Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread

@burni said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

Please don't put that Self-repair crap on the Cyrban com, really not needed and will only end up in more silly changes to other faction coms to "balance". Cybran coms regen more anyway. Plus are we really gonna have tele laser nano coms fresh everytime they tele to the next area?! I only play as Cybran and think this change would be tragic.

Teleport and Nano cannot be obtained together.
They take up the same back slot.
It's only one or the other, not both.

As for Self-Repair, the Cybran com was arguably the weakest early on.
This only makes up for the deficit.
It needed something to make up for it.

Also, too much work already went into the upgrade in the programming, testing, and balancing standpoints.
And it may be a little late for feedback as the changes go live in about 2 days.

Cybran coms regen more anyway.

They do now.

~ Stryker

Where can I go to read more discussion about the vision range changes?

I'm sure I'll be talked around as soon as I see people's reasons for wanting it... But at the moment I just feel like I've always loved how including scouts was an important part of supcom combat; even having some great opportunities to bomb the enemy scout to render their forces weaker etc! At the moment I feel like it would be a massive shame to reduce how essential scouts are.

As I said, I'm sure I'll understand better as soon as I see the discussions where people talked about why they wanted this... I just don't know where I can read it all. x

I believe the best place to look for a discussion about this is on the FAF Discord in under the BALANCE section in #balance-suggestions &/or #balance-discussion.

@mostlostnoob Damn, I already searched both those places with the keyword 'vision' and saw nothing recent besides discussions of ways to change the fatboy.

(plus other or older, unrelated comments like 'Jip's original vision', how to make blodir's vision meta, units disappearing inside vision range, seraphim scouts giving vision when they die, artillery requiring vision to get built facing an enemy, "vision/radar and bombers idk what those were about" etc etc, going back to February this year! )

I'm sure I just don't know how to use discord search properly. Thanks for the pointer, I'll try to learn! I'd just hoped to find an actual discussion between people about why vision needed increasing 15%.

@Sylph_ I did search on Discord too & also didn't find anything relevant for the 15% change. The only thing I've found is the brief description about the change on the fafbeta patchnotes page: https://patchnotes.faforever.com/fafbeta.html#vision

@mostlostnoob
That's the only place I read about it, too!

Where is the discussion / justification behind these vision changes, devs?
Please help me understand why this change is being implemented!

@Sylph_

I'm not a dev, but I think I can partially answer your question.

The vision change was meant to try and fix an age-old problem of... well... vision.
Sometimes you have an enemy unit right on the edge of your vision, and since, it's on the edge, you technically should be able to see it and engage it, yet you don't.

This is because vision and intel rings are nowhere near a perfect circle, as FA(F) implies.
In fact, if you played the original SupCom, you can see the vision of the game updates in more of a grid-like pattern.

I can't plug in an MP4 file, here, but if you head to Discord, you can plug this link somewhere so you can see it what I'm referring to.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/862695268901453864/1129601713096114246/VisionDemo.mp4

Global vision increases just help to effectively mitigate those niche circumstances.
The perfect vision circle is just a placebo effect, sadly.
A good placebo, at that, though.

~ Stryker

@blodir said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

Tbf the hp diffs were already in some sense meaningless. Like maybe someone really good has at some point thought "oh the enemy is UEF, so I will now choose to not send a raiding party because their mex has more hp", but that has never occurred to me. Yes it obviously makes a pretty significant difference, but it felt still like it wasn't impacting practical decisionmaking very much.

You're right. No one consciously thinks about not sending raiding parties or whatnot due to HP differences.
What does change is the damage.

For example, if a raiding party comes through, it'll either take longer for them to destroy a mex, or they'll just run by dealing minimal damage.

The difference between T1 mexes is meaningless, yes, but the difference between T2 and T3 mexes grows exponentially per tier and per faction.
We're talking 9000 HP down to 6000 across the biggest gap at T3.
2500 to 1800 across T2.
Large differences.

And that's what's changing.
The faction HP differences are being minimized and normalized...
But if I guess it's for the better health of the game, I guess we'll have to see...

~ Stryker

UEF bubble shield refresh rate doubled. Regen rate increased by 50%. Called small buff.

That HP normalization fucks me up as well. And in defense it favors cybran which is per design an offense faction. It brakes with the faction identities and doesn't make sense to me. It's the same with mercies going from precision to aoe but the difference is that mercies needed a change this feels just random. I get the underlying idea but the execution seems bad, especially with the reclaim change.

UEF Bubble will probably be a meme, based on the costs. Otherwise interesting changes. Hope the naval experience is well balanced.

@comradestryker How will increasing the vision range solve this issue? Won't it just make the 'circle' of fuzzy 'can I see or not' happen a little further out?

I assumed that the vision changes were more to do with what the beta changes page suggested - trying to give a player more information to act on during non-radar combat.

My immediate thoughts on it were that while that sounds like a noble goal, it has the side-effect of making radar vs no-radar combat much weaker. Ie, make scouts less crucial, and potentially mess up certain balance tightropes like aurora vs t1, and remove the advantage that range+scout can give to many engagements like, say, ilshavoh, or mongoose. Even hoplite (particularly when paired with a deceiver, which is so much fun if a little niche)...
But, knowing that I'm a total noob, I know I'll be talked around by the opinions of better players, that I very much respect! As such, I was hoping to read the discussion where they were justifying the advantage of a sweeping +15% across-the-board increase to such an important stat.

