The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird)

@javi said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (Ambassador & Blackbird):

@ftxcommando I mean not all factions were meant to have the exact same values. UEF has better T2 and T3 land than Cybran, so should we just buff Cybran t3 land to be as good as UEF t3 land?

And jamming is pretty crazy on t1 navy when you don’t know if it’s 2 or 5 frigates

I am aware that UEF frig is a great use of jamming, it’s literally the only good use of jamming in the UEF roster. Doesn’t change that UEF frig is 3rd place in the frig tier list tho.

Cybran strat would STILL be better than UEF strat. The boon of Cybran strat is the aoe it does, not the stealth. I would rather counterintelligence BECOME a greater part of balance BECAUSE it raises the margin of error in unit positioning as well as the benefit of proper intel gathering which are huge parts of what makes FAF gameplay interesting to me. This is why I would want jamming to extend to more units in UEF roster and Aeon and Sera to get their own counterintelligence aspects so intel gathering becomes a secondary battlefield itself.

I dislike how easy it is to get away with lazy scouting and I see things like stealth and jamming as ways to punish it.

@ftxcommando said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (Ambassador & Blackbird):

@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.

For what it matters Sera unique counterintel if you had to force it is is “weirdness” or more accurately having go invisible under certain criteria (submerging Destroyers & Selens basically)

Not that it matters, but I like that people like ComradeStryker try to increase racial diversity and keep FaF young. Like FtX said it might not be the biggest deal.
I wish we all are more open-minded to keep FaF as an interesting, complex RTS that even attracts new players. This is not about UEF or a specific race. I would appreciate it if we are a bit more courageous to change.

Tell you what, ill give you jamming on your UEF t3 strat if my AEON t3 strat gets shielding

@god-emperor said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

Tell you what, ill give you jamming on your UEF t3 strat if my AEON t3 strat gets shielding

That's a cool idea, but overall, Aeon has great air.
They have the T2 Swifty, T3 AA gunship, The Czar, too.

Shielding the Strat as is would just offer more strength to a faction that doesn't need more strength in air. UEF on the other had is quite the conundrum.
If anything, shielding a strat would likely hurt the unit overall, as if it has more HP than the standard Strat HP - then it would make the unit way too tanky. So, to keep it balanced, if it has just as much HP as it currently does, that means sacrificing unit HP for shield HP and that means an energy cost as well as a chance to lose that HP when you power stall.

It worked for the Czar, back when it had 60K HP and no shield, vs now that it has 40K HP and 20K shield, but it only worked as the unit had such a large HP pool. With a strat that has only about 10% of the HP pool, that is so much more difficult to work with.

But, again, decent idea. I'm sure it could be balanced in somehow. Just gotta find something for Seraphim.

~ Stryker

Sera strats should drop ion storms. Or, leave ion storms when they die.

Neither of those ideas are intel based buffs. They're just literal straight stat buffs to already strong units.

Just diversity ideas in response to the post before.

@stlng said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

Sera strats should drop ion storms. Or, leave ion storms when they die.

@ftxcommando said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

Neither of those ideas are intel based buffs. They're just literal straight stat buffs to already strong units.

What about leaving intel wherever it dies similar to the T1 air scout it has, Or it leaves a lasting vision where it drops its bombs?

-Stryker

A weak ion storm with vision would be interesting. Would have to adjust bomb damage to compensate for the ion storm damage.

@comradestryker said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

@stlng said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

Sera strats should drop ion storms. Or, leave ion storms when they die.

@ftxcommando said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

Neither of those ideas are intel based buffs. They're just literal straight stat buffs to already strong units.

What about leaving intel wherever it dies similar to the T1 air scout it has, Or it leaves a lasting vision where it drops its bombs?

---

-Stryker

I don't think it's very useful for a strat bomber compared to jamming or stealth. Best thing I could come up with for Aeon/Phim is something where they had some "drone" ability that produces like 5 hp aircraft that shows up on vision but not radar, but I don't know if it's possible to assign something no icon on the radar map. That way it punishes no radar coverage/makes sniping radars more valuable while UEF and Cybran are more about abusing people that only rely on radar.

