Aeon Gun ACU

seems accurate.

@phong said in Aeon Gun ACU:

Hey can anyone justify why Billie nuke needs to be so absurdly overpowered?

It can destroy whole bases, deny pushes well into the super-late game, deny experimental wrecks, and force the enemy to build large amounts of tmd all over the place. All of this from the comfortable range of half the map away.

The risk is virtually nil, compared to either Chrono, splash gun or cloak laser, and even that risk is mitigated by having access to t3 engineering suite.

• By the time you have billy, every base's perimeter can easily afford a couple TMDs.
• Mobile shields mitigate a LOT of Billy's damage, you'll seriously damage stuff in the inner ring but that's it.
• It doesn't do shit against experimentals.
• It doesn't do shit against most exp wrecks either since comparatively low damage, and every faction can do it 10 times better with TML batteries.
• It's not available 10 minutes into the game.
• It COSTS RESOURCES to build each and every missile, and not a trivial amount.

I assume this is trolling, but still.

@mazornoob those are all very good points. but does it NEED to be this strong? Sure i might've exaggerated the strength a bit but then again, I never claimed that, for instance, an overextended aeon gun ACU is a problem with 'no solutions' for two of the game's factions at the late t3 land stage.

Notice how crafty this manner of presenting an argument is? Suddenly I, who should be justifying changes to the balance, providing examples, replays illustrating the problem, etc, I am now the one asking for proof, for keeping it as it is.

I learned that trick from FTX. He sure knows his way with words, doesn't he?

Alright, you bothered me enough with your garbage posting.

There are two ways to make a viable ACU upgrade: either it (1) answers a problem proposed by the baseline gameplay of ACUs or (2) it solves a weakness in a faction roster

Sera resto field sees use because it give’s survivability to a mid game push to a faction that gets their survivability option at t3 stage. Sera nano is more expensive and therefore better because their other midgame survivability option for a push is to facetank with ACU so that the handful of ilshies and legion of zthuees are unimpacted by enemy long range fire + ACU.

Sera double nano and double gun are no longer “good” because they answered an old problem: sera t3 stage being horrible and them needing something to hold the line until t4s can get churned out. Or being a more extreme facetank for their terrible othuums. Now sera t3 stage is quite solid so the upgrades are simply “fun” rather than an interesting choice to consider.

Billy answers a UEF problem of dealing with a t4 push combined with t3 support. You billy the t4, support dies, now the percies solve the t4 problem.

Cybran stealth was buffed to become an answer to (1) because Cybran ACU had no way to compete with every other faction in mid game survivability. Now their stealth upgrade went from simply being a unique tool to being a solution to (1) with a unique flavor, same as UEF nano or Aeon shield.

Aeon gun range was unique because Aeon t2 stage used to be horrible. Their ACU was solving (2) by becoming their t2 stage answer and it was up to the Aeon player to build up an advantage at t1 stage to then be able to quickly transition to their extremely strong early t3 stage for a snowball.

Now Aeon t2 stage is extremely good. Now their unique ACU doesn’t solve a problem, it creates one for every other faction. There is no hole in their roster that the ACU upgrade fills it just makes a strong stage of their game into an oppressive stage.

Now could you find another thread to ruin with pointless garbage so I can read an actually thoughtful post? I guess it was my fault for assuming I didn’t need to spoonfeed basic game interaction, but it is a public FAF discussion so my bad.

@ftxcommando I unironically found this post a lot more convincing and well argued than the OP. For the record, I'm not too attached to the current balance, not in this case and not in general, unless I think a proposed change would impact new player retention.

If you feel this strongly about garbage posting though, you must have a good reason for shitting all over the chrono thread, unprompted. Were you trying to preempt bad arguments by aeon fans?

In answer to the original question
It counters, UEF gun at t1, and mongoose/hoplites

@phong said in [Aeon Gun ACU]

If you feel this strongly about garbage posting though, it must mean you have a good reason for shitting all over the chrono thread.

The difference is that I agreed with the OP and decide to show it by having fun clownposting a recent pepsi insanity take about UEF being OP in current meta. You decide to crawl out of a radioactive cesspit to accuse me of random bullshit and derail my thread and you didn’t even care about the topic anyway.

Beyond that, I didn’t do anything serious in that thread because I am broadly fine with chrono in the ecosystem of the Aeon roster. It serves as a solution to Aeon t2 late game being a slow, low range tank. How to get stuff in range? Have a walking stun machine.

The problem is that chrono + Aeon gun converts chrono into “it is literally impossible to kill my ACU until you have t3 tech so I don’t need to make units and can turn any push into a mass donation at will.” So I made this thread because a rework of chrono also needs a larger look at gun range since that is the major culprit and nerfing chrono to work with range kinda ruins the unique point of it in the Aeon roster.

