If you liked Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander, or were able to see the interesting game behind all of Planetary Annihilation, you should check out https://www.beyondallreason.info/ instead of continuing to support this company after all the BS of PA.
instead of continuing to support this company after all the BS of PA
Any context for this? I've played PA a little and enjoyed it well enough, but I'm totally out of the loop regarding any drama / shady practices surrounding it.
Others can probably add more, but PA started as a Kickstarter back in the wild West days of Kickstarter. Lots of promises made, lots of concepts shown. Biggest failures I can recall from that hazily distant time:
Last minute they added an always-online requirement to play. This was in the early 2010s, and was very frowned upon considering the local-first nature of TA. Also lead to enormous stability issues for months after launch.
The promise was for a TA/SC successor, but what we got was far more cartoony and watered down than TA/SC and what was shown during Kickstarter. A lot of the core game loops of TA/SC were simply missing or so simplified they no longer mattered.
While the game was still in a fairly immature, broken, buggy, incomplete state, they released Planetary Annihilation: Titans. This was probably done to duck all the poor reviews they had on their Steam page, which stemmed from the issues with the Kickstarter campaign promises and the mentioned bugs/incompleteness on release. Titans was significantly better, but required a new purchase (begrudgingly discounted if you had bought PA early enough) and offered a lot of improvements that should have been brought to the original game for free.
All of that said, since the Titans release, Uber has generally done right by the community, but it was a painful and bumpy road. Most of the community turned their focus to work on Beyond All Reason, rather than continue to depend on Uber.
Thanks for the summary! Yeah, I can see how anyone who bought the original Planetary Annihilation would have felt burned by all of that. Titans is what I've played and I did have a good time with it, but it seems like getting to that point was a rough time. I'll have to check out Beyond All Reason, I'm not familiar with it but it seems promising from the reviews!
I backed the game at a high enough level to get a “physical” release, and enjoyed my time with the game, but the game ever hit it’s stride until Titans came out.
They also had a crypto miner put into their dying game SMNC during one of its last patches, you could mine crypto from them to get keys for lootboxes to get hats in SMNC.
BAR is good and so is Zero-K. If you’re more of a C&C guy OpenRA is in great shape. Honestly indie and community developed RTS’s are absolutely spanking other efforts.
I mentioned this in another comment, but they’ve renamed themselves TWICE to try and dodge their shady reputation from ruining Super Monday Night Combat and the Planetary Annihilation fiasco.
Who remembers that they delivered a half-baked Planetary Annihilation out of early access and then move their product to Planetary Annihilation: Titans to get rid of the bad steam reviews?
Did you ever get into Supreme Commander? It's a true, updated TA successor. Otherwise now there's Beyond All Reason, which the community has largely migrated to.
Oh but do you also remember how they blew up SMNC (Super Monday Night Combat) on their way out, and their last two moves on SMNC were:
1 - Adding more microtransactions, AND LETTING THEM MINE CRYPTO ON YOUR COMPUTER TO GET THEM!!!
2 - Apologizing and promising to update the game soon, and abandoning it to work on PA, which had a day 1 price of $90 on Early Access (because it wouldn’t be fair to the kickstart backers)!
I loved MNC, I loved SMNC until they wrecked it, but I will never give that company another cent. Also if you’re curious why you never heard of Star Theory Games doing all that shady stuff, it’s because they used to be Uber Entertainment Inc. and literally renamed themselves to try and shed the bad name they made for themselves. Oh and now they’ve changed their name AGAIN to Galactic Annihilation, but it’s the same people. Do not trust them.
Oh boy, I was not aware of this at all, thank you for the enlightenment. What utter douchebags. I think I've known them as Uber Entertainment from the beginning, but it's been some time now.
Seem like those turds have a pretty straight modus operandi in regards to changing name every now and then when they eventually shit the bed.
Ah they kept the graphical choice of Planetary Annihilation… Not my favorite (I know, purely personal taste).
Like the idea a lot thought. Could be fun to have a “two mans team” mode where you can split the tasks however you want (two different fronts with production and battle? One full production and one commander? Etc…)
Wasn’t Planetary Annihilation developed by Uber? I need to take a look a the kickstarter. Thanks for the share!
I’ve been thinking about this combination for a while. I’m curious how well it’s gonna work, since factory games are usually the type of games that require a lot of attention. I can’t imagine having to rebuild all kinds of complex recipices only to be attacked again by the time you fixed it. Then again, you can also get attacked on Factorio and there it works well.
Interesting game, sounds like something to keep an eye on
Yeah… If someone takes out a complex part of your production, is that going to just end your game because you can’t practically divide your attention effectively? I can imagine a couple of ways around this, but it’s a challenge. I suppose that’s another layer of strategy in the whole game… But I also think unless it’s very streamlined it’s going to put a lot of people off.
Build redundancy, make sure you prioritize hardening and defending the right things, do the scouting to find their key infrastructure and target that?
There are valuable pieces in normal RTS, too. The main difference here is that you have more capacity to obscure and creatively distribute that value to make it harder to find.
If it’s anything like factorio you could probably sneak in, flip one component around, and then everything would grind to a halt while I panic and try to figure out what is wrong.
Mindustry did something similar to this (tower defense instead of RTS). It’s actually a really fun game. It worked by simplifying the factory part enough that you could slap down things quick and dirty in between waves of enemies.
Ah yeah true, I kinda forgot about Mindustry. There it works well indeed. Especially since it also has some interesting stuff like the Thorium reactor. Something like that would also work well in an RTS
Ah yeah true, I kinda forgot about Mindustry. There it works well indeed. Especially since it also has some interesting stuff like the Thorium reactor. Something like that would also work well in an RTS
I’ve been thinking of something similar too, not direct control of the units though. Would be two factories producing units and warring it out along different lanes.
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