Comments on: Thoughts: Planetary Annihilation

By: Rolly

Rolly — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 16:40:26 +0000

In my E-mail today, The announcement of the Oct 9th Update for offline play. If it works well they’d have been much better off to hold release until now or possibly Halloween. I wonder if we’ll ever see the sales figures.

By: Gap Gen

Gap Gen — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 21:08:11 +0000

Yeah, I think it’s fair to judge a game that’s been called released by the devs as released. Obv stuff like Minecraft is ongoing but it was still ‘reviewed’ on ‘release’.

By: Rolly

Rolly — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 16:38:55 +0000

You can afford to have one plan that requires clever micro at a time, Whatever is happening on the other side of the planet needs to be a blob given an order to crash into an area or need very sparing intervention on your part. Multi front warfare on a large planet can get interesting but it’s multi planet warfare isn’t too bad as you really only have to manage where you want to make contact and where the enemy wants to make contact, (and avoiding any unfortunate commander/nuke interaction.

I’m waiting for the local game to work before I take a swing at the large planets, The medium games feel more similar to the tighter TA maps with early micro being much more important and the combat is much more desperate from an early stage. Some of the team games go back and forth in a very MOBAesque fashion.

In response to various; you can’t review a released game based on planned features, it’s a product that you can buy.it being unfinished has a spot in the Pro/Con list and it’s not on the Pro side. Obviously if they get chronocam/save and the local server in the the coming weeks history will judge them a lot kinder than if it takes months.

By: Gap Gen

Gap Gen — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 22:09:23 +0000

How annoying is it to command troops on a sphere, when you can’t see the other side? I imagine porcing is a lot harder with no map edges to hunker against, but when I tried the alpha I found it frustrating to not be able to command effectively more than 30 degrees away from your current view onto the planet, let alone defeat an omniscient AI across several.

By: David Schuessele

David Schuessele — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 17:53:30 +0000

You can refresh the game’s UI by hitting F5 as if you were using a chrome browser, which in essence you are. This solves the blue screen bug from prematurely ending your games.

Ending the game can be done by:

Teleporting Units in for attack
Nuking
SSX sniping
Planet Smashing
Annihilazering

Oh and that gas giant you smashed into, I’m afraid that is deliberate, It happened to cross the path your moon was taking. Ahh celestial mechanics.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 08:24:15 +0000

It’s a mistake, however the damage will be limited by the fact that most of the people who are likely to buy Planetary Annihilation already bought it while it was in Early Access, meaning the number of new users like me who are coming into the game fresh and getting annoyed because it’s still somewhat incomplete will be lower than for a game releasing straight from development to 1.0.

As far as Uber are concerned, the true damage will be that the “Official Launch” of the game is last big spike of interest they’ll enjoy before they put the game on sale, and it won’t be as big a spike as it could be because word of mouth won’t be as glowing as it should be. Which means a lower bottom line for them. It’s a self-defeating strategy.

By: trialq

trialq — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 19:14:01 +0000

Like I say, v1.0 release seems to give the finished message, but they are still working on the features that are not in yet (ranks, ladders, matchmaking, server released to name a few). It’s a risk they have taken for whatever reason, which I don’t agree with, but there it is. Time will tell if it’s a big mis-step, a correct decision, or somewhere in between.

By: Aleksei Volchok

Aleksei Volchok — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 15:50:44 +0000

>They definitely haven’t said “the game is finished”, quite the opposite.

Steam says OFFICIAL LAUNCH with very big letters.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 09:33:21 +0000

That’s all good stuff to know — I thought I was missing something with the unit loading, but couldn’t figure it out for the life of me. I also didn’t know that nukes were interplanetary weapons.

I do think the online only nature of the game and the lack of saves are pretty huge deals – like it or not the big “Official Launch!” banners on Steam do give the impression that the game is finished now, but I’d expect a finished RTS to have a save system at the very least. Online I’m slightly more flexible on, but only because I have an excellent net connection; I have a friend who also bought Planetary Annihilation on launch, only to discover that it ran awfully on his system because it was constantly streaming data over a subpar connection.

Don’t get me wrong, I do really like PA despite its plethora of issues, but right now it’s not set up to let me play it on my terms. I’ll go back to it once they have all that stuff in the game, since I think it’ll be a hell of a lot of fun once it is.

By: trialq

trialq — Mon, 08 Sep 2014 18:11:17 +0000

Also, you can refresh the screen by hitting F5 to get over issues like the screen bugging out.