Why seraphim dont have RAS?

@wikingest your math is ok but this is not an accurate comparison and lacks context

say you are at the point in-game where you have full t3 mex, maybe ACU RAS and your storages capped with fabs but you want even more eco before you are ready to contribute towards your team winning....

anyway you can build two t3 pgens and two t3 fabs with the double adjacency, costing 14.48k mass and generating 32 mass and 3125 energy, after discounts.

instead we can build RAS coms, but we can't just straight build them we also need to build a gateway first, so for 3 coms plus gateway, costing 22.35k, we get income of 33 mass and 3150 energy.

so for ~50% more we get the added benefit of the build power, mobility and dps of the coms, which is admittedly nice if you don't have kennels or hives, but if you are fighting any t3 army with your RAS COMS you will trade very poorly.

Sera not having sACU RAS is part of their faction identity as instead they get by far the strongest combat COMS and from a balance point of view is not needed. Generally in team games you can always ask for an engie anyway.

@black_wriggler said in Why seraphim dont have RAS?:

@wikingest your math is ok but this is not an accurate comparison and lacks context

say you are at the point in-game where you have full t3 mex, maybe ACU RAS and your storages capped with fabs but you want even more eco before you are ready to contribute towards your team winning....

anyway you can build two t3 pgens and two t3 fabs with the double adjacency, costing 14.48k mass and generating 32 mass and 3125 energy, after discounts.

instead we can build RAS coms, but we can't just straight build them we also need to build a gateway first, so for 3 coms plus gateway, costing 22.35k, we get income of 33 mass and 3150 energy.

so for ~50% more we get the added benefit of the build power, mobility and dps of the coms, which is admittedly nice if you don't have kennels or hives, but if you are fighting any t3 army with your RAS COMS you will trade very poorly.

Sera not having sACU RAS is part of their faction identity as instead they get by far the strongest combat COMS and from a balance point of view is not needed. Generally in team games you can always ask for an engie anyway.

Your math is also incomplete because you need approx 30 or so hives to make a decent boy production facility.

There is mods for sera Ras bois or all factions gateway.

Fixed

@ftxcommando said in Why seraphim dont have RAS?:

Your math is also incomplete because you need approx 30 or so hives to make a decent boy production facility.

Interesting. 2 teams of 4 t3 engies take about 100s to build the fabs and gens, but would take 190s to build the gateway and then assisting for the coms.

If you wanted to scale harder and have space you could always build a gateway grid with t2 fabs

Well I'll explain my understanding of why gpg balanced them like this then.

Sera's faction theme is around sieging from firebases, they have the best arty, shields, snipers, base killing units, etc. They are, in fact, the 'invasion' faction, or 'alien' faction.

Sera's mini ras on scus offsets the lack of ras while incentivising building them for general offensive purposes. You then use them to build sera's firebases or use their combat upgrades. I think they're supposed to be the focus of a late game sera t3 army where you have lots of t3 land units based around a sera scu. It's similar to how armies focus around the acu at lower tech levels, and the fact sera has an oc upgrade makes this especially obvious that they are like expendable acus at the late t3 stage. I'm not saying this is what people do, in fact, no one does or tries to use combat scus like this, but I think it's still part of the point of how they were designed. Anyway, I digress.

This hard pushes sera into an aggressive mode with their scus, with them representing and supporting sera's forward positions. They are the only faction with an aggressive faction identity, and I think it adds a lot of character to a faction made up of designated killing machines to have their scus focused around combat. It's consistent to the lore too. Think of sera scus as spartan warriors who only know war. I feel pretty bad for the designers when it seems no one realises what they were going for with the scu design or sera's design.

Why not just give them ras anyway? Sera acu has it, but scus already have mini ras. I personally don't want it, but there's enough people already saying how it's not necessary due to fabs. It's also just lazy and boring faction design.

If they did have it, I'd want them to have some energy based ras, say 5m, 1.5ke, and 10k storage. This would help sera oc scus, or they could convert the excess at a somewhat similar efficiency to the other factions.

Yeah I have nothing better to do.
TLDR: Sera is the alien faction.

ras bois for noobs, bild t2 mass fabs

@ftxcommando said in Why seraphim dont have RAS?:

Your math is also incomplete because you need approx 30 or so hives to make a decent boy production facility.

Add some more lies. Player can use engineers to assist gateway. And the amount should be in relation of economy, possibilitys, and game plan, not because someone on net ordered so.

@black_wriggler said in Why seraphim dont have RAS?:

your math is ok but this is not an accurate comparison and lacks context

Context was, that a polite new player asked a totally justified question, and got avalanched by lies and toxicity. My comparisions goes to examples brought out by others. And as you are saying, that I was not accurate in those comparaisons, show me where was the mistake I supposedly made.

If you think those examples were bad, then tell that to people who invented stuff like that.

