brood War until your eyes bleed. We don't need new games when we are still trying to be the "best in the world" in old ones.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Oct 2012 16:39

From the trailer:

"We are not shooting for realism, we are shooting for AWESOME."

http://culture.vg/features/commentary/t ... esome.html
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Oct 2012 16:57

My main problem with Supreme Commander (as an outsider, having not really played the game), which is clearly being carried over to this one, is how sterile it all looks. Aesthetically, the games have no character at all. They are not ugly, but they are not beautiful either. Part of it has to do with the all-robot theme and the lack of humans or organic life at all, and part of it with the fact that the artists are, if not exactly mediocre, then certainly uninspired.

I mean compare this with Red Alert or even Generals. Even Dune II, which had a much tougher job of creating a cool environment since the entire game took place in a desert, looks a thousand times more alive than this. Of course it had the benefit of having its universe created beforehand by a novelist and David Lynch, but that only goes to show how important it is to have good artists on your team.

I was hoping Squeenix would have helped on this front with Supreme Commander 2, but from what I've seen of that game, not really.

It's really hard to give much of a shit about a world if all it contains is a bunch of tin cans slamming on each other. Nevertheless, the mechanics look so awesome that this has shot up to my top 5 list.
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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Jan 2013 17:38

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01 ... ihilation/

RPS: Earlier in this interview you said you felt there was “unfinished business” in the RTS genre – what is that?

Mavor: The promise of this kind of game has always been that we’re going to get something on a crazy huge big scale. And if you look at where computers are now, versus where they were in the TA era, well, my TA machine was at 32mb of RAM. It was hot! Look at what we have now – why aren’t we playing these huge RTS games with crazy battles with loads of people? Where are those games?


Exactly. EX-actly. And the answer is: there are no such games because of all those aspies on the internet who latched onto a mediocre RTS back in 1998 and won't let go because they are not interested in the genre but only in seeing their name high up on some omg autistically stupid random list.

RPS: There’s no campaign mode, is there? This is straight up robot army warfare – I would say “skirmish” but that sounds too small to be accurate… Do campaigns not matter?

Mavor: I think people really care about campaigns. People want campaigns. The issue with campaigns is that they are unbelievably expensive to build. You have to build the game first, and then you have to build on top of that, and then you have to bug fix that, you have to test that. Think about a bug that shows up hours into a mission. And you have to replicate it… think about that. And do you want videos to introduce it and tell the story? That’s money. It would be nice to do a campaign, and that might expand the market of people who would buy the game, but it’s beyond our budget. The other things is that I think that building a replayable meta-game that can take the place of a campaign is a strong, well proven solution – look at the Total War games. As long as you can implement good AI, you can create something that is different every time.


The only RTS I know of that works without a campaign is the Age of Empire series (they have campaigns, but they are not worth playing). And that's because they are set up like Civilization, which works without a campaign. So the lack of campaign in this game could very well be a deal-breaker for me. Still, better to be honest about having no campaign at all than to try and phone-in one just to have that bullet point on the box. But perhaps the Galactic War will take the place of the campaign, as they are saying:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5caRZBS9QsM

If so it could be awesome.

RPS: Can you compare this to Supreme Commander? I mean, on the biggest maps with multiple players that’s hours and hours of play. Does PA go up that far? Can you make a comparison?

Mavor: I want to have a lot more capability than that. Hopefully you’ve heard me talk about 40-player games that take place over tens of hours. The client-server technology that we are developing means that it is possible to have a game that is persistently there, and have teams come in and join a game in shifts. We could start up a game with four different armies and twenty players, and you might leave go have dinner, have someone else control your forces, then come back, and the game is ongoing. It could potentially persist. We are trying to push the engine way beyond what you would have seen in the past. This cuts both ways of course, because for a game like that you will need a beefy server. But hey we have this thing called The Cloud now, and there are beefy servers for rent right now. To play on the biggest game your server might have to be in a data-centre with an ultimate machine. Conversely, if you want a small game you can run it on anything. The level of scalability is going to be unparalleled. The number I throw around is a million units in a game. Whether we reach that… I dunno. But that’s a goal.


This sounds incredible and I don't believe a word of it (a million units lol: one can dream!), but who knows?

RPS: It showed in the pitch. The Kickstarter video itself is one of the most impressive pitches I’ve seen from anyone. How close is that gameplay visualisation to how the game will actually look?

