FAF Beta - Feedback

On the Soul Ripper:

The Problem:
Currently, it feels like an air experimental without purpose. We have the ahwasser for massive AoE, and the czar for great single target damage. The soulripper is an awkward middle-of-the road. If you want to snipe a com or land exp, czar is better. If you want to flatten a base or t3 army, ahwasser is better. The soul ripper doesn't excel at any of these tasks, and especially as cybran you are better off just building t3 bombers or gunships to fill these roles. Additionally, the strategic capabilities of the Soul Ripper don't feel special at all. In most regards, it feels and performs like a group of T3 gunships.

On raw combat power, the soul ripper is not as cost-effective as T3 gunships. Having less efficient T4 is not a problem on land or navy, as you get a higher concentration of combat power compared to building more T3 units. But in the air, packing lots of units close together is not nearly as much of a problem. Thus if a T4 air unit isn't as resource efficient as T3, it has to offer other capabilities to compensate. Both the ahwasser and czar do this sufficiently by offering unique abilities not achievable with T3 air, while the soul ripper does not.

Proposed solution:
One way to give the Soul Ripper a more distinctive role and feel could be to make it a long-range bombardment unit. For example, what would happen if we give it a range of 62? This would enable it to hover on the edge of a battle or hostile base (conveniently just outranging SAMs, being able to avoid them with good micro), poking away at the enemy and drifting in and out of vision with it's stealth. Kind of like a lategame air version of cybran stealth com or hoplites, or tempests in starcraft2. In combination with the stealthed ASF it can be used to deceive the enemy and bait air fights, fitting the general cybran philosophy well. Due to being an air unit it can attack from unique angles unlike any other long-range unit in the game today (just think of the possibilities on mountainous maps like gap!). This would add a new micro-intensive strategic dimension to the game.

If it proves too oppressive, values like range, dps, hp and speed could of course be tuned. But I would love to see a new angle being explored with the bug, instead of its current existence as a strictly bigger gunship.

@xayo said in FAF Beta - Feedback:

conveniently outranging SAMs

Yes, a Fatboy should also get a buff so it outranges t2 arty.
Units that can be countered are pretty boring anyway.

And the soulripper was buffed compared to the other air t4s.
Its e cost was only increased by 98.3% compared to an 109.2% increase for the czar and a 146.2% increase for the ahwassa. Even before it was less e per mass than the other two (14.12* vs 16.25* its mass cost in e). So even though it might need more buffs, saying it wasn't buffed compared to other air t4s is just wrong. So making a soulripper compared to an ahwassa is now more viable than before the patch.

@xayo

This seems like a really good role for it, but I don't know if outranging SAMS is great... since it has stealth already, maybe make it have the same range as SAMS? That way you could outrange SAMS if out of omni or vision range

I’m not sure about that, couldn’t that mean you could stack 2 soulrippers and just clean up every base if you win air? Since SAMS can’t stop you anymore, you’d just continue making ASF and soulrippers and win game. Specially with them bearing a 99k health bar

If it almost outranges SAMs, it would be easy to kill small groups of SAMs, and still hard to kill big groups of SAMs, but you could try to avoid them. So it would be harder to spam SAMs to keep out a soul ripper out of a large area but it would still be viable to spam SAMs to keep the ripper out of a single base. It would also be easier to protect a ripper if it has more range because you can have more land-based units supporting it when it's further away from the enemy.

Please no. It's enough that Ahwassa can kill sams without losing much hp.

That design of the unit will require it to cost the e that washer or czar costs. You can’t have people making a unit that baits air fights by sniping sams/defenses away and therefore risks an immediate and complete game loss while also costing basically zero infrastructure.

It's kind of weird how fast balance swings when you introduce SAMs vs Air or how fast the balance swings when the SAMs Disappear vs Air ( in a certain area). Air can sometimes feel very oppressive in Teamgames, it's extremely different in 1v1s tho where Air is just a great support role and can offer an upper hand, but in Teamgames where one players can invest fully in Air. It can get oppressive with how easy it is to all in snipes and how losing air is just an instant game lost which can sometimes be frustrating.

Soul Ripper is too slow to be effective biggest buff for Soul Ripper would be a Movement Buff & Alpha Damage, would make it a quick ambush experimental (flying monkeylord basically)

I might have missed it, but will sera battleship nukes get the same kind of cost increase as nuke subs and stationary nukes?

For now, no.

@tagada may I ask for your thought on why not increase the energy cost of nuke missiles? Wouldn't this be easier?

My first assumption was naval balance, but regarding the sera BS I'm not sure that the planned chances are healthier/better (without unplanned side effects).

Oh, I indeed cant't read as I thought the missile cost was changed, not the sub/launcher itself..
Changing the sera BS cost to nerf its nukes wouldn't be a great idea, so good that it's not planned.

Then I don't quite get the energy cost explanation though: "while the bigger energy cost increase makes it a lot harder to make a fast second nuke."

On the current balance it takes (roughly) 1 additional t3 pgen to build a nuke launcher in a reasonable amount of time and 2 t3 pgens to actually load the missile.

The proposed change of doubling the energy cost would make it so you need 2 t3 pgens for the entire process. While this means you need to build the 2nd pgen earlier, which is a slight nerf, this results in essentially no change to the total cost of launching your first or any subsequent nukes.
(the additional 3k mass increase does of course increase cost though)

If the goal is to discourage building a second launcher, beyond the proposed 3k mass increase, further increasing the launcher's mass cost, or the energy cost for launcher (and missile) beyond the 2 pgens from the proposed changes would have a much bigger effect imo.

Updated the changelog with the following new changes:

Jamming for T3 UEF Air
Redirection of Billy Nuke by Loyalists
More Sparky buffs
Fix for Aeon ACU Heavy Shield Icon

Possible upcoming changes:

• Further adjustment of nukes thanks to your feedback. Increasing the E cost of missiles and adjusting previous changes

• Nerfing the E cost of the T3 artillery in line with adjustments made to Nukes and Air T4s

• Reworking the bubble shield of UEF ACU

• Bringing back the strength of GC's claws to a normal level

• Buffing the Loyalist's ability

• More tweaks for kennels

• Soul Ripper tweaks to make it a cheaper experimental with more focus on value over time

• Reducing the Crash Damage of Air experimentals

• Small rework of the Bulwark to emphasize its use on the T2 rather the T3 stage

• Mini SACU Rework

• Nerfing the HARMS

• Buffing Higher Tech engineers by making them more BP efficient

• Adjusting T2 static Artillery

• Possible Billy Nuke adjustments

Stay tuned and thank you for all of the feedback so far.

@blodir said in FAF Beta - Feedback:

Looks like an overnerf

nothing is an overnerf to what snipers currently are

T3 UEF Air
Added jamming for Spy Planes and Strategic Bombers

Allow Sparkies to build T1 factories

Happy now?
Or do I need to give UEF Frigs hover ability as well?

Time to main uef i guess

@tagada said in FAF Beta - Feedback:

Happy now?
Or do I need to give UEF Frigs hover ability as well?

Looks good, your list of possible changes looks great as well, hope you guys have the time and endurance for achieving some of that changes as well.
I have the impression that in this list and the current change log most points of the community are included. So thanks for your work so far and being here on display

@unknow said in FAF Beta - Feedback:

Time to main uef i guess

Yes. As basicly all changes can be summarised: " make UEF much stronger, and other nations/factions weaker..."