@zeldafanboy said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (Ambassador & Blackbird):
@ftxcommando
My whole point was that if UEF T3 air was as good as Cybran it would make UEF unbalanced. It already has the best T3 naval (Neptunes are anti meta because they are good against frig spam) and the best T3 land that synergistically fills in the weakness of its siege T4 land unit. The game balance is supposed to be holistic, every faction isn’t supposed to be equally powerful in every arena at every tech level…
Also just wanted to quote this cuz I almost forgot about it. Nowadays UEF is definitely not the best t3 naval. UEF t3 navy is honestly quite hard countered by Aeon t3. Both exodus/shields or Omen are brutal against neptunes and Tempest is very painful for summits to properly deal with, especially since tempest kills all shieldboat protection in one volley.
That isn’t saying UEF t3 navy is trash, really every t3 navy stage is decent and has varying situations they’re solid at and it’s up to players (and maps) to make it possible to make those situations happen. Summit for example is horrible early on (slow, takes forever to shoot, easy to dodge) but is the best bs in terms of production scale combined with the shieldboat to compensate for their inability to dodge. Only tempest spam can really compare. But this is a highly specialized segment of navy combat that requires situations like sentons rather than something like Point of Reach or even Metir for navy combat where you rarely see more than 5 battleships per side. That’s where other factions are superior. When it comes to neptune, they’re fine (so long as no sub spam) but that comes at the cost of UEF t2 stage being total trash so you’re forced to rush them or slowly lose.
I also don’t see why UEF t3 land is the best for the same reasons just reversed. UEF needs to do enough damage with titans to either win the game through them or build up a snowball that then allows local advantage in the form of percy, t4, or SACUs to win. As it currently stands snipers win any sort of stagnate t3 game and therefore Aeon/Sera have the significantly easier to use “passive buildup” t3 stage. If you don’t pressure with UEF or Cybran, you’re just dead.
These are actual, healthy areas of the game where it doesn’t come down to “this faction is autowin at this stage” but instead it comes to forcing game states through play of the game. This is much healthier than something like being forced to rush neptune since players actually have an advantage to play for at that tech stage.
It’s also why I get sick of reading dudes say one faction “deserves” to autowin something (hello cybran frig) because of “holistic” balance when that’s just terrible game design. This situation of a faction “deserving” a shittier strat for “holistic” reasons is the same.
This in turn is why I would want all T3 air to have unique counterintel aspects, because you can’t make one faction “stronger” or “weaker” when they all basically have the same units barring the unique Aeon ones. If you gave ASFs counterintel you can then make some weaker or stronger forced depending on the air force size, or if not, then you at least introduce spy plane dynamics into air fights and punish lazy players that just make two blobs fight.