Mavor: I think from a visual style standpoint the actual game is going to look a lot better. And that’s because for the video we didn’t really have time to go to town on how it looked. From a gameplay perspective it’s also fairly accurate, but well… because you can look at the video and attempt to extrapolate gameplay specifics, people have done that, but I have to say “no: it’s conceptual”. The specifics will vary! But things like selecting the engines that are on the asteroid and then clicking for where you want it to go, that’s straight out of how we intend for the game to work.

But it will look better than the video, I think. We’re already starting to push past that. The video will look quaint by the time we’re finished. And that’s because that is the kind of game we want to make: TA-style gameplay, multiple planets, smash asteroids together, big explosions… fundamentally it’s not that complex to describe it, and that’s why we could get it across so well in the video. Conceptually, you understand what an RTS game is, and you get the concept of smashing stuff together.


Glad to hear this. The trailer visuals looked good, and would be acceptable in a pinch, but they could be better. Unfortunately, I am sure he's not talking about art direction, since this can't be improved without hiring new artists.

And I'll close this with some sombre reflections by none other than Chris Taylor:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1 ... red_games/

lextoc wrote:What do you think about Planetary Annihilation?


ctaylorGPG wrote:I like the video a lot, but beyond that, I'm pretty skeptical... I know what it takes to make an RTS game. TA took 20 months, and I (and the team) worked 7 days a week. SupCom 1 took 3.5 years and cost over 10 million. I don't think they stand a snowballs chance in hell to make that game for 2M.

But now that I've said that, they're really going to have to work extra hard to prove me wrong... good luck!!


There's nothing more to say on the subject, and consider GPG had 60+ employees at a time, while these dudes are just 12 dudes. Their plans do sound crazy in context. Still, if there's a chance in hell of them delivering even 1/10th of what they say, it will be the first real step forward for the genre since 2007, and the best way to help improve their chances is to throw as much money as you can at them. The Kickstarter may be over, but you can still pre-order the game from the official site, so do that if you want to see this game deliver:

https://store.uberent.com/Store/PreOrde ... h8yoigbcgy
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Unread postby austere » 11 Mar 2013 13:56

Some work in progress screenshots were released. They're definitely going for a simple style.

pa_units_06_public.jpg

pa_units_02_public.jpg

pa_units_01_public.jpg

pa_units_07_public.jpg
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Unread postby dinopoke » 19 Apr 2013 06:18

March 22nd LiveStream (1-hour long with planetary creation and AI demos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Qyl7h7D1Q8
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Unread postby alastair » 20 Apr 2013 00:37

Video of it being played (with temporary graphics): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugz7I8Z1bkI&t=2m41s
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Unread postby Dolt » 20 Apr 2013 00:53

You beat me to it, alastair. The video includes pre-alpha game footage, mainly of base building. The developers talk about a new type of replay system at 9:35, and hold a Q&A at 12:00, in which they talk about modding, minimaps, and not having unit upgrades to avoid micromanagement. An open alpha is planned for the end of May.
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Unread postby Ununpentium » 05 May 2013 00:22

May 3rd LiveStream Main Feature: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU9vVC_Hchs

May 3rd LiveStream Q&A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQavbTGaJtQ
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Unread postby movie » 31 May 2013 01:23

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/05/27/plane ... next-week/

Here’s the release timetable, as revealed on their most recent Kickstarter update.

• Alpha will start to roll out this month, and a combined UberNet Alpha/Steam Early Access Alpha will start on approximately June 7th.
• Alpha access will run for the summer, until the end of August.
• Beta/Beta Early Access will run from September through the end of November.
• Finally, we expect to have our worldwide launch in December of this year.

Alpha access will go out to anyone who backed at the relevant, $90+ Kickstarter level.

Uber also announced their plans for Steam, saying:

“Steam access is a convenience for some people who prefer to keep all their game keys in one place. If you wish to move your key to Steam, you’ll be able to once the game is live on Steam. If you wish to continue to simply play though our own service UberNet, you’ll be able to. No action is needed at this time for Steam access. We’ll send information once Steam keys are available for use. It also means it’s our first digital distribution platform besides our own, which means another way for the community to grow further and bring in more players.”
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Unread postby icycalm » 22 Jul 2014 04:01

Steam page (Early Access): http://store.steampowered.com/app/233250/
Beta Reveal Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE8QgqCiV8Q

I've just spent an hour or so looking at new videos and reading up on the game. It's not even that I can't believe what I am reading -- I can't even believe what I am seeing in actual YouTube footage. I half expect someone at the end of the video to come out and say "Hahaha, you thought this was real, but it's just a pre-rendered video we made to take the piss out of you lol." It really is that good. Or at least it seems that good -- because I am finding it extremely hard to believe there is not some catch somewhere in all of this. Every single thing I see or read about the game is a dream come true. I have zero negative things to say about it -- and if you've been reading my forum comments for a while you'll realize this doesn't really happen. Even the artstyle and setting are growing on me, and the music, the colors, the unit and building designs, "Galactic War" lol, everything...

