Without a true counter, this unit really should be just a T3 unit with vision. It's really that simple. ANY UNIT, which can't be targeted but can target, just sets the stage to be hated in RTS. GPG was wrong. Maybe this unit should have been SP only. @CumCitron, @Ske - Should UEF really have only (3) T4 units? Fine. But UEF deserves something for the subtraction. You can't even build this out of spite now (or is that the only reason remaining?). @DommyMommyDostya - Its no DPS increase as much of the wasted damage is in traversing time arising out of the 4500% targeting speed. Thats my take. @nomander, ty for break out response but your vitriol is surprising! I just wrote a provocative post because it was fun for me to write, and I wanted it to be at least entertaining. I wanted to point out the heavy hand here seen. I meant no personal slight at balance team. I'd support the game if I wasn't poor, and your & others volunteer efforts don't get thanked enough. Yes, I'm a drifter who could disappear into static. Since you replied, for what its worth: "Not an arguement" - I'll try again, there's an "a" and "b" to the argument I meant to convey: a. Slow response units are less fun to use. This was never a Megalith or FB, it was a scalpel. It rewarded micro through timing, punishing that shield breakdown/stray engie. Now it's by comparison, a limp, localized lag laser. b. Because it fires while retargetting, that grass cutting DPS is utterly wasted. So, this appears to me the biggest nerf- its less fun and less effective. Math can't see this. An AI wouldn't either. But only a human is going to be like "WTF, this thing so slow, unresponsive, and wasteful of a preciously short firing time". "Post a replay of transports [shielding]..." - I doubt you've never have seen people do this. Its very ineffective but I didn't make it up, either. Was stupid of me to distract from 1 AoE ->.5 Thats the real nerf here sir. "Yes... second sentence = nonsense" - I meant to sort of restate 1b, the shortened firing time means it fires uselessly as it moves to target. So not only does it not switch between targets quickly (a pivot movement), but it also shoots as it approaches the new target. This happens if you change targets mid firing cycle. So if perhaps, you've qued some targets and one dies (or you retarget), before the laser is finished, the rest of the charge goes into the dirt while the sat moves to the new target. (See minute 2-3 of this replay https://replay.faforever.com/27635804 )..So after wasting the shot, it arrives over the new target on cool down. Now if the DPS was 'shield poping' (you show that its not), might be good use of hover-bomb-esque hold fire micro. 4 & 5. This is still new behavior and therefore adds weight to the total scale of the nerf. But other than that fact, I'm wrong, fair enough & thank you. I read the Charge Cost & Drain rate incorrectly (I see that's the total duration of the firing cycle). Agreed, its a nerf. Just replying to the issues you had with my points. I didn't go into GitHub, or Discord and 100% only read the FAF News Change Log page, and then tried the unit. Again, this balance change was just very significant. Very unlikely to ever use this unit, (164) t3 scouts seem like a better investment.

Another way to show how broken spearheads are is dps per mass spent spearhead is 0.6 dps per mass harbinger which is the best dps per mass (direct fire) unit in the game is 0.38 almost half the spearhead percy for reference is 0.26 uef t1 bombers are 0.77 highest in the game T3 mobile arty is 0.09

The simplest QOL change would be to increase the assist range to 15, so it serves the dual purpose of being a reverse guide.

With my proposed rework a proxy would be kept safe with an smd that you built early on, it just becomes a high priority kill target and rushing the smd will delay ur land push by a minute while you build the missile. The idea is that SMDs operate as more of a conscious swap from units into defenses when right now they’re more just something you’re supposes to build at some point and passively fill as the game goes on without giving it any real thought

If you buff the Czar damage to 12k it will destroy bases that only have 1 shield up when it crashes into them making the czar a better suicide unit than the ahwassa

@HotCheeseInRear I used an extreme analogy as an example to make my point clearer. High-level players, such as bully or banani, don’t necessarily need to play the games to understand whether these changes are good or bad. Furthermore, in FAF development games, it’s not even always possible to build the unit being tested. And it’s more effective to test the changes in a test lobby.

what does the omni see that vision and radar dont? Its only the cybran cloak com and cloak boys. Stealth gens don't work against the vision of the sat, and i think its radar is fine to spot everything else.

Didnt the soul ripper already have a dps buff not to long ago, I feel its fine as is.

