Planetary Annihilation

[Sno]

Another goddamned Kickstarter!

So i think this looks pretty cool.

I don't know how realistic their 900k goal is, but if you tell me that people who worked on both Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander want to do another game in that vein, i'm invariably going to be excited. (Because, of course, Total Annihilation is irrefutably the best RTS ever made. Irrefutably!)

[Orv]

I so, so hope this gets funded. That said, I don't think any video game Kickstarter that has asked for this kind of money has actually reached it? I'm probably wrong, but I feel like all the things that have surpassed a million were asking like >500K.

[I_smell]

That is pretty much the best fucking Kickstarter pitch video.

Game looks sweet. Spherical map? Collapsing planets? I barely even like RTSes, but fuck it man, I'm in. The Uber Entertainment guys have a great art and animation team, and I hope they make something I can pick up without dieing in 2 minutes.

If anything I hope they go even nuttier with the planetary space stuff, and gravity, and atmospheres having goofy stat effects.

Also yea, 900,000 is a lot.

Hahaha, their "early bird discount" tiers are a pretty funny and smart idea.

[Sno]

The trailer they open on is a total love letter to Total Annihilation.

[jeremywc]

Oh man, this represents a huge risk to my bank account. When I saw the thread title I immediately thought, "I wonder if it's a Total Annihilation clone." Then I saw it most definitely is a TA clone and my brain went "WUT." Total Annihilation is probably my favorite game of all time. I spent so much time playing it in high school, especially the Uberhack mod. It's hard for me to describe how I felt when I was at my best in TA. The closest analogue I can think of is it feels like you are weaving threads of robotic destruction. It's about managing these streams of units and applying constant, unrelenting pressure on an opponent while still being agile enough to respond to new threats. Supreme Commander was a good game too, but it never felt quite as "sticky" as TA. The old school TA community pushed for Supreme Commander to go even further in the direction of being a pure macro level game. I think it really ended up damaging the pacing of the game, to a degree. It was just very slow. Total Annihilation involved a lot more macro management that it's contemporaries, but it was still a very hard and fast game. GPG pretty much gave the TA community everything it had been asking for, but looking back, I don't think the end result was as good as TA.

Anyway, I'm really excited about this game. I hope they can pull off regaining that crazy balance of organized chaos that I enjoyed so much from TA.

[Sno]

TA is easily one of the top three or so games for me, a game i played consistently for years and years.

I also really liked Supreme Commander, but it never really clicked for me the way TA did. (On top of that, SupCom 2 is just a complete mess.)

SupCom's strategic camera was awesome though, but the way it just let you sit far out looking at a bunch of abstracted icons, and the way the interface was all just a little bit more automated than it was in TA, it made you feel very disconnected from the action in a way TA didn't.

Not to say that TA wasn't about macro-management.

When you're playing TA right, you're dealing with complex overlapping webs of command queues, basically trying to automate your base to be more efficient and more resilient than the opponent's base, very rarely do you give direct orders. (While attacking with very broad, mixed-force strategies. Scouting and creating distractions, finding a weak flank, and throwing everything you can at it.)

Did any of you guys ever play on Boneyards for the short while that was up and running? The huge galactic conquest metagame?

[Roderick]

This sounds very exciting. It's a great visualisation too!

[Nitrium]

Well, this has a reputable studio behind it, so... BACKED.

[jeremywc]

Did any of you guys ever play on Boneyards for the short while that was up and running? The huge galactic conquest metagame?

I loved Boneyards. I still wonder why no one has managed to duplicate the metagame there.

[racingfreak92]

So... Spore?

[Murdoc]

Well that looks pretty cool and those guys come off as pretty pro with their pitch, so I'm in.

[Henroid]

Oh good, someone made a thread for this.

Any attempt to keep Total Annihilation alive, in spirit even, is something I'll support and try to get people to support too. That game dominated a lot of my time when I was growing up through my teen years. I loved how the resource system worked, the actual 3D nature with artillery. I trust these guys to build on all that and PA looks like it'll do it.

[TychoCelchuuu]

So... Spore?

I don't remember driving one planet into another planet in Spore although to be fair I barely played it.

[Roderick]

If I may give one general criticism that shouldn't be taken too hard: I find robot factions quite uninteresting in an RTS. That's why Total Annihilation didn't interest me, visually. There's just nothing at stake storywise (who cares about robots dying?) and they look like blocky Transformers, or worse, Go-bots. There's very little character involved.

But again, that's nothing against this game; just personal preference.

[Orv]

If I may give one general criticism that shouldn't be taken too hard: I find robot factions quite uninteresting in an RTS. That's why Total Annihilation didn't interest me, visually. There's just nothing at stake storywise (who cares about robots dying?) and they look like blocky Transformers, or worse, Go-bots. There's very little character involved.

But again, that's nothing against this game; just personal preference.

Your problem is playing an RTS for story reasons, Rodi.

[Sno]

I think it's fair to want story out of an RTS, there have certainly been a lot of great RTS's with big narrative focuses. (I've never been a fan of Blizzard's games, but there's those. There's also Relic's games, and the C&C games, etc.)

