SACU Rebalance

@tagada said in SACU Rebalance:

What about https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/6040 ?

That just equalizes the requirements I think, you'd have to check and verify it in-game

@sainserow said in SACU Rebalance:

I've checked it in current game and basic seraphim SACU & battle preset gained the same 400/4000 veterancy (10% progress) after killing 1 harb. My question is why such a change wasn't explicitly mentioned in any game patchnote ? It's quite a significant change worth mentioning, it's very strange to have "hidden" patches.

It is mentioned here in a release on GitHub, which you can find a direct link to in-game in the changelog dialog.

Okay a small 3 days later than planned but better late than never.

What i will write here is the vision that i have on where to take the sacu rebalance. Note that a lot is still up for debate and nothing is set in stone.

The global picture

So i assume everyone knows that aside from ras boys other sacu's are barely seen in the average teamgame. The reason is simple: they're just not good enough because of a multitude of issues. They cost too much mass or e, take too long to build or just have upgrades that aren't worth getting. Generally speaking sacu's are a giant untapped resource that's kind of just sitting in the game being ignored by almost everybody.

Therefore they're gonna get rebalanced so they will be worth making. The general idea is to create 3 main sacu presets for each faction. A rambo preset, a support preset (more info on this later) and an engineer preset (of course there are also other more faction specific niche presets). The rambo preset will basically work the same as the current presets do (but better balanced) while the support presets are an entirely new (mostly) preset that's meant to support big armies. The engineer preset kind of speaks for itself, but the main difference is that they will be more usefull at the front than they currently are.

The way i envision the impact of this is that in mid to lategame land armies you will see multiple sacu groups as part of the bigger army, instead of evergrowing numbers of t4's.

The details

To allow the 3 main sacu presets to exist we first need to look at the current sacu upgrades, their presets and the sacu's themselves. It is extremely important that wrong upgrades do not overlap with different presets as this might make some presets obsolete.

So first of all the base sacu's. They will be nerfed for 1 simple reason. Not because they are strong but because them existing as they do now interferes with the plan of having 3 main sacu presets. A few examples:

• The base bp of sacu's needs to be nerfed substantially to make engineer sacu's (especially at the front) ever worth it. There is currently zero use cases for an engineer sacu because rambo sacu's already have so much inherent bp on them that coupled with all the survivability upgrades they are simply that much better than engineer presets on the front. You can outbuild a single t3 gunship with a rambo sacu.
• The base hp of sacu's needs to be nerfed to give the planned support presets a possible counter: sniping them for their lower hp.
• It also makes no sense that the non rambo presets basically have the same dps as a percy when they're clearly not meant for fighting. I remember a specific game where i walked a gc into a group of 20 ras boys and i managed to kill 3 ras boys before their combined 6k dps (2.5x the gc dps) killed my gc in about 20 seconds. That kind of stuff should simply not be possible.

The base sacu will get some buffs in return although we haven't discussed the details yet. It's probably gonna be something like a cheaper mass cost and/or lower bt, but it is important to keep in mind that most likely base sacu's are always gonna be too bad to build because they try to do too much at once. The moment it is made a viable option for anything it will almost instantly become OP since it's viable to do that one thing plus has the additional benefits.

The way gateways are balanced will also be changed quite a lot. I want them to work in a similar style as factories: You have multiple of them with some adjacency. Gateways always had terrible adjacency because with it ras boys would become way too strong, so the plan is to buff the adjacency anyway to become similar to t3 land facs in efficiency, and nerf ras boys as much as it's necessary to not make them stronger.

More specific details

So the support presets are probably the most controversial but also the most exciting changes for me. 1 faction already has a set of 3 support upgrades that should work pretty well: UEF sacu's with a jamming, sensor and shield field upgrade (although obviously it needs to be rebalanced to be worth making). The other factions right now are lacking these upgrades though. We have come up with a few possible ideas but like i said at the start nothing is set in stone, so please mention it if you have a good idea. Maybe it will be used.