@freedom_ said in Aeon Gun ACU:

In answer to the original question
It counters, UEF gun at t1, and mongoose/hoplites

No, gun counters gun. Gun ACUs existing fills the checkmark for Aeon having a 30 range gun not a 35 range gun. What you mean is that Aeon [hard]counters [every] gun at t1. If double gun came with a speed debuff, this would be a reasonable position.

It counters mongoose and hoplite? Does every other faction have a difficult time with them with their normal gun? Mongoose is also, again, specifically supposed to be either a response to a long t1 stage which Aeon no longer desires or a long term utility option. In a long term t2 stage, mongoose and hoplite can do essentially zero damage to obsidians and their early potential is heavily hurt by the existence of blazes as mentioned before.

Well that's a very good reason indeed ftx. An in joke.

Mine was that I laughed so hard at @Strydxr's comment that I felt compelled to join in the fun. Not an in joke, more like a bad joke. An overindulgence, in retrospect. Nothing I could come up with would ever match the wit of his Janus jab.

I did accuse you of hypocrisy in regards to shitposting, but you've cleared that up and I must apologize. You're not a shitposter and I'm sorry my ignorance led me to conclude you were. Now that I'm in on your joke, I know better.

Neither agree or disagree with you on the gun range. But I'm happy to have helped bring out the better version of your arguments. I think that, like me, people will find them more convincing than I did the OP. Stay classy.

@phong said in Aeon Gun ACU:

Well that's a very good reason indeed ftx. An in joke.

Mine was that I laughed so hard at @Strydxr's comment that I felt compelled to join in the fun. Not an in joke, more like a bad joke. An overindulgence, in retrospect. Nothing I could come up with would ever match the wit of his Janus jab.

I did accuse you of hypocrisy in regards to shitposting, but you've cleared that up and I must apologize. You're not a shitposter and I'm sorry my ignorance led me to conclude you were. Now that I'm in on your joke, I know better.

Neither agree or disagree with you on the gun range. But I'm happy to have helped bring out the better version of your arguments. I think that, like me, people will find them more convincing than I did the OP. Stay classy.

I personally think our UEF balance takes were more interesting than the aeon thread tbf. Should do this again sometime! : )

@strydxr I'll be honest mate, I'm legitimately sad the Colossus is still in such a sorry state, a full 9 months after Jip published videos on how he fixed the bugs with the grabby arms on the official FaF Youtube channel. I'm not sad because I die to it, but because of what it means.

But that is more or less a settled issue warranting no further balance deliberations. It just raises the question, what good are discussions anyway, if problems linger for so long even after they're decided upon?

I recently hosted a game with beta balance by mistake (i was meaning to pick fafdevelop) and was informed it's not up to date, so I can't even provide what little help I might, by testing, although I want to.

With regards to @FtXCommando's proposal, I tend to agree that T2 is in a good enough state right now to consider such a change, but again, I'm not really confident my opinion on this matter is of much worth.

EDIT: Your point about the Janus, I've seen that type of argument brought up many times when it comes to factional balance, so yes, at least parts of our discussions were interesting.

@phong said in Aeon Gun ACU:

@strydxr I'll be honest mate, I'm legitimately sad the Colossus is still in such a sorry state, a full 9 months after Jip published videos on how he fixed the bugs with the grabby arms on the official FaF Youtube channel. I'm not sad because I die to it, but because of what it means.

But that is more or less a settled issue warranting no further balance deliberations. It just raises the question, what good are discussions anyway, if problems linger for so long even after they're decided upon?

I recently hosted a game with beta balance by mistake (i was meaning to pick fafdevelop) and was informed it's not up to date, so I can't even provide what little help I might, by testing, although I want to.

With regards to @FtXCommando's proposal, I tend to agree that T2 is in a good enough state right now to consider such a change, but again, I'm not really confident my opinion on this matter is of much worth.

reject colossus, embrace percival push.

Theres like 5 balance issues that need addressing and 4 of them are aeon, come on balance team

And the one problem that isnt aeon, is torpedo bombers, which aeon is way less affected by due to hover flak

@FtXCommando
As you mentioned, Aeon has arguably the best T2 land stage, and these units synergize so well with the ACU.
Spending 1,000 mass on double gun is almost always a no-brainer for an Aeon Commander.

To counter it; Spending 800 mass on your own gun upgrade is out of the question as you're out-ranged, anyway.
So, instead, you need to spend 800 mass on a T2 upgrade and then almost 600 for a T2 PD.
Since when was the counter to something more expensive than its own worth in mass?
It should at least be mass equivalent, no?