Sera does have the Selen for that

Vision after crash for Aeon is on theme with Eye of Rhianne but @FtXCommando makes a good point that it's not directly useful to the unit. Could be useful if you weren't sure you actually killed what you thought you did though.

These are all awesome ideas, however, in order for those to be taken into consideration, something about the UEF air & jamming needs to be done, first. Hence the post.

I'm glad this post has gotten a lot of attention, most of which people seemed to enforce my overall point - UEF Air is lacking a little. Sure, this is a controversy, but as we can see, it is a topic that needs to be discussed further.

At some point, I even thought about offering a suggestion to add Jamming to ASF, too... but figured that may have been too much. Now that this post has had some time to settle down a bit, perhaps we could talk about this further?

~ Stryker

This has nothing to do with buffing UEF air. UEF air isn't bad beyond stinger being a terrible unit. It's about expanding the game into the counter-intel sphere that has been criminally underused since the days of GPG balance. ASF won't get jamming purely due to the performance issues that it carries.

@ftxcommando said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

This has nothing to do with buffing UEF air.

It's about expanding the game into the counter-intel sphere that has been criminally underused since the days of GPG balance.

Counter intel plays a large portion of this game due, and so, it should be looked at from all sides. Including from the UEF side... but not just intel & counter intel... we need to look at the overall picture, too. It's not about 'buffing' UEF air - yes, I agree... but it should still be a little more viable as every other faction has better alternatives.

UEF air isn't bad beyond stinger being a terrible unit.

What's wrong with the Stinger?

ASF won't get jamming purely due to the performance issues that it carries.

I feel that @Jip would be able to answer this directly. But from what I know, fake signatures shouldn't be an extra load on the processing side. Sure, it'll be a pain to look at, but look at frigates - I'm sure you've seen the games in which there seem to be thousands of them? Yet, no performance drop is noticeable.

~ Stryker

You don't make 800 frigs in a game. Stingers suck because they have no aoe and they shoot slow so literally anything making circles dodges 90% of dps forever.

@comradestryker said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

fake signatures shouldn't be an extra load on the processing side

Then how are your units shooting at fake signatures?
As long as the signature is visible it's considered a unit. Sure it doesn't have weapons itself, but it can still be targeted. I'm not sure how much movement needs to be calculated for them or if they just copy the original, but targeting is already a very performance heavy calculation.

@ftxcommando said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

You don't make 800 frigs in a game. Stingers suck because they have no aoe and they shoot slow so literally anything making circles dodges 90% of dps forever.

Ah, I see. Though, I thought this was being fixed by increasing the projectile speed?

~Stryker

@nex said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

@comradestryker said in The Problems With The UEF - Part 4 (The Ambassador & Blackbird):

fake signatures shouldn't be an extra load on the processing side

Then how are your units shooting at fake signatures?
As long as the signature is visible it's considered a unit. Sure it doesn't have weapons itself, but it can still be targeted. I'm not sure how much movement needs to be calculated for them or if they just copy the original, but targeting is already a very performance heavy calculation.

Jip could probably explain it better than myself, so this is a post I recall about this.

@jip said in Jamming ability should reset when vision of unit is lost:

@e33144211332424 said in Jamming ability should reset when vision of unit is lost:

though again having 100's of frigates do it every 5-10s sounds like a small tactical attack aimed at performance.

It is not.

The complexity (with respect to the input) is linear. We denote that as O(n) . Linear algorithms are usually a good candidate when you're on a budget (and we are).

Some of the performance improvements that we've been having is because there were operations implemented using a complexity O(nlg(n)) or O(n^2) while there was an O(n) or even an O(1) implementation possible. To give you an idea of the growth, see these graphs:

See also on desmos

To pick one x coordinate on the graph: if we have 100 (n = 100) units then it takes the algorithm:

• O(n) = 100 steps
• O(nlg(n)) = ~664 steps
• O(n^2) = 10.000 steps

This is by all means a simplification - there's still a constant factor that can make things expensive. But jamming is not one of those.