Satellite overperforming.

@mazornoob said in Satellite overperforming.:

If we're talking so late in the game that e costs no longer matter then the opposing team should afford tele def anywhere they have antinuke anyway.

People just naturally overbuild E late in the game, if you naturally hoard 50k mass then this will be true.
It's also not that E costs don't matter, but they are less relevant than mass costs, since if you at some point needed E for something you invested the mass already but the E production will continue for the rest of the game.

@mazornoob said in Satellite overperforming.:

Yes I am. Nukes are yet another "target anywhere on the map, has a specific per-area cost counter that you need ahead of time" weapon that has yet another counter with different numbers. Doesn't make the underlying mechanics much different.

A GC can also walk anywhere on the map and shoot things down so where's the difference?
The difference between a GC and a Novax is similar to the difference between a Novax and Telemazor. You can see and defend against a GC on it's way to its target, while you can only see the Novax and have to prepare defenses at it's target position + it's faster.
Telemazer you cannot intercept or even detect on it's way and it's also way faster than a sattelite.

@mazornoob said in Satellite overperforming.:

How is paying 20k mass and 2 million e for a telemazer not an opportunity cost?

That's just cost, the Novax needs to travel to places and the enemy can just concentrate on building defenses where it's going. against telemazer you need your defenses up everywhere at all times.

@mazornoob said in Satellite overperforming.:

Fighter-bombers obviously won't protect the telemazer target in the first place sure, that's the job for T2 PDs. Their purpose is to ensure the first tele is the last one, and this they can do no problem.

As soon as you build your t2 pd you lost to the telemazer because making it is more expensive than the telemazer was. So while you think you just countered the tele, in fact you just lost some mass to the enemy.
Also because Telemazer is hard to scout and arrives very fast you need to start preparing such defenses even before a telemazer is out, so you need to invest in useless PDs in your core base just because your enemy is Cybran.

@mazornoob said in Satellite overperforming.:

Conceding the Novax DPS analysis, except again, you have to factor in the cost of shielding all the mexes where otherwise you wouldn't bother because SAMs stop strats and no one will nuke/arty/Asswasher random lone T3 mexes.

The math presented doesn't factor in shields because it assumes you don't build any. Making shields would be more effective, but even if you just rebuild the mexes destroyed by the Novax it's not that expensive, because it has such low dps.

an idea i just had would be to turn the novax into a factory that has to build the satalites, kinda does this anyway when they get shot down.

base of novax could be cheaper with sats having increased build time and costs ect
with options of which satalite you want to make such as

*intel only sat
*defense sat that does more dps but has a range limit
*current sat, renamed to something like offensive sat without intel just vision

just an creative idea

@caliber And they all die when their host factory dies? Or do they become immortal beings?

Make the satellite build walls so you can troll your opponents and write stuff in their bases.

Haha that's the best

not 100% sure but afaik last time novax was changed the idea was to make it weaker but give it intel
so "i build one to scout for my arty" idea is used, so people don't just spam them but the unit itself is still consistently getting build. Like so you don't get benefits from spamming more satelites.

Maybe we could lower DPS a little (i agree that satelite is usually strong and often pays off, as well is making multiple of them)
Then we could make it fire in more of a burst way, so it is shooting for less time (would not like to increase the damage per 1 laser charge but instead make it so it shoots harder but for less time) hopefully it makes it harder to keep retargetting laser to kill 8 different small things in one base, like imagine shields go down and isntanly 4 mass fabs around 4 different mexes are getting killed and then all the shields also getting killed, this aspect of satelite is pretty OP.

alternatively could be cool to somehow make it so you just can't retarget while laser is firing, but idk how to make it natural, and it probably just gonna be extremely anoying.

@thomashiatt said in Satellite overperforming.:

Make the satellite build walls so you can troll your opponents and write stuff in their bases.

Build them straight into reclaim fields to turn off factory attack move

Make ground fire burnt marks stay and ground fire write

You could just add a limit to how many you can build.

make them push each other away so you can't have two of them shoot the same thing so 2 t2 shields will always be enough to protect anything unless guy gonna groundfire exavtly inbetween two shields to make them both go down at the same time or something

Significantly reducing attack range may also help to prevent lots of fast retargetting

@zlo said in Satellite overperforming.:

imagine shields go down and isntanly 4 mass fabs around 4 different mexes are getting killed and then all the shields also getting killed, this aspect of satelite is pretty OP.

If we're talking about a satellite on its own, then by nature they won't do that unless you get them in large numbers at which point the same would happen with T3 arti - in particular it's much easier to defend a priority target against multiple sats than the mass equivalent in T3 arti. E.g. 2 overlapping T3 shields will do pretty well if the enemy gets a second sat since the shield overspill doesn't do anywhere near as much damage as the aoe from a T3 arti shell. If a satellite does overwhelm a shield, then it's likely other shields further away will still be under shield coverage so the satellite is limited to only killing 1 or maybe 2 shields.

It's only if you introduce other units I could see that scenario happening, e.g. you get enough T3 arti to bring down the shields, and then you have the satellite take advantage by killing the shields. I don't see that as a bad thing though - it takes you longer to break through the shields than just getting T3 arti only (assuming there's more than 1 shield), but with the benefit that if you do break the shields you can destroy the shields quickly (whereas with only T3 arti the enemy might get a shield online before the next shell lands).

If it's that mass fabs are clustered together and so volatile they can lead to a chain reaction that overwhelms nearby shields, that's more a mass fab issue, and again feels like a valid/good interaction to have.

If the sat was to be nerfed then in terms of your suggestions I'd much prefer something like smaller attack range or longer weapon recharge time (potentially coupled with higher damage so the dps is similar) - things that would be a significant change in mechanics and unintuitive like not being able to have satellites in the same place together or being prevented from targeting more than one unit would be a bad move from a new player perspective.

Random thought, as I don't think we need to change the sat, make the sat more real with two settings.

Low orbit where you can't control it and it fastly moves over the battlefield firing at everything doing little random damage, and it moves diagonally across and comes back in the other end of the screen a little lower like a real sat does at low Earth orbit. Goes fast enough that it really gives you Intel for the whole map and will get random kills.

The second setting is geostationary orbit where the speed has been reduced and possibly the damage since it's farther away. You can control the sat and where it fires. To obtain this orbit and back it takes two obits to switch so it's not instant.

@veteranashe So a range limit in favour of two different range and dps modes? Basically the seraphim sniper bot, but cooler and stuff.
Removing the global aspect of the satellite would solve a lot of the "feels bad" moments. It could also be used to justify other cool changes to offset the restriction. E.g. constant beam instead of burst fire since it has limited range, perhaps even anti-air targeting too

Sat scaling is the main thing that really makes them hard to manage.

What if they had a power drain as a limiting factor-? This isn't a major change, just a response to scaling.

Won't break the unit, won't make it unviable, just respond to scaling issue.