Learning to Play Planetary Annihilation

Discord: https://discord.gg/pa

Like any RTS there is a learning curve

Try the following to ramp up quickly:

For single player:

Tips for New Players

  • There is no pay to win
  • Commanders skins are cosmetic
  • PA uses a streaming economy based on energy and metal: https://palobby.com/units/table/economy
  • Left click drag for area build, attack, patrol, assist, reclaim, repair, etc
  • Right click drag for local custom line formations
  • AVOID custom line formation moves across the map by moving platoons via waypoints in group formation then shift queuing a custom line formation at destination
  • Control move to break formation and move at full speed (a wide area selection of units will move into formation at the slowest unit speed)
  • Early game you should snipe fabbers, attack economy and prevent expansion (factories are harder to destroy and cannot produce units with no eco)
  • T2 Advanced Metal Extractors can be built over the top of T1 Metal Extractors and vice versa
  • Link Teleporters by selecting one then right clicking the other teleporter including the Helios Invasion Titan mobile teleporter
  • Open the top right planets menu for info like the number of Halley engines required to launch a planet
  • Nuclear Missiles and Unit Cannons are interplanetary
  • PROTECT YOUR COMMANDER

Tips for Returning Players

Tips for Opening Build Queues to Manage your Economy and Expansion

The goals of an opening build queue are:

  • Minimise walking by your commander and fabricators
  • Avoid stalling your economy with too many fabricators or factories
  • Produce units to scout, raid and defend your nearby expansions
  • Produce fabricators as needed for expansions, proxy bases and eventually the transition to T2 once your economy can support BOTH the cost of a T2 factory and production of T2 units
  • Avoid idle fabricators and commanders
  • Avoid excessive use of static defenses

The key elements of an opening build queue are:

  • Optimal starting location
  • Optimal build order and factory selection
  • Optimal placement

Opening build queues will vary for each map, planet terrain, starting location, nearby expansions, opponents, game mode, etc.

Take your time to look around the map and don’t just randomly click in the starting location. You’ll want to spawn close to a metal spot within range of the commander while leaving space to build your initial energy plants and factories around the commander to minimise walking.

A typical new player opening build queue might be:

  • Bot / vehicle / naval factory (never air) with priority queue (control click) of two or three fabricators to claim nearby metal spots then continuous build of fighting units (rallying to a point in the direction of the next expansion or raid)
  • One (or two metal extractors only if within turning range of the commander)
  • One or two energy plants
  • Air factory with priority queue (control click) of one Firefly scout then continuous build of fighters and a bomber to snipe enemy fabricators (rallying to a point where you can easily select your air)
    Note: for Galactic War without air tech build a Skitter vehicle scout and raid with Dox or Strykers
  • One or two energy plants
  • Next factory with continuous build of fighting units (rallying to a point in the direction of the next expansion or raid)
  • One or two energy plants
  • Priority queue (control click) of one or two additional fabricators for expansion which may include an air fabricator to expand to other parts of the planet

As you become more experienced you’ll adjust your energy to be more efficient with only a single energy plant per T1 factory or fabricator. Be careful with other units that also use energy. eg Spark tesla bots.

Place your factories on the outside and near choke points to protect your economy. In important areas outside of your main base consider creating proxy bases by building factories next to your expansions that will continuously build more units.

The more you queue with your commander and fabricators the more you can focus on positioning other units to scout and raid while protecting your fabricators and their expansions. Once you have scouted the enemy be prepared to adjust your build queues and unit mix.

Tips for falling in love with spherical planets

  • Disable pole lock and use align to north pole (default keybind: n)
  • Learn to use middle mouse to grab and alt middle mouse to rotate
  • Alternately use the arrow keys and control + arrow keys to rotate
    (on macOS you’ll need to change the default mission control keyboard shortcuts in system preferences > keyboard > shortcuts > mission control for move left a space and move right a space)
  • Learn to scout and expand as you can be attacked from all directions including orbital and other planets

You will get used to playing on spherical planets. Once you do it’s hard to go back to flat maps.

