Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread

[FtXCommando]

You can literally walk away from a teleporting UEF acu making torp launchers and survive, sounds like game was over or shady was afk

[deletethis]

@storm said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

t4 bomber you can cntrl K and kill anything under shields

the crash damage was already heavily nerfed?

@storm said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

the floating arti you can just spam and end any naval game with

Well excuse me for finding crippling Zthuee spam hilarious...wait, what were you saying earlier? Oh right:

@storm said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

please don't ruin the fun for the rest of us.

[Exselsior]

@ftxcommando I’m going to assume it’s the same game I was watching the live replay of before the replay crashed, and in which case if I were shady I would have intentionally sat in those torps to end my misery even if I wasn’t afk.

But yeah, the only way current UEF tele is even remotely useful is with a stealth tml base and those are so easy to counter.

[Khal]

I am just here to say can you stop balancing the game? I honestly can't keep up with how often you change things. its making it impossible to learn the game

[Sylph_]

@khal Are you getting a popup window whenever there's a change?
If so, do you pay attention when the game brings up the 'update' popup window?

I'm asking this because a friend of mine was immediately closing it without reading it (or about it), and didn't know about things like mobile factory changes!

(I'm asking this with the best intentions - I haven't found that many of the changes introduced by the balance team were major enough to 'spoil' my learning of the game, exception: the massive 15% vision change, which I dearly hope get's revisited...
It's possible that the reason for my experience being different is mostly playing 1v1s, where low-tech units are typically the most influential, now that I think about it.)

Still, I just wondered whether the problem was you being surprised by the changes, or that you can't get a 'feel' for the current balance situation?

[WilloWisppsi]

I'm not sure about the UEF Billy nuke changes as 2 of them can now kill any game ender regardless of shielding. All you'd have to do is teleport next to the game ender fire the first billy, it impacts the shields dealing 12k damage all of them, then the second one teles in a second later and billies again overmatching whats left of the shielding and dealing the full 12k damage to the game ender.

To counter this you'd have to have 4 tmds in range to shoot the billy down before it impacts the shielding which gives the tmds a second or two to react which I'm not sure is possible due to they're projectile speed? Aeon tmd cant stop this as the billy would have to touch the magic ball but there'd be a shield or 3 in the billies way. An unreliable counter would be units with aoe that kill the billy as its being launched so triads and oblivions might be viable. The only real counter I see is a bubble SACU that can just tank the 24k damage.

I'd love to be proven wrong as the tele billy opens up some interesting strategies but in its current form i think it might be too oppressive.

[Sylph_]

@willowisppsi On the contrary, from what I've seen, aeon are the BEST at stopping this, since their TMD is quite effective against a billy!

4 aeon TMD, spread around the game-ender, seem completely reliable in stopping billy missiles without them even exploding!

Other faction's TMD, OTOH, have a billy explode into shields before 4 surrounding TMD can take them both out, requiring a bunch of shields to stop the billy from doing damage!

[edit - I did a bit more testing against double-billy launches for this

• UEF and seraphim require 4-8 TMD to be positioned between the ACUs and their billy targets - spreading 4-8 around the target is ineffective.
• Cybran sometimes just about get by with 4-8 TMD spread around the target - but I'd get extra just to be safe!
• Aeon are by far the best (Aeon TMD OP since forever! :D) - Aeon TMD can reliably defend against double-billy nukes even if they are spread around the game ender being defended. In fact, only 1 aeon TMD is needed for reliable defense against double-billy (2 if you want protection from every angle)!

'4-8', means 4 if the firing ACUs are 30 range units away, and 8 if the ACUs are 256 away.

Overall, the best defense against double-billy is probably a combination of shields and TMD. Enough TMD to shoot down a single missile (~6 in a circle around the game-ender, unless you're aeon, in which case just 2 on opposite sides seems fine). and enough shield to tank the rest!
I'm sure it's possible to co-ordinate a double-billy between shots of aeon TMD, but have you ever tried that even when you're NOT co-ordinating your timing with another player? The 'downtime' on aeon TMD is REALLY small, and the 'uptime' gives basically missile-invulnerability!]

Perhaps most crucially regarding what you were saying - all factions can defend against double-billy with sufficient TMDs - or even IN-sufficient TMD and a shield or two!

(I only tested about 60 nukes - there might be positions where this changes, but I did try to get close to the target as suggested. figures generally depend on range - the further away the billy is launched, the more TMD are needed to stop it before it hits a shield and blows)

[Exselsior]

@khal said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

I am just here to say can you stop balancing the game? I honestly can't keep up with how often you change things. its making it impossible to learn the game

No? Multiplayer games need ongoing balance adjustments or they die. There are only 2 balance patches a year, and almost none of them make substantial changes that require learning much of anything. There's almost nothing to learn in the balance changes as it is unless you're trying to memorize unit stats which is quite irrelevant for actually playing the game even up to a fairly high level.

[zappazapper]

If there's an anti-tele tower, it shouldn't just prevent a teleport, it should actually kill an ACU that teles in its range, which would necessitate more scouting/strategic play.

[Deribus]

Scouts no tele tower
Begins teleport
Enemy sees teleport effect and speed-builds an anti-tele tower next to it
Teleport completes and you die
GG EZ

[WilloWisppsi]

@deribus give it a 20 second warm up period

[Sylph_]

@exselsior said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

Multiplayer games need ongoing balance adjustments or they die

While I'm certainly not against balance changes, I think this is one of those 'truths' that gamers often accept, that just isn't true.

