Im done with billy nukes
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I wouldn't mind a nerf to billy speed, even if it were made significantly cheaper to compensate for this nerf. Its very generous range makes it too safe to use in my opinion, compared to other late ACU upgrades. If it flew slower, there would be more of an incentive to get closer before launching, or it would be less frustrating to play against because dodging would be easier at max range.
That being said, here are some things you can do to counter it on the move @Caliber. As soon as it's revealed, split your armies up into small, spread clumps, start a few t1 air scout streams in the UEF's general direction, start spamming t2 or t3 engies to the front from at least 1 factory, and avoid pushing until they get there. Later you can switch out the engies for sACUs if you want, they can do this more reliably.
If you're seraphim, add more mobile shields to the army mix, they block the billy so incredibly well that you can just keep everything clumped. In the longer term, if you're aeon, you can also consider transitioning to GCs instead of mass t3. Whatever mobile anti air they need can follow behind the build power and still be effective, while the collosi themselves are so tanky they make for very unappealing targets.
In general I found billy a bit less annoying to deal with after I started mixing t2 or t3 engies into the army in all my games instead of relying only on t1 engies to reclaim in the lategame, as I had been doing before.
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@FtXCommando it's true that the billy is quite expensive, especially energy wise, but it's efficiency quickly scales as the number of players goes up. Similar to how on setons, for instance, one nuke launcher forces 4 smds, the very large range of the billy allows it to stall or complicate pushes from several players on many fronts very fast, especially if you also get a continental. Another reason it scales so well with more players is because of energy overflow. It spreads the cost out among teammates and this means the investment into a billy doesn't leave as large gaps to exploit for the opponents in a 6v6 as it might in a 3v3. This also makes it "cheaper" in lower rated games, where overflow is way more abundant, but the experience, reaction speed and attention management needed to defend against it are at more of a premium. The fact it leaves no wreck behind, unlike broadswords, also grants it a comparative advantage as the average skill goes down.
And while defending against broadswords might be more expensive mass wise, it's definitely cheaper attention wise. I fear the skill floor might be too high to push against the billy properly for quite a few players, which is another reason I suggested making it cheaper but slower.
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SACU are quite good vs Billy with their HP, regen, and BP. Billy deals 12k/30s or 400 DPS maximum, so an SACU can be a good investment to defend the Billy without being super snipeable. The SACU is also useful in other situations like detecting Cybran armies, building reclaim factories/SAMs/TMLs, or dealing with small amounts of units with their AoE damage. They're particularly good at lower level because they avoid the issues of your T2 BP dying and having to very quickly replaced or else you gain 0 ground vs the Billy.
I see @phong's perspective in that it requires specific knowledge/different army composition and a higher level of apm, but nerfing things because of such ideas that are basically skill issues might lead to situations like we have with the strat where it's 99% unusable just so that it isn't extra strong at low levels. As for the lower cost/slower velocity suggestion, that might make billy even stronger at a low level where they likely aren't setting up the scouting you recommend and don't really have the apm to split their army a lot.
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@Nomander I guess you have a point, it wouldn't help noobs in particular. Should you agree that it's cheaper at lower skill and in larger games and consider it a problem, shifting its cost towards mass and away from energy might address that more directly.
However, I think it's a strange to suggest my proposal would make the weapon 99% useless and call it a nerf instead of a change when I was so vague with the parameters and even explicitly called for a cost tradeoff. You're also apparently estimating its usefulness against static targets, which would actually go up, to reach at most 1% after such a change. Consider that telebilly would never have even been suggested in the first place if static targets were that unappealing.
Should you decide to be a bit more charitable though, I would rather you imagine a changed billy being effective and cost-efficient at ~2x gun range against skilled opponents and falling off gradually beyond that, to the point where getting your army hit at max range is cause for ridicule. This would make it a bit trickier to use when experimentals are pushing or air is contested, but more interesting, since you would actually have to put some thought into the ACU's positioning.
If you get maser or splash or advanced gun range then just chill among static shields and pd forests, it feels like a waste. Venturing out with your com to make use of these powerful weapons is part of what makes them exciting. I'm not saying billy is unbalanced, but it's not as fun as it could be.
