Smol ACU Adjustment

@ftxcommando said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

Don't see why I'd feel silly at all nor do I care about your pointless garbage in that post.

Then I have entirely misjudged you. Your post must have been meant to broach a potentially controversial change the balance team is considering, gauge feedback, and gather all criticism unto yourself while shielding them from it for now.

It's a noble thing to do in their aid, as their task is already hard enough. I will defer to their better judgement although a little hope remains that some suggestion in this thread inspires them, should they have the mental fortitude to read through and endure mine and others' ramblings.

As I must have misjudged the present relevance of the forum guidelines, perhaps the recent criticism for a perceived lack of transparency makes enforcement problematic right now.

What about making it half as good? As in it needs double the power for the same damage as normal OC? So that it's more of an investment to keep auto OC vs t2 and t3 units. It won't make it that much weaker but it would be imo step in good direction. Same with small cooldown nerf to 6s from 5s.

Eh, it mostly just comes down to intuitiveness I guess. Not sure if it would be very clear or how to make it clear to people that you would need say double the energy. In terms of it being a solution, there's definitely a number where energy cost nerf can match a time nerf.

An energy-cost solution has less impact in a team game than in a 1v1 because of team overflow, since it is increasingly unlikely that every commander is engaged at the same time the larger a team is. It would also impact manual OC. On the upside, lower rated players would feel the change less, since there's generally more overflow in lower rated games, so the idea's not bad. An energy-storage based solution could scale similarly in 1v1 and in team games, and both amount to a mass tax but energy storage isn't shared. If manual OC is to remain unaffected, auto-OC fire rate would have to be tied to e-storage as well, and even though damage already is, it might not be a problem. The issue outlined in the OP is with t2 spam, and at that stage, anything beyond 2 e-storages is basically overkill. Requiring extra e-storages at that stage purely for the benefit of auto-OC doesn't impact the later t3 land stage as much, since by that time, the risk has inherently increased as well and having the extra OC damage earlier is maybe not as problematic. I have no other suggestion for making this intuitive than a UI change that shows auto-OC fire rate, maybe it's possible to display it inside the OC icon, and have a text bubble explain the relationship in more detail when you hover over it, along with OC damage potential which is currently not displayed

If we want to penalize people for using auto OC, why not just remove auto OC? The argument in the thread is that higher rated players shouldn't want to use auto OC, checks out since it doesn't exist. For lower rated players, having to manually OC a valuable target every once in a while is about as valuable as any kind of nerfed auto OC. Yes it's more micro, but so is manual reclaim, LAB and tank micro, bomber micro, drop queueing, engineer management and all the other things a player must learn.

@mazornoob said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

If we want to penalize people for using auto OC, why not just remove auto OC? The argument in the thread is that higher rated players shouldn't want to use auto OC, checks out since it doesn't exist. For lower rated players, having to manually OC a valuable target every once in a while is about as valuable as any kind of nerfed auto OC. Yes it's more micro, but so is manual reclaim, LAB and tank micro, bomber micro, drop queueing, engineer management and all the other things a player must learn.

If you want to penalize people for using auto-OC by removing it, not by having them spend mass, that means you've identified a problem and come up with this solution after weighting the pros and cons. My worry is that lower rated players will feel less inclined to try out an aggressive play style until they gain more experience relative to how things are now.

This postponement might mean more new players remain stuck in astro gap lobbies, choosing instead to become experts at that, since they have some vague idea of what to do and only have to build on that, rather than exploring and finding the enjoyment of a more dynamic play style, but having to face the frustrations associated with learning a very powerful mechanic with very high risk so late in the process. Players are softer on themselves and take criticism from teammates more lightly when they're new, but it gets old really fast and the more they play just astro, the more likely they are to keep playing just astro.

I'm worried that until the matchmaker comes to dominate, or by some unimaginable twist of fate Supremacy or something like it becomes the preferred victory condition in casual custom lobbies, this kind of decision effectively costs us future play partners. A small player pool is extremely bad, for team matchmaker and for tournament play and for keeping the game alive in general. If other solutions exist to the problems this proposal addresses and are somewhat viable, maybe they're worth exploring first, with this in mind? It is not a minor change, compared to the examples you listed. Few of those units are as useless without constant micro as a com with half the DPS and no auto-OC, and losing any of them is not the same as losing the commander.

Counterpoint: auto-OC makes it so that a player that overbuilds power has a better chance of beating back an enemy that makes a bunch of T2 tanks. Therefore, it teaches players to overbuild power and not push with units.

I hardly see managing some base thing instead of using overcharge as a tradeoff. Overcharge gets you hundreds of mass per second of net gain, double if you get the reclaim. Managing anything else in the game is negligible in comparison. And if your are using your ACU aggressively, but not watching it, you are just going to die.