TITANS 1v1 Ranked Ladder Reset and Seasons Update 112314

Hello Commanders,

The official TITANS 1v1 ranked ladder was reset on 2018-11-02 at 06:00 UTC starting a new season that ends on 2019-01-24.

The player holding the Uber #1 position at the end of this season will be shipped an Invictus Commander statue, a beautiful item that everyone should want in their trophy cabinet.

There will be new 1v1 ranked maps later this month with at least one new map every month.

Current Map Pool (11)

  • Amplus
  • Berg
  • Blitz
  • Clutch
  • Crag
  • Duat
  • Forge
  • Lock
  • Meso
  • Pacific
  • Roc

1v1 Ranked Seasons in 2019

Starting in 2019 each 1v1 ranked season lasts 3 months with a ladder reset at the start of every season.

2019 Seasons

  1. 2019-01-25 – 2019-04-25
  2. 2019-04-26 – 2019-07-24
  3. 2019-07-25 – 2019-10-24
  4. 2019-10-25 – 2020-01-23

1v1 Ranked Fixes

  • Fix for never-ending 1v1 ranked queue after a network error

1v1 Ranked Display Improvements

  • 1v1 rank and inactivity displayed in start menu (moved into base game from community mods)
  • 1v1 rank display in game over (moved into base game from community mods)

1v1 Ranked Work in Progress

The following are still in development / testing:

  • Tweaks to limit highest initial placement to Gold
  • Inactive 1v1 ranked ladder decay (slowly lose points if you’re not active)
  • Visible points display
  • Penalties for disconnecting instead of surrendering

Technical Notes

Server Improvements

  • Experimental multi-threading on official servers (still legacy toolchain and infrastructure)
  • More performance and memory usage improvements to navigation cost cells
  • Logging of server rate
  • Logging of system free memory (currently windows only)

AI Improvements

  • Further refinement of AI aggression
  • Adjusted how the AI chooses where to expand
  • Performance improvements
  • Retrained neural networks

Server Fixes

  • Fix for AI Platoon::numUnitsOfType server crash
  • Fix for AI chooseStartLocation server crash when passed bad data
  • Fix for AI attempting to transfer a unit to a planet that did not have an initial planet manager assigned
  • Fix for AI getting stuck building no factories if it is modified to remove the ability for the AI to build one or more factory types
  • Fix for a multi-threading crash

Client Improvements

  • More visible orbital attack lines in the orbital path visualiser

Client Fixes

  • Fix for particle emitter crash when emitter has an invalid fx_trail_spec

Modding

  • MatchmakingUtility.getSeasonEndDate()
  • New gVersion global with current build number accessible in all scenes
  • api.game.isPTE()
  • UTC start_timestamp (landing time) and end_timestamp (game over) in server control state to calculate accurate game elapsed (note that valid_time_range.min is the in-game landing time

Multi-threading, Performance and AI Improvements Updates 112176 / 112209 / 112214

Greetings Commanders,

It took us a little longer than we expected to prepare this build in light of some server issues last weekend, which are now resolved.

This is our first new build on the legacy toolchain and will be the first of many once we stablise our modern toolchain builds.

Our focus is on speed and stability as we work to ensure we’re in the best place possible ahead of upgrading the technologies which underpin the game. We’ve implemented numerous server sim performance improvements, while also resolving a number of the most common causes of server-side crashes.

You should still make sure your graphics drivers are up-to-date as out of date drivers are still the most common cause of client issues. Seriously. Go do it now!

Over time we’ve seen the competitive meta settle, revealing some very visible imbalances. No one likes those. We’ve introduced some small changes to fix things. Balance is as much an art as it is a science, so we’ll continue to monitor and adjust as necessary.

