Smol ACU Adjustment
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@phong said in Smol ACU Adjustment:
Generally I think a turtle style feels way more comfortable for new players, and this is reinforced by a bias towards safer maps like gap or astro when it comes to the games they play.
For them to become ladder players, if they ever do, they have to go through a phase where they unlearn some bad turtle habits, and try out and succeed at being aggressive. They tend to do this by playing more open maps in custom lobbies, the lower the skill and confidence, the more players.
There's already a big cost in attention needed to use the ACU offensively, as compared to just making some obscene firebase with a t2 com, a very, very common noob trap. And attention, specifically, is a beginner's most scarce resource. They often forget radar, tmd, scouting in general, they may idle their first high tech engies for minutes if they get distracted, or attack then look away from the fight, because doing these things right is not yet second nature to them. They spend more time doing any one thing and often get tunnel-vision on some random task because they have to think about it and it's not just busywork as it is to a veteran. This makes multi-taksing harder.
I'm worried about the nerfs you suggested because they make the climb from astro noob to ladder player steeper. I'm sure, FTX, you're very familiar with all the things I described, with all your mentoring experience on discord, and with that in mind, maybe I shouldn't be worried, but I'm still hoping you can think of another way of solving the problem.
I think the recent speed boost to t2 is a welcome change, and in general, I think I'd prefer some solution (which i don't claim to have) that emphasizes decision-making. The same way an air player rushing t3 air might conclude he has a window of opportunity and a need to do damage with a very early strat if he sees his counterpart making t2 bombers, and the same way a less skilled air player like myself decides to pay a mass tax and always shield their t2 pgens, even as i know some better players skip this sometimes, by scouting better and being able to determine if they're far enough behind that a shield is needed.
My problem is the dynamic you’re talking about with regards to OC doesn’t really exist. I don’t even have an OC hotkey bound anymore because I just abuse auto-OC and I don’t find it as bad as thomas makes it seem. This is amplified by the fact auto-OC actually gives you advantages that manual OC doesn’t in terms of continuous movement.
The fact I can get away with playing so utterly lazy to abuse an insanely OP (not that I want it nerfed, I find it fun) mechanic frustrates me. I shouldn’t be allowed to drag some arbitrary e storage value for the tech stage I’m at, hit a button, and afk my ACU at front with small glances at mini maps while I zoom around upgrading mexes or engies reclaiming.
All it takes to counter t1 in teamgames is paying for 1 e storage, really. Maybe a t1 PD behind if you’re really scared of a guy going all in on you. For t2, just add an 800 mass gun upgrade. For t2 to do anything noteworthy, you need 10k+ mass in it to breach an ACU and any emergency meatshield measures that took 60 seconds to create.
With regards to new players, teamgame ones suffer from the exact opposite problem of the ones trying out ladder. They build too much useless stuff, precisely because of this dynamic I’m talking about. They make 4k mass in tanks, it dies, they donate mass, game is over unless enemy does it with 10k mass 6 minutes later. I would like it to be more intuitive for units to actually be useful, and that requires a general ACU nerf, for teamgames.
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I agree that noobs in teamgames still demonstrate many bad habits unsuited for ladder. that's why i mentioned number of players being inversely correlated with player skill and confidence. once you get into 10x10 2v2s or 15x15 3v3s you're much closer to a ladder experience than on any 6v6. But the 6v6 open map is one of the many baby steps that seems to describe a player's trajectory to 1v1 after playing a bunch of astro. Maybe they're only just starting to experiment with units and haven't gotten the hang of using them yet, and the insane commander density on such maps is indeed a hindrance to learning how to use t1 spam. But that's why I mentioned t2 land speed. You can't afk your com at the front if the army can just go around you easier. I mean you can, if 5m to the left of you there's yet another com, but then I'm wondering why are you playing such maps then concluding it's boring? go play 2v2 on a 20x20km.
I never said the problem you described didn't exist, I was just hoping there was a way of solving it that taxes economy, for example, as an alternative to attention. Maybe auto-OC frequency could also scale with the number of mass storages, for instance? That way pros that can afford using manual OC get to spend less mass, but ADHD types get the option of paying more mass for the same benefit.