You know, but TA isn't that. (Aside from being amusingly grim, it's about as thin a premise as you can get.)

SupCom kind of tried to weave a narrative, and fell totally flat in its efforts.

Planetary Annihilation looks like it's going to go more for the TA thing, played somewhat less self-seriously.

[Donk]

Psyched and backed! My only fear is that it's just a pitch video. They seem to have the right ideas though, I sincerely hope they do them justice.

[Roderick]

It's not about story, it's about the world, the story the game tells just with its world building. Robots are boring, visually, contextually. Unless they have tons of personality like Portal's robots. But when it's an RTS with just robots bashing in other robots' robotic skulls, meh. But that won't keep me from playing this game though, because it has an asteroid rocketing into a planet on an elliptical trajectory.

[Nappi]

This game looks awesome.

Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of multiplayer RTS. I don't mind getting my ass kicked in multiplayer FPS but after a 30+ minute match (I actually have no clue how long an average game of Planetary Annihilation would take) I would like to feel that I have actually achieved something. In addition, I don't think I could take the pressure.

I think I will have to wait and see whether they will include a single player campaign or something, and then decide to back the project or buy the final product. To be honest, I don't even know how this game is supposed to be played at this point.

[Orv]

(I actually have no clue how long an average game of Planetary Annihilation would take)

They're talking about doing weekly event type stuff where they host 40 player, multi-system (planetary) games that start everyone off with a unit cap of like 200, but as more people get eliminated everyones cap goes up gradually. They want these games to take 12 or 24 hours and I'd absolutely love that. Brutal tactical and strategic level combat that by the end of a 20 hour game is just the last two or three or four players making mistakes that would lose a smaller scale RTS in the planetary graveyard of shattered worlds as newly formed asteroids are launched through the void in last ditch MAD deterrence-esque warfare.

[Sno]

I understand Nappi's feelings. In a typical FPS match, you can have gradients of victory. As long as your KDR is above 50%, you can feel pretty good about how you did. While in an RTS, typically it's very binary. You win or you lose, it can be very trying.

I think that's one of the secrets of why FPS's are so huge, it's a style of MP game where less responsibility is placed on the individual. Even if you didn't dominate the score board, you can simply settle for feeling like you contributed to your team or performed above the average.

It's the difference between small-team or 1v1 games as opposed to big-team or FFA games. (Or, alternatively, score-based versus elimination.)

As for how long a match in Planetary Annihilation will take, it will probably vary quite a lot.

A typical, two person TA/SupCom match on a smaller map was usually about half an hour to an hour, and usually topped out at a low-tier tank rush. However, on a huge map with larger groups of people, things can totally spiral out of control. That's the fun stuff, where people have time to build up banks of intercontinental artillery cannons and huge ocean fleets. (Fog of War settings and Commander Death settings also had a very pronounced impact on how long a match will take. Disabling forfeit on commander death makes routing an enemy like trying to stomp out a weed, combine that with fog of war and it can take forever to achieve a definitive victory.)

I've seriously had ten hour TA matches, though. Get like eight players fighting for a continent while throwing around nearly a thousand units each, it can quickly turn into something you can't finish in one sitting. (In those games, you could thankfully save in-progress matches to continue later.)

[Roderick]

The developers have hinted at a singleplayer campaign for one of their stretch marks goals. I agree with the sentiment: without a singleplayer I'll likely not play it as much.

[Nappi]

They're talking about doing weekly event type stuff where they host 40 player, multi-system (planetary) games that start everyone off with a unit cap of like 200, but as more people get eliminated everyones cap goes up gradually. They want these games to take 12 or 24 hours and I'd absolutely love that. Brutal tactical and strategic level combat that by the end of a 20 hour game is just the last two or three or four players making mistakes that would lose a smaller scale RTS in the planetary graveyard of shattered worlds as newly formed asteroids are launched through the void in last ditch MAD deterrence-esque warfare.

Jesus. That sounds insane.

I couldn't imagine ever participating in a match like that myself but I would love to witness one (in some condensed form). How would these even be organized? Is there, you know, breaks and so on?

[elmuerte]

I have two friends you would probably enjoy that. They've played a lot of TA, and a ton of Supreme Commander.

[Frenetic Pony]

Jesus indeed, or Thor, or any diety of choice.

This game is juuuust what I needed. I played Starcraft 2 until I was hitting diamond and above level in 1v1. But that just had too much frustration involved. It was more fun to win than to play, and whenever I lost I could almost instantly tell why. One single mistake and I'd have just spent half an hour incredibly tense and wound up just to lose to not scouting right for thirty seconds. Even winning could be almost as thankless; when I won the same way, or was alternatively playing someone who'd gotten into the same rank as me using some idiotic one shot tactic that failed. I'd get no satisfaction out of those matches, his only chance was blown and now I just wasted another 10 minutes and being very hyped up to finish off someone who wasn't even approaching a challenge.

TA on the other hand was just plain fun to PLAY, win OR lose. I'd love the huge cross map artillery things, as long as I got to build some, or a giant robot or something I was having fun. And PA sounds very similar, and I hope it ends up being so.