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Planetary Annihilation is out.... uh... OT?

I think this video showcases the extreme potential of this game and how truly epic these games can be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6ACTIcWZyY

The last ten minutes are absolutely crazy.

This looks like the single greatest and most clever awesome rts ever made. (also you can build walls, I'm a sucker for walls in rtses)

But the no save thing (there has never been a bigger dealbreaker in any rts ever) And always online for now? You can make the most delicious chocolate cake ever and still render it worthless by throwing it on the floor and stepping in it.


You guys backing this and buying it day one got ubered :p You should know the best way to describe their games is 'a crying shame'
I sincerely hope they don't abandon this before polishing it up , removing the drm , adding lan support (if it's not already in) and allowing you to save.
I would loveeeeeee to play this

If they don't,it'll be a crying shame. Especially as this one in offline mode would remain a viable game for people to keep enjoying forever, it wouldn't rely on a big online community like their previous games.

I don't get the hate for smnc btw (as a game of course; it died a sorry death and they abandoned that too). I had a lot of fun with it, Great and by far the most competent 3rd person shootbang take on the traditional moba with good game mechanics.

Someone should make a hype thread with that video (and big disclaimers about the no save thing!), the game gets zero attention on gaf, there's plenty of rts lovers who would be grateful for knowing this exists

I wish uber would get a benign publisher that can fund their brilliant gameplay ideas and execution while keeping them in check and help them finish their games properly.
Imagine them getting to do this project for valve *drool*
 

Sinatar

Official GAF Bottom Feeder
Yea the actual game seems very solid so far, but they need to get these issues ironed out with a quickness.

A poor PC game release will rarely overcome the stigma of being buggy, no matter how much patching they get.
 

boltz

Member
Welp, the impressions of this game at this point are not too hot. I really hope Uber puts more work into it, but their track history isn't too promising.
 

prudislav

Member
Wait wait wait wait wait...

This game has no save option? What?

not in the match for now. Saving is planned as part of "Chronocam" feature (pretty much interactive re-play where you can start from whatever position of a saved replay you want)
as for Offline mode, they've already tested local servers on PAX , but for now it consists of running numerous batch files to work , so they probably just need to make UI for that and test it
as for LAN - the funcionality is in the servers from the start, but so far hidden in servers in "dev mode" - so i guess when they'll finish local servers - they'll unlock this aswell
 

Hrothgar

Member
The lack of saving during Galactic War games is rather annoying. I understand why there is no manual saving in the campaign, but during battles?

Well It's been out for about a week now and there no reviews up on Metacritic yet. I did find Tom Chick's review and he lambasted it as expected.
Why we won’t live happily ever after with Planetary Annihilation

Hopefully there is a Three Moves Ahead podcast dissecting this game and it's development.

As to the game, it was stupid to 'release' the game in this state.

This just doesn't seem to be the game for him, as I disagree with most of his complaints, some of which just don't make sense. The second camera (which he doesn't seem to know about) and the drop down planet selection box in the top right of the screen make multiple planet management quite possible, although I concede that if you are fighting on 4+ planets at the same time, it can be hectic. He also mentions a lack of alerts, yet the top of my screen is saturated by alerts, which can bring you right to where the action is. If anything he should have criticized that there are too many alerts during fights, as I really don't need an alert for every small energy plant that gets attacked. Complaining about transporters and the distance between planets? Really?

But I don’t get any sense that Planetary Annihilation is tuned to keep me and my opponents from playing a city builder until one of a couple of superweapons slams the game shut. Is that on the players for not being aggressive, or is it on Uber for not giving us much incentive to be aggressive? Even if we share responsibility, Uber hasn’t done the work of tuning their RTS to play like an RTS instead of a multiplayer city builder.

Then he also says you can't turtle, but that it is also a glorified city builder, which would be mutually exclusive in this case. Apparently there is also no incentive to attack your opponent? Yet, I haven't played a match yet where the players (or the AI for that matter) didn't try everything in their power to eliminate the opponent.
 

Kiru

Member
Won this on steamgifts.com, still have to play it. Kinda fear it won't run well on a GTS 250 lol. Nvidia gotta release that 900 series.
 

erpg

GAF parliamentarian
Still no drm free

won't be trusting these guys ever again on kickstarter
Yeah, I really wish I hadn't redeemed my key and just pawned this thing off. Oh well.

I'm 0/3 on Kickstarter right now. Just give me Project Eternity & Shantae, let me forget about the site for awhile.
 

Sinatar

Official GAF Bottom Feeder
Eurogamer Review - 6/10

Eurogamer said:
Where Planetary Annihilation started to lose me is the instant the game began getting tougher. As you'd imagine, I started wanting to learn the correct answer to what factory to build first, and which of the four unit types to build from any given factory, and in what combination. I wasn't expecting StarCraft-like levels of balance, but I wanted to learn the point of all these toys. In what situations should you choose robot factories over vehicles? The seas, when they appeared, always seemed peculiarly small. Why the sprawling naval tech tree? What good are flamethrower tanks? When's it worth building base defences when the enemy can approach from anywhere?

You know what I think is next? The option to select your units, bases, even planets and toggle AI on and off.

These are questions with one ugly answer. There are two games tucked away in Planetary Annihilation. The colourful one comprising its opening hour, full of variety and promise, and what it actually is: players racing to draw the quickest, ugliest lines through all of its content.

Utilising the game's secret third resource of clicks-per-minute, you want to get your economy up and running as fast as possible (pros recommend using mod assistance to smooth out the game's interface), first producing fabricators and then sending them roaming across the planet to metal extractors as fast as possible. Meanwhile, you want to construct factory after factory, spewing out tanks, and with any mental faculties you have left you'll want to be dispatching tanks around the world to crush any and all metal extractors and fabricators you find. Naval units are almost useless, while planes can be lethal. Advanced tech can be safely ignored until you're involved in the business of harassing your opponent's own factory construction. Altogether it's a tense but ultimately exhausting exercise in micromanagement, and compares unfavourably with other modern RTS games in terms of breadth and depth.

Things are most awkward of all in Planetary Annihilation's own personal new frontier: the additional dimension of interstellar combat. Spacecraft have by far the least variety of any unit type, and ordering them around the solar system is the most taxing and least enjoyable aspect of the game. There's no large-scale transport unit, either, so in any single-player campaign games without advanced space tech (with which you could build a teleporter from orbit), launching a planetary invasion means loading a crowd of units into an equally sized fleet of single-unit transport craft. A logistical operation with all the appeal of counting sand.

All of which is an underwhelming challenge to try and master and it's unpleasant to be on the receiving end of it, with tiny little groups of units ceaselessly raiding your handiwork. After being burned once when the AI took out my main power plant, I got into the habit of having fabricators building an unending string of power plants on multiple planets, just so my teleporters and factories would stay online. The entire game is like this. Strategy takes a backseat to speed, efficiency and swarming your opponents.
 

Card Boy

Banned
I don't understand why Destiny has a 213 page review thread when it has a 76 meta (2 below Wolftenstein: New World order)

There should be a 200 page thread on this game instead.

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I told you guys like 10 times Uber sucks hard.
 
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