The current plan is for sera to get a regen field which has the same function as the current regen field on the normal acu. The plan for aeon is for them to get a chrono support acu (again similar function as the normal acu). Both of these kind of fit their faction theme since the main acu already has these upgrades. It's probably gonna be relatively hard to balance these upgrades properly since the effect can be very strong, but i believe that with enough testing it will be possible.

Cybran is by far the toughest one for me though and aside from a multitude of ideas we haven't exactly gotten many concrete ideas for them yet. A big issue is that both their sacu's and acu have a lot of niche upgrades that don't necessarily fit into a preset. Right now the only support upgrade that exists on the sacu is the sam upgrade, which is fine but nowhere near enough.

Here are a couple of ideas that we came up with/ got mentioned:

• Have a damage aura that damages enemy units (so the opposite of regen aura). You can combine it with cloak which is an almost unused upgrade to walk into enemy armies to damage them. It sounds cool but the main issue with this is that it isn't a support upgrade. That isn't necessarily the worst for cybran since they're kinda known as the aggressive faction, but it's also kinda easy to counter with spyplanes (although funnily enough you can have the sam upgrade on them as well to shoot them down)
• Have a damage aura that increases the damage of your own units that surround it. This feels kinda lame for me personally though.
• Have a speed aura since cybran is known to be the raid focussed faction. The issues with this however is that it's mostly useless in a straight fight (unlike the other support upgrades) and it won't work on a lot of maps where flanking is not really an option. It also is awkward that sacu's are very slow themselves and buffing the speed of units around you will make other units slowly leave it.

If you think you have a better idea we would be happy to see it.

All in all right now we are in the conceptual phase. We (think) we got the general idea down and will slowly start implementing these on fafbeta. Obviously a big overhaul like this needs quite a lot of testing and even then there will be no way we get it right the first time, but considering the current state of sacu's we have very little to lose imo.

You could let Cybran Support SCUs rebuild the wrecks of dead units.

Just wanna comment that I love the amount of thought that is going into faction diversity here. Re:

@theweakie said in SACU Rebalance:

The issues with this however is that it's mostly useless in a straight fight (unlike the other support upgrades) and it won't work on a lot of maps where flanking is not really an option

Might not be an issue necessarily: not every faction has to do as well as any other on any terrain. If cybrans are generally faster/lighter/more aggressive, then their strength would be in flanking, raiding, and winning by manoeuvre. If that doesn't work on maps that are more closed, then that's fine imo. Let other factions shine where they do their stuff best.

Make Cybran SACUs upgrade all nearby units' weapons to lasers.

Kidding..... kinda.

Only somewhat normal idea I can think of for Cybran is maybe giving them the TML redirect like Loyalists but also somehow add an arty redirect as well. Doesn't seem that great tbh but it's just an idea.

Overall I really like the plan so far.

Large deceiver field?

Why would cybran get a speed upgrade when there is a faction in the game that is perpetually forced to play reactive at all times on land as soon as titans are no longer relevant damage dealers, primarily because nobody wants to do anything about the fact all the mainline battle tools are the slowest things in the land game.

The stun gun is technically a support upgrade while AA is offense. You could put stun as an alternative to gun and giving the upgrade increased range.

Probably a bad idea, but why not include cloaking in all cybran presets? Stealthy engies for sneeky building or risky reclaiming. Stealthy rambo to shoot without being shot back, stealthy support option in whatever form that ends up taking. It fits in any situation just about.

As for what the support upgrade could do... I really hate to say it but a regeneration field fits them well, too well, even better than it fits Sera. All their stuff regens faster than other factions anyway, their nano repair upgrades have rediculious regen rates, they even got hives which are practiaclly a stationary regen field already, they lack mobile shields so they have an open slot for a mobile defence field. They even have a building that in the lore explicitly creates a nanobot field around it (Soothsayer).

It would not be an identical copy of the seras regen field as sera would also have the max health boost, but I can understand if the overlap is decided to be too much.