A shielded Aeon ACU with (double) gun is more than enough to lock down an entire section of a map,
if not single-handedly able to push back anything in its way - even up to the T3 stage.

In my opinion, the range upgrade is far too cheap, for how beneficial it is.
No other faction can be as aggressive, heck... half as aggressive... as early as an Aeon Commander can.

Pairing these upgrades with Chrono, Shield, or even just mobile shields ensures that this ACU can retain its aggressiveness (even when retreating... which doesn't make any sense).

I understand that range is an Aeon perk, but with the points you bring up... should it be really have that much range?

No.

~Stryker

So, umm. Maybe just make it double upgrade? First upgrade gets you 30 range and the other one costing another 1k or w/e mass gets you 35 range? It won't fix the percy and brick problem but it should give some breathing room to other factions by making the abusive 35 range come in online a little bit later.

I feel like such small change would be a decent band aid until people can come up with better idea.

I’d rather Cybran have such an upgrade than Aeon, even with it making telemazor more cancer.

@ftxcommando said in Aeon Gun ACU:

I’d rather Cybran have such an upgrade than Aeon, even with it making telemazor more cancer.

I doubt this change would do much.
A few T2 PDs should be more than enough to deter, if not counter, regardless of the few extra units in range.

Though, I'm not sure it's the best idea to have a Stealthed, sniper com, either...
Unless it's the laser upgrade itself that gives it's gun upgrade more range??
Having a range increase on the gun upgrade would be... unbalanced... considering all other Cybran upgrades.

If anything, it's the UEF that should have the range over all other ACUs - and I'm not trying to be biased here.
The point of UEF is to have Alpha damage and Range with their units, no?
For example, the Percy, and the Summit.

Why shouldn't the UEF ACU be any different? It already deals 200 damage per shot.
It probably wouldn't be that difficult to dodge either, considering it would only have half of the firerate as all other ACUs do.

Sniper UEF ACU woudn't be anywhere near as powerfull as an Aeon Sniper ACU.
Well... minus the nano, but it's a crappy version of the nano, anyway.
It wouldn't take much to overwhelm.

But, I digress. At the moment, the best solution against a Sniper Com is just T2 PD.
Even then, its not anywhere near as effective, but with some luck - they may just push off instead of pushing in.

~ Stryker

@comradestryker If the complaint is that getting T2 upgrade and T2 PD costs too much to counter an Aeon guncom, then I'd have thought the solution is to make the T2 route slightly cheaper, not Aeon guncom more expensive. After all the T2 upgrade route has the exact same issue against every other faction's guncom (the main difference is there is no 'counter guncom by getting the exact same thing' when against Aeon guncom).

What about making T2 PD slightly cheaper and combining with a buff to MML? I.e. the idea being you improve the counter to guncom, and the counter to that counter, to hopefully create slightly more dynamic gameplay, rather than just nerfing Aeon gun (which is already more expensive than the other upgrades)

Making t2 pd cheaper buffs impulse defense which is already too strong in FAF and buffing t2 ACU does 0 to address the reality that Aeon ACU uniquely hard counters any land unit that does not have a sniper tag.

Cybran is the ACU that least benefits from having larger range as it has no real late t2 upgrade that buffs them nor any way to supplement the fact they are currently the weakest t2 stage. Arguing UEF should have a range upgrade is about as incoherent and cancerous as explaining why Aeon needs it. These are the best 2 t2 stages of the game, neither faction needs something that makes a strong segment of their game into an oppressive one.

All the faction lore logic is BS anyway. Cybran hoplite has more range and alpha than mongoose. They're the sneaky raid faction so their ACU would get the ability to do sneaky-free damage yet also be easy to catch out of position due to having no shields at all to act as an hp dump.

@ftxcommando said in Aeon Gun ACU:

I’d rather Cybran have such an upgrade than Aeon, even with it making telemazor more cancer.

Well I'm personally all for it considering Cybran been getting the short end of stick for quite a while and is still lacking in offensive T2 acu options. But my problem lies in how will the community react to outright removing the range from aeon ACU. Which might be a little bit too drastic of a change.

That's why for now I would rather see the aeon gun split into 3 parts of DPS + Normal range + Sniper upgrade. With the sniper upgrade branching out from the range upgrade.

I like the idea of the sniper range buff being split off into a 3rd upgrade. As it is, getting the two upgrades is super cheap compared to the counter as someone else already did the math. Though let me add 1 t2 PD is often not enough, so realistically you need to spend 3x or even more in mass than the upgrades to counter it effectively. I routinely push through 3 t2 PD with the Aeon com.