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Also maybe I'm wrong but you can only counter spam in teamgames the way you described if the teamgames in question have too many coms per square meter to make runbys possible. Which is sort of like arguing against a nuke nerf because you play gap a lot.
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The only maps that don’t see this dynamic are maps with immense snowball design to promote all in play and even then, it’s just barely more efficient than an active turtle. There’s a reason the most often played open wonder was one that had a disgusting 9(!) mexes to win in mid map control with like 8 in the safe base and that isn’t even bothering to talk about the additional reclaim.
Looking at current 4v4 pool, the only map that doesn’t fit this dynamic is monument valley due to the corners being the whole point of the map. You win the reclaim there you win the game, same as wonder open.
I ignored primarily navy maps since ACU isn’t relevant there.
Even then, I’ve gone t3 air rush as the front mid spawn on monument valley because I know there’s nothing anybody can do to touch me as long as I got an acu and 2 scouts.
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Make overcharge an upgrade in stages. Tech 1 OC (Does 400 DMG max)-->Gun--> Tech 2 OC (Does 3000 DMG max)---> Tech 3 OC-- (Does 20,000 DMG max)
put the xbox units in the game pls u_u
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If you want to nerf guncom, t2 com needs to be nerfed as well. What do you think should be done in that regard? What do you think about auto-OC frequency being tied to
massenergy storage count (with tweaks to damange / energy if needed) ? How much slower would a com need to be, do you think, to allow spam to be useful, and why would you rather not change com speed, but dps instead?edit: tongue slip
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@zeldafanboy said in Smol ACU Adjustment:
Make overcharge an upgrade in stages. Tech 1 OC (Does 400 DMG max)-->Gun--> Tech 2 OC (Does 3000 DMG max)---> Tech 3 OC-- (Does 20,000 DMG max)
This doesn’t actually solve anything and is already what overcharge is already functioning as by making damage predicated on e spent.
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My problem specifically is with the attention investment you think is vital to the solution. Is there no other way ? Am I being ridiculous by pointing out auto-OC helps noobs enough to be worth it ?
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@phong said in Smol ACU Adjustment:
If you want to nerf guncom, t2 com needs to be nerfed as well. What do you think should be done in that regard? What do you think about auto-OC frequency being tied to mass storage count (with tweaks to damange / energy if needed) ? How much slower would a com need to be, do you think, to allow spam to be useful, and why would you rather not change com speed, but dps instead?
You can just nerf t2 bp I don’t really care tbh, the value gun provides is additional range and with OC that still gives insane value. A gun ACU should have t2 units to push into a t2 ACU, the t2 ACU is expending more resources to hold him back generally since it isn’t like you are going to need less than 2 t2 pd to halt a gun ACU oc’ing your defenses.
I don’t want OC nerfs because it’s one of the few genuine micro opportunities the game provides that feels genuinely good to abuse. Tying it to mass storages is intensely map specific and just makes too much math involved when damage already varies on your e production.
Speed, dunno. I think touching speed would break more things than touching the gun would, though.
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Maybe there's a way to nerf Auto-OC but not manual OC. It's what i was suggesting, with only auto-OC frequency tied to e storage. The damage scaling on OC right now technically exists but is severely quantized by unit health and firing frequency rather than e-storage amount, especially at the early t2 stage that seems to be the problem.
It's a bit disconcerting to see you dismiss this suggestion because you feel there's too much math involved, while refusing to acknowledge the problem i pointed out with noobs and attention. That you fail to address it can only mean you know the problem exists because otherwise you would have torn it apart by now, but it's less important to you than the chore of doing the maths
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No, there are tons of high rated players that can’t even bother to do the trivial division to figure out how many e storage for what tech level. I can imagine a single percentage is even aware your e storage will never use the last 10% of your e so you actually need to overbuild e storage a bit more than you would expect. Combine that with whatever equation for mass storage impacting frequency, especially since mass storage isn’t actually a controllable variable you can minimize if you want to play the game properly, and you remove player agency with the tool while also making it less intuitive.
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solution: OC button now has a % display when you enable auto-OC. with 1 storage, you right click, it says 25% or something. by the time you're at 100% auto-oc firing speed you can OC bricks like you can now. something like that. doesn't seem so complicated to me. tweak mass cost of e-storage and % to land on some fixed point you think is reasonable, the mass tax for idling your acu in the middle of a t2 army. The first time you almost die to a t2 army you disable auto-oc, do it manually, and make a note that 25% is not quite enough to be so lazy. no division required.
