Hives Need a Nerf vol. III
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Hives are imbal because they are used to spam boys. You justify the increase in infrastructure to spam up RAS SCUs in a singular, defensible location where the hives can either protect thru shield assist, immediately put infinite eco into eco production, or deal with a threat by making a t4 quickly.
Remove SACU garbage and hives are back to their normal stationary use as stationary buildpower that can't help you build up eco since you need to spread out your mass fabs and can't cover them with a singular shield.
And you do get different results based on games you look at. I'd say you could pretty quickly see SMLs are quite OP by looking at turtle games (as this thread is all about it). You would also see that scathis is a garbage T4 by watching dual gap games. In fact, novax would even be considered trash-tier in a dual gap game. These are all not true at all on maps that allow for interaction at all or most phases of the game.
Ultimately balance, or determining if something is OP or UP, should revolve around looking at a game state where you not only had to take into account the opportunity cost of getting to a position but then the utility from using the option.
In dual gap games, this is drastically simplified. You have your eco slot make the first and really final decision "Do I nuke rush or do I eco sim into t3 arty or t4 game ender?" and this is in just about every situation what decides the game assuming enemy air is not extremely competent against your garbage air.
There is no decision "hmmm maybe I need to make a T4 to help win mid" or "hmmm maybe I need to put more mass into air production" or "hmmm maybe I need to get into navy" because the map is extremely linear with 1-3 things to think about for really any slot. If your map is reduced to this, it doesn't really tell anything noteworthy about the state of balance in the game.
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Also as another thing, that entire idea presumes that dual gap players are at some higher refined meta on lategame tactics relative to “ladder players” or whatever. Which is really just not true. It’s the map that forces the strategies, not some hidden microcosm of epic gamers on dual gap. Most top tier ladder players are also top tier senton players, which is a massively superior teamgame map for determining the strength of lategame tactics anyway BECAUSE it allows so much more room for opportunity cost consideration.
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@FtXCommando said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
Also as another thing, that entire idea presumes that dual gap players are at some higher refined meta on lategame tactics relative to “ladder players” or whatever. Which is really just not true. It’s the map that forces the strategies, not some hidden microcosm of epic gamers on dual gap. Most top tier ladder players are also top tier senton players, which is a massively superior teamgame map for determining the strength of lategame tactics anyway BECAUSE it allows so much more room for opportunity cost consideration.
I haven't taken a poll or anything, but I believe the notion that T4 is a bit OP is fairly widespread in the team game community.
And I think an understanding that the scathis was in a terrible place was also well understood in the team game community.
And yet in both instances, I had to come in here and do a lot of arguing before people came around.
If you play games where you're primarily building T3 land and T4 assault experimental game after game after game, you're probably going to be the first people to notice if there's a problem with those specific units because you're constantly exposed to them.
I'm sure they're fantastic on any map they play, but they aren't focused in on that set of units. That's all I'm saying. I'm not proclaiming that I'd kick their ass on gap or anything.
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Scathis has been known to be in a bad spot since it was first nerfed in 2016. Fixing it was always on the cards, knowing how to fix it wasn’t. If you reread the scathis thread on old forums, you’d see it’s mostly people discrediting bad fixes rather than acknowledging no fix is needed.
I don’t agree on t4 being OP, really. ML could see a use of a lower turn rate on laser maybe, only real thing I’d adjust. Problem seems to center around ML being able to vet quicker due to cheaper cost, just need to slightly nerf it in some way to account for that.
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I do not think Hives are strong enough to require the other factions to get engineering stations. Nor do I think the existence of Hives justify rebalancing Experimentals. Additionally, different maps encourage different game styles, but it is still FAF. I agree that different communities who have different game styles are going to notice different things, but don't disparage other subsections of the FAF community.
@Tagada said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
Hives are strong in super late game where BP concentration and pathfinding is more important then BP efficiency. In every other situation other forms of BP are more efficient and therefore with good BP scaling better.
I'd say Tagada's comment accurately sums up all that needs to be said in this thread.
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Couldn’t in theory the Monkey Lord get a specialized vet table?
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@Dragun101 said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
Couldn’t in theory the Monkey Lord get a specialized vet table?
The problem isn't the Monkeylord, and if all this results in a nerf to just the Monkeylord then we're doing it very wrong.
This is the patch that is in question:
https://content.faforever.com/patchnotes/3696.html
In that patch, you can see significant across the board nerfs to most T3 units in the "T3 Land Combat" section. Notice that there were no corresponding nerfs to the combat effectiveness of assault experimentals.
Its not just the Monkeylord that's OP. The GC, Chicken and Fatboy are also all too damn capable relative to T3 units.
As I posted in another thread, as you read through that section remember that those nerfs are not additive, they're multiplicative. Its not a 17% nerf to those units, its a 33% to 50% nerf to each of those units.
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Nah don't touch vet values. The game has too many exceptions to general rules as it is. Would be better off adjusting the physical unit.
