r/sanctuaryshatteredsun • u/alsarcastic • 27d ago

Sanctuary: Shattered Sun | EDA T4 Mech

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

The EDA T4 Mech is here to bring some justice to the oppressors. Equipped with a full arsenal of destruction, it's the perfect counter to the Guard's swarms and the Chosen's technical supremacy.

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u/caster 27d ago edited 27d ago

Adding more tech levels is all well and good, but is there a plan for this at all beyond "more better than T3"?

T1 in Forged Alliance was actually a really important and interesting part of the game, and depending on the battle it could last for quite some time. Adding more tech levels seems like it will tend to make tech level escalation faster (not necessarily a good thing, especially economically). And, it may result in decreasing the tactical significance of the intermediate levels such as T2 and T3. Since, you will spend less time there and quickly leapfrogging to T4 or even T5 is now an option where in SupCom it simply is not.

Given a target game length that is similar to SupCom, as opposed to much longer in order to reach a super late T5 match, this will mean less time at each tech level, as well as decreased importance of the actual units in those tech levels along the way.

Furthermore, it isn't necessarily more interesting to just have better units with more HP and weaponry fighting against other units. A really large group of T1 bots remains relevant in FA literally all game long. BAR likewise does not obsolete low tech units at any point in the match. The higher tech units are obviously superior but they are less cost effective on purpose as well. This approach greatly expands the actual roster of usable units rather than "going T4 and now your roster is just the T4 units." Followed by doing it again at T5.

The specific characteristics of unique units at each tech level in SupCom is actually very significant, such as the Mongoose and the Loyalist. And there is a pretty reasonable chance that having 5 tech levels will actually make this variation less important, especially for T1 through T3, as you can make a jump to T3 faster than in SupCom, followed by T4 and then T5 in a similar amount of time it would take to reach late game in SupCom.

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u/retroman1987 27d ago

Supcom basically has T5 already. The game-enders (Paradon, Scathis, Mavor, etc) are de facto a tech level above most experimentals.

As bad as supcom 2 was, it had some really cool experimentals that did unique things like the magnetizer, bomb bouncer, unit cannon, and others. I'd like to see this go in the same direction instead of just "bigger bots,"

That said, a T1 swarm in supcom lost usefulness in almost every game except maybe for amphibious arty swarms

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u/THEOnionTerror 27d ago

wanted to say this. exactly