The other other things that make any faction sense are radar stealth field (redundant, although having a t3 deciver wouldnt be the worst thing ever). A cloaking field (extremely overpowered unless we give omni out like free candy). And EMP, which Aeon have nabbed first.
Edit: It has occured to me that personal cloaking with a radar stealth field would actually be highly versatile but not overpowered. That would be an excellent support option.

Add a targeting laser enhancement that allows SACUs to guide TML missiles.

(How this would work exactly I'm not sure but put a slinger behind the trigger you know what I'm sayin'.)

Regen field definitely sounds like it makes more sense for Cybran. Maybe give Sera some kind of shield field? Not a bubble shield, but give shield to units within the area.

A few notes from a developer / ux perspective:

• (1) Anything 'area'-like is expensive. It needs constant re-evaluation. Units may lose the buff for a few ticks, just to gain it again. Units (with aura's) may stack up. Therefore whatever we do, it needs to be simple.
• (2) Anything that you can not communicate to the player in a reasonable fashion should be a no-no. The game is complicated enough as it is, it doesn't need aura's that complicate it even further.

With that said:

• The suggestion to add dynamically shields is a no-no from a performance perspective. Shields are fairly expensive to (de)allocate and in their general use because of overspill. There's a reason that the Lua file for shields is super large.
• The suggestion of a cloaking field is a no-no from a game perspective, especially if it applies to structures. The shader of cloaked units is relatively expensive to compute (because it is transparent). And structures once scouted are visible to your enemy, no matter how hard you try to cloak and/or stealth it. This is obvious to your enemy, but not to you as a player who owns the cloaking field as the game does not communicate to you what the intel of your enemy is.
• The suggestion of a damage aura that deals damage to enemy units is also a no-no in my opinion. The damage effects that you would apply are likely not visible when zoomed out. And if the damage applies through the fog of war (which is also not trivial to compute properly. What does it even mean, is a radar blip sufficient?) then it is very difficult in general to communicate to the user where the damage originates from, which is something that is usually very simple in this game: wherever the projectile originated from. Let alone - how do you balance this? What if there are 10 SACUs with a damage aura?

And in general: stun is a very annoying mechanic in this game. The reason is simple: if a unit is stunned long enough then for some reason the engine decides to drop the current order. Usually units do not have more than 1 order, so the moment the unit is available again it will just stand there waiting to die. Let alone that stun immediately stops a unit in its track, which also prevents projectiles that are already fired by weapons to hit the target as they expected the target to not stop dead in its tracks like a normal unit. Therefore Chrono on SACUs is a no-go in my opinion.

A few thematic suggestions on things that are cheap to compute:

• UEF: Jammers, optics (vision/radar) and (bubble) shields on the SACU. That fits the theme of the UEF where they use conventional tools to dominate the battlefield. They would of course need to be adjusted to become more useful. The game fully supports these type of area effects and stacking of SACUs with these area effects has little benefit.

• Cybran: Initially the faction was called 'Recyclers'. The theme of the Cybran is utility and the idea of improvising and adapting. What I'd suggest is to re-use the build drones. But instead of them only slowing up when building, the build drones now hang around the SACU and assists nearby (not-moving) allied units by repairing them (for free) or by reclaiming nearby wrecks (at a relative low rate, but the SACU can move and do whatever while the drones reclaim). The game fully supports these type of aura's and stacking of SACUs with these aura-like effects has little benefit.

• Aeon: Optics (vision/omni) and a new aura that buffs nearby units with shields. The buff is simple: it removes the delay that a shield has before it starts to regenerate. As a result the shield will always regenerate, where as usually there's a small delay (of a few seconds) before it starts to regenerate. The game fully supports these type of aura's and stacking of SACUs with these aura-like effects has no benefit.

• Seraphim: Just OC and no aura-like effect. I agree with @FtXCommando that the energy costs need to be simplified so that it doesn't drain all of your economy. I'm personally also a huge fan of the lambda field mechanic of BlackOps, but then decently balanced.

