SACU Rebalance

@arma473 said in SACU Rebalance:

My main point is that 1-2 assisted gateways is far better than having 4-10 unassisted gateways.

That's your idea for how to nerf RAS SACU. Your main point is that RAS SACU are too powerful due to their survivability (HP, mobility, size, buildpower, farms mentioned DPS).

Mass fab farms are only a better investment if you ignore their vulnerability. They're easy to kill with strat bombers, T3 arty, Novax, Telemazor, etc. Every time you expand the grid, you increase the vulnerability and you'd need to make more shields to protect it.

You make it sound like fabs are way too easy to kill so they're a bad investment compared to RAS SACU, but I don't see any good examples to back this up. In theory maps where fabs are made are huge:

• strats take too much time being spotted before they can drop on your fabs (with a competent air player). A cheap emergency t2 shield will also stop them if you have your bp is arranged well.
• T3 Arty and game enders are way too expensive to not be spotted and give you time to build shields then start your own game enders. You can also spread out fabs without a huge loss in efficiency relative to RAS SACU which makes them survive more against arty and be a worse target in general.
• Novax is cheap but it's still slow going across the map and can't do something like one shotting your t3 fabs. That gives you time to have mobile shields if you're a land player or just to build shields with engis. For t2 fabs the HP is a downside but they are more efficient eco.
• Tele is still unstoppable for large targets I have to agree. At least you can kill it with tmls + gunships but you're guaranteed to lose everything volatile near the teleport location. It's like 35k mass in tele+mazor+pgens/storages and you can't do anything to stop it from dealing damage without ridiculous investments in PD to instakill it. Except UEF/Sera TML tele which get blocked by TMD/T2 shields cheaply.

Even if you want to make a few mass fab farms, it doesn't take long before RAS boys become a better choice.

Maybe the meta just hasn't shifted to punish mass fabs enough, but at the moment their ~5:30 payback time compared to SACU's ~8:00 payback time makes fabs more lucrative than SACUs for quite a while into a game, despite the super late game vulnerabilities.
To understand the effects of that payback time, you can consider that the earliest you can get a structure built is when you put your entire (expendable) income into it and finish it before your next eco option pays itself back.
Let's say we want to build a Paragon with 130 engis needed for salvation spam (this is the fastest way to get multiple salvations out) with shields and teledef (310k mass):

• This means that with fabs you build at 820 income and finish in 6 min. Total time of fabs + para is 12 min.
• With RAS SACU you build at 511 income (very little, might as well go off only t3 mex + reclaim) and finish in 10 minutes (8 minute payback for SACU is only achieved if you somehow use all their energy instead of T3 pgens the entire time). Total time is 14:15.

The total time is not very important, the important part is at what income it is better to just start a full game ender build instead of making new eco, and you can see that if you are ever unable to keep building fabs it is better to simply start your Paragon than to make RAS SACU.
I used a complex calculator that includes the buildpower and energy costs for the entire eco build order then game ender build order, and includes generated mass every time the eco is built, so the payback times and build times are a bit longer than you would expect.
If you want to consider reclaim, then the SACU have an even lower income until you want to start your game ender (mass/paybackTime, and mass cost just got reduced), so it isn't helpful there. You can easily spare some random t3 pgens scattered around.
I think that this analysis conclusively determines that RAS SACU are terrible, and some mass fabs into T3 arty or game ender (you'd choose game ender because there are places where T3 Arty doesn't reach, which is a safe place for your extra fabs) is way better.

Addendum: The only efficient way to use RAS SACU is to send them out to reclaim as if they're normal SACU, where you can consider the RAS upgrade as independent of the SACU cost and paying back in 5:20, which is pretty much equal to T3 fabs, but that scenario is situational (underwater reclaim is the best use for SACU, and then frontline engineering is a decent one if T3 engis just die for some reason).

Coming back to your main point that RAS SACU are too versatile and durable, don't you think it's enough that they're getting large nerfs to HP (around -20%), BP (-28%, maybe further), and DPS (-66%) in the rework?