(Are you sure that the upcoming vision changes are just to try to fix a UI nuance? If so, doesn't the knock-on effect on balance and strategy concern you?
ps. I can't seem to view that attachment in discord. I tried 'search', 'find a conversation' etc, and it turned up a 'can't seem to find what you're looking for'! Basically, I don't know where I'm supposed to paste that link to reach the video you were describing. I'll keep trying (although if it's just that a unit on the edge of vision can often not be seen or come in and out of vision while trying to attack it - I expect that will happen the same when vision is increased by 15%. After all, it can currently happen to a scout, an engineer, or an atlantis!
Thanks for taking the time to reply to me. Sorry for still being confused!)

The point is that basically all units have intel that is the same as their attack radius. This means there are a lot of situations where even though you are in range of a unit, it doesn’t get engaged because of a vision bug where the unit doesn’t pop in until it’s well into the vision radius. The extra intel is supposed to smooth that over.

After a few games, Bubble Shield rework definitely feels like a new viable strategy.
I like where this new placement and direction of the upgrade is going.

Though, as stated before, the stats should be further adjusted.

I believe it should either;

1. have more SHP for the resource cost.
2. or its resource cost be reduced.
   That's all.

~ Stryker

@ftxcommando Essentially, this change, to me, felt like it was making non-radar stronger when up against radar.

It might be a 'sweeping' change, that we can assume affects all factions equally, but (at least at my level) I see certain factions/unit choices using more scouts than usual (aforementioned aurora, mongoose, ilshovah, hoplite etc). I feel like those units are getting a (very) indirect nerf.

I'm unsure whether they need that nerf- I've heard that aeon are too strong, but I think that's in tier:2, right? And I haven't seen anyone talking about mongoose or hoplite being too strong. Ilshovah, otoh, is kinda 'supposed' to be 'too strong' from what I understand, given seraphim's lack of 'ace' cards after that.

And, all that being said, I was just hoping to see the discussion / justification behind these changes.

Thanks for taking the time to help me understand.

I do not think that the buff of t1 subs was really needed. It was not OP that torpedo bombers were killing subs with one shot, cause they are much more expensive. It is not fair to consider only mass value. Firstly, because torps are more expensive in energy, 2.5 times more than sub, also u have to add the cost of the technology, air factory hq costs 920 mass and 18K extra in order to counter those subs (We do not consider now torpedo launchers, as in the patch notes was clearly said that the buff was aimed to make subs suffer 2 shot from torpedo bomber). So if we just count that I have invested mass in torps and t2 air and have 6 torps against 6 subs, which is 1620 mass and 48K energy against 2160 mass 17K energy. Not fair that u have to invest so much resources in something that can be so easily countered.
Imagine my opponent has not invested resources in t2 air and invested resources in t1 interceptors instead. I invested 920 mass and 18K energy in T2 air HQ and my oppnent spent 900 mass and 40K energy in 18 interceptors, which easily kill all the bombers I have.
So in the end of the day I spent 2540 mass and 56K energy and my opponent invested 3060 mass and 57K energy. I can really deal NO damage to my opponent in that case. Even if I add 2 more torps and spend same amount of mass on that I can deal NO damage to that. And also I have not considered the resource of build power, t2 torps cost more in bp than the subs. So it makes no sense to make them die from 2 shots of torpedo bombers.
I am not against the sub buffs, however. I suggest to make them cheaper or add extra damage, so that u will not bury ur 6 subs with cost of 2K mass into one torpedo launcher that costs 450 mass. Making them cheaper will be enough buff for them in my opinion.

@gabitii said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

It was not OP that torpedo bombers were killing subs with one shot, cause they are much more expensive

It was not OP that torp bombers were one shoting t1 subs, because t1 subs are cancer and should be bad

@deribus said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

@gabitii said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

It was not OP that torpedo bombers were killing subs with one shot, cause they are much more expensive

Well you can not simply take mass costs. If you would have read the whole text, you would also have read that you have to consider energy costs, which means extra pgens and technology costs(t2 air hq). So yes, they are more expensive.

Extra pgens? You not making t2 pgen as sub spammer? Why doesn’t your analysis account for the fact subs always are made much earlier than torps?

@ftxcommando said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

Extra pgens?

Yes extra pgens, just look at the energy cost and realize that u need extra pgens to counter that shit tons of subs with t2 torpedo bombers.

@ftxcommando said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

You not making t2 pgen as sub spammer? Why doesn’t your analysis account for the fact subs always are made much earlier than torps?

@ftxcommando why does it matter that they are made earlier then torps? If it does then consider that I have to rush t2 air hq much earlier than I supposed to. We consider the amount of spent mass and the counter actions for that. Tell me pls what is wrong in my analysis and how the t1 subs should be countered then? It was only t2 torpedos which are extremely expensive to rush, but at least they killed them. But now all I have to do with subs is spam enough t1 ints which is not a problem when my opp rushing t2 air.
They barely can attack because of the low dps, but they are mega annoying in case of defense cause still they can be countered too easily with torpedo launcher. So I think that buff should be in dps or in mass cost, not in hp.