I'm sure there's enough leeway here to work with, but if you don't like my suggestion, I would rather you explained either how it would be detrimental to this weapon's current intended role, or why there is no combination of numbers that could achieve it. If you don't respect arguments for noob-friendliness, consider them arguments for fun gameplay, and avoid straw men please.
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Certainly don't mind nerfs to billy accommodated by relational price adjustments. I just think it's at a reasonable level of efficacy given its current price point and so long as that's carried through any change the upgrade remains viable.
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@FtXCommando 5 broadswords vs a billy? and u choose broadswords? lol
tmd creep is a shitass countermeasure vs billy btw, if anything its an argument against billyI sort of get what you're saying if the map is an open 15km mapgen like the standard is nowadays, but have a look at this 10km game where we were winning and a billy just shuts down uef push completely
https://replay.faforever.com/24328792
timestamp 25 minutes or soi think you'll agree percies and bricks are too slow to dodge with anyway, and you don't want to be constantly dodging while you're attacking someone. and if you're going to say "don't attack into a billy" then u agree billy shuts down attacks too well
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Yeah I choose broadswords. Are you just rallying them into armies or what? 10 broadswords will force an air fight anywhere and you can attack any point in the map and babysit them to heal damage. They compound, billies do not. Ironically enough UEF is the faction most stalled by billy, yeah. Problem of percies having zero initiative with movement so they must keep everything in one singular blob because t4s will catch them out of place. Not a problem with billy, it's a problem with percies being slower than every mainline t4 other than mega. Disagree with bricks, that's just a unit mix problem because loya shouldn't have a problem dealing with billy. Nobody wants to risk their 300k e investment just bouncing back to hit their own base.
I sure would hope TMD creep is a relatively bad counter. 5 billy nukes + the upgrade itself + t3 = washer in cost. Washer has 40% more area of impact, no cost for drops, and doesn't result in game loss if it dies. Imagine you could spend 500 mass to deal with washer. To keep this argumentation going, sam creep is also a shit ass counter to washer because it can edge bomb sams and the engineers building them. Except you know, it doesn't cost 300k e for every usage of this. It's annoying to keep sending more engies to continue the TMD creep, but it's a war of attrition you win because the enemy is spending 10,000 e a second to edge nuke some tmd.
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Counter to Broadswords = Mobile AA
Counter to Washer = Mobile AA
Counter to billy = ?
Also 10,000 e per second is 4 t3 pgens then what? most air players float +10k energy in average games.
If you want to compare energy costs cybran laser costs 500,000 energy and places the commander in much greater risk compared to the 315,000 energy for billy and keeps the com relatively safe
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If you think floating 10k e is normal and expected behavior I think I found the reason for game loss and it had nothing to do with billy. Personally I never float above 2000 e at any moment as an air player and that would only be for maybe 20 seconds as another air fac finishes.
Nice comparison with Cyb laser, did you forget it’s 315k e to to build the launcher and 315k e to build the first billy and then 315k e to build every subsequent billy?
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Billy has a similar problem to Ahwassa in that upon being built it effectively means T3 land is no longer an option. And you aren't going to send land T4s without support, so it means land gameplay is over. It isn't fun to watch your entire army be deleted in an instant, and there's very little counterplay (aside from TMD creep, which by that point in the game is very easily sniped). It also promotes turtle gameplay and air dominance.
What if had a targeting laser effect? A little marker like teleport has so you can see that there's one incoming and split your army or build emergency TMD with some front line engies/SCUs. That way you have some counterplay options and the "skill issue" crowd can still say "should have seen the targeting laser"
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@phong The reason I said it might become useless is because lower velocity is not a stat that changes with equal effect on higher and lower levels of gameplay, because the effectiveness of the change is related to the player's ability to counter billy in the first place. It would make people who play well against billy play even better, but have little effect on people who don't play well against billy. Like your example with hitting armies at range relies on the army having scouts and regularly paying attention to dodge the billy (every 30s as long as the army is alive). Lower velocity would help people who do that but have little effect on people who don't.
I don't like straight up buffing the cost in response to a velocity nerf because a cost change has a very different effect across skill levels compared to the velocity in my mind, not because I think that a lower velocity + cheaper cost doesn't compensate each other at high level.
