Planetary Annihilation

hoom

hoom

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Kinda surprised this didn't seem to manage to get a thread about it.

Planetary Annihilation is a Kickstarter funded spiritual successor to Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander.


Here is their Kickstarter vid which is awesome.
http://youtu.be/FhEYvOYceNs
So TA/SupCom type play with infinite resources/pay as you build economy and big cool experimental units but played on spherical planets, with colonisable other planets, moons & asteroids + you can build special unit engines on asteroids to make a really massive super weapon!

And the Galactic War map
http://youtu.be/5caRZBS9QsM
So a big Boneyards style random generated Galactic map.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts
Its being done by Uber Entertainment (seem to be mainly famous for micro-transaction game Super Monday Night Combat) including a bunch of the technical guys who worked on both TA & SupCom (not Chris Roberts who is having his own rather different experience with Kickstarter/GPG, best treated elsewhere I think).

They quickly hit not only their initial 900K target but all their stretch goals up to $2.1mil.
Frankly that doesn't really seem like much for a big game?

But I think part of the deal is they are making relatively simple but stylish graphics, a big fairly simple random galaxy generator, no complex story line, no human characters etc so a lot of the real expensive production stuff is cut out.
Even the factions: 1 faction.
In one of the various update videos they put it this way 'would you rather have 2 factions with variations on 100 units or 1 faction with 200 different units?'

In one of the vids they also talk about initially planning on only 2 tech levels because SupCom was a bit excessively dominated by leveling, focus instead on trying to get truly massive unit counts, like 1 million! (though I think that would surely be 1 million total spread across multiple systems in the meta-galaxy)

Totalbiscuit interview with two of the devs
http://youtu.be/qqDSh34VoPY
Mavor is spitting. image. of. Simpsons. comicbook. guy.
 
I would like to see a TA-style strategy game where you can build proper roads in your base so that units moving around don't stand butting heads with one another all the damn time, where defenders automatically patrol and repair units also patrol and patch up any damaged stuff if you don't set them to construct new stuff and so on.

Chris Taylor hit gold with the original TA once, long ago, and since then he's not made a single thing worth a damn unfortunately. He's like George Lucas, a victim of his own accidental success. :(
 
Did you just imply Supreme Commander Forged Alliance was not totally wonderful? Man the multiplayer battles I've had with that game... and the community is great too, similar to the TA community. Actually I think it's the same community lol.

Everything else sucked though, yeah. SupCom2 is also one of the most wtf moments I've seen from a sequel done by the originating company. You can have fun with it but the motives for the changes escape me.

Planetary Annihilation was introduced to me by one of my Total Annihilation & SupCom buddies. I will be all over that when it comes out!
 
news to me, I loved supcom and fa so ill closely watch this.
maybe start with wathcing the interview when I got some more (quiet) time.

I like how a globe removes the "safe corners" of a map, dreaming of a rts utilising this since a long time. But I dont think spreading off to different planets is a good idea.
 
swaaye said:
Did you just imply Supreme Commander Forged Alliance was not totally wonderful?
Click to expand...
I felt Supcom had a lot of issues, including crash problems, bad AI, unit pathing problems and CPU multicore balancing problems.
 
Grall said:
I felt Supcom had a lot of issues, including crash problems, bad AI, unit pathing problems and CPU multicore balancing problems.
Click to expand...
The original SupCom is best forgotten. Forged Alliance is basically that with a ton of fixes, some nice new units and an additional faction. Then throw in the Sorian AI mod and you're good to go. Sorian actually developed SupCom2's official AI and that is definitely one aspect to SC2 that doesn't suck.

The SupCom games will max out a dual core easily but they don't really scale past 3 cores. There are two main threads. In multiplayer with the AI, the simulation thread ends up being by far the most demanding. Without AI it's much less demanding.
 
Sorian is in for PA too :)

SupCom2 had so much promise: nice units, better AI, better pathing, better 3D engine.
Then they put that all to waste with stupid little out of scale, low poly & low texture quality maps.

Regarding scalability: they have gone to client/server model with dedicated server running AI/physics etc & clients only having to draw changes.
Size of battles/galaxy being scalable depending on how big your server is but they say should be able to do decently big battles on your LAN running the server on a fairly low power PC (presume with a client on that PC too?)
 