It's perfect. I have half a Videogame Art review in my head already written and I haven't even played the game. It's going to take an insane exertion of will to keep myself from playing it this weekend when I finally set up my PC. The worst part is that there is no official release date beyond "when it's done". How am I supposed to hold myself off from playing it when IT'S SITTING RIGHT THERE ON STEAM and I've no idea when it will be ready? So what I am going to do is start from the beginning of the Total Annihilation campaign, then move on to its expansions, and then the SupComs and their expansions, plus a ton of multiplayer on all of these games, and hopefully all this will keep me busy for a few months until PA is ready. That's the plan at any rate. I've never played any of these games before, so this is the correct way to go about it anyway. I followed the Westwood/Blizzard/Ensemble/GSC branch of the RTS tree, you see, instead of the Westwood/Blizzard/Cavedog/GPG branch, because the original Total Annihilation (where the second branch split off from what I consider the "main" branch) seemed flat and boring to me at the time, compared to Age of Empires. And it still looks flat and boring compared to AoE, but when I see how far its successors have come, and when I also hear that the original game has been modded to work with high resolutions and 5,000 units caps, lol, I am willing to sit down and give it a serious try. I did play the first 2-3 missions of its campaign on my laptop a few months back, and I was pleasantly surprised by them. It's no Age of Empires, but it's very playable and certainly looks promising.

So, we'll see how it goes and I'll keep you updated of my progress, in this thread and in other threads and, hopefully, plenty of reviews eventually.

And if you are interested in playing all or some of these games along with me (and co-operatively, for the ones that offer that option), as we work towards the PA release, for which I hope to have an Insomnia team ready, keep an eye on the Online forum where I will talk about this in detail. Until then, here's a cool wallpaper to get you pumped for the game:

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http://www.uberent.com/pa/category/medi ... wallpaper/

It's going on one of my PC's three screens this weekend.


Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation

Wikipedia wrote:Jon Mavor commented that the game's complexity and playtime can vary, from half-hour, 2-player battles to lengthy, 40-player matches. ... In development updates, Mavor has commented that "a million" in-game units is a design goal of the development team.


lol
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Unread postby icycalm » 22 Jul 2014 21:41

I've spent half a day reading up on the game and watching videos, so I'll be dumping all my finds here soon. The most important questions I had, and the answers I found to them, were the following:


1. How big can the planets get, because right now it looks more like Asteroidal Annihilation, as I mentioned in the Universim thread:

http://culture.vg/forum/topic?t=4873

I wrote:However, the "galactic scale" is bogus, since the planets are more like the size of asteroids, a la Planetary Annihilation (aka Asteroidal Annihilation), than real planets. Which totally bums me out. I'd rather have one real massive planet than all those tiny faget asteroids that pretend to be planets and can only fit 12 buildings on them. It just looks stupid


And the good news is that THERE IS NO LIMIT TO THE SIZE OF THE PLANETS besides what your hardware can support:

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/supe ... ost-510915

neutrino wrote:The technical design goal is no upper limit on planet size other than available CPU and memory. In other words no hard baked in limits other than those based on processor architecture.

In practice network bandwidth and unit count may be more the limiting factor at the moment than sheer map size. But there will be no upper limit on what you can attempt to setup (past a certain size may be a console command or something to setup so we don't cause people to constantly crash the game).


(Note that "neutrino" is Jon Mavor, creative lead of the game.)

Given enough time for technology to catch up, we'll be playing with Earth-size planets eventually. This dude describes exactly what I am dreaming of:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... ?context=3

Havitech wrote:How big is "bigger"? I exclusively played the massive 40km and 80km maps in SupCom because I loved how you actually had to use and coordinate transport units to ferry your army across vast distances. There was also nothing quite like building a Galactic Colossus and sending it to walk under the ocean for a 20+ minute trip, then watching it finally surface on the enemy beachhead and stomp their base to ashes.