G2 - https://replay.faforever.com/27084307 You had 1 t3 sera shield barely covering your scathis and it seemed like it was already damaged. You got dropped 2 ahwassas dealing 8k crash + 1.1k initial bomb damage = 18.2k dmg. Then there's 9900x2=19800 remaining delayed damage on the bombs. Didn't watch czar replay. I think you're more complaining that ahwassa has too high alpha strike than anything related to suiciding them. If you ever talked about bombing and then ctrl k for the wreck to fly under a shield and kill it to let the bomb deal 9900 dmg that would be about the crash damage. For mitigating crash damage: shields absorb crash damage up to 20% of their max hp (ahwassa 8k -> 3800 when going through sera t3 shield, shield bar takes 4200 dmg), and you can spam shields around your target to reduce the chance of the remaining crash damage's splash reaching your target. The reason ahwassa can have the high alpha strike is because it's bad against shield spam since it has a long reload and you need to micro well to fire on time with that reload. It's also a bomber and the most expensive air t4 but also lowest hp. So you should spam T3 shields in a line parallel to the bombing path to stop ahwassas easily.

Beetle’s 1100 is an aoe so if we’re talking theoretical max damage that aoe could be packed with say 35 units, meaning abut 40k damage for just 190 mass. Hence why realistic scenarios and likely practical results are much more valuable to assessing things than theoretical best case scenarios

This is in the context of the typical lane-based land teamgames, which is a great situation for snipers because of high available apm, reduced effectiveness of T1/T2, and smaller areas to cover so less unit speed required. I think vs Aeon/Sera they ruin the entire land domain and turn it into a static t2 shield + mobile arty + sniper war because they beat every T3 land unit and Ythotha/GC. Against Cybran they're overpowered and force Cybran to give up nearly everything and rush Megalith, although I'm still developing my playstyle as Cybran against snipers so that's not my final opinion. Mobile arty and static shields seem too weak and slow to build for Cybran, especially vs Seraphim. Firebeetles require a lot of precise sacrifices to get through to the snipers so idk if it's a possible solution to hold them off until Megalith finishes. Also when I play, after Mega finishes it usually just dies to GC or Ythotha + army/2nd T4 (bricks are so bad vs GC claw DPS/Ythotha splash now they cant help mega win and survive to snowball megas), so it's not even a proper solution. Monkeylord is simply bad against snipers. Against UEF they're good and the only way to stop percies besides ACU/PD, but they don't scale nearly as much as vs Cybran because UEF has spearheads to keep the sniper count down and limit apm, ravagers to just kill snipers for 2k mass, and fatboy at 28k mass to make snipers unusable. They're super vulnerable to air so it can happen that your entire army gets wiped in 1 air attack because of a smaller air loss compared to what is needed to wipe armies of other compositions. Usually this means you don't infinitely scale snipers and try to go T4s+othuum/harb just for the safety, even though snipers are better. They're kinda optional to play in 1-1.8k teamgames because othuum/harb + shields can begin to kill ACUs and othuum/harb drops are easy to get through and they deal devastating damage. This is like a general trend of later game efficient choices being played rarer because people are too bad to keep the game even for that long.

@Caliber Would much rather to fix or to balance out MML's and TMD's bit better then novax since those units dont really do much at all. Less so for TMD but still requires balance. xD Novax is a late stage game ender and to be honest... it is pretty bad one since you need multiple of it to start doing anything. Memes be memes.

Introduce a new approach to automatically disable maintenance of units #5822: This is an energy throttle order that you can issue to units to make them turn on/off based on energy. It would give pause icons to fabs and give players full control over throttling. Unfortunately it was left unfinished with Jip working on many projects, then leaving the game team, and nobody picking it back up. There were also some changes concerning stored energy. Fabs still toggle off at 80% and on at 90% storage but now there is a 105k storage limit above which fabs wont turn off, and a 108k storage limit where fabs are forced to turn on. It's mainly for overcharge but if people know about this they can cope with fab behavior by building a pgen-storage 2x2 for 16 storages and rather efficient energy. There were also some logic changes to make fabs aggressively use energy overflow from allies when on lower max storage. I disagree with @deribus's eco analyses. The problem players have with fabs is that they can never use up their storage. For example, if you have 100k storage and try to up RAS (only 175k energy) you lose out on a few seconds of a few fabs instead of using up storage. Basically you're forced to float energy with the fab behavior. This is due to the assumption that you need to store energy for OC combined with no existing implementation of adjusting your energy throttle parameters (which goes into my next point). Desyncs aren't a reason you can't have user-adjustable or permanently saved settings for fab throttling. To implement that it's as simple as writing a sim callback that sets the parameter for your army's ai brain, which is no different from toggle resource sharing or adjusting diplomatic status or toggling auto OC and so on for nearly every UI feature we have. The only difficulties I foresee is if you're playing with union control then you have to determine permissions for adjusting throttling, and writing the UI to show how much energy youre throttling and syncing it between players switching armies or on the same army.

Send me the replay of you killing a cybran hq with a single tml in the latest version

@hotcheese Sounds good to me. That way, when reclaiming wrecks, you can target specific areas instead of collecting piles of trees at the edge.

xD

@Hotcheese another fantastic suggestion ^.^