Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread

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!)

Sylph_

I should also re-iterate, I don't feel any certainty about whether or not the fatboy is fine right now, I just think a lot more experience is needed with this mobile factory change.
For example, while taking those screenshots, above, and testing a tiny bit, I noted how much turning the fatboy's rear to the enemy just before a parashield pops out can help.
Fatboy's can be driven backwards - this will also probably help a TON when building parashields, and it's something I haven't tried! Hell, building t3 combat units would probably make a massive difference there, too!

Until players have a 'feel' for what kind of resistance merits going in 'ass-first' with the fatboy, and similar understandings of the changes, I feel it's hard to know how good the current unit is.

The only thing I will say with confidence is that the mobile factory functionality was a significant buff to the unit.

CocaineDiesel

I think given that there's no specific changes for the Fatboy included in this patch or planned for the future we can probably take it easy on hashing out what may or may not happen.

Sylph_

@clyf Fair enough. I saw a comment in a different topic suggesting that changes were coming soon.

(Maybe I'm a bit paranoid given how suddenly the massive +15% vision range change was pushed out!)

CocaineDiesel

There's a comment in this thread that says it's on the to do. But that means it isn't done yet, e.g. they're gathering more data.

Sladow-Noob

The fatboy is a complex topic as you can see here:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/4865/the-problems-with-the-uef-part-8-the-fatboy?_=1696441679442
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/4807/talking-about-the-fatty

Only arguing that the build-while-moving gives access to more parashields isn't enough cuz my personal take:
It's a counter against sniperbots, why should you invest way more than 15k mass for like 8k mass in sniperbots killing your army?
Or the problem with airsnipes being way too valuable (see the linked posts for detailed answers).

I'm not saying the change doesn't favor the fatty, but it's nowhere near enough to say it's in a fine position right now. Also I have no idea what the other balance team members think about it so it could be a discussion lasting hours if everyone has something different in mind.
Another thing are the shield-SACUs. Since the SACUs are going to change quite a bit in the future, it can be that they will be an important factor to consider as well. So yeah, overall not easy to tell right now.

CocaineDiesel

In a spitballing non-committal off-the-record way what's on the docket for shield SACUs?

maudlin27

@sladow-noob Is there any (rough) indication of when the SACUs might be changed?
They've been rumoured to be due to be changed soon since I recall first started FAF around 3+ years ago, so I've held off trying to implement any special logic for my AIs for SACUs due to the risk of it being wasted time. I'd recently assumed the changes weren't going to actually happen given how long it's now been since SACU changes were mentioned so was starting to think about whether to look into it again, but it sounds like it could be a change that happens 'soon' again - e.g. in the next 6 months?

Sladow-Noob

@maudlin27 It's actually something which was talked about already a bit, however I cannot / don't want to say too much about it since it's not a topic I can add a lot, so it's completely up to them figuring out the details and direction. Depending on the size of the changes it might take a while since it's not easy to balance, but in short it's not forgotten; Maybe it'll be smaller changes but more frequent or one big patch, no detailed plans there

FtXCommando

sacu rebalance is older than some faf players

CocaineDiesel

Even broader--what's the issue that's been identified with them? Why do they need to be rebalanced? Surely that should be pretty static and okay to reveal.