And in general, SACUs with RAS should explode more violently to make it easier to create a chain reaction like with tech 3 resource production. I also agree with @FtXCommando that non-engineering presets need to be really bad at engineering. They can start it, but need help to finish it up.

Great write-up Jip, I'm a fan of everything you suggested.

Jamming still seems like a waste of a slot. It serves no real purpose, its easy to spot and basicly does the exact opposite. The only slightly usefull jamming is on the uef frigrate, all other jamming seems so useless imho. Unless someone can explain to me how to effectivly use jamming

Agreed. Jamming on works on things you make a lot of and you make later in the game. Jamming on units that commonly end up fighting in vision range doesn't do much, and jamming on things you don’t make a lot of is also pointless. This leaves frigs as one of the few units where jamming is kind of nice on in practice, forces scouting like stealth does for cybran navy. Still weaker than stealth, but it does something. Even then it’s only relevant later in the game when you’ve got destros and battleships fighting outside of vision range.

That said, this could be a bad idea but I’m throwing it out there anyway. What if UEF SACUs get jamming and shield dome at the same time same slot. So shield dome gives them jamming as well. Additionally, they get buffed jamming that throws more radar signatures than normal jamming and also has a longer range.

That way they have counter intel in beyond visual range fights and it’s not an utterly useless add on when there’s vision on them, which is most fights.

Another idea that might be impossible, but is optical jamming something they could do? So not only is there radar jamming, but they could have holographic images of the sacu projected randomly around them. This would only be counter by Omni or by paying close attention. That might be too op/unfun to play against but it’s an idea I suppose.

Edit: Could be something like it both projects images of the SACU but also other units like titans, parashields, flak, etc. These projections also have a radar signature if there’s no Omni. So basically just massively buffed radar jamming.

Jamming could be put into UEF SACUS at base (cant waste a slot if it doesnt take a slot!) but that does leave a gap in the support for preset and I can't think of anything useful to add there that isnt just a basic stat up like extra sensor range. I suppose there could be a 'high intensity jamming' upgrade that just amps the jamming effect up to 11.

optical jamming

I think it's possible: you create a list of units that can be holograms, and then in the blueprint loading phase you create hologram units out of that list.
The holograms would have 1 hp and are spawned attached to the hologram generator, with a long respawn time, which allows the enemy to clear out the holograms by shooting them (otherwise they would permanently break targeting unless omni comes into range or units are manually retargeted).
Target priority switching can be modified sim side to prevent setting priorities that ignore holograms.

@jip said in SACU Rebalance:

if a unit is stunned long enough then for some reason the engine decides to drop the current order

Chrono can't stun lock units, so this issue shouldn't show up.

On a related note, my concern for Chrono is that it's going to be annoying to desynchronize the Chronos for max stun duration if stuns are protected from for less than the reload time of Chrono (ex: 5 second stun, 10 second stun protection, 30 second reload requires microing 3 Chronos).

(bubble) shields on the SACU ... stacking of SACUs with these area effects has little benefit.

The spillover mechanics won't cause making multiple shields to have little benefit.

With the current mobile shield spillover of 0.3x, the 3rd stacked shield would contribute 0.49x of its hp, for a total of 2.19x. That's not mentioning that SACU bubbles have 0.2x multi, so you can stack 4 of them for 2.95x total hp and the 4th shield contributing 0.51x hp. Graph

Sure there are diminishing returns here, but it's not literally 1 unit per army, especially since you can avoid overspill by microing to cycle shields. Compare that to Chrono or regen aura which clearly have no benefit from stacking if they are implemented like the ACU versions.

new aura that buffs nearby units with shields. ... The game fully supports these type of aura's

Wouldn't this require Lua very similar to regen aura? If it does, then it goes against the idea that Seraphim can't have regen aura SACU because of performance concerns.

SACUs with RAS should explode more violently to make it easier to create a chain reaction like with tech 3 resource production

This goes completely against RAS SACU's durable but extremely inefficient eco concept.