I am going to do something I am only going to do once, I analyze the game (or rather, with does different to anyone else, and why that is maybe a problem
That no tier 1 unit has an icon is actually one of the gravest oversights of them all (all aside). In a way it is actually kinda baffling that for once I agree with IGN, I thought I liked planets....
I was mistaken!.. the idea was new, it was cool. But it is extreme usability nightmare. All Views only display
50% of the planet and the closer you zoom, the less you see, there is no way around that unless you use a tethered PiP, and you only have 1 pip....... If there was only 1 major planet
(when I saw the KS I thought moons would be dominated entirely by "outer space" units and not act the same as planet locked land battles) it would work, but the more I played the more I realized that other planets are really just "other maps"
Imagine playing SupCom 1 in it's terrifying huge scale
(Tier 3 groups being devastated, insane long range artillery, nuke barrages) on 4 large maps
at the same time all the while you play Kingslayer mode with a slow moving and VERY low health unit (commander dead, game over). That is PA. And it was a bad idea. A hugely bad idea to not include alternative win conditions.
To quote IGN
It's a fog-of-war you can never dispel; even when you have radar coverage of an entire planet, your situational awareness is severely reduced.
So PA is like playing (1/3 of) SupCom 1 with half the map blocked off unless you focus on it (then the other half gets blocked off) in terms of usability that is a nightmare. It's funny that I never realized until PA what huge genius it was from Civ 4 and 5 to do planets the way they did them. Hex and Grid based maps can be easily "wrapped" but without having geometric tiling at your disposal you literally can not fix the situational awareness problem.
PA would have needed severe design overhaul in relation to how they did planets. Planets should have inaccessible poles to some degree (the reason is near the poles, the angles and distances between steps are very small, this means cameras have the problem that they can "flip" over the pole and rotate 180° a HUGE usability problem when playing with pole-lock. And poles are the primary source of distortion in mapping and unwrapping of a sphere.
Planets should have grid based geometry, alá Civ4, this doesn't mean building or movement needs to adhere to the grid, but when it comes down to it a grid based planet allows you to remove poles from the projection and display the ENTIRE planet as a flat map with no (noticeable) distortion. This would have allowed a properly flat projected minimap per planet.
So I can understand that they didn't do it. This is counter to what they already had done to make planets look more planet'ish. (their entire design projects for planets was actually a hugely bad idea in retro-perspective) When you make planets you do everything you can to NOT have to use brushes. (because of relative projection issues). This is why nearly every visual tool in existence uses procedural height-maps as source for planet geometry. This is just, infinitely easier to procedurally generate than brushes on an already existing flat sphere.
But they wanted to do craters without the game requiring
DX11.
Because DX11 has a functionality for craters... this can feed back to CPU and be synced over network just fine. In the end, I realize PA is a series of concessions and band-aids slapped on a genuinely impressive idea the designers had. But they faltered turning that idea into a practical reality. What we have now is PA, and it is not really horrible. It is relatively fun if you set yourself some restrictions. But it COULD have been so much more, so much better.