@mazornoob building power could be seen an investment in eco that can quickly be repurposed for increasing the chances of your ACU's survival, by pausing some energy draining structures. OVERbuilding power shouldn't be as good as making tanks, and could be a choice of less mass production but more insurance. But since it's something that happens anyway the lower your rating is, a nerf to OC damage per energy purely on this basis feels less bad to me. The failure to address larger team games remains, and it feels like that's where the original problem is worse, because unit mobility is less valuable.

Who's talking about nerfing OC damage? Your reasoning is: No auto OC -> players who didn't learn to OC lose games -> players get discouraged and go to gap. This is wrong for 2 reasons:

• Your argument also works for T1 bombers. Players who don't know how to defend against bombers get discouraged just the same.
• It also works in the opposite direction for T2 land. Bad players who build T2 land lose to bad players who enabled auto OC. They get discouraged from being aggressive with T2 land and only do gun + T1 + auto OC.

@thomashiatt said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

I hardly see managing some base thing instead of using overcharge as a tradeoff. Overcharge gets you hundreds of mass per second of net gain, double if you get the reclaim. Managing anything else in the game is negligible in comparison. And if your are using your ACU aggressively, but not watching it, you are just going to die.

Well according to FTX, you can use your ACU aggressively, AFK it and you're not going to die. If you mean you SHOULD just die, I can't but agree in general principle. But please, ensure that if you, for instance, have decided that you want to try an aggressive play style this game but have been caught slightly out of position by an attack, and are now a few overcharges behind because of all the orders you have to issue to units and factories and possibly engineers to salvage the situation, please ensure that's not the end of it right there because of a few missed spellcasts. If that were to be the case it might prove a souring experience, maybe not as sour as getting shift-g'd but of the same general flavour.

@mazornoob i thought your comment about energy was in reference to xiaomao's suggestion and my reply

@mazornoob i've failed to make myself clear, apologies. My argument was for nerfing auto-OC, not manual OC, but not removing it completely, with a mass tax for making it gradually better, thus providing an alternate path towards a good guncom that taxes attention less. I think energy storages could enable this mechanic just as they enable variable OC max damage, with storage count governing auto-OC fire rate.

You already have that path, it's called ACU upgrades.

@mazornoob said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

Who's talking about nerfing OC damage? Your reasoning is: No auto OC -> players who didn't learn to OC lose games -> players get discouraged and go to gap. This is wrong for 2 reasons:

• Your argument also works for T1 bombers. Players who don't know how to defend against bombers get discouraged just the same.
• It also works in the opposite direction for T2 land. Bad players who build T2 land lose to bad players who enabled auto OC. They get discouraged from being aggressive with T2 land and only do gun + T1 + auto OC.

An early T1 bomber can be devastating, no doubt. But as a noob, your first encounter with one is most likely in some team game. You lose a few engies, ask for help, see inties and maa responding and countering the threat and teammates dodging with their engies. You get tested on what you learned from this interaction as more T1 bombers show up. The learning loop is shorter, it's not game over unless you're playing 1v1. As for T2 land, I want a betterment of the current situation, and I've said multiple times I agree the problem exists. Ideally the t2 land spammer should win, unless the defending player has built enough t2 storages (more than 2, maybe 6 or so) to make auto-OC as good as it is now OR they manually OC, at the cost of whatever else they might have been doing with their attention

If you know enough about OC to build storages and set it to auto, then you know how to use it manually. There is no learning loop. It's dead simple "point at the T2 unit" micro. I'd even argue that auto OC makes it worse, because a player who only auto OCs will lose to a manually OCing player without knowing why.

@mazornoob I think Zelda suggested further ACU upgrade refinement as a solution to the problem in the OP, I got the impression that in their current state, the guncom is seen (by me as well) as too strong. I think his suggestion is interesting because upgrades limit com mobility and take time, which increase the opportunity for spam to do damage. Perhaps it's worth considering

@mazornoob well, knowing how a mechanic works in principle and being able to execute it under pressure are different things, in my opinion. Knowing I can compensate for my lack of discipline under pressure by making some insurance is maybe what makes the difference between deciding to try guncom again right away but applying this knowledge (by paying the noob mass tax) or deciding guncom will have to wait until I'm way more comfortable with the game in general before i attempt it again. There is, for sure, room for improvement in how OC mechanics are presented to the player, even now, and maybe this is a good opportunity to address that.

To clarify: I agree that auto-OC should never be as good as manual, no matter how many e-storages you build. Players attacking should do their best to cast OC manually. It's when you've chosen this upgrade path and are suddenly on the defensive that I think auto-OC has the most value, and when the gun ACU perfoms worse than the T2 version in less skilled hands. That's when you have to not only micro the ACU but scramble units, adjust rallies and build emergency PD. Auto-OC is probably overpowered in its current state, but a valuable crutch to new players that I'd prefer were still available at some mass cost. Otherwise, their only option is to stay away from guncom until they get better at everything. There's value (more players graduate from astronoob) in keeping early exploration of these mechanics available, and knowledge of game mechanics is much easier to come by than general game skill, provided the UI, or wiki, or discord, do their job.