And then there's this amusing tidbit from their "how to keep PDS fun and fresh" page:
If you were not considering something to spice up PDS fleet battles, then perhaps you are after something else? While not as fun as commanding three corvette squads up the side of a battle cruiser on an attack run, you could write some fan fiction. One of the key aspects of PDS, more so then their trademark battles, is their sophisticated role play.
God, they really have tipped over into total self-indulgence.
I posted this here as it seemed a little lacking in content for G&C.
(for those that don't know, PDS = "Point Defense Systems", a mod for Homeworld 2)
Yeah, their fanfiction wanking is responsible for most of the impenetrability of the mod. I'm all for the changes they make to HW2, but burying all the information players need to know about units and weapons behind their dense faux-terminology and fluff pieces is irritating.
Funny you mention impenetrability, because I just came across this tidbit over at ModDB:
Unlike almost all RTS's found on the commercial gaming market PDS doesn't target the average gamer. My vision demands a certain air of cruelty in making just about everything inaccessible to players unfamiliar with military doctrines and terminology; and going directly against familiar trends exhibited in most gaming genres.
Self-indulgence and elitism, all in one package... how very efficient.
Bah, you should have posted this over in G&C. And yes, they've become rather self-indulgent and read too much into the Armchair Admiral's Guide to Naval Warfare or something like that.
Gah. Watering down detail and complexity is bad, but introducing detail and complexity THAT ADDS NOTHING for NO REASON and being pleased about it is so amazingly lame it baffles me. The people behind PDS are clearly a bunch of wankers.
Like Nephtys says, useful information (improved heavy guns) is obfuscated (HVRG 300mm mod5 bis) and best of all, they don't bother to explain what everything means. Hours of play later, I've just chosen units that seem effective for my tactics and use those: I simply don't have the time in-game to ponder the differences between the eight different PD missile packs or whatever. Grrr.
You're right about the obfuscation; it almost seems like they don't want you to be able to precisely know what weapons a given ship carries and how effective they'll be against other given ships.
The mod seemed to become this weird animal where they used it to model their fan fiction; so when they say "well the SUPER BATTLESHIP HIIGARA PLUS just got the CIWS 30mm Block C AMGRG FPROT upgrades!", they put it in the mod and oh hey this version of the mod is supposed to take place a couple of months after the last version!
phongn wrote:Bah, you should have posted this over in G&C. And yes, they've become rather self-indulgent and read too much into the Armchair Admiral's Guide to Naval Warfare or something like that.
OTOH, I could move the thread ...
Like I said, I wasn't entirely sure if bitching about PDS justified it's own thread in G&C, but if you want to move it where it might get a little more visibility, you're more than welcome to.
Because of their fanfiction! Maybe it's like, you know, those forums where they're all roleplaying nations or cat people or whatever, and the latest PDS is just the latest 'state of the art' in some wierd space role playing game. It'd explain their huge tooltips full of worthless 'Queen of Lamers fought at Pixel Fag 9, and her 43GE6 bis 2 mk12s defined the battlespace' crap.
I could actually appreciate their intent to hide the actual numbers - many games like StarCraft actually show players the damage values, etc, and that would detract from the game (and lets players devise cheesy tactics). However, leaving players with essentially no idea what's going on, and having descriptions like 'Middling escort performance, but lack of ARMG12 MVPs relegates it to second line duties'. A quick check shows that none of the other ships in the class have ARMG12 MVPs either, so the net result is confusion. You have to dig through massive readmes (mostly fluff, and I fucking hate that) to even find out what an ARMG12 MVP *is*.
Stark wrote:Because of their fanfiction! Maybe it's like, you know, those forums where they're all roleplaying nations or cat people or whatever, and the latest PDS is just the latest 'state of the art' in some wierd space role playing game. It'd explain their huge tooltips full of worthless 'Queen of Lamers fought at Pixel Fag 9, and her 43GE6 bis 2 mk12s defined the battlespace' crap.
I could actually appreciate their intent to hide the actual numbers - many games like StarCraft actually show players the damage values, etc, and that would detract from the game (and lets players devise cheesy tactics). However, leaving players with essentially no idea what's going on, and having descriptions like 'Middling escort performance, but lack of ARMG12 MVPs relegates it to second line duties'. A quick check shows that none of the other ships in the class have ARMG12 MVPs either, so the net result is confusion. You have to dig through massive readmes (mostly fluff, and I fucking hate that) to even find out what an ARMG12 MVP *is*.
So wow. They're modding to play some kind of sandbox DM'ed STGOD...
Anyway. I wouldn't mind so much if a weapon is called the Mk52-Rapid Fire 300mm FGNA mod2 BPLZ-6k, if it had at the end (Heavy Railgun). It's a bad sign when you can't tell the armament difference between your pickets and your flagship...
It is like someone ran an acronymizer over a HAB "information"(read; propaganda) peice.