Loved everything I saw in the trailer, but one of my first thoughts was, "what is this, a planet for ants? It needs to be at least... 10 times bigger! With everything about 10 times further apart!" I want to be able to spend 20 minutes just building my base before players can even get probes to reach each others bases, much less send their first skirmish forces. Is this at all realistic to expect from the game?

If the game can really deliver on playing "a 12+ hour game with 40 of your closest frenemies and thousands of units" then I will fall to the ground in violent-but-joy-filled convulsions. This finally sounds like the grand scale of RTS I honestly have been hoping for since I first got into SupCom.


uber_neutrino wrote:Back us and I'll make it happen.

The max size of the planets will only be limited my memory and CPU. SupCom had a max size...


Havitech wrote:Incredible. I already pledged $50, I'm going to keep telling all my friends about this with links to the Kickstarter.



2. What about multi-monitor support?

The Alpha did not support multiple monitors, but at some point (they are now in what they call "Gamma") they added the following feature in:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/di ... 981847849/

SXX wrote:Yes there will be support of multiple monitors as well as "picture in picture" mode.

If all of your monitor have same size currently you can just resize game window to all of them. It's not looks perfect, but works.


The end goal is this:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/15/plane ... interview/

The other thing I'm going to do... If you remember, Supreme Commander supported multiple monitors. I don't know if you ever played it in that mode or not. You had one monitor that was your main one and a second monitor that was another view of the world somewhere else.

We're going to bring that feature back, but we're going to make it more flexible, so you're going to be able to split your viewpoint and look at your different bases on the same screen. You can have a viewpoint that's got your moon base, a viewpoint that's on the asteroids, and then a viewpoint on the planet if you want to.

So like a bank of security cameras...

Mavor: Exactly. And they're all active windows. You can do everything in those windows, contextually, that you'd be able to do in the main window. Now, I don't necessarily expect every player of the game to split their thing into a bunch of windows and use that, because I really want the high-level strategic awareness to be there. But advanced players are definitely going to be able to do that.


Note, he's not talking about just three monitors, but as many as your machine can handle:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/65 ... ration-rts

Will you support multiple monitors?

The plan is to support multiple windows across as many monitors as you want. The more windows you want to open the higher the system requirements.


Even more exciting, as far as monitor tech is concerned, is the scalability of the detail level:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... ?context=3

ColaColin wrote:Will it be possible to tweak settings like level of detail? It really annoys me that I cannot see wrecks/trees/whatever from the fully zoomed out perspective in supreme commander. I think it would be nice if the game could be configured to just show anything even from a fully zoomed out view, so that people with the right computer can use it. PA's graphics looks rather simple to render and it will support lots and lots of ram thanks to the 64 bit version, so it might just run fine. Considering that some people play games like PA for many years there will be a point in the future were most people can profit from it.

EDIT: somebody else wrote abour permantly lasting wrecks of units and you said no, not possible. While I understand it is unrealstic in longer games, it also would be great to make this somehow tweakable. Like: keep at least X wrecks on the field before removing any and make that X easily configurable.

I just want the game to be able to scale as much as possible with faster computers, even in the future, cause I hope to spent years with PA ;)


uber_neutrino wrote:Yes. This will be configurable. The main reason is that when we get ultra large high resolution displays.


This will be the killer app for 4K screens. Far more useful for this game than for any other type of game.

Also, persistent wreckage was eventually added (I mean in the design -- not sure if the Gamma currently supports it):

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... ?context=3

uber_neutrino wrote:Wreckage is in!



3. Will there be shared unit control, a la Age of Empires (which is a far superior form of cooperation), as opposed to standard co-op?

http://www.reddit.com/r/planetaryannihi ... he/c5wsd2j

uber_neutrino wrote:Yes, I was agreeing we are going to support team play where more than one person can control a single army.


uber_neutrino wrote:Basically there will be a distinction between a team which is where you control one set of units and an alliance where you have separate armies.


Note he said "more than one person", not "two". Which is just unbelievably incredible and the future of the genre.


So that's all I have for now. The answers to all my crucial questions were not merely positive, but "infinitely positive", if that makes sense, since what I am basically asking for is MORE, MORE, MORE, and what they are saying is THE SKY IS THE LIMIT. I have zero reservations now, and bumped the game up to the top of my Most Wanted list. It's hard to explain why without giving you Videogame Culture: Volume II. Yes, MGS5 belongs to a higher genre, but PA does more within its genre than MGS5 does with its, so PA wins for now.