I also agree with Thomas that violating the rule that everything that builds can be assisted is going terribly against the game's fundamentals, and is certainly not worth the "small minus factor" from lore.

For Cybran SACUs: short-distance area teleport?

May or may not be a good idea, but what’s more Cybran than 4 Bricks and a SACU suddenly appearing next to your air grid because you didn’t spot them activating the teleport ability.

Short list of some small potential changes to discuss:

SACUs only have access to t1 and t2 unless they have the engineering upgrade which grants them t3 t4 as well as extra BP. At the very least it would force UEF to get the engie upgrade if they want to Rav creep.

Engineering upgrade gants extra build radius (discussed on the discord a while back https://discord.com/channels/197033481883222026/1236147386141904988).

Gateway adjacency changes, maybe even including changing the size to fit more or less adjacent buildings (Would 8 t3 adjacent fabs be overpowered, or is that enough risk of a chain reaction plus setup cost to be fair?)

Nerfing RAS so the mass generation goes from +10 to +5 (ontop of base +1 from the SACU) but also lowering the cost to the payoff time is the same, but now you need to spam twice as many to get the same total income, meaning you have ~twice as many things to defend from incoming fire, which combined with the base health nerf should mostly satisfy people complaining about ras bois being op.

Removing the income generation of SACUs without RAS entirely so now your not paying for uneeded stuff when building rambos.

Some upgrades cause SACUS to death nuke harder, things like teleport or gun upgrade, thigs that you wouldnt get unless you are expecting them to end up in enemy territory.

Replacing Sera overcharge upgrade with a Refracting Chronotron Amplifier so multiple can be used at once without needing infinite energy.

Aeon aura to increase range of units around it? Something like +5 range, so harbs have close to same range as bricks and percies.

Late to this party but I was listening to the balance team meeting recording posted to the youtube channel talking about this.

Unique Cybran ability - EMP enhancement field
My idea would be to give the Cybran support commanders a field that gives all allied units in the area the EMP stun effect on all their weapons (excluding AA).
The field does not apply EMP itself directly to enemy units.

It will probably need tuning to how the stun affects higher tier units and to add some sort of stun cool down so large dense armies can't just stun lock everything to death for free.
It's significantly different to the Aeon Chrono fields because it's not applied directly to the enemy units, instead acting as a buff to nearby units.

This makes me wonder, what values about a unit could an aura change? We can see that it can change Max HP and HP regeneration, but can it do other base values like movement speed? Fire recycle time? Muzzle velocity? I imagine any kind of aura skill would be limited to the values it's able to change.

I have listened to the youtube balance meeting. I would like to point out that 90% of Supreme Commander units are inspired from the Total Annihilation game.
So for the Cybran SACU upgrades I would perhaps sugest from TA:
"Necro" Resurrection bot, the SACU will have the hability to ressurect a dead unit, this would be a timed event and you would have to pay for the E cost but not for the mass of the dead unit
"Grinder" mass reclamation unit, the SACU will reclaim mass(TA metal) at a larger distance and this is automatic, if no mass in range, deals damage (low)
From SC:FA mods, the wagner missile(yes it has one) had a slightly longer range then main weapon and the missile carpet bombed with little medusa shots but with only stun(no damage). Cyran SACU allready has missiles so I think tis faction related.

@tarantellaswan i like your idea so much, but how we will resurrect novax satelite after rework, so smd can shot it down.

@tarantellaswan Funny you should mentions this, was thinking before of a reconstruction bot implementation. Wanted to call it
"The Necromancer" reconstruction bot. Would get a list of surrounding wrecks and rebuild on the spot with the same mechanic as rebuilding on dead buildings. Guess that could work as an upgrade for an SACU, but would require a lot of work.

In ta it's balanced by arm having the fark, fast assist and repair knot, so having a necro sacu for cybran while uef gets a pretty slick engineer sacu probably would work out.