RTS Planetary Annihilation: Titans Released

[DakaSha]

I heard yesterday that Save/Load was still in beta.
If this is true im sucking my own damn dick

 

[Raghar]

And it's already part of a €5.46 bundle: http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/killer-bundle-3/

GG Uber

You can send me a spare steam code, I play SupCom FA, so I could laugh at what they did to originally decent game. (It went bit downhill in SupCom 2...)

 

[Makabb]

titans is out

 

[Infinitron]

PA gets an EE: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-08-18-planetary-annihilation-titans-announced-released

Planetary Annihilation: Titans announced, released
Free for Kickstarter backers.

Planetary Annihilation: Titans is an updated version of the sci-fi real-time strategy game and it's out now on Steam.

Titans adds 21 new units to the game, including five huge titan class units. Elsewhere, there's new multi-level terrain, a new bounty mode, and an improved tutorial for the single-player.

Uber took Planetary Annihilation to Kickstarter back in 2012 and raised an impressive $2.2m. The game left Early Access and launched proper in September 2014.

Titans is free for Planetary Annihilation's 44,000 Kickstarter backers, and on sale with a discount for those who own the original game.

"It takes everything we've learned from Planetary Annihilation over the last two years plus feedback from our players and combines it into a new experience," developer Uber Entertainment said.

 

[Destroid]

I'm pretty amazed they invested any further in this game given the reception it got.

 

[Baptismbyfire]

Wow, is that how the original game looks like? It looks like a bunch of plastic Lego cockroaches fighting. It takes away from the awe factor of experimental units.

 

[Infinitron]

Wot I Think: Planetary Annihilation – Titans

Announced and released today, Planetary Annihilation: Titans [official site] is an expandalone version of Uber Entertainment’s Planetary Annihilation. The original game, Kickstarted and released last year, was trapped in the orbit of two RTS giants – Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. Staff at Uber had worked on both games and their new venture was seen as a spiritual successor of sorts, pitting enormous robotic armies against one another, backed up by Commander units, supply-and-demand resource management, and base-building.

Titans adds, tweaks and modifies but does it do enough to make Planetary Annihilation worthy of a second look? I’ve been playing since late last week and here’s wot I think.

At launch, Planetary Annihilation had a singleplayer skirmish mode but concentrated its efforts on competitive multiplayer. The Titans edition – free to backers of the original and discounted for those who bought it after release – adds some flesh to the metallic skeleton of singleplayer, building on the Galactic War campaign mode that Uber patched in after launch. I’ve been playing for three days straight and that’s enough time to convince me that this is the definitive version of Planetary Annihilation. Sadly, that’s because the changes quickly bump up against the limitations of the current design, adding to it rather than significantly altering it. If ever there were a game that needed something new rather than MORE and BIGGER, Planetary Annihilation is it. Titans allows players to launch interplanetary nukes and to plough moons into their enemies’ planets, but always comes back to fighting over a small patch of land.

The headline additions, as the title suggests, are the Titan units. They’re enormous, capable of grinding armies into the dust and armed with super-weapons that can turn the tide of battle. There are new high-tier units in the other categories as well – naval, bot, vehicular and aerial – and a new tutorial to replace the limp video that came with the original game. The tutorial begins with the Titans and, presumably by accident rather than design, immediately shows that they’re not game-changers at all. They’re introduced as large units that can walk through an army and that’s almost precisely what they are. Big tanks in all but name.

Like so much in Planetary Annihilation, the Titans are a bigger form of something else. Units scale in power and size but there’s very little tactical variation between them. Occasionally you’ll need to build a navy to attack or defend a coastline, or might be forced to rely on airpower to hit vulnerable positions, but on the whole PA foregoes the Art of War in favour of the Graft of War. Efficiency wins out over inventiveness.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some people prefer efficiency and the construction of a well-oiled war machine to the minute tactical details that can decide a specific skirmish, or the operational decisions that decide a war. PA is an efficient game for efficient people, and Titans greatest improvement lies in the ways it now communicates that efficiency to the player. The tutorial explains camera anchor points, continuous build queues, area of effect commands and the use of teleporters. It doesn’t QUITE manage to explain how the two-resource economy works but there are prompts whenever the flow of supply and demand is broken at one end or the other. Essentially, resources require constant balance between intake and output rather than long-term planning and storage.

