Game version 3741

Is there TMD that misses? And if so, how does it affect this? Will it shoot one anti-missile and if it misses your out of luck?

It will try and fire again.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@jcvjcvjcvjcv said in Game version 3741: Sneak peaks:

On the other hand, doesn't this open a can of worms? What about AA overkilling their targets? (Draining all SAMs on a few spyplanes and letting the bombers behind pass, etc.)

The 'can of worms' argument is also considered the 'slippery slope fallacy' - just because we fix one issue and similar issues exist, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't fix this one issue.

As Nex describes - the reason this works is because the amount of damage that TMDs do is uniform. That doesn't apply to other weaponry. Hence even if we'd want to fix this, we couldn't reliably put a 'count' on it. Let alone that it is a property of projectiles that we're using here, not a property of a weapon or unit.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@jip Oh does the desiredshootercap refer to units attacking the missile and not to number of shots?
So one TMD with high rate of fire will still overkill a single missile?

It refers to the number of shots - the number of shots to be fired to the target before it is considered 'taken down'. If a shot misses the target then another shot is taken.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@jip said in Game version 3741: Sneak peaks:

To compensate for the higher effectiveness, tactical missiles from cruisers and aircraft carriers have one additional hit points.

Um did you post this correct? Cause the end result from this would be that any tmd gets obliterated by 3 hp uef and 2 hp sera cruisers.

Also this would probably alter navy balance considering a few random cruisers will have a way easier time breaking through bs tmd.

@thewheelie good friend, it’s time cruisers rise up against the oppression of TMD

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@thewheelie said in Game version 3741: Sneak peaks:

@jip said in Game version 3741: Sneak peaks:

To compensate for the higher effectiveness, tactical missiles from cruisers and aircraft carriers have one additional hit points.

Um did you post this correct? Cause the end result from this would be that any tmd gets obliterated by 3 hp uef and 2 hp sera cruisers.

Also this would probably alter navy balance considering a few random cruisers will have a way easier time breaking through bs tmd.

@tagada said in Game version 3741: Sneak peaks:

@ftxcommando The solution Jip came up with was increasing the TML missile's hp (cruiser one). This would counterweigh the buff of the TMD and allow for more natural linear scaling of your TMD defenses. Right now the first few TMD's give a lot of value while consequent ones give less and less utility. That kind of solution would benefit from not touching the TMD vs single TML (non-cruiser one) interaction. It would buff TMD vs massive TML barrages but I don't think that's an issue.

I'm fine with reversing it again - you're the balance team after all.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

If the fix is thought ti be too big of a buff to tmd what about a slight cost increase for tmd roughly equivalent to the boost in effectiveness that 3 tmd get from the targeting fix? Or a slight rate of fire boost for cruiser missiles?
Since tmd’s sole purpose is defending against missiles though, it doesnt seem a bad thing that they mass efficiently defend a small area against just one part of a cruiser’s functionality, providing it’s not too mass efficient a counter. I.e. it should be cheap to protect against one small location, but expensive to try and protect lots of different locations.

A bit like how a novax is good if they have lots of spread out mexes since they cant defend them all, but bad if they can cover most mexes with a couple of shields

The buff affects all TMD right?
Even mobile ones as long as you have more than one. But you get the biggest effect when you can spam the TMD, so i think nerfing the most spammable TMDs (i think nerfing ROF is the most natural way) would be the best way to balance out this change.

Nerfing rate of fire may be interesting from a balance aspect, but it also makes the game feel a lot more dull. I'd veto that as game lead - the game is supposed to feel reactive and fun. Not dull.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

You could make them miss some of the time (is that what firing randomness does??), so they still go brrrt and just miss 20% of their shots or something. Looks cool + balanced.
Brings back some of the old unpredictability, but in an intentional way 😄

is that what firing randomness does

Yes

I can try, will make a video of it 😄

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Nerfing rate of fire or accuracy will result in tmls being massively more oppressive and practically require people to double the mass put into tmd that they already do.

@ftxcommando no because the fix from the patch will make tmd much more effective as they will split up and shoot at different incoming missiles.
And nerfing their base stats would also only be an option if they end up too strong due to this change.