The AI has also seen some love, upgraded to be more ruthless than ever. It’s in it to win it, with an upgraded neural net, along with additional behavioural improvements.

Finally, rumour has it some kind of ladder reset is fast approaching…

Titans Balance

  • Advanced Air, Bot, Vehicle and Naval Factory cost increased by 25% to 4,500 (minor delay to T2 rush)
  • Slammer cost increased to 500 (minor adjustment against Leveler)
  • Solar Array cost decreased to 1,600 (minor adjustment against land-based advanced power)
  • Gil-E vision increased to 220 (vision now matches weapon range)
  • Bluehawk range increase to 220 (buff as a counter e.g. Kaiju)
  • Pelican health increased to 200 with group (formation) preference set to back (increased survivability)
  • Stingray vision increased to 250 with new radar and sonar of 350 (new cruiser role as naval radar)
  • Typhoon vision increased to 250 with drone guard radius of 250 and passive health regen reduced to -2 (20 seconds)
  • Kaiju rate of fire decreased to 0.5 shots per second (minor nerf)

Technical Notes

AI

  • Adjusted the neural network fitness function
  • Neural networks have all been re-trained for Titans and Classic
  • Threat response platoons now see amphibious units as anti-sub threat

Added a couple of new target filtering options, a new neural net input, and a few new outputs

  • AI does a better job of gathering and using intel as well as caching it for later use to improve performance
  • When looking for a place to attack, the AI will now take into account neighbouring areas when determining what size of a force to use
  • The AI will now look for more fights that it can win rather than fights it can at least tie
  • Fix for AI platoons that would get stuck trying to disband
  • Adjusted how much the AI raids
  • Improved AI neural data merging
  • Fixed bug preventing the AI from attacking when it should have been
  • Adjusted AI aggressiveness

Server / Simulation Performance

  • Adjusted how search spaces are updated in an effort to get through as many of them as possible per tick
  • During the nav update, more of an effort is made to allow as many search spaces as possible generate their high level path so units can start moving faster
  • Added a fail safe to allow nav to steal more voxel budget if it is having a tough time getting through search spaces
  • This will give nav an opportunity to fulfill a larger number of move requests over a shorter time
  • We now query a search space to ensure we have enough voxel budget remaining for the space to prevent doing a bunch of useless work
  • Added the count of updating search spaces in nav to the perf output window
  • More aggressive filtering of collision pairs to reduce the number of pairs we have to check
  • Nav now attempts to pre-allocate the cost cells it will need for the updating search spaces it has
  • Search spaces now return their cost cells to nav when they are finished so they can be reused later
  • Moved the spatial DB update for dynamic objects so that it only happens once, at most, per update

Server / Simulation Multi-Threading

Please note multi-threading must be enabled for your server.

  • The task scheduler now supports running the plan step of parallel tasks (such as weapon auto targeting and auto manoeuvring) at the same time, per unit
  • Entity record step now runs in parallel
  • The nav and physics updates now run alongside the economy update
  • Added multi-thread support for the heavy parts of the recon update
  • Units can now update their weapon aims in parallel
  • The physics update now supports multi-threading
  • The small island build is now multi-threaded per sector
  • This helps in-game perf as well as system loading
  • Added –max-threads command line to set the max number of background threads

Crash Reporting

  • Improved crash reporting for all platforms
  • Crash dumps are now stored in the log folder (varies by OS) instead of a temp folder.
  • On Windows, a DxDiag report (stripped of all personally identifiable info) is now automatically attached to crash reports.