It’s telling that the most important elements of PA: Titans are in its highlighting of the interface tools and shortcuts that make its frantic arms race manageable. Rather than overhauling any part of the game, Uber are attempting to show what already exists in a better light. They succeed but the fundamental design of the game continues to be frustrating. The occasional beauty of the planets – this is the Mario Galaxy of RTS games, with fully rotatable and explorable tiny spheres – means little when you spend most of your time zoomed out, ordering icons around a map whose shape serves to confuse distances rather than altering strategies.

The surfaces are more interesting now, at least. Multi-level terrain allows for defensive positions, bottlenecks through valleys and slightly more complex base construction. It’s an important change, adding a small but much-needed layer to the ground combat that is at the heart of PA’s eternal war. The other part of the war takes place between planets, using orbital units that can transport fabrication units to other bodies in a system. Those units can then construct teleporters to beam entire armies between planets and moons. At the top end of the research and construction ladders there are engines that can steer moons into enemy planets and evacuating a planet before such a strike was my favourite multiplayer moment. I still lost the round but ‘porting my troops out at the last minute felt like precisely the kind of grand scheme that PA should be host to.

Mostly, it’s tanks vs tanks or bots vs bots though, on a planet’s surface. I used the word ‘ladders’ above to describe the progress through tech. At the heart of PA, that’s what I see – a ladder that every player attempts to scramble up, in a race to the top. The Titans add another couple of rungs but don’t change the shape.

In the singleplayer Conquest mode, technologies must be unlocked from one mission to the next but I find that picking between a vehicle factory and a bot factory simply reminds me that there’s little difference between the two. There are other techs in the form of buffs that do allow for some strategic variation by powering up defensive structures or build costs for various units, but they don’t change the basic form of the race to the top, they simply add various boosts, bumps and hurdles along the way. The AI seems more interesting than in the base game, occasionally showing signs that it is something other than a perfect machine. That said, either I’ve become significantly better at the game, or the AI has had some of its advantages stripped away. It hasn’t put up as much of a fight as it did in the early days of the original release.

As I worked my way through the Conquest mode for the second time, I picked different technologies but ended up falling into the same patterns. The PA community talk about a third resource, alongside harvested energy and metal – that resource is attention. I can see the value in recognising that. With its multiple battlefields, various methods of attack and vulnerable Chess-King Commander, PA trains players to shift their gaze and effort from one spot to another, quickly and smoothly. I’ve become accustomed to that and I’d love to try some 2v2 multiplayer battles since I think the game shines with cooperative play, when attention can be divided and plans can become more elastic and complex.

This is an improved version of the game but, in singleplayer and in 1v1, it retains the same rigidity as the original release. The story of Conquest mode is of several AI commanders waking to find their creators gone. They commit themselves to war, without reason or purpose. As I started afresh in each new system, queuing the same build orders and organising the same base layouts, I realised the structure of the game perfectly reflected the story. Planetary Annihilation’s vision of the future of war is a finger, clicking on build queue – forever.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

It is only good in multiplayer. Please, kindly fuck off with your impressions based on single player campaing or vs AI skirmish.

 

[Endemic]

Seems like Supcom 2 with asteroids and only 1 faction.

 

[Grokalibre]

I remember people pledeging hundreds for this game and hyping the "play on spheres" thing a lot, but Spore had done it already and it was a shit game so, well, idk...

 

[Zewp]

For only $13 more, get the game you should have gotten when you bought the original!

Yai! So kind of Uber.

 

[Infinitron]

Oh lol, they're not giving it for free to all owners? How do you do that in the age of CD Projekt EEs? FFS.

 

[Endemic]

I remember people pledging hundreds for this game and hyping the "play on spheres" thing a lot, but Spore had done it already and it was a shit game so, well, idk...

