Atlantis

@ThomasHiatt For this game, the design should, as a general rule (with exceptions of course), reflect real-life physics and in general, the things we see on the screen should intuitively make sense to the viewer. Those are factors, among other factors, that we want to have in our game.

It is not wrong to say "I don't like this particular gameplay mechanic because it is different than what I intuitively feel like I should be seeing."

If video games won't validate our feelings, what in this horrible wasteland of a world will?

I think the root of the problem is that water is very inconsistent and poorly designed in this game. There are about 10 different types of water in the game and you cannot distinguish between them in any way other than trial and error. Mapmakers have a huge amount of responsibility to design their maps to have clear and consistent mechanics, but 99% of them aren't even aware of this and just try to make pretty maps. You can never create good balance and clear consistent mechanics under these circumstances.

The only consistent mechanic shared by all water is that hover units can go over it and amphibious units through it as long as there isn't a cliff blocking them (which can also be unclear).

Otherwise, water always has these unknowns:

• Is it deep enough to protect unit X from surface fire?
• Is it deep enough for torpedos and depth charges to work?
• Is it deep enough to build a navy factory?
• Is it deep enough for navy units to travel through?
• Is it deep enough to hide submerged unit X from AoE with radius Y?
• Will the seafloor kill my units if I drop them there?
• Can my amphibious units cross there or is there some underwater terrain issue?

If subs were capable of adjusting their depth like air units it would still never be clear if they are deep enough to be safe from AoE with radius X since the depth of the water can vary significantly. You don't want to make underwater units immune to all AoE just because they went 1 inch under the surface either because that is stupid and still inconsistent. You could make the AoE some sort of ellipsoid shape so it doesn't penetrate as deep into the water, but that doesn't address the issue, if anything it becomes less clear what can hit what. You could make water have a dampening effect (pun intended) so that damage taken from AoE is reduced with depth, still inconsistent and unclear. The way it currently is, where submerged units stay at a consistent depth at all times and take AoE damage if they are within range, is probably the most consistency you can get.

I think placing so much power and responsibility in the hands of the map makers is the biggest design flaw in Supreme Commander. It is the cause of this problem and several related problems which all have no solutions. When I was thinking about what I would want from a new Supreme Commander type of game this is the first thing I had to find a solution for.

well this isnt the forum for that, but maybe its possible for map editor to show these unknowns in water to the player's ui in some way when they edit maps so that they can more easily know what water's mechanics are like at different locations on map without guessing and thus design maps with better water parts

@TheWheelie said in Atlantis:

The main reason why groundfiring is something i want to stay in faf is because it is one of the rare situations where micro is rewarded quite heavily. I know lots of people on faf don't care about that but i do. I do agree that the groundfiring doesn't make any sense from a logical standpoint but i don't give anything about that tbh. Gameplay is all for me.

Harms are a great example of this btw. They can be groundfired by battleships and even uef/sera cruisers i believe, but people still see them as super strong simply because groundfiring them takes a lot of attention and micro. All in all you get a big reward, free kills, if you groundfire them but it comes at the cost of great time investment.

Your example would make sense if you didn't remove aa from the game, but still added the option for arties to be able to hit air by groundfiring. After all even without groundfire you can still counter subs. There is a very important difference between the 2 situations: In 1 it is mandatory and in the other one it is simply one of multiple options. Therefore, if in addition to there being aa you would be able to do dmg to bombers if you did some sick arty groundfire then i would love it to be added to the game

yeah i understand your point. I also like to keep the micro that we have in the game.
But i think that BS shooting T3 subs is breaking the balance, when you have bs it's not worth it to suicide the torp on T3 subs, it's so much better to freely kill the T3 subs by ground fire.
Also as i said i like to keep micro (air fights, dodging shots, army movement etc etc etc), but i don't like bs groundfire, because it's pretty counter intuitive etc (see previous points).

As a casual player I see whole game from prism of emotions (will make this a signature)

Using ground fire to kill subs:
1st emotion is WTF???
2nd emotion is "I broke the game"
3rd - "MUAHAHAHAHA"
4th (after realizing that game balanced around this) - "I really supposed to do this each time?"

It's super effective. It rewards paying attention
It's pain to use. It's counter-intuitive

It's sad that game actually balanced around this use. Will be hard to fix.