Crash Fixes

  • Fix for crash if, during the same tick, a search space was marked for removal and then another search space was created for the same destination
  • Fix for rebuilding the collision geometry BVH when it wasn’t needed
  • Fix for crash in swizzle tree from trying to evaluate log(0), in a rare case
  • Fix for big game crashes caused when the flood runner gets a request from a search space with an invalid goal location
  • Fix for virtual texture binding crash on the client

Modding

  • icon atlases now use grids which increases the maximum strategic icons (52x52px) on an 8K texture (older GPUs) to 157 x 157 (24,649) and on a 16K texture (modern GPUs) to 315 x 315 (99,225) resulting in a breaking change to the following shaders:
    • particle_direct_ring_selection.vs
    • particle_direct.vs
    • particle_icon.vs
    • particle_status_icon.fs
    • particle_status_icon.vs
  • strategic icon mods should use the new utility function calculateAtlasUV (added to particle_common.vs) replacing:
    • v_TexCoord = vec2(a_TexCoord.x, vUVAndExtra.x + vUVAndExtra.y * (1.0 – a_TexCoord.y)); with v_TexCoord = calculateAtlasUV(vUVAndExtra.xy);

Server Issues Resolved

Our legacy infrastructure hit a 10GB limit for archived game summaries. That’s a lot of games!

112209

112209 build is now live to help us track down the cause of sim speed stalls and includes a fix for the XOV commander crash on Linux.

112214

112214 build is now live with a fix for missing metal spot icons in the system editor.

64 bit – The Future of PA and Titans

Hello Commanders,

Today marks the six year anniversary of the Planetary Annihilation Kickstarter, where 44,162 backers helped breathe life into the concept of a next-generation RTS, where thousands of units would clash across multiple worlds, unleashing interplanetary destruction.

It’s been a long road and we’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who backed, supported or just played Planetary Annihilation over the past six years; we couldn’t have done it without you!

The incredibly sexy technical work continues behind the scenes. After the next major update we will be focusing on 64-bit operating systems as we continue to modernise Planetary Annihilation. If you’re part of the 2% still on 32-bit Windows now would be a good time to upgrade so you can fully reap the benefits of the changes we’re making.

Similar to Valve, Blizzard, Nvidia and many other game developers, this modernisation necessitates saying goodbye to some unsupported, end-of-life operating systems like Windows Vista, and older macOS / Linux releases. We’ll confirm the details prior to our modern build going live and plan to make unsupported older builds which will continue to work in offline mode available to anyone who cannot upgrade.

We have also performed a much needed refresh of our community rules and guidelines, after all we don’t want our little pocket of humanity to fall into discord and be overthrown by the Machine Liberation Army. There’s even a tl;dr version, because we know you want to be playing PA not reading rules. These apply to all aspects of PA: lobby names, in-game chat, official forums and the official Planetary Annihilation Discord server, which is now live.

Please feel free to use the official Planetary Annihilation Discord server to coordinate games, discuss strategies, seek out help with modding, and anything else PA related. We also hear there’s more to life than PA, and while we’re not sure we believe that, we have created an off-topic channel just in case.

See you in Discord: https://discord.gg/C3GBXbg

The PA Team

planetaryannihilation.com – The Future of PA and Titans

Hello Commanders,

We hope you enjoyed the multithreading technical update from Sorian. The work on modernising Planetary Annihilation continues and we will bring you more of that sweet technical goodness in future posts.

The transition to Planetary Annihilation Inc is almost complete and we have moved the website, forums and support.

New URLs are as follows:

The support articles are being developed to provide more content relevant to issues we see reported. Like with any game though, we find most issues are caused by out-of-date drivers, especially with cross-platform OpenGL support, so please ensure you check that your drivers are up-to-date.

We are targeting 15th September for the launch of our official Planetary Annihilation Discord server, though you can already sign-up. We will also be following up later with Discord rich presence support to make it easier than ever to form a party with your friends, join a game with them, or just spectate one they’re already in.

In looking to the future, Classic Planetary Annihilation has been removed from sale. This will not impact existing players, the game will remain in your Steam library and Classic PA players will still be able to upgrade to TITANS at the permanent 90% off discount. New players will only see TITANS in the store, which is both backwards compatible with Classic PA lobbies and also supports switching to classic mode to host classic games. Classic PA will continue to receive updates, including the new simulation performance improvements with multithreading that Sorian is working on.