We are speaking single TML, not barrage of missiles from cruisers. A single miss on TML missile means losing t2 power or t2 mex even though you have it protected. Making it so now even though the TMD is better against massive onslaught of missiles it can fuck you up if there is only a single missile coming and you have single TMD that decided to casually miss it's shots against that single TML.

20% would make it a 1 in 25 chance of 2 TMD missing and letting a tml hit your ACU for a snipe. That’s card game RNG mechanics in a macro RTS, it’s just bad.

@nex said in Game version 3741: Sneak peaks:

You could make them miss some of the time (is that what firing randomness does??), so they still go brrrt and just miss 20% of their shots or something. Looks cool + balanced.
Brings back some of the old unpredictability, but in an intentional way 😄

See the videos on Github - these have the same randomness as tech 1 artillery does, but four times the firing rate. It looks epic, but it is really bad at the moment 😄

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@ftxcommando said in Game version 3741: Sneak peaks:

That TMD change seems like it hugely shifts the balance of basebreaking back to the defender since TMD is way cheaper than cruisers and part of the reason you could eventually break bases came from the fact dumping a giant line of TMD was never efficient and you had to both waste space so they wouldn’t shoot the same thing and waste buildtime as your engies move from isolated TMD to isolated TMD. It also encouraged slowly breaking TMD since them being spaced out meant all TMD aren’t covered by all other TMD.
This could make it orders of magnitudes more painful to break bases, especially competently shielded ones.

My take on this:

  1. It's about navy vs base. This has never been balanced, excepting that "navy should be OP vs land to prevent stalemate".
  2. Worse, it's about a specific case of cruiser TML vs base: only two factions have such cruisers anyway. The proper solution vs bases is battleships, or maybe the Aeon missile ship.
  3. Aren't cruisers massively OP vs TMD anyway? The biggest issue is when those TMD are shielded too. But this is where battleships are (again) better: they aren't countered by TMD.
  4. Cruisers' primary function is AA, and secondary is TMD. Having them able to kill distant mexes etc. is an interesting addition, but having them somewhat cost-effective at destroying base defence too is weird (too many roles).

Hmm... maybe we should have T2 missile ships, or cheaper variants of the T3 subs or something, just for missiles, and remove the cruiser TML completely? That way navy players must choose between building AA and missile-launchers. Otherwise, at least let TMD properly counter cruiser missiles.

The github testing comments mention that you currently need at least 4 buzzkill to defend against 2 Seraphim cruisers, and that after the bug fix you only need 2. However I think this number is both too high and is being misinterpreted to suggest that the TMD become twice as good after the change (against cruisers), with this being used to support nerfs to TMD or buffs to cruisers to the same ratio that could make cruisers even more powerful vs the TMD than they currently are:

  • For example, 2 TMD protecting a T2 mex can indefinitely defend that mex against 2 Seraphim cruisers if the cruiser targets the mex and the mex is behind the TMD (this doesnt just happen due poor target selection by the attacker - the defending player may build TMD after the attacker had scouted and it may not be obvious for a short while that the structure blips are TMD; the cruisers may be firing at their max range with the TMD just outside radar range; the attacker may be focusing their APM/attention elsewhere for a while).
  • The amount of damage getting through per second from the cruisers over time is also relevant since in some cases the TMD will be shielded, which can help compensate for the 'sometimes missiles get overkilled' issue
  • When I tested 3 buzzkill slightly spaced out vs 2 Seraphim cruisers (that were targeting the closest TMD), the buzzkill defended indefinitely. I'm assuming the '4 buzzkill to defend 2 cruisers' result was where the buzzkill are placed right by each other (and players are less likely to do this due to aoe damage being able to hurt both tmd at the same time).
  • In some tests, 2 buzzkill could defend against 2 Seraphim cruisers indefinitely (when the cruisers are targeting the TMD)

Therefore a doubling of missile health would mean cruisers would be getting a buff vs TMD when they're already able to use missiles to overwhelm a unit whose sole purpose is meant to be to defend against missiles.

I also dont like the idea of having firing randomness which sounds like it'd be more frustrating to play with than the current overkill bug.

The factions with cruiser missiles have terrible direct fire destroyers for base killing. Forcing them to use BS, especially when one has an incredibly expensive BS that is slow at getting across to do anything is a gigantic faction nerf to a faction that is already just terrible at t2 navy.