Wreck value and health
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I think the current wreck value and health numbers are imbalanced. In vanilla FA, wrecks were worth 81 percent of the original unit mass value. It was many years ago that naval wrecks were reduced to about half this because naval wrecks were OP. The main reason naval wrecks were OP but land wrecks weren't was because land wrecks are subject to damage from land battles. Primarily, it is T1 mobile artilley that damages wrecks, but any weapon can if it hits them. Navsl wrecks, however, are safe from damage due to hiding under water away from stray shells.
As a result, land wrecks are significantly vulnerable to artrition by random misses from tanks, artillery, and bombers.
My proposal is to reduce all land and structure wreckage value by half (to about 40 percent) and to increase wreck health by 400 percent.
Generally, wrecks have about the same health as their original units. A striker wreck - assuming no overkill - has about 300 health. Increasing this to 1500 would make striker wrecks greatly more resistant to damage from stray shells and would reduce the randomness in how wreck fields are created.
Also, with 81 percent reclaim on structures, it makes more sense (based on mass) to always reclaim and rebuild from scratch instead of rebuilding from a wreck.
Thoughts?
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In my view your proposal would massively increase the importance of early skirmish reclaim fields, because much more reclaim would be left in those skirmishes. My experience tells me that arty crushes most reclaim fields currently especially when cybran and sera are played. Now this further enhances the lame defenders advantage and also increases snowball effects because the player getting a few fac attack move engis in the never ending reclaim field of the first skirmish now has such a huge lead on 5x5 and maps with few corridors. That’s also shit, if anything I would like a balance where sending suicide raids to deal structural damage or raid build power would be a viable move. Currently if you invest into early attack to kill build power or maybe a MeX, the reclaim left nullifies the mass worth damage too much. That’s why people don’t really attack unless they have the area in radar, with air scouts, with air cover and with suffiecient units to totally win the fight, which is too rarely. The game in my view would be much faster and much more spicy
if reclaim wasn’t as high.Therefore I think your idea leads to even more normalization, stalemates and cautious play and that’s gay, which is also ok.
Anyway.
I think that all reclaim should be 50% flat on land, water everywhere and for all units. That greatly reduces reclaim everywhere, makes it more viable to send suicide t4s and so on and it’s logical and intuitive, and that’s all good things.
- for a faf experience that rewards aggression
- for a more colorful game with more explosions and more shiny experimentals
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First post.
You beat me with a place holder! Not fair!
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No other thoughts on making reclaim more consistent and less suspectible to chance?
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I think I would prefer that wrecks were given a reasonably quick decay over time rather than a flat decrease in initial value. There is a sort of degenerate game state that occurs where a fight creates a reclaim field and then both players are forced to fight over the reclaim field for the rest of the game as it grows larger and larger until one player secures it and wins the game. This degenerate game state almost always occurs in navy gameplay because navy wrecks are worth so much mass and water is generally a bland area with no mexes to fight over, so reclaim becomes the only focus. This game state prevents interesting things from happening and limits strategy greatly. An example is how 5x5 maps often do not allow you to make T2 because you have to be all-in fighting for a reclaim field the entire game. I believe If the value of wrecks decayed over time it would be easier to avoid this state because reclaim fields would go away on their own if a player is unable to secure them and they would not snowball to game-ending levels of mass so quickly. Reclaim would have to be grabbed promptly in order to capitalize on it, so preparation and intelligent gameplay would be rewarded. It would make aggression slightly more viable since your mass donations could disappear if your opponent doesn't take them quick enough or you can deny their reclaim engineers until it is gone.
Reducing the initial value of wrecks would discourage players from reclaiming their own units and structures to recycle them into better things. I think recycling is a beneficial behavior that encourages creativity, accelerates the game, and makes it more interesting to play and watch, so it should be encouraged. Reducing the value of navy wrecks has not really solved the problem of navy fights being degenerate and navy wrecks being overpowered.
I do not think the HP of wrecks has much of an effect on gameplay. It is nice to be able to intentionally destroy reclaim with TML or groundfire and its HP being similar to the original unit is intuitive.
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@sinforosa I think reclaim decay is a pretty creative and interesting idea and you have some good points to support it.
I'm not sure if there is a way to avoid this effect for wrecks that are initially placed on a map, or if it is a good idea to have them still decay, or what rate of decay would be appropriate. I guess if we can't exclude those initial wrecks a number of maps would just have their design impacted, for better or worse. What rate are you thinking might be appropriate? 10% per minute? 0.5% per second (30% per minute), or more? And maybe so that you don't need to use a lot of bp to reclaim large wrecks quickly, the decay mechanic could be paused if the wreck is currently being reclaimed?
I agree with you that recycling wrecks encourages creativity and speeds things up, but I also find reclaim to lead to more defenders advantage than I would prefer, so if the decay idea isn't feasible, maybe we could still get the best of both worlds by keeping the same reclaim value for units and structures that are ctrl-k'd, while decreasing it to 50% (or so) for units or structures that are killed? In theory people might be able to somewhat abuse that differential, but I'm guessing it would be pretty difficult to do in practice for anything besides T4s.
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@corvathranoob The easiest way to do that, and to avoid abuse at the same time, is for reclaim value to be based on health at time of death. If you ctrl-k a 1hp unit it should leave behind basically the same mass as a unit shot to death without overkill. If you ctrl-k a full-health unit perhaps it should leave behind more mass.
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@corvathranoob said in Wreck value and health:
@sinforosa I think reclaim decay is a pretty creative and interesting idea and you have some good points to support it.
I'm not sure if there is a way to avoid this effect for wrecks that are initially placed on a map, or if it is a good idea to have them still decay, or what rate of decay would be appropriate. I guess if we can't exclude those initial wrecks a number of maps would just have their design impacted, for better or worse. What rate are you thinking might be appropriate? 10% per minute? 0.5% per second (30% per minute), or more? And maybe so that you don't need to use a lot of bp to reclaim large wrecks quickly, the decay mechanic could be paused if the wreck is currently being reclaimed?
I agree with you that recycling wrecks encourages creativity and speeds things up, but I also find reclaim to lead to more defenders advantage than I would prefer, so if the decay idea isn't feasible, maybe we could still get the best of both worlds by keeping the same reclaim value for units and structures that are ctrl-k'd, while decreasing it to 50% (or so) for units or structures that are killed? In theory people might be able to somewhat abuse that differential, but I'm guessing it would be pretty difficult to do in practice for anything besides T4s.
You can make a distinction in behavior for static wrecks (placed by the map maker) and dynamic wrecks (during gameplay). As an example:
You could therefore change the decay behavior too.