Later this month we will be releasing new PTE (Public Test Environment) builds for TITANS and Classic PA with some of those improvements for you to try out. The PTE is how you can test out new features that are still under development, and we’ll be using it to get your feedback ahead of official releases.

See you in Discord on the 15th!
https://discord.gg/C3GBXbg

The PA Team

Multithreading – The Future of PA and Titans

@Sorian is back working on server simulation performance with multithreading this month and we have a technical update to share on his work for the next update.

Two years ago I was given the opportunity to continue work on my baby, Planetary Annihilation, for the 99337 Performance Update. My primary focus was attempting to improve performance by multithreading parts of the simulation. My initial focus was on areas of the simulation where I thought it would be easiest to do things in parallel. The most natural separation was based around planets.

Since navigation and physics are typically the worst performance offenders, separating updates by planet seemed like a good plan. Their updates tend to only act on a single entity. Initial testing blew up spectacularly, as I expected it would. Fortunately, there were not many areas of contention between threads and a performance win was born.

So, now that I am back, you may be wondering what I am working on now. I’ll be continuing right where I left off! This time I am digging further into the sim to see where I can split large groups of tasks over threads to speed things up. Early this week I was focused on the physics update. I figured, since we should only be looking at two unique physics objects at the same time, it should be possible to thread this.

Well, I was right and wrong. There were the usual small issues to fix, but threading the physics update revealed a larger issue. The physics system utilizes an HGrid (described as a loose octree) to find potential entity overlaps using a function called buildPairs. It turns out that there is no guarantee that the vector of pairs that we get back does not contain duplicates. Under normal operation this isn’t a huge issue, as this is a single call that immediately returns and it was just being done thousands of times more than it needed to be. However, when you throw threading into the mix it gets ugly. Fixable, but ugly.

I have also started work on restructuring the sim tick a bit to allow the navigation and physics updates to happen alongside other updates. Right now I have it running alongside the economy update, but the economy update is only a small part of the overall update, so not much of a win there yet. I am hoping to split some of the plan steps (our sim has plan, execute, and record steps for entities) out into a group that can also run at the same time as the navigation/physics update.

For the navigation system, I have been mainly focusing on the epic number of allocations the navigation system does during voxel integration. I have a new system in place that saves off vectors of cost cells (the objects the integrator makes tens of thousands during voxel integration) for reuse. The integrator is also doing a better job of allocating in blocks instead of individually. On the multithreading front, the navigation system has proven to be quite difficult. There are so many little acceleration features and so much lazy loading that is simply prevents multithreading without a significant amount of work.

So, what’s next? There is still more work to be done with navigation, there is still the sim tick stuff to be investigated, and some AI updates as well (of course), starting with a much needed performance pass. And that doesn’t even get into other fun stuff like modern toolchain and Coherent GT updates.

Mike “Sorian” Robbins

Future of PA and Titans Update

We wanted to share some of the things we’ve been working on and that are currently in the pipeline:

  • Ladder reset for 1v1 giving everyone a fresh shot at hitting the top of the ladder
  • Working on server performance and optimizations to improve player experience (some of these optimizations have already been made)
  • New 1v1 ranked maps

We will let everyone know as these come online.

Also, for those of you who did not see the announcement, Community Mods, the Community Dedicated Server, Community Chat and Legion Expansion support are now up and running.

Hotfix 110069 is now live!

This hotfix resolves the SSL issue preventing MacOS users from being able to sign in. A separate fix for the PA Launcher will be rolled out next and we will release that as soon as it is ready. Thank you again for being patient with us and happy annihilating!

Update: A fix for the PA Launcher on MacOS has been released. However, there is a new bug that has appeared on the Windows PA Launcher that causes it to get stuck in an update loop. For the time being, please hit Cancel and it will allow you to continue to play Offline for now while we sort this out. Thank you for understanding.