Atlantis, a shallow (pun not intended) attempt at faction diversity. Of could have just been given a t3 carrier like everyone else but instead they got a t4 just to be different. But then it would be too different, so instead they got a t3.5

That roughly sums up the whole problem, the Atlantis doesn't know what it wants to be, a t3 aircraft carrier or a t4 submarine, so it tries and fails to be both at once.
It's not a good carrier because its mass cost per BP is over twice as much as other carriers, in fact it's literally cheaper to build a t3 air HQ from scratch if you want t3 air units.
It's not a good submarine because its massive size, slow speed and relatively low hp make it a pitifully easy target to destroy.

The only thing going for it are its relatively cheep cost for a t4 unit, and its decently powerful weapons.
Essentially it is a glass cannon, a quick to build but short term boost to firepower. A gimped monkey lord.

There are a few options on how to rectify this:
Take a heavier focus on the submarine aspect, make it a little smaller, boost its speed, add some anti torpedoes. Make it threatening to enemies naval units.
Take a heavier focus on its carrier aspect, give it much more build power, more powerful AA, maybe even Airstaging (if adding that to a submersible unit doesn't break everything).
Turn it into a dedicated support unit, a t4 cruiser wannabe, using its AA and torps to discourage incoming attacks to your navy while offering extensive sensor range and fighter support.

@keyser said in Atlantis:

yeah i understand your point. I also like to keep the micro that we have in the game.
But i think that BS shooting T3 subs is breaking the balance, when you have bs it's not worth it to suicide the torp on T3 subs, it's so much better to freely kill the T3 subs by ground fire.
Also as i said i like to keep micro (air fights, dodging shots, army movement etc etc etc), but i don't like bs groundfire, because it's pretty counter intuitive etc (see previous points).

Well i never disagreed with the fact that groundfiring isn't properly balanced. It is way too strong vs atlantis/tempest/sera t3 subs to the point that most of then are in a bad spot just cause groundfire exists. I just think that the solution shouldn't be to remove groundfire but to make tweaks so it's way harder to do.

It's actually surprising if you look at other rts games how they are completely riddled with weird unintuitive features. In sc2 when you send workers to mineral patches they lose all unit collision functions and can go straight through other units. In Aoe2 shooting uphill will give you a big dmg penalty, but if you delete the unit before the shot arrives the penalty will just disappear and the shot will deal full damage.

Now the interesting part is that both of these features get "abused" by pro gamers and when they do everybody watching the stream is shouting what a sick move the player just made, because these weird unintuitive features enabled for more strategic gameplay and micro. As far as i've seen the majority actually likes it when these kind of plays are getting made.

Now i'm not saying this is an argument as for why groundfiring is good. I just wanted to mention that this "problem" is not at all exclusive for faf and that it isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Ground firing submerged units is unintuitive. Part of this problem is the "can't ground fire directly onto units". Perhaps a code fix allowing players to ground fire directly onto the point they click?
This "ground fire" mechanic adds micro to the game. This is good.
Main problem is slow, submerged experimental units getting killed freely because of ground firing (because they are slow). Someone suggested having damage taken underwater from surface weapons be reduced. This might balm peoples pain but adds another "hidden" mechanic to the game, which I view as bad.
The problem can be viewed from another angle. The way underwater (submerged) units are detected is by sonar. You won't know where to ground fire without it. In recent patches sonar has been nerfed by an increase in maintenance cost. Perhaps sonar should be nerfed further to bring it inline more with it's Radar counterpart??

Yes, groundfiring subs is unintuitive, created by engine limitations, unhealthy for balance, and makes little logical sense.

That all said, I'm highly pessimistic about removing this feature. Credits to the balance team for all the great work they've done thus far, but this would require a complete rework of the entire underwater balance. That to me sounds like an enormous task, and I'm afraid of having another firebeetle situation where we have a unit that no-one knows what to do with.

I'm not convinced such a task would be a wise use of the balance team's time, nor that the final result is ensured to be a net benefit to the game.

sorry but what farms is talking about in other games' examples all sounds like exploiting bugs, while it does take micro and knowledge of those bugs to do so, and therefore more "skill", those things were never supposed to exist in first place even in the games' very designs, you could say that any of the bannable bug exploits we have listed here on forums takes skill to do, you have to know how to do them (skill) and then micro to do them, why are they then not considered fine and this (groundfire hitting underwater, which it isnt supposed to) is? building under a transport to kill dropped units would "reward micro" as well, terraforming "rewards knowledge" of how to do it as well, walking with acu while upgrading as well, and so on.

and @deribus while it is a big task, not doing it is just ignoring these problems in the game, submarines currently already are in bad situation except on useless extreme instead of OP because of this problem, fixing this would simply show how unbalanced they are without this broken mechanic to keep them in check, which is not how balance is supposed to go about it

so how about instead of rewarding knowledge of bugs and their abuses, we reward strategy within what units are supposed to be able to do and balance them based on it instead of bugs?