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Ah yes i remember that nice patch. The patch after which everybody was complaining how t4's became useless because of the buildtime nerf
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@moses_the_red said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
In that patch, you can see significant across the board nerfs to most T3 units in the "T3 Land Combat" section. Notice that there were no corresponding nerfs to the combat effectiveness of assault experimentals.
Patch also nerfed almost every experimental in the game but that's okay dude, I know you'll contort it to suit your righteous crusade, i'm sure we can revert this patch and go back to the glory days of loyalist/harbinger rushing literally every game very soon.
@moses_the_red said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
Its saying "Fuck all these maps, they aren't really part of the game, balancing around them isn't worth the effort".
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Pay attention to the wording.
"Nerfs to the combat effectiveness of Assault Experimentals".
Their build times were nerfed, doesn't affect their combat effectiveness. Just affects how quickly they can be turned out.
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@moses_the_red said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
@biass
Pay attention to the wording.@biass said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
that's okay dude, I know you'll contort it to suit your righteous crusade,
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Ok well since this topic has been hijacked several times over, i'll reguide the focus back onto the fact that while ecoing, losing some build efficiency using hives vs engineers is not a big trade off if your completed goal adds more income to your rates. So when you look at the possible curves players can pull off ecoing, Cybran is simply out of balance as they will never lose that race. Add any overflow or throw style play (which happens often when players intentionally lose their front position and fall back). No engineer clumping, and to the range of hives, once 4-8 t3 fabs can be completed, the hives can then just sit on a quantum gateway and keep their production value in use. Not to mention as stec did in the example, your eco is so popping at that point that you can just quickly build more hives in new positions to eco more. I just can't imagine doing that as a seraphrim player under any conditions with the 33% Build buff gone.
As for all this map fluff rubbish i have to listen to on any post, dual gap is a popular map, it is ranked, it follows the no-allshare meta that seems to be more popular in tournaments (somehow that still hasn't been standardized). If every map wasn't a canis clone, then there wouldn't be such a call for conformity. Look at the maps i've designed and uploaded for smaller or different versions of the role-based style. Lets start getting more play on maps that are like our favorites, but are not our favorites just for academic sake.
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And again back to possible solutions:
Add engineering stations of some type to all factions (I thought i saw this in dev notes somewhere but might have been for a mod)
Add a spool up time for the hives.
Remove the 2nd upgrade for hives.
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Every serious teamgame tournament is played with full share. Zero idea how you got the idea that share until death is “standardized” in tournament play.
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@Spy_Emanciator said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
Ok well since this topic has been hijacked several times over, i'll reguide the focus back onto the fact that while ecoing, losing some build efficiency using hives vs engineers is not a big trade off if your completed goal adds more income to your rates. So when you look at the possible curves players can pull off ecoing, Cybran is simply out of balance as they will never lose that race. Add any overflow or throw style play (which happens often when players intentionally lose their front position and fall back). No engineer clumping, and to the range of hives, once 4-8 t3 fabs can be completed, the hives can then just sit on a quantum gateway and keep their production value in use. Not to mention as stec did in the example, your eco is so popping at that point that you can just quickly build more hives in new positions to eco more. I just can't imagine doing that as a seraphrim player under any conditions with the 33% Build buff gone.
It's true that you can generally spam up more buildpower quickly, but the main bottleneck when ecoing is always going to be mass. Assisting nukes is an exception but nuke assist has already been nerfed. Sitting on a gateway keeps hives active but doesn't give a speed increase once you use all the mass in storage. Once you get out an SACU they generally either assist the gateway go build something, in either case they spend more mass than they generate so you won't really hit a buildpower bottleneck after that.
You can generally get around engie pathfinding problems with good rally points and assisting them on each-other. They can move around and start construction (hives can only assist/reclaim). You can drop engis on the map for reclaim or move them out to build sams without having to risk a ras com. Hives have some advantages (shield upgrading with Hive assist is expensive but fast and good for arty wars) but so does engie spam.
And I watched the replay, Stec got so much eco and stuff because he balanced his power well, he got reclaim, and didn't do anything but eco for the first chunk of the game. He was in air slot but was very delayed on T3. If you hadn't suicided your first two strats and had killed his one asf with your 5 before it shot down your strat, you could have completely destroyed his base. Even at minute 20 you had much more air and could have sent some strats or corsairs and destroyed his entire mass fab/pgen grid.
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Just need someone to implement the bigbrain idea of aeon t1 engies being able to merge into a t2 if u have an hq kappa
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@TheWheelie said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
Just need someone to implement the bigbrain idea of aeon t1 engies being able to merge into a t2 if u have an hq kappa
I think thats nice for aon for faction diversity. But not as a general concept because transportation of engis to key areas is good that its apm intensive. Imagine if you can just merge 4 engis into a t2 uef and spam triads everywhere once you hit t2. Ridiculous idea.
T2 aon pd on the other hand? Who cares??