Second Update: The issue with the Windows PA Launcher has now been resolved and you should be able to launch the game again using any platform and any OS. Thank you for bearing with us as we worked through this issue!

Hotfix build 110029 is now live

This hotfix resolves the SSL issue preventing most people from being able to sign in.

We are aware that there is still an issue with MacOS as well as the PA Launcher. We are still working on tracking those down and will release a fix as soon as we are able. Thank you for your continued patience.

Official Chinese Localizations now live on build 109959

We’re happy to announce that we now included official translations in Traditional and Simplified Chinese. Enjoy!

我們很高興地宣布，我們現在包括繁體和簡體中文的官方翻譯。 請享用！

我们很高兴地宣布，我们现在包括繁体和简体中文的官方翻译。 请享用！

The Balance and Community Servers Update 108271 is now live!

Balance changes
Zeus

  • Reduced Zeus effective rate of fire to 0.5 from 0.67
  • Increased Zeus ammo per shot and capacity to 10,000 from 9,000
  • Decreased Zeus ammo demand to 5,000 from 6,000

Leveller

  • Increased Leveler build cost to 800 from 600
  • Decreased Leveler turn rate to 50 from 60

Gil-E

  • Increased Titans Gil-E range from 180 to 220 for Titans (same range as Classic PA)

Titans vs Classic PA

  • Titans Leveler ammo velocity is slower (140 vs 150)
  • Titans Gil-E health is lower (150 vs 200)
  • Titans Gil-E build cost is lower (800 vs 1200)
  • Titans Gil-E weapon can also target WL_Air

Polish/fixes

  • Fixed sudden death mode not displayed for other players in new game lobby (patched via community mods)
  • Fixed zoom to celestial for POV camera
  • Added tooltip for POV camera button
  • Fixed attack, move attack and area attack for point / follow units to attack from max weapons range instead of rushing into and hugging target eg bots, hornets, etc.
  • Fixed multiple saves during same game corrupting config
  • Community Servers Support:
  • Posting community servers beacon
  • support for 32 players with 16 alliances
  • command line option –gameover-timeout
  • command line option –community-servers-url
  • command line option –community-server-public-host
  • command line option –community-server-region
  • added missing help for recently added command line options.
  • added state to server beacon
  • added offworld support for AI only (no human players) testing

Enhancement Update 105067

A host of new custom commanders, free for everyone!

  • Added Locust, XOV, Reaver, spz58624, raizell, visionik, tykus24, mostlikely, nagasher, zancrowe, kevin4001, damubbster, commandonut, sadiga, jt00010177, vidicarus

Balance changes:

  • Removed friendly commander reclaim
  • Changed grenadier group preference to back
  • Changed default bounty to 0.25

POV Camera Mode, Spectator Selection, Holodeck Improvements

  • A POV camera mode that follows a unit and watches the action from their perspective! The default keybind for this is Ctrl+Shift+M.
  • More details can be found on the following thread in our forums: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/new-pov-camera-mode-testing.72119/

Alternative Win Conditions

  • Sudden death for teams (protect your weakest player)

Sim Speed Control for Local Servers

  • Added sim speed control for local servers with key bindings -/=

AI Improvements

  • Added AI shared armies
  • Added resume anywhere for AI games with no human players

Fixes

  • Fixed black screen joining game over state
  • Added social notifications when uberbar hidden
  • Fixed broken classic galatic war saves with missing combined unit_list.json for.ai and .player spec tags
  • Changed handling of look at player for spectators to use units
  • Changed label for dynamic alliances eco sharing from RESC to SHARE ECO

Modding

  • Added Friendly_Commander reclaim type and excluded friendly commanders from default unit reclaim type. Commander reclaim can be enabled again by adding Friendly_Commander to reclaim_types.
THE GALAXY WON'T CONQUER ITSELF Get it now on Steam!
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