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OC button really should show what its max damage with current e stored is at least
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The mass cost, and capacity for the e-storage was initially chosen as some value that seemed reasonable at the time in order to use the ACU vs t2, t3 and experimental units, with a consideration to how granular this investment needed to be, that means, how much mass needs to be spent to enable overcharge in the first place. Currently we're doing 5 damage/mass invested in e-storage, and the damage maxes out at 15k for 60k energy which translates into 12 e-storages or 3000 mass. Now let's see how we could tweak auto-OC fire rate and change nothing else.
I'll pull a number out of my ass: say that 2 storages should only give you 30% auto-OC frequency. that means 15% fire rate per e-storage, with a cap at whatever multiple of 15 you want, or 100% of manual-OC firing speed at 7 e-storages. how's that ? you get to AFK your ACU if you put in around 1500 mass in e-storage. you want a bigger tax? make the ass-number 10%. All that research I did and showed in the first paragraph was useless. The math, trivial. Impact on manual OC, almost none, aside from the fact that now, lazier players incidentally do more damage with their overcharge, but that's sort of irrelevant at t2 stage and I can't see how this side benefit would invalidate the whole idea. Just make 3x more e-storage if you want auto-oc to be as good as it was, easy to remember and hopefully, easy to display in UI, along with whatever else you feel is obscure about OC right now.
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@ftxcommando said in Smol ACU Adjustment:
@zeldafanboy said in Smol ACU Adjustment:
Make overcharge an upgrade in stages. Tech 1 OC (Does 400 DMG max)-->Gun--> Tech 2 OC (Does 3000 DMG max)---> Tech 3 OC-- (Does 20,000 DMG max)
This doesn’t actually solve anything and is already what overcharge is already functioning as by making damage predicated on e spent.
Yes it would because these upgrades would be time consuming and expensive, as well as actually requiring the commander to stay still while acquiring them. Instead of 2 engines in your base building 1 e storage basically on demand which takes care of all of t1 and 90% of t2 threats. Then just build 3-4 more to deal with T3
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i realize my tongue slipped earlier and i said mass storage instead of e-storage. apologies. My suggestion, to be clear, would only have to do with e-storage
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@thomashiatt I like your proposal of a
speedrange nerf for the commander a lot more than FTX's because it's less drastic, and I think it goes well with the recent speed buff to T2 land. But the difference in range between a t2 pd and a guncom is the distance between t2 pds that you need in order to creep with little concern. Is there anything we could change to prevent pd creep from becoming too cheap, relative to what it is now? it would also warrant a proportional nerf to turning speed for t2 range bots, otherwise they could kite too easily, right? -
@phong said in Smol ACU Adjustment:
I like your proposal of a speed nerf for the commander
Range nerf for ACU, or speed nerf for T1 land.
I haven't seen a range bot used at all since whenever they were last nerfed, so I'm not really worried about them. They were previously pretty useless against a gun ACU, so if they become more usable that would be good. I don't know anything about PD creep, it doesn't happen to me and I don't really play team games. I imagine that using T2 MMLs to counter T2 PD is just another thing that makes the T2 stage more important.
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@ftxcommando this hand-waving away of gun vs t2 is a bit sus, especially in light of the forum guidelines. There is currently a small window where a guncom can prevent a t2 com from establishing a base at all, and since pd creep is a thing, it can be an all-or-nothing sort of fight. I'm not convinced that halving the guncom's damage doesn't affect this tenuous relationship between the two upgrades. If this window of time were to become too small or dissapear, that might be an auto-lose for the guncom. by how much do you suppose t2 build suite should be nerfed to keep this balance or change it for the better ?
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@thomashiatt so a guncom would need to invest into t2 land as well before he can contest a t2 com's emergence and creep onto the map? That's one way of countering t2 pd creep, probably the optimal one given enough space to retreat and prepare. But if "enough space" is too much, like on some 4v4 or even 3v3 10x10 maps, you might be forced to take it on with t1 land or sacrifice too much map control and time. So what do you think the new range should be?