Should you decide to be a bit more charitable though, I would rather you imagine a changed billy being effective and cost-efficient at ~2x gun range against skilled opponents and falling off gradually beyond that, to the point where getting your army hit at max range is cause for ridicule.
In a similar idea, I think reducing the max range is a good direction. Billy currently has TML range, but that doesn't make sense for two reasons:
- TML pressures eco by targeting single targets in the backline, while Billy's targets are frontline armies.
- TML is static and fragile, while ACUs are mobile (especially with transports or even tele) and durable.
Reducing the max range would make the ACU more vulnerable to land/air, make it easier to scout/keep intel over, would make the ACU's target more obvious, and would limit its power on smaller maps (TML covers an entire 10km map edge to edge but not corner to corner).
As for velocity accomplishing the balance you describe, I find that the effect would vary. Lower velocity would certainly make predicting army movement harder for the billy user at longer range, but for the billy victim I think whether or not the billy is fired at long range relies too heavily on intel to be able to spot the billy that far away. Basically if everyone uses T1 scouts flying into sams, it doesn't matter how far behind the sams the ACU is for the army, since they'll see the billy with the same warning time every time.
Should you agree that it's cheaper at lower skill and in larger games and consider it a problem, shifting its cost towards mass and away from energy might address that more directly.
I don't have experience abusing massive energy overflow like 10k e/s from the air player like Caliber is talking about. Nevertheless, my intuition says that Billy will take an equal amount of time because low level air players can overflow energy but land players can also float tons of mass, and in the end people will complain about Billy's damage either way.
Also an overflowing air player typically isn't thinking that they need to keep the overflow up so that their team can use it, so in the end the Billy user will want their own pgens and storages. -
If it was to be nerfed (e.g. by reducing speed, range, or giving a VFX to indicate the target when zoomed in) I hope that the minimum time between firing 'feature' could then be removed due to how unintuitive it is
I also worry that anything good the UEF gets is nerfed because when viewed individually it is strong (billy nuke, novax), with nothing else given to the UEF to compensate. I.e. whether a unit is too strong shouldn't just be considered in isolation, but also in the wider faction context.
Plus, in terms of counters, Aeon TMD ignores the billy nuke health (albiet billy can just go over its head to strike further back targets); Cybran just needs a single loyalist; Seraphim has mobile T3 shields that [edit: Looked up the wrong shield before: have 10k health (testing in sandbox 2 overlapping mobile shields meant a billy nuke dealt 250 damage to units under the shields)] and UEF in theory could make a shield SACU to cover most of their army as an alternative to TMD-creep
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@Caliber said in Im done with billy nukes:
only cybran have a mobile counter to it
Seraphim as well cause of t3 shields
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@Sainse I have tested sera mobile shields and I dont see them as a counter to billy
Billy damage = 12,250 Sera mobile shields health 10,000 leaving 2,250 damage to units under the shield and kills the shield so they cant even recharge
at best it protects the units from being one shot, it reduces damage, but does not prevent damage.
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@Nomander the projectile's motion need not be flat. By deciding how the billy flies you can adjust how valuable intel is to dodge it - make the landing take a proportionally larger chunk of the flight time, or a projectile that starts off fast and slows down as it goes, and scouting is less relevant.
I personally would like a reduced billy range more than tweaks to its speed, and even a reduced ACU TML range to be honest, but I would have thought it to be a more radical suggestion since it's very counter-intuitive that an upgrade to the tml have shorter range, and since it impacts billy's performance against static targets which I didn't think was the problem. This is why I suggested what I considered less drastic.
If you did go for the range reduction, would you let players still fire regular TMLs after upgrading to billy? If yes, how would reloading work? I don't care either way, just wanted to know what you thought.
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@Caliber I didn't know this. Do multiple stacked shields survive?
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@phong Yeah I considered some dynamic flight characteristics and what came to mind to me was slowing the projectile down as it approached, like Seraphim missiles, which was a bit unintuitive so I discarded the idea. Making the Billy fly higher and and take a long time to go downwards is a better idea.
