SACU Rebalance mod
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I have published the SACU Rebalance mod. Afaik there are no bugs and its very playable: the balance is theoretical number crunching with very light T3/T4 land/navy combat testing, and all the game/visual design is implemented at a basic level (so you can look in UI for stats). Please host it/play it/sandbox it.
There's a github page with the working environment and commit history: https://github.com/lL1l1/SACU-Balance-Mod/tree/mainFrom the github:
FAF SACU Rebalance
This is a mod for Forged Alliance Forever.
Implements changes for the SACU rebalance proposed by balance team: cheaper SACUs, stronger adjacency/gateways, new army support enhancements.
Rambo SACUs are independently reworked with new weapons and upgrades to fill gaps in faction rosters.General Changes
- Cheaper SACUs: Buildtime and energy costs are significantly reduced across the board.
- RAS is more energy expensive due to decreased base SACU mass cost. RAS also increases death volatility of SACUs.
- Weaker base SACUs: Unupgraded SACUs have less HP and/or DPS.
- Stronger gateways: Gateways consume 32-44 mass/s building SACU and have 160 buildpower, while costing 2550 mass, down from 3000.
- Stronger adjacency: Mass fab and pgen adjacency for gateways is un-nerfed and made equivalent to land factory adjacency.
- Engineering upgrade buff: Engineering upgrades are made much cheaper, especially on buildpower and energy, so that they can come close to engineering stations in power.
Faction specific changes (Rambos and support enhancements)
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UEF SACUs are highly armored with good firepower. They have powerful support enhancements and combat enhancements designed to engage T4 units.
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Cybran SACUs are lightly armoured and slow, but are highly upgradeable with enhancements designed to engage enemy T3, SACU, naval, or air units.
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Aeon SACUs are agile and have a powerful sensor suite (to counter underwater cloak) but are lightly armored. They have cheap combat enhancements designed to engage enemy T3 units.
Aeon SACU nano is removed since nano does not fit the faction.
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Seraphim SACUs are highly armored with increased Regeneration rate but reduced firepower without combat enhancements. They have unique utility/support enhancements and powerful combat enhancements designed to engage enemy T3 units.
Seraphim SACU shield is removed since personal shields do not fit the faction.
- Cheaper SACUs: Buildtime and energy costs are significantly reduced across the board.
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89% mass discount (tested) on SACUs, though... And this is with fabs only. If they touch mexes... This makes RAS SACU farms the only viable late-game eco, and will delay mass land experimentals hard. This makes quantum gates the most discounted factory in the game.
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I updated the mod to v2, here's the full list of changes: https://github.com/lL1l1/SACU-Balance-Mod/compare/v1...v2
There's quite a bit of discussion brewing on Discord, anyone who is interested should check it out. The changes were based on that discussion and 3 replays (#25281467, #25280473, #25280951).
@Kilatamoro said in SACU Rebalance mod:
89% mass discount (tested) on SACUs, though... And this is with fabs only. If they touch mexes... This makes RAS SACU farms the only viable late-game eco, and will delay mass land experimentals hard. This makes quantum gates the most discounted factory in the game.
I reduced T3 fab adjacency by 25% (0.2x -> 0.15x mass discount), although I wasn't very thorough so this is basically just a guess. It'd be great to see some replays or math for how gateway spam with adjacency compares to mass fab grids. It's a unique situation that I don't think has been calculated before.
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There should be like 5 ish presets max per faction. It makes no sense for there to be 12 for cybran since it becomes a mess ui wise and usually 5/12 would see 98% of gameplay
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@TheWeakie To reduce the number of presets you'd have to remove upgrades or nerf them so that they're not a key upgrade.
- Cybran: I don't really see a reasonable way to nerf cybran upgrades. As for removing upgrades you could combine stealth into regen and maybe cloak, or remove the laser upgrade.
- UEF: They're actually lacking rather useful/op bubble shield + speed and bubble shield + gun + speed presets. But that's a bit off topic; the combatant and rambo presets are the only similar ones but I think they have a meaningful cost difference so the combatant shouldn't be removed.
- Aeon: I added a Chrono Combatant preset last update, so now there's 5 combat presets + 3 eco. I think they all have their purposes in efficiency/cost tiers but I suppose it's confusing to a player who hasn't delved into the stats.
- Sera: the OC is so strong I could remove the combatant preset, and maybe the bare regen field (without OC+gun) preset as well.
I think there's a general problem that the lower tier combat presets don't seem to be built and people just click the most expensive combat presets. Maybe that can be solved with time as a meta develops, or it can be solved by making the gaps in cost much larger, so it's like making a T4 vs a T3.
Also I don't think the ras/engi/engiras presets should count towards your limit of ~5 presets.
usually 5/12 would see 98% of gameplay
There's value in having less often used presets because it allows them to be mass produced when the situation arises. None of the presets are like tele where you build one and expect it to do strategic levels of damage, so they're all spammable.
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@Nomander said in SACU Rebalance mod:
@TheWeakie To reduce the number of presets you'd have to remove upgrades or nerf them so that they're not a key upgrade.
lol why?
There's just a lot of duplicate presets that in practice will almost never see use.
A good example for cybran are the different stealth/nano/cloak presets. You have 9 different presets for essentially 3 different types of sacu build.