@Mach said in Atlantis:

sorry but what farms is talking about in other games' examples all sounds like exploiting bugs, while it does take micro and knowledge of those bugs to do so, and therefore more "skill", those things were never supposed to exist in first place even in the games' very designs

How can you possibly know that? You really think that game developers of those games wouldn't fix these things if they were "bugs"?

one thing not to be forgotten is, that groundfire is a good solution to the obnoxious mechanic of shift g stacking subs.

While I can't exactly disagree with what is being said, and while I freely admit that I never used it for its aa or air building/staging, I think it is a very good unit for:

a) intel (I think this point isn't being stressed enough, the vision it gives is VERY handy)

b) very good torps and the only sub you get (your t2 torps options as uef navy are very good, but are not subs, so very easy to kill)

c) very often forces your enemy to focus its attention on ground-firing it, which gives the rest of your navy more time to hit the enemy fleet (an argument could be made that given your battleship hp, it doesn't matter much, still), and often it's enough to move it a little to make their battleships completely miss the shots (its weird shape makes it sometimes very hard to hit).

I'm perfectly willing to accept that I'm bad and I might agree that a mass cost could definitely make it "better", but I don't find this unit to be useless at all.

@Tagada said in Atlantis:

How can you possibly know that? You really think that game developers of those games wouldn't fix these things if they were "bugs"?

I cant know, Im not them, to use farms' example, tell me is it good game design that arrows fired uphill doing less damage should suddenly do more damage if you suicide the unit that fired them before they hit? Sounds more like an unintentional bug. Lets do that in supcom where then you get an artillery that when it fires a shot that shot does more damage if you ctrlk the artillery before the shot landed. Sure it adds "gameplay" (if you can call it that) options, but so does any action a player can take, so to use my previous point, why not allow all the bug exploits that are listed as bannable as well then? Why not terraform when it can be done? Just because it can be done doesnt mean it should have ever been an option at all.

You can just take any game filled with bugs and say that they arent bugs because if they were then developers would have fixed them. How many bugs did faf fix that steam fa still has? Were those bugs at all since gpg didnt fix them? No, it is up to us to decide what game mechanics should and shouldnt exist at this time (because gpg doesnt exist to do that instead), instead of doing nothing about those bugs because we wrongly consider them valid gameplay mechanics.

We should first fix the bug, then balance underwater units once the bug is gone. 2 negatives dont give a positive in game design and 2 bugs dont cancel each other out.

It's not a bug, it's an imperfect solution given the engine limitations. While I agree that given the slowness of Tempests and Atlantis it creates a weird balance I don't think it's a realy problem with subs. They are fast enough to dodge the shots easily and unless you pack them closely together (which makes their torp defenses insanely strong and without a groundfire it would be impossible to counter it efficiently). If your opponent is spending so much APM for ground firing why can't you spend half of that APM microing your subs?

because the whole microing to hit them with weapons that shouldnt be able to hit them vs microing submarines so they dodge things they shouldnt have to dodge thing shouldnt exist, these 2 things should be balanced with valid mechanics instead of with these bugs (that a lot of players probably dont even know about because of how nonsensical they are)

There is no real difference between exploits and bugs aside from what “community opinion” deems is acceptable. FAF could have allowed terraforming and expected mappers to take it into account. FAF could allow people to abuse aoe on t2 pd. FAF could allow people to block nukes with novax.

Any argument should be based on explaining why the change is beneficial to gameplay/what issue it’s solving in current navy meta. All this moralizing and relativism is bullshit. At least pick a better topic like how government is just legalized crime.

Edit: i completely forgot about this, I don't know if its a engine limitation, but it would be a very nice buff if the Atlantis was able to produce units while moving... but that depends on the engine

Quick and dirty solution that I think will (somewhat) satisfy both people for and against groundfiring subs.
Submerged units revive 50% less (or whatever percent you want) damage from all attacks except torpedos and depth charges.

Bam. Groudfiring subs is still advantageous, but not to the point of rendering them obsolete. Bonus points for making tempest submerge not useless.

Its not a perfect solution, HARMS would need to be nerfed a little to stop it getting overbuffed, and sera t3 subs would still get one shot by tempests and summits (assumeing 50% resistance). But it should work.