Now I am going back to watching this video from a recent build (May 22):

Giant Bomb Quick Look EX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25QPvbugdg

More updates soon.
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Unread postby icycalm » 23 Jul 2014 00:40

Screenshot Wars!
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/scre ... ars.61975/

I picked the best so far:

ciLriDL.jpg

rDtKuFL.jpg

qcO5dKj.jpg

233250_screenshots_2014-07-13_00001.jpg

okBCqem.jpg

e5APiQW.jpg

GQOGjDd.jpg

Screenshot_51.jpg

233250_screenshots_2014-04-20_00008.jpg

EDiWbbP.jpg


It is the prettiest RTS ever, no doubt about it. And they are improving the effects all the time.
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Unread postby icycalm » 23 Jul 2014 23:47

Instead of reading things at random, I decided to start from the beginning and read everything. This is the game's news blog:

http://www.uberent.com/pa/news/

There's ten pages of it at the moment, so that's what I'll be doing, and I'll be posting here whatever seems especially interesting, starting with their first Kickstarter video update (update 4):

http://www.uberent.com/pa/2012/08/25/pa ... ckstarter/

It explains their vision for the naval warfare and gas giant stretch goals, the second of which I've always been curious about since hearing of it. I mean what the heck are you going go to do with a gas giant, since you can't even build anything on it? And their plans floored me. They seem to be envisioning an entire self-contained orbital version of the game, with orbiting bases, etc. And the same thing goes for naval warfare. Not merely ships and subs, but floating and underwater bases too, and entire water planets to match. And then imagine blending those planets in a system with regular planets, and having all this shit go on at the same time. Nothing remotely as ambitious has ever been imagined by anyone else, never mind attempted.

The somber news is that even though they achieved both stretch goals, and even though it's been almost two full years since then, both the naval and orbital dimensions, though they are functional, are nowhere near the scale of the original vision, and gas giants are still not in the game. And the 1.0 release is around the corner... However, my extensive reading of their replies in the forum, and a look at the changes made between the game's playable versions so far, indicate that they still hold those goals, and are still actively working towards them. It is certain, for example, that gas giants will be in the 1.0 version. It just doesn't look like the orbital dimension will be as fully explored in the near future as they had originally imagined. The naval dimension, on the other hand, has been achieved to a much higher degree, and is not very far from what they talk about in that video. Mavor seems committed to keep expanding the game indefinitely as long as money keeps coming in, and given his track record, both before PA, and since its announcement, I fully believe him.

Also, from the video, about commanders exploding in a mini nuclear blast when killed:

If you go out, you've got to go out with a bang.


Thus spoke Zarathustra.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Jul 2014 00:09

Very good impressions article on the Penny Arcade Report. Basic, but good:

http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/ ... nihilation

Andrew Groen wrote:The greatest achievement of the game in this early beta stage is simply the feeling of being in a solar system. You don't feel like you're on a 2D StarCraft map, instead you feel as if you're on a planet, and you have the capability to engulf that sphere or move to another. There is something intrinsically satisfying about filling out the entirety of a planet with your machine of war before moving onto the next one; this is the strategy gaming version of manifest destiny.


Andrew Groen wrote:That sense of scale is what's most impressive about Planetary Annihilation. Even when the match is only beginning and the only unit you have is your commander who will build your first structures, the planet just calls out for a massive World War.


Andrew Groen wrote:There's the sense, and Uber Entertainment has echoed this on live streams, that these commanders are going from system to system just strip mining for the purpose of war and at times obliterating entire solar systems in their all consuming need to destroy the other side of the conflict. It's not an all-together comfortable feeling, and it's weird to see untouched environments only to begin thinking of how they can be torn apart for the greater good of your war machine.


The only thing I really disagree with is this:

Andrew Groen wrote:There was never anything wrong with real-time strategy games, as the size of StarCraft 2's audience will attest. They just lacked innovation and gamers got bored of the same-old, same-old.