Tons of games turn out to 'self-balance' really well over the years. Starcraft would go months and years without balance patches, yet the metagame kept changing as players learned and adapted.
Streetfighter 2 was known for how overpowered Honda and Dhalsim were, until players learned to play, at which point Ryu, Ken, and Guile were OP.... Except until it was zangief... Then years later dhalsim... Years more, boxer... Years later, Sagat. Nowadays, claw is broken! This is all despite zero balance patches.
Chess hasn't seen a lot of changes in the last few decades, or even centuries (admittedly there are a few per millennium!)

big segue-anecdote upcoming - skip at leisure! :

• I often see players get angry when a game doesn't get a balance patch for a few months, and more often than not it annoys me. I remember playing 'league of legends', and a new character came out that the community considered 'OP' due to getting un-blockable damage every time she landed 3 attacks. There was also a character, then considered 'trash', that would dodge attacks randomly - so she would never hit the 3 'stacks'. I had a blast taking advantage of this for all of maybe 2 weeks, at which point the developers buckled to community pressure, nerfed the 'OP' character that I'd been enjoying beating, and also completely re-designed the underplayed character that countered it!

I'm not against balance patches, but for many games, particularly "strategy" games, I think it's important to give the players plenty of time to devise, refine, and adopt strategies. I think this process takes many, many times longer than the 3-6 months between updates.

Sorry if this sounded like 'erm actually'. I totally understand the desire for changes, especially to keep a game 'fresh'. I just wanted to offer the suggestion that, as strategy gamers, it's important that we try to, and have the time to, overcome things strategically, before the game itself is changed.

I think games can work fine without constant balance updates, and often the best games do better with fewer, rather than many.

[FrantzX]

Is there any news on improving the Fatboy? It needs either longer range (to outrange t2 arty) or better shields.

[Sladow-Noob]

If it's not listed, then no. But it's on the to do

[CocaineDiesel]

I think the main issue with telemazor is that the amount of scouting/player attention it requires is proportionally far more attention than anything else in the game.

Watching your base late game for something to pop up is a drag because there's no action there otherwise, and you want to focus on where the action is. Likewise for the scouting pattern required (scouting the enemy ACU every 25 seconds?).

[Sylph_]

@frantzx Have you tried telling it to spam shield generators?

I've found that since it can build while moving, it's MILES better at defending against artillery.

I'm totally not saying 'it's fine'.
It's always been able to generate 100-165 hitpoints of shield per second,
I'm just asking if you've tried it since it became able to spawn an additional 3000 hp of shields every 3.7 seconds.

After all, this is an +800% increase in its ability to resist incoming artillery before taking any damage.

[Chenbro101]

It can only build T3 units cant it?

[deletethis]

@chenbro101 said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

It can only build T3 units cant it?

It could always build all tech units unless the last patch changed this.

[maudlin27]

@sylph_ How do t2 mobile shields help vs arti fire? The aoe is so high and shield size of the mobile shield so small relative to the fatboy that I’dve thought the fatboy shield takes the damage, and when it’s depleted most shots would either hit the fatboy directly or hit a mobile shield close enough to also damage the fatboy

[Sylph_]

@maudlin27 Shield bubbles protect units inside them from AOE attacks hitting the shield, even if the units being protected are in range of the AOE.

AOE attacks can hit more than 1 shield bubble at a time, but think of 'outside' and 'inside' shield bubbles as 2 separate areas.
An AOE attack that hits a shield explodes outside the shield bubble. It can hurt units (or bubbles) outside the bubble, but inside is protected.
Fatboys definitely get protection from artillery fire from parashields. They don't even have to be fully under the bubble - as long as no part of the AOE explosion touches the part of the fatboy that is outside the bubble, the fatboy is fine.
(The larger the AOE of the artillery, the harder it is to hide behind a parashield, but most T2 artillery AOE is nowhere near large enough to make it difficult if the parashield is between the 2. The hardest (the cybran gunther) is conveniently the worst T2 artillery in general due to terrible accuracy and damage!)

Another important factor is this: shots that hit a shield bleed a bit of extra damage into overlapping shield bubbles, even if the overlapping bubbles were not in a place that should be damaged by the attack. For mobile shields, this 'bleed over' bonus damage is much higher.
The bleedover for static shields is - 15%.
The bleedover for mobile shields is 30%.
The bleedover for the fatboy is 0%

This means that shots hitting the fatboy shield do zero 'connected shield' damage to shields inside or overlapping its bubble - they have to actually HIT the parashield bubble to hurt it!

Overall, this effect makes the fatboy shield especially good at 'combining' shields with other units, since the usual penalties, built into the game to prevent many, many shields from being impenetrable, is reduced for fatboys.

(You can see an example of a fatboy being attacked by artillery (from the NE), with a parashield absorbing the hit, here: )

Given that T2 artillery (the most common anti-fatboy tool?) take 20 seconds to reload, and a fatboy can build a parashield every 3.7 seconds, you can see how much build-while-moving can help a fatboy survive artillery. You do have to make sure that the rally point of the fatbctory (!) is in front of the fatboy, but this isn't too hard if you know where you want to be going!

Given that a fatboy has a range not too shy of a T2 artillery, it's hard to really think of good 'test cases' to give examples, but here's one:

If both sides have radar, and a fatboy approaches a bunch of 12 artillery (3 from each faction), reasonably spaced out for efficient defense, the old fatboy would kill ~4 before dying.
The new fatboy (building parashields) kills all 12 and survives.
Of course, in a real game, those artillery would have power generators increasing their firing rate, so don't expect these numbers to translate to a real game.... It's just an example of how much better the new fatboy deals with incoming fire if it's spamming parashields.
(I've not played nearly enough games where I get a chance to make a fatboy, though!)