- Anti torp/air preset, but 1 with stealth, 1 with nano and 1 with cloak = 3 presets
- lazer combat preset, but 1 with stealth, 1 with nano and 1 with cloak = 3 presets
- stun combat preset, but 1 with stealth, 1 with nano and 1 with cloak = 3 presets
A preset shouldn't contain all possibly combinations but just the most likely to use ones (although i guess you can argue that you don't know for the time being what the most likely ones to use are since its all new) otherwise you could also argue for a preset for cloak + bp (to steal reclaim or make a proxy) or even stealth/nano + bp or anti torp/air without stealth/nano/cloak for example or sera having the tml + bp preset, but not the tml + bp + tele preset, nor the tele + bp preset.
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Looking at the prices, has anybody tested tele GCs? It seems the engineer preset is tad more expensive than the old RAS one, so does that changes the numbers for Tele GC? (I know it is a very niche use case, but I am curious to know if there is a significant change there)
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Can we make the mod ranked?!
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@TheWeakie I think players shouldn't have to be limited by the UI, so I'd try to have all presets that can be optimal for some niche. The alternative to this is SACU upgrade manager, which btw can be an unfair UI mod if there's some good but niche upgrade sets without a preset.
Tele isn't in any presets because it's already quite strong and discounting it would be way too OP, especially with buffed adjacency.
If there's truly "duplicate" presets I think that's an issue with upgrades not being distinct enough or some upgrades being OP. Like if nano is too strong for its cost compared to stealth so people always make nano presets then stealth and nano should be changed, not have the stealth presets removed (unless removing the stealth upgrade itself). Avoiding such bad upgrades avoids noob traps too.
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@Regal_Eagle said in SACU Rebalance mod:
Looking at the prices, has anybody tested tele GCs? It seems the engineer preset is tad more expensive than the old RAS one, so does that changes the numbers for Tele GC? (I know it is a very niche use case, but I am curious to know if there is a significant change there)
It's still 5 RAS presets (not even engiRAS) for tele GC, so tele GC is slightly more efficient now. With the RAS energy cost increase RAS is a much better sacrifice for paragon as well, which might be OP.
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@Nuggets said in SACU Rebalance mod:
Can we make the mod ranked?!
I don't think the mod's gameplay is similar enough to vanilla for it to be ranked, and that's putting aside any balance issues that someone could abuse for rating.
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@Nomander said in SACU Rebalance mod:
Tele isn't in any presets because it's already quite strong and discounting it would be way too OP, especially with buffed adjacency.
Tele is super busted tbh, it gives aeon and seraphin a way to kill smd's that are otherwise nigh impossible to kill
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@Firv Tele is easy to counter for its cost with shields/secondary smd, but it's quite annoying because that counter is super precise shield placements.
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i wouldn't say easy, but it might be better now that atleast the sera one doesnt have both tank upgrades anymore, but it still seems very oppressive. Is there a way to give an upgrade negative to armor/regen/shield? This might also be a way to nerf billy, if the com becomes weaker it is more vulnerable to snipe, but thats a diffrent subject
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Stat reductions for upgrades are possible in the same way as stat increases, it was even an idea at first to have the base SACU be more versatile with upgrades decreasing certain stats, but it was complicated so I didn't do it.
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@Firv said in SACU Rebalance mod:
@Nomander said in SACU Rebalance mod:
Tele isn't in any presets because it's already quite strong and discounting it would be way too OP, especially with buffed adjacency.
Tele is super busted tbh, it gives aeon and seraphin a way to kill smd's that are otherwise nigh impossible to kill
removing the shield from sera tele sacu's makes it way weaker (which is good cause i do think its too strong in normal balance). Not sure how strong it'll be after that but it's a good step in the right direction
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yeah its going to be interesting to see how they are now without shield and nano at the same time.
I still think lowering stats when having teleport would be nice, esp on scu's as there is no risk for them. On coms its a diffrent thing as well you die if shit goes wrong
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The mod somehow messes with coop, revealing the entire map, and then the narrator thinks that you have completed many objectives (tested on Black Day only).
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I find Aeon SACU's EMP design conflicting with ACU EMP: while ACU EMP does not consume any energy, SACU's minor EMP consumes unreal amount of energy.
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@Kilatamoro said in SACU Rebalance mod:
The mod somehow messes with coop, revealing the entire map, and then the narrator thinks that you have completed many objectives (tested on Black Day only).
Might be because some presets are removed so scripts break. Campaign does have its own mod, so maybe they can re-add the necessary presets if the mod gets added to the game. I don't think keeping all existing presets is a great idea, as it limits what upgrades can be made and how the overall design of SACUs will go in terms of costs and effectiveness.
@Kilatamoro said in SACU Rebalance mod:
I find Aeon SACU's EMP design conflicting with ACU EMP: while ACU EMP does not consume any energy, SACU's minor EMP consumes unreal amount of energy.
The ACU Chrono Dampener consumes 200 energy every 5 seconds. I took that as a direction for the SACU's Chrono Dampener, but it's way too small of a number so I increased it a lot. But I do agree with you that 7000 energy every 10 seconds is a lot for how little it does. It's difficult to make a fair energy firing cost because the game has no such weapons on producible units. Overcharge is a special case with the ACU and is rather inefficient in mass-produced units as we see with the current overcharge SACU. The closest analogue is shield/stealth upkeep which are 30-50 for t3 units and 400-600 for experimentals. Turning those upkeep values into firing costs gives numbers like 1100 energy every 10s, which I thought appeared lackluster at first but now I think they are more fair (it would be unfun to punish people more for using their units constantly), so I'll probably reduce the energy firing costs significantly everywhere. What do you think the costs should be?
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