Did Uber forget that TA had amphibious vehicles, torpedo bombers\fully realised naval warfare, and radar\sonar jamming, among many other things? They sorely overestimated what they could do on a kickstarter budget when hyping the planet-hopping feature.

 

[Johannes]

Did Uber forget that TA had amphibious vehicles, torpedo bombers\fully realised naval warfare, and radar\sonar jamming, among many other things? They sorely overestimated what they could do on a kickstarter budget when hyping the planet-hopping feature.

Obviously you shouldn't include too complex stuff related to a single planet like those, when your scope is on the planetary level. It's their first and crucial mistake that doomed the whole project, they didn't have a clear vision how the space travel would work when starting out. It was obvious they can't just have a TA remake for the ground combat and expect the space stuff to mesh at all with that.


And Infinitron ffs, don't hijack my thread (again). Make your own one for proper clarity.

 

[Whiran]

Oh lol, they're not giving it for free to all owners? How do you do that in the age of CD Projekt EEs? FFS.

Same company that charged $100 USD for the alpha...

Imagine being one of those people who paid $100 USD when it went up on Steam and still don't get this update for free.

 

[Zewp]

To be fair, the kind of person who paid $100 for this game are probably busy calling everyone else entitled for expecting to get this for free.

 

[Raghar]

For only $13 more, get the game you should have gotten when you bought the original!

Yai! So kind of Uber.

Kickstarter participants are receiving it for free.

BTW have you seen a real world company? Normal real world company?

 

[Endemic]

So, decided to pick it up to try it out for myself, since the base game is a couple bucks now.

If you're receiving the error that Offline play is Disabled or Unavailable, it may be the case that:

• You are not running a 64-bit OS
• You are not running an Intel Quad Core, AMD Six Core, or better
• You do not have enough RAM (8GB or more is needed)

So I can't use offline mode because of their bizarre coding (needing to run a server)? Gee, thanks Uber.

 

[Raghar]

Normal persons are using pirated version when they are trying a singleplayer game.

 

[Endemic]

Normal persons are using pirated version when they are trying a singleplayer game.

I get that, but since when was a hex-core mentioned on the Steam page?

 

[Raghar]

Intel 4-core, AMD 6-core. That's normal recommended configuration for CPU demanding games.

 

[Endemic]

Intel 4-core, AMD 6-core. That's normal recommended configuration for CPU demanding games.

Should be listed on the Steam requirements page then (it says quad-core for recommended CPU).

Didn't leave a great first impression by crashing when I tried to pick a skirmish map. Then crashing again 5 minutes into a skirmish with 1 AI on a 1 planet system. With the settings turned down at the minimum res it looks no better than Total Annihilation... must be too awesome for my PC right? The memory leaks still haven't been fixed?

Think I'll go back to Supreme Commander. Good thing PA was so cheap...

 

[Raghar]

What CPU do you have? SupCom FA require 4.2 GHz Intel. (Otherwise players would throws tables at you for playing Setons.)

 

[Endemic]

What CPU do you have? SupCom FA require 4.2 GHz Intel. (Otherwise players would throws tables at you for playing Setons.)

It's a Phenom II X4. I get that it's not amazing by 2015 standards, but the PA requirements page claims a dual core CPU of non-specified type is the minimum. It even mentions integrated graphics as being supported...yeah right.

"MINIMUM:

OS:Windows Vista SP2 64-bit
Processor:32 or 64-bit Dual Core or better
Memory:4 GB RAM
Memory:Integrated graphics with shared memory requires 6GB
Graphics:Shader 3.0 / OpenGL 3.2 +
Resolution:1280x720
DirectX®:9.0c
Hard Drive:2 GB HD space"

As for Setons...boring. Yeah, the simspeed does start to tank after 8 players have spammed their ASF blobs, but I rarely play matches of that scale.

 

[Data4]

Wow, is that how the original game looks like? It looks like a bunch of plastic Lego cockroaches fighting. It takes away from the awe factor of experimental units.

Looks to me like playing army men on a basketball. Fuck the shitty scaling in it. I prefer the flat vastness of SupCom1/Forged Alliance.