@black_wriggler said in Why seraphim dont have RAS?:

we also need to build a gateway first

Gateway cost 3000 mass and gives 120 buildpower, same as 4 t3 engineers, with mass cost 1248. In the same time gateway has 10000hp, while t3 engi (cyb) has 740. Even if you ignore totally the hp, it is only 1754 extra mass. If you divide it by, let's say 50 ras sacus expected to be built, it is extra cost of 35 mass by sacu.
You need about the same amount of build power to build massstorage ringed t3 massfab, as for sacu, but you lose lots of it, when engis are moving, so there is no economi on that side.

@black_wriggler said in Why seraphim dont have RAS?:

if you are fighting any t3 army with your RAS COMS you will trade very poorly

You mean mass equivalent? Never seen anyone deliberatly doing that, so I cant see why do you invent that. Who would build those for frontline combat? Where does that idea come from? Have you tried fighting t3 army with massfabs, rather than with military units and pd's?

@black_wriggler said in Why seraphim dont have RAS?:

you can build two t3 pgens and two t3 fabs with the double adjacency

Yes, this is true. You can use adjacency, more you use, more you get, and more it becomes explosive. And you can have more than double adjacency. You can cover big parts of map with this type of farm. And then if one enemy t1 arty gets through for long enough, all that explodes in chain reaction. Or bomber run. Or drop. Or enemy builds satellite. Or tac gets through. Etc.
But if you have an army of sacu's behind your base, they can counter lots of t1 arty with no loss at all. Same for other things, they can build pd's shields and more, before dying (one by one). And they can move, hide underwater etc.
Yes, adding different example with added ajacency and added explosiveness, makes it in the same time better and worse. Depends from game situation.

Gosh, I sure am excited to start reading all this new content.

@balanceslave
Did your parents not teach you not to litter in forum threads? Have some self-control, you are wasting the time of people who are reading what you write.

Lol. News flash, I'm super high rated. My presence here is a great honour to the thread.

i think ovenman is right. its hard to not compare faction unit to unit, but as the asymmetrical rts faf is we always have to look at the factions and their tactics as a whole. this not just boils down to the one or two special units or buildings but to the whole integrity of a faction.

in many cases id rather have 5 sera oc rambos than 10 ras bois.

If economical options shouldn't be limited to certain factions...
Why not give Ras Boiis, Paragon, and ARAS to all factions?

~ Stryker

I have a better suggestion: remove ras from all sacus and leave it only for acus, reason: the whole concept of "mobile tanky eco with guns and buildpower" never made any sense to me, they effectively become the grey goo unit that everyone should spam because it is always useful, even if the game never realistically reaches the point where they are more efficient than other stuff, why not keep them specializable combat/support units instead of 99.9% of their use being "eco, but better in literally every way"

Why does no other faction have OC sacus??? Fix please!!! Why do aeon and cybran not have tml bois??? Fix please!!! Why can all sacus have a personal shield, but cybran cant???

Balance team, please fix.

@alexmp

there is no good reason to not let have Seraphim RAS SACUs.

I saw many of those discussions, and for me it looks like people in charge just dont like the idea.
Thats all.

In my opinion every faction should have the same opportunities to make more eco.
I see no reason why Seraphim is excluded from this.

Does your logic extend to paragons?

It seemed like the people in charge were in favor of giving engineering stations to all factions, which is equally stupid as giving RAS SCUs to all factions, so why not.

If your game has reached a point that someone is massing RAS bois, then it should have already been over. The investment that a mobile economy of RAS bois takes is far more than actually winning a game.

Also what happened to nerfing ras bois? I feel like that's been rumored to happen for years as this point.

@ftxcommando said in Why seraphim dont have RAS?:

Does your logic extend to paragons?

Well in a vanilla game no. The Paragon is a unique game ender and should be the only one.

In games versus AI and modded games and turtle game play, yes of course.
For the AI it helps to build more units to compensate the stupidness of an AI.
For longer turtle games its a good option to reduce lag.
For mods like Total Mayhem where experimetals can cost 400000 mass, then its also a nice to have.

I made already a mod that adds a paragon like buildings to all 5 factions.
And i would not play without it.

Paragon is a unique game ender, yes. The reason it is unique is the relation it has as a giant eco structure compared to the big guns or nukes the other factions have.

Does that somehow stop applying in vanilla on the scale of a RAS SCU vs tele tml or OC SCUs that sera has access to?

It isn’t like this is a critical component of eco scaling, you won’t find any decent player that thinks that. You might find a few decent players that think a paragon is insanely more valuable than the other game enders though, if it isn’t killed in the first 1-2 minutes it’s up it doesn’t really matter if you have a mavor/yolo/scathis. 10,000 mass per second will beat 800. Though then you get into arguments about needing engie stations to spend 10k mass a second quickly enough.