Tactical Skill Progression
Because PA is the also the best real-time tactics game ever
You won't be seeing a lot of playing guides on cosmicwar.net because, as I have explained elsewhere, I am strongly opposed to "metagaming", and I believe that strategy and tactics games were made to compel the player to devise strategies and tactics himself, and not to simply copy them off of YouTube or a FAQ. For me and The Cult, therefore, all instructional material beyond in-game tutorials and the manual are strictly off limits. However, when I saw the chart above in the PA Academy Discord [ > ] a few weeks ago, I made a note to clean it up and feature it here, because it helps demonstrate how deep PA's tactical dimension can be for those who take the time to learn how to play the game. As a simple glance at this chart will reveal, PA has years of practice and experimentation to offer to even the most capable RTT players, and while it may be true that the unit count may be lower than in certain versions of TA or SupCom, resulting in reduced complexity in some tactical aspects, 1) There are plenty of other aspects in which PA is deeper than any other game, such as e.g. the added orbital layer, or multiple fronts and battlefields, or superior player/team/unit numbers, and 2) The four-tech-tier mod of Legion that my friends and I are working on will eventually double the number of units, so even this criticism of PA's tactical dimension will be eventually neutralized.
As for the chart itself, it doesn't really constitute "metagaming", and to me serves more as a roadmap to help me locate where I am now, and in what general direction I should be heading as I work on my skills over the coming months and years, and that's how I suggest that everyone else use it too. It was initially presented in a rough Google Sheets format, linked in the Academy Discord by its creator, top 1v1 player NikolaMX, before he left the game to pursue some academic opportunities. So, after he was gone, and the link to the chart sunk down and disappeared in the abyss of the Discord chatlog, I spent some time cleaning up Nik's terminology (the most egregious error being the labelling of the chart as "Strategy Skill Progression", since there are no strategies in the chart at all, but that is typical of top 1v1 players: they can't tell the difference between strategy and tactics, because there's almost no room for strategies in the tiny systems used in the 1v1 ladder, and that's the only facet of the game that they know), and then, with the help of my friend danjiro who converted the Google Sheet into an easier-to-vew image file, we arrived at the chart you see above. Use it, share it, enjoy it, and thank Nik for making it, the Academy Discord for hosting it, and my friend danjiro for helping me bring it to you in this convenient and easily located form. Until next time,
See you on the battlefield,
icy