Fire beetle balance suggestion

KaletheQuick

Perhaps it could be made viable by giving it a normal attack? Like a flamethrower or some shit. Move the kamikaze to a special ability button like that useless Aeon engi 'sacrifice' ability. Now you can incorporate them into a unit composition in a way where they can consistently contribute, and still have an extra special ability. Maybe make the suicide ability auto trip when they get low on HP, so as they get wounded they charge in the enemy and detonate. Add in the AOE DOT that MazorNoob said. I mean, they are a 'fire' beetle, why not have them set the ground on fire? Then they could even be detonated to cover a retreat.

I was actually tossing around a kamikaze idea to put on t1 labs. I desperately want them to be useful.

BlackYps

The DoT idea and the name of the unit gave me an idea. I present to you the real firebeetle: https://imgur.com/a/rdL7f9q

tatsu

if that's relatively low dps then heck yeah

archsimkat

Nice concept! Now that's a Fire Beetle!

moses_the_red

I don't know if anyone has suggested this, but I think this makes sense.

The problem with firebeetles as an eco drop attack unit (which i think is their primary intended role) is that T1 arty is just better.

One way to fix them might be to give them "eco attack" modes. You click one mode and they're set to target mexes, you click another and they're set to target power. When dropped, if they're near mexes or power they attack those structures automatically - no player input required - targeting the highest tier structures first.

With T1 arty you can just drop. You don't even have to watch the drop happen, its fire and forget, your T1 arty will start attacking things the moment they land. You can look back at the drop zone a few seconds after the drop happens and see how you're dong, but its not really mandatory. This doesn't happen with firebeetles. You have to micro them and they're expensive and they're often dropped into places where they will be attacked.. You have to split the say 8 beetles you dropped into groups of 3, and separately send them at mexes, or you have to clumsily just send all of them to each mex in sequence. This gives the enemy more time to respond.

You can get around this by queuing up attack orders before you load them into the transport, but I've tried this, and what happens is that the beetles get stuck on one another and you wind up with a traffic jam for several seconds. You're better off just microing it after the drop.

Anyway, I'm seeing lots of good interesting suggestions, but I feel like if you can make drops with firebeetles less clumsey to use, that might just be enough to make them worth using - and I really like the idea of firebeetles having synergy with transports and decievers. If they were useful as drop units - at least on par with say Zthuee drops I'd be using them all the time.

moses_the_red

@BlackYps said in Fire beetle balance suggestion:

The DoT idea and the name of the unit gave me an idea. I present to you the real firebeetle: https://imgur.com/a/rdL7f9q

I like it, should make them more damaging to structures since structures can't move out of the way so it buffs them as drop units as well.

Northern-Newbie

Certainly the Firebeetle may have not seen as much success as the ever so prevelent Units as the Mercy or the Corsair but it might be due to be being stuck on Land for the most Part and the Cybran transports absolutely not being the Best for huge Drops (given Seraphim transports have more slots and can still drop T1 Arty with good payoffs if the transports can fly through gaps in AA) there certainly could be place for the Fire Beetle..
if it were only that tad more durable and faster since even with a successful drop of a good amount of Fire Beetles they are quickly dispatched due to not being as blazingly fast as an Mercy and having to fight Land Fortifications like other Tanks, the ACU and maybe PD

on the Flipside they are about as cheap as some TML butreally arent worth their "wasted" Mass in Tanks

Marked_One

https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Terror_drone_(Red_Alert_2)

they remind me of these little guys for some reason haha

MazorNoob

@BlackYps Did you change the lua to do that or is it just a graphical effect? If it's lua, maybe I'll try and pack it up into a mod to show some viability to the idea.

BlackYps

I didn't have to do some complicated lua coding, but I changed some blueprints. Not sure what you mean with graphical effect.
You can have a look here: https://github.com/BlackYps/Napalm-Beetle

MazorNoob

It's a complete mod already? Please please please upload it to the vault so I can bug everyone to enable it for their games!

BlackYps

Will do, kinda forgot about it to be honest. If you can't find it in the next days, remind me again.

MazorNoob

Following recent balance forum rule changes, I decided to check how often beetles are actually built. So, I did the following:

I grabbed 2000 replays from id 13370143 downwards, skipping IDs that gave me a 404.
I ran the replay parser on replays with the following script:
```
#!/usr/bin/fish
for file in scfa/* 
 ./fafreplay commands $file -c IssueCommand 2>/dev/null | grep -q xrl0302
 if [ $status -eq 0 ]
 	echo $file
 end
end | wc -l
```
This basically counts the number of replays in which commands were given to a unit type "xrl0302" (or fire beetles).
Finally, I counted replays in a similar fashion for a bunch of other gimmicky/niche units.

Here are the results:

Beetles: 18
Sparkies: 100
Mercies: 79
Janus: 187
Continental: 99
Spearhead: 42
Shard: 76

keyser

what would be interesting would be to look into the replay of high rated players, to see how much they are made at high level.

techmind_

@MazorNoob do this for atlantis as well and for ras coms, pls.

MazorNoob

@techmind_ Atlantis was built in 70 games. There's probably large bias towards dual gap, but still.

MazorNoob

@keyser None of the 18 replays with beetles I checked have a player with more than 1.4k rating in them. Mostly they're comp-stomps and 500 average rating teamgames. Maybe an API query can be prepared to fetch a bunch of recent high-rated games, but I can't be bothered to do it right now.

techmind_

Something like # mass spent on specific unit per average game OR #avg number of unit build per 1 game would be interesting graph to show useless units.

MazorNoob

Can't calculate that by parsing replays. IMO knowing whether a unit is built at all in the game is a good enough indicator.

Tagada

Over the thousand high lvl games I played I don't recall seeing a single situation in which people successfully built and used beetles. They are very very situational and require a lot of micro if you want them to be actually good. I am not really sure on how to remake them to make them useful while not making them OP or un healthy. I don't think they should be a snipe weapon nor a mine. One idea I have would be to make them a designated drop unit by giving them a lot of dmg vs buildings making them a nice run by units in late mid-late game and a very powerful drop unit to snipe Pgens, Mexes, HQ. You could give them no AoE so they would be terrible vs Engies in the base, t1 pgens etc. but let them be very good vs buildings themselves allowing you to easily snipe a t2 pgen or even an HQ. This however would need to be well balanced, if they would be too weak, people won't use them and instead they will drop arties. If they will be too strong it will be just OP considering how strong drops already are. 1 way to solve this would be to have different dmg multiplier for Buildings in General and Mexes, this way they wouldn't be OP in a sense that you can't just 1 shot an HQ, while making them a unique unit that would leave very little or no mass at all after killing t2 mex.