There was "never anything wrong". Only that "they were old, stale, boring shite". But as a journalist he can NEVER take what a lot people enjoy and call it BAD, because his goal is to write for a lot of people. So he has to find some way to justify everything they do, even if that justification is as retarded and self-contradictory as, "there was never anything wrong with it except that it was boring".
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Jul 2014 03:09

http://www.reddit.com/r/planetaryannihi ... no/cj5te4k

cptconundrum20 wrote:It's just human nature that people are being so critical of the game now. Games with small teams and low budgets generally have much lower expectations. Your team has done such a great job with PA that a lot of people are starting to feel like they are playing a AAA game. The more the criticism piles up, the more clear it is to me that this game has moved up into the major league. The best major league baseball players get criticized a lot more than an average minor league player.


uber_neutrino wrote:All true. The better job you do the more criticism you get. Bring it on then ;)
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Jul 2014 05:13

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/unca ... ost-965253

neutrino wrote:On the topic of modding we are working very hard to make mods integral to the experience. Even now you can just join a modded game and it will auto download the stuff you need from the server. We are working on more advanced versions of this stuff to make mods as seamless as possible. Game as a platform, I've said it before and I'll keep harping on it.


Sounds really cool. I hear there are already several useful mods, but haven't looked into them yet.
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Unread postby icycalm » 25 Jul 2014 08:33

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/mach ... mod.62215/

phlogistinator wrote:Machine not kill Machine Mod

I have been an avid player of many SIM games for many years, and I have often wondered: what if we could import some of the peaceful elements of those games to PA? This is the whole point of the Machine not kill Machine Mod, which I am currently working on.

I will update this thread with the latest information while I work on it.

What is this mod about?

Machine not kill Machine is a Planetary Annihilation City-builder mod that revamps the entire game and turns it into a city-builder game like Simcity, but with war elements, exactly like Anno 2070, but retaining all of the current units.

Features:

- Player Diplomacy Menu
- Trading
- Robot Farming
- Population Growth
- Cities
- United Galactic Republic (Something like a UN)
- Natural Disasters
- Tech Trees
- New Units and Buildings
- Peaceful Victory
- 4 new resources
- 30 different minor resources for trade and production

New Units:

- Research Bot: Grants 1 base research point per second.
- Advanced Research Bot: Grants 4 base research points per second.
- Scientific Academic: Houses up to 5 research bots (normal or advanced).
- Specialist Bot: Allows the player to specialize into 3 into areas - Philosophy, War, or Growth.
- Growth Bot: Grants 1 food per second.
- Philosopher Bot: Grants 1 Utopia point per second.
- War Bot: Grants 1 war point per second.
- Each of the 3 specialist bots can be improved with tech tree talents.
- Specialist Hub: Stores up to 3 specialist bots.
- Robo-Farm: Grants 3 food per second.
- Granary: Stores up to 300 Food each.
- School: Educates citizens in its radius.
- House: Has 5 levels, each housing more citizens.
- Citizen: The basic unit of the entire game. Your aim is to please as many as you can.
- Police Station: Quells crime rate.
- Military Base: Trains recruits (for PA units)
- [All PA units now require recruits or veterans to operate them, meaning that one cannot simply build a large army anymore without the required population]
- Mine: mines any of the 30 resources.
- Factory: Each factory can specialize into 10 different types, which will process different resources to turn them into materials for higher tier items etc. This follows the same gameplay as Anno 2070's production line.
- Market: For trading
- Diplomacy Hub: For diplomacy
- Entertainment Hub: To be updated
- More to be added!

More information to be added!


The Philosopher Bot is my favorite.
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Unread postby icycalm » 30 Jul 2014 22:53

I made a thread on the game's forum: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/lets ... ars.62336/

Tons of lengthy posts in there by me, so I am not going to bother to copy-past them all here. I'll just save a copy of the thread in case their forums go down one day, and if that happens I'll upload the saved thread to my server and link it here.

If you just want the lols, you can skip straight here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/lets ... ost-969763

Strategy geniuses, they are.
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Unread postby icycalm » 31 Jul 2014 04:10

Thread got locked after 7 pages. The icycalm effect. It reminded me of the good old days. The admins have been remarkably delicate with me, though. I received a warning email that was more supportive than insulting, and when they finally locked the thread they didn't try to lecture me at all. It's because they are mature professionals instead of the shut-in dimwits who normally administer online forums. Still, bad moderation is not the problem, it merely exacerbates it. When moderation is good, as in this case, the shit still hits the fan, it just takes a lot longer to do so. The problem is that

1. I am right

and

2. I refuse to rest my case

The admin who emailed me told me that sometimes it's best to walk away, but walking away is for people who don't really care about what they are discussing. In THEIR case, walking away makes sense, because they are busy professionals who talk through their work, and general principles are not very important to them. But to me, general principles are EVERYTHING. That's what I do all day -- I dream up general principles. Walking away is PAINFUL to me. Shutting up is painful.