"Okay, I'll have the truth with a side order of clarity." ~ Dr. Daniel Jackson.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." ~ Stephen Colbert
"One Drive, One Partition, the One True Path" ~ ars technica forums - warrens - on hhd partitioning schemes.
What ticks me off about the whole thing are the INSAIN Building limitations they put into the game.
IN almost any other Homeworld Mod, If I wanted to have fun, I could make as many of any ship I wanted to.. shoot, in one game I once had 6 'Sajuuks' think about that for a second...
Now in this thing... They don't just restrict how many ships you can build, but what types of a given class. For instance, can someone tell me what the bloody use builing only TWO of the multibeam Frigates is to me? Or being able to build only ONE Battle Cruiser? You can't even have more then one freaking shipyard.
And why the bloody hells do they force you to have a Max of EIGHT Gun platforms? You could be 25 in the normal game!
Praying is another way of doing nothing helpful
"Congratulations, you get a cookie. You almost got a fundamental English word correct." Pick
"Outlaw star has spaceships that punch eachother" Joviwan Read "Tales From The Crossroads"! Read "One Wrong Turn"!
Well, PDS isnt that hard to mod to your own desires if you spend around 30 minutes looking around the mod folders. I recently switched nearly all capital missiles to use nuke-like explosions and gave the Hiigarans the capability to build missile pods from their biggest ships (e.g just missile platforms with one huge salvo to fire and insane reload time) the problem was that when I started slugging at the enemy from around 35 klicks, there being some 1000 missiles in space from my ships alone, the screen tended to go white for upto a minute as the new death anims kicked in.
But yeah, the first incarnations of PDS were pretty much devoid of the impenetrable wall of bullcrap, but somewhere around 5.0 the devs and especially Tel'Quessir caught a serious case of "asshattedness" and started the whole weirdy weirdy grammar shit. Sure it makes the game feel more militaristic, but when one doesnt have a damn clue what two different kinds of Destroyers or Frigates can do because of the bullcrap, it gets bad.
Oh btw, the unit build caps are very easy to modify if someone wants to increase 'em. Or alternatively if anyone cant bother but wants higher caps, I can upload my unitcap files for everyone to download.
"The ones they built at the height of nuclear weapons could knock the earth out of its orbit" - Physics expert Envy in reference to the hydrogen bombs built during the cold war.
That would be preferable... As much a fan asI am of HW, i have zero mod skills aside fro mwhat I dream up
Praying is another way of doing nothing helpful
"Congratulations, you get a cookie. You almost got a fundamental English word correct." Pick
"Outlaw star has spaceships that punch eachother" Joviwan Read "Tales From The Crossroads"! Read "One Wrong Turn"!
Rightous Fist Of Heaven wrote:But yeah, the first incarnations of PDS were pretty much devoid of the impenetrable wall of bullcrap, but somewhere around 5.0 the devs and especially Tel'Quessir caught a serious case of "asshattedness" and started the whole weirdy weirdy grammar shit. Sure it makes the game feel more militaristic, but when one doesnt have a damn clue what two different kinds of Destroyers or Frigates can do because of the bullcrap, it gets bad.
The later 4.8 and 4.9 builds were quite excellent. I have fond memories of one of my BCVs being stalked by a Vaygr CVS and only surviving the missile salvos due to the submunition turrets I stuck on the back.
I just don't get the same amount of fun I used to, even if the game is prettier now.
Back in my days at TAUniverse and habitual Total Annihilation play, there was a semi-popular mod called Uberhack, which (rather eerily) was very much like PDS; it was born out of a desire to correct what was percieved as a single flaw in the game. For PDS, it was the addition of a bunch of point defense guns on the big capital starships. For TA, it was adjusting the turn rate of the Penetrator turret so that it wasn't a completely useless unit.
Uberhack began to grow into something more ambitious, to the point where just about everything had been tweaked in some capacity, some units were completely different, and even completely new units had been added. Does this sound familiar?
On more than one occasion, the project leader said that Uberhack was as finished as it was going to get, that he was done with Uberhack, and let's all just sit down and enjoy it.
Every time this happened, the UH community started getting itchy. They had come to enjoy the test builds, the squabbling over whether the Flash was overpowered or underpowered this time around, the little changes to discover and learn how to utilize. And so, after a time, people would start suggesting changes, and eventually development would start back up again. I quite suspect that if TA hadn't gotten a bit old for a lot of people, there'd still be active development of Uberhack today.
It seems to me that the PDS community decided to fully embrace the idea of a continually-changing game.
I've started to play HW2:Complex lately, and it, IMHO, plays more like HW2 than PDS does. The enormous research tree is somewhat tiring, but it is certainly fun.
Uraniun235 wrote:That's definitely something I thought PDS got right. I hate hate hate doing research in RTS games.
Indeed, but there is certainly something about being able to hack down fighters from the sky en masse (mass-deployment of LDS/DFGs got annoying real quick) in non-PDS-style games.
