Main problem of Supreme Commander
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It’s pretty common for absolute noobs to overflow both mass and energy because they barely understand what icons are moving on the screen
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@IndexLibrorum So instead of thinking about what I wrote, you just looked at list of my games? Constructively. It's probably just a habit that helps save time.
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@Sainse It seems like people have forgotten how to read.
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A good chunk of what your mods does is just making the game clunkier with added restrictions and increased costs. What can I do in-game with your mods (Advanced Bases or others) that I can't do with the current FAF balancing?
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@Razana With vanilla balance you can't have good balanced gameplay on large (20-40 km) maps. That's why the percentage of games played on them is very small. If players could play on such maps, they wouldn't crowd into tiny squares of 10-16 people. You can't have good battles because spamming megaliths, stationary artillery, nukes and shields is not gameplay. You can and do get "turtle" gameplay because game-enders and shields are imba in relation to all other units, but apparently this is necessary so that at least something can compete with the imbalanced economy, which is what the post is about. I can't claim to have solved these problems, but I am trying to solve them.
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It's highly map and playercount dependent. There are some maps where people will get full T3 mex before their first combat unit, and some maps where getting their first T2 mex before a T1 tank is basically an auto-loss. Perfect balance for both situations is impossible.
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If you know how to play the game well then this poses no issues. Even if you were to half the buildtime on eco buildings you would just use that extra time gained to scale your unit production faster with the extra resources so you can raid your enemy sooner.
Funnily enough increasing the bp like in your mod will just make it almost impossible to properly balance your eco at the start because a single air fac will drain like 300-500 e/s with your proposal. It will make early game aggression insanely strong because u can rush out the units so much faster, which btw is the complete opposite thing that sc2 went for when they increased the starting workers from 6 to 12 to make the game not be 80% earlygame 15% midgame and 5% lategame
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@thinker No, I've read your post. I am saying that your lack of experience playing the game (with or without mods) means you have not seen enough of the game to make any sweeping statements. Moreover, your inexperience is a big part of the problems you're facing. As Theweakie and Sainse explained, we suspect that a big part of your issues is your inexperience with the game, rather than any part of the design of the game itself.
This is not meant to be dismissive or insulting.
A comparison between a T2 mex and a T3 mobile Arty for example, makes no sense, if only because one of the two can move. If you take from this that it's 'more profitable' to invest in economy over units, you're not considering that mexes don't shoot and an enemy that made 20 tanks instead of a T2 mex will kill your mexes. Sure, in a vacuum it might be better to just invest in economy, but that works only when you get no pushback.
You're welcome to come play a few games against me where you can show me how "investing in the economy is much more profitable" and "war cannot compete with the economy". I predict that you'll find that having enemy tanks in your base does few wonders to your economy.
"Design is an iterative process. The required number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time."
See all my projects:
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@TheWeakie Are you sure you understood correctly what I am suggesting? I am suggesting not to increase bp, but to increase build time. The construction time of everything on the contrary increases several times with the same bp.
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@IndexLibrorum Theweakie got my idea the wrong way around. Sainse simply didn't read it and saw something of his own.
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@Deribus I only consider the second type of maps. And what I propose will make economic development even more difficult.
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@thinker I don't see the benefit of slowing the game down significantly as a blanket change - there are already many maps where the game is decided at the tech1 stage (e.g. 5km 1v1) where someone who eco's early is likely to be punished.
Where slowing down gameplay might have a beneficial impact is on larger maps (40km+) since the FAF gameplay on those strongly encourages focusing on a game-ender or experimentals (due to how long it takes for units you build at your base to reach the enemy/do damage - so there's far less point to T1). I could see the use case of a mod that adjusts FAF balance to work better on such maps by making the T1-T3 stages more important, although I'm not sure what the precise changes would need to be (as a 'finger in the air' I'd guess doubling costs and build times for all HQs and eco buildings might help). However from the description of your changes I dont think it'd help much - you're increasing only the build time, meaning you have a slightly larger cost to build some engineers to assist those buildings with upgrading (e.g. 8 T1 engineers mean a t1 mex upgrades at the same rate to t2 as before; you only have to build those 8 T1 engineers once though, and it shouldnt take that long to get; meanwhile t1 mexes build fast enough that even with 5x you could probably just have 2 engineers build t1 mexes in pairs and quickly get your initial mexes in your base area to fund more engineers). I.e. since the mass cost isn't different I feel like it'd only slow down things slightly, and still lead to 'rush experimentals/game-ender' on an 80km map. -
@maudlin27 For balanced gameplay on large maps, I created another mod - "Gameplay Scaling". It increases the time and cost of building everything by 2 or 4 times. This helps to get good gameplay on maps 2 or 4 times larger, respectively. But we pay for this by increasing the duration of games. I tested M28AI on the 81 km Debris map with 4x increasing, and got the same game logic as when playing on a 20 km map, only the game develops 4 times slower. The same number of units on the map, so there are no brakes.
The increase in build time described in this topic has a different purpose. For example, if in this case a T3 generator (or anything) is destroyed, then it will take 5 times more time to restore it, which will lead to the loss of much more energy income. Or you must have 5 times more build power, but this is an additional expense. That is, battles will affect the outcome of the game much more strongly. This is what I meant when I wrote about "dominance of economy over war". In vanilla balance, the economy is too strong, because the one who has gained an economic advantage, in the vast majority of cases, simply "crushes with mass" his opponent. The game develops like a snowball. And the one who is lagging behind has almost no opportunity, from a strategic point of view, to stop this avalanche. And in the vast majority of games, everything happens according to almost the same scenario. Linearity and monotony. And my assumption is that it is the build time that is the reason for this. The linearity of the gameplay was discussed, for example, here: https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5552/title-a-time-for-change-faf-community-balance-team