I would have thought it to be a more radical suggestion since it's very counter-intuitive that an upgrade to the tml have shorter range
Imo it is not an "upgrade" to TML but more like an evolution. It isn't an unusual game design to have the next step of something have a similar design with different purpose. This is already reflected in Billy's missile cost: you can no longer use it to kill T2 mex efficiently (and T3 mex are good targets by a small margin).
and since it impacts billy's performance against static targets which I didn't think was the problem.
With how many great targets Billy has, I don't think losing out on Billy-ing bases because it has TML range is something people will miss out on. Also it is much more exciting to transport/teleport in range of a base to Billy it, so maybe it would be a positive change for the gameplay vs static targets.
If you did go for the range reduction, would you let players still fire regular TMLs after upgrading to billy?
It is not necessary to be an option because Billy can always get a use, even in a static late game with tele (which you conveniently have the power for when maximizing Billy load speed), so people will never feel like they lost out on significant power from upgrading to Billy.
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Do multiple stacked shields survive?
On paper, 2 shields survives because it's 10k + 3k overspill damage + 2.25k remainder damage = 15.25k total vs 20k HP.
In reality, the engine handles the AoE damage and shield entities with difficulty (or we have a shield bug, hopefully not), so 12k dmg gets blocked completely by every single shield in AoE range despite the shield being behind another shield, so all shields touching the 12k dmg range get disabled. Afterwards, 250 outer damage hits everything, even the shields that blocked 12k dmg by stacking up together, and these shields only have 400 HP. T2 shields have only 100/150 HP.
There is a point where you can spam enough shields to block all the damage fully, but it requires more researching how shields work.
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@maudlin27 said in Im done with billy nukes:
I also worry that anything good the UEF gets is nerfed because when viewed individually it is strong (billy nuke, novax), with nothing else given to the UEF to compensate. I.e. whether a unit is too strong shouldn't just be considered in isolation, but also in the wider faction context.
Imo the UEF on the whole need a bit of a nerf
Billy nuke = arguably the strongest com upgrade allowing the acu to destroy all t3 armys without risking the acu (aswell as telebilly lol)
Percy = Strongest land unit
Broadsword - strongest air unit
Spearhead = only t3 mml
Ravager = only t3 point defense
Novax = best intel unit and very effective harrasment unit
drones = no other faction has drones
Mavor = strongest artillery / strongest unit in the game
fatboy = land exp that can destroy any other exp without even getting scratched
acu = T2/gun/shield or shield nano gun very versatile acu
Atlantis = requires ground firing from battleships
sparkys = great t2 build power
continentals = stongest transport for transporting the strongest T3 land units = most powerful drops.
anymore I missed?
as well as all that they have no real weakness, shields are strong arty is strong most HP for buidlings ect
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@Caliber said in Im done with billy nukes:
@maudlin27 said in Im done with billy nukes:
I also worry that anything good the UEF gets is nerfed because when viewed individually it is strong (billy nuke, novax), with nothing else given to the UEF to compensate. I.e. whether a unit is too strong shouldn't just be considered in isolation, but also in the wider faction context.
Imo the UEF on the whole need a bit of a nerf
Billy nuke = arguably the strongest com upgrade allowing the acu to destroy all t3 armys without risking the acu (aswell as telebilly lol)
Percy = Strongest land unit
Broadsword - strongest air unit
Spearhead = only t3 mml
Ravager = only t3 point defense
Novax = best intel unit and very effective harrasment unit
drones = no other faction has drones
Mavor = strongest artillery / strongest unit in the game
fatboy = land exp that can destroy any other exp without even getting scratched
acu = T2/gun/shield or shield nano gun very versatile acu
Atlantis = requires ground firing from battleships
sparkys = great t2 build power
continentals = stongest transport for transporting the strongest T3 land units = most powerful drops.
anymore I missed?
as well as all that they have no real weakness, shields are strong arty is strong most HP for buidlings ect
This is possibly the (lets put it in a friendly way) .. weirdest.. listing i have ever seen. You are literally just listing things as to how they work.
Lets go for cybran:
Brick = strong and versatile land unit
wailer = more dps than broadsword
t2 shield = cheapest shield
monkey = cheapest experimental and strong
scathis = huge area of effect
acu = only acu with stealth, kills others without getting damaged
t2 engies = good t2 build power
mobile stealth fields = mobile stealth fields = most powerful drops
And so on
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