Now, to be sure the internet is full of retards who have nothing to do all day and to whom walking away from a discussion is painful, but so what. Yes the retards are obsessed and I am obsessed -- the difference is that they are retards and I am a genius, and therefore their obsession is worthless but mine priceless. And though the retards gain nothing from their obsession, read that thread and tell me you haven't learned a shitload about Planetary Annihilation, RTS games in general, and even war in general and life in general. When I become obsessed, as I did in that thread, the results are VALUABLE. And not only to people who read them, but even to me. Their arguments force me to think deeper about the issues, in order to provide more and more convincing counter-arguments, and the value of this exercise is undeniable. When my review of PA comes along, you will find entire passages copy-pasted from that thread. Then I will send a copy of the book to Jon Mavor, and post the review in the forum (calling the anti-space brigade "retarded" for good measure), and the mods will not be able to do anything about it because I will not be saying it directly to them, but merely quoting a review from a published book lol. And I will have the last word there too, as I already did in that thread.

Yes, I can be petty like that too, because it's fun and useful at the same time. And as long as I keep winning, who cares, it's all good :)
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Unread postby icycalm » 31 Jul 2014 04:25

I would like to say that I will enjoy crushing these dimwits online, but the reality is that I may well be the one who gets crushed more, because I refuse to follow the "metagame" (i.e. to read guides/forum posts and watch videos that give me ready-made solutions to problems I should be solving myself).
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Aug 2014 21:56

For those like Masahiro who want their name, or part of their name, displayed with capitals, check this:

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/how- ... ost-853361

mkrater wrote:We're unable to change usernames, but there is a way to display your name in capital letters! :)
If you go to 'My Account' and change your Display name and modify it with capital letters (the name itself must remain the same,) it will display with the capital letters.


The "My Account" page he's talking about is this: https://store.uberent.com/Account/MyAccount

And once you've got your display name exactly as you want it, go back to that page and add the [CULT] clantag, like this:

[CULT] icycalm

Make sure you do it in this order: first modify the name to add capitals (if you want them, that is), then save, then modify it again to put the tag in.
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Unread postby icycalm » 12 Aug 2014 04:17

http://www.uberent.com/pa/2014/08/11/pl ... now-29-99/

bnicholson wrote:Planetary Annihilation Now $29.99

Awesome news: starting today, Planetary Annihilation is just $29.99 across the Uber store, Steam, the Humble Bundle Store, and other providers.

Permanent price drops like this one have always been symbolic of the strides we’ve made with the core game experience. Since the debut of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Galactic War, we’ve continued fleshing out and iterating on many key components of Planetary Annihilation. The new user-interface elements you can see today add flair and flavor — and make browsing more enjoyable. Battles are even bigger and faster courtesy breakthrough technical upgrades. We’ve also taken some huge steps visually by ratcheting up explosions and improving the Commander launch sequence. And the AI? It grows more evil by the day.

These are just a few of the improvements we’ve been making, and we think you’ll love what we’ve got in store for you next. Enjoy Planetary Annihilation at $29.99 now!


I urge new players to opt for the Steam version, because it makes it very easy to see at a glance which people are online, and more convenient to chat with them in order to set up games with multiple people. It will be a bit of a hassle having to coordinate things if some people are on Steam and others aren't. I know Uber makes more money when you buy directly from them, but if you are concerned about that just buy an extra Commmander from the Armory and you'll easily cover that loss for them and have a rare Commander to boot.
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Unread postby icycalm » 13 Aug 2014 23:41

Guys, you need to install the PA Stats mod, so you can all use this site to track your personal stats/ladder position:

http://pastats.com/

Here's mine:

http://pastats.com/player?player=63675
http://ladder.pastats.tk/player/63675

Too bad I installed it late and it didn't record any of my wins (three 2v2s and one 3v3 so far).

Here is the 2v2 ladder:

http://ladder.pastats.tk/2on2

I am currently at 879/950. Too bad there don't seem to be any 3v3, 4v4 ladders, etc.


EDIT: Actually, it did record our 3v3 win: http://www.pastats.com/chart?gameId=190827

Awesome!

Install the thing asap dudes. I'll be up for playing with whoever in about 30 minutes.
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