Wow
Planetary Annihilation is 83€ on steam. I really dont know what to say about such ridiculous price. After all the support they got from kickstarter people they are now pulling something like that? Dont they understand the difference between voluntary donations and retail pricing?
 
From what I understand, the €83 price was pre-announced since the original kickstarter, and the price is going to drop over time they have stated.

Still, it's a really bad idea and I would have advised against it had I been in a position to do so; not everyone can be expected to read up on an entire history of a project so they can understand why a game is listed at a ludicrous price. ...Because it is ludicrous, there's no other word for it.

Even if they are following a pre-announced plan they deserve being slagged off for this.
 
DeF said:
Wow
Planetary Annihilation is 83€ on steam. I really dont know what to say about such ridiculous price. After all the support they got from kickstarter people they are now pulling something like that? Dont they understand the difference between voluntary donations and retail pricing?
Click to expand...

The higher cost is for early alpha access, the regular price won't be that much.
 
Most games we buy are initially beta testing experiences anyway. SupCom was essentially the $50 alpha/beta of SupCom: Forged Alliance. ;)

I have a friend who's a SupCom / Total Annihilation fan like me and he went for this alpha apparently. I don't know if he's tried it yet though. He's a Kickstarter donator so maybe he got in that way.
 
Davros said:
So they are actually charging for being an alpha tester, it should be the other way round
Click to expand...

No, they are making it the same entry level as their Kickstarter. That way people that contributed to their Kickstarter campaign don't feel like they are getting screwed by helping to fund the development of the game.

Nothing more, nothing less.

AFAIK, they also get all rewards of that monetary level of Kickstarter contribution.

Regards,
SB
 
This is 'pay to get access to Alpha instead of having to wait for the game to be out'.
If you want to pay lots of $$$ to have access to a buggy incomplete game then go ahead & do it.

There is a big Early Access highlight & this notification:
What the developers say:
“Please be aware that not all of the features of the game are available. We are currently playing with a subset as the game isn't completed. By getting early access you are helping us to shape and form the game. Because we take feedback seriously we think that prioritizing access to the game early on is important. So we've put an emphasis on getting the game in front of you as early as possible.

Our anticipated schedule is as follows:

Alpha Early Access Begins: June 16th, 2013 - Alpha access may be restricted to online connection required

Beta Early Access Begins: September 6th, 2013 - Beta access may be restricted to online connection required

Retail Access Begins: December 15th, 2013

Please Note: These dates are subject to change. We will do everything we can to meet them, but it is possible that these dates may change as we continue the development process.”
Click to expand...

Me, I'm gonna wait for the final game.
Partly because I'm a cheap-ass but partly because I've got better things to do with my life than waste time on a buggy incomplete game.
 
Wargaming, the developers who created World of Tanks have bought the intellectual property of two Atari Games, Total Annihilation and Master of Orion. This means that a new sequel of Total Annihilation -one of my favourite RTS games ever- might be in the works.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2013/07/23/wargaming-buys-total-annihilation-and-maste/

article_img.jpg
 
The mod community for TA is still very active I noticed. Isn't that crazy. :)

One can only hope that a new TA would be more like Forged Alliance than Supcom 2. One can also hope that Planetary Annihilation turns out well.

The TA universe itself doesn't really mean anything to me.
 
Cyan said:
Wargaming, the developers who created World of Tanks have bought the intellectual property of two Atari Games, Total Annihilation and Master of Orion. This means that a new sequel of Total Annihilation -one of my favourite RTS games ever- might be in the works.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2013/07/23/wargaming-buys-total-annihilation-and-maste/
Click to expand...

I'd rather have it otherwise, but I'm convinced that all they'll do is rape the franchise into another free-to-play MOBA...
 
Well for me the price of 83$ was a no go, specially at alpha level. I dont know if this is the case here, but participation to alpha is offtly really limited, at standard price im ok, but not at 83$.. Features are added in general slowly, when the participation is not time limited on a week ( open only the week end for some games ), with the bugs and queue etc ...

Ofc in general i dont enter alpha test for "play" tha game ( offtly for discover it and help if i can ) ....
 
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