Novax rework

[Nomander]

Looking at the mod its 8k e/s * 4s every 20s so 1600 e/s which is just 0.64 T3 pgens (2073 mass), and then like 4 storages (they boost your pgen so they're pretty much free economically but not defensively). Novax station is up from 36k m, 512k e, and 44.k bt to 45k m (+25%), 810k e (+58% e, ratio 14.2->18), and 58.5k bt (+30%).

Satellite:
Beam lifetime: 8 -> 5s
Damage: 60 (4860 volley) -> 96 (4896 volley)
Energy/shot: 0 -> 100 (irrelevant, I guess you were testing and ended up scripting the 8k e drain)
Yaw/pitch speed: 360 -> 8 deg/s
Omni: 60 -> 0
Radar: 200 -> 0
Vision: 60 -> 40

[Caliber]

@nomander so it would seem that the energy drain being 1600 e/s is actually reasonable. I might change the build costs to be more inline with 25% increase overall.

[Nomander]

My opinion on all the changes:

Beam lifetime/aim speed

I was skeptical but they're reasonable changes from testing. It makes a good novax player weaker but if you're just sitting there dumping the beam at one shield with bad timing it doesn't really matter.
For killing fab capped mexes I went down from killing 6-7 fab clumps placed in a line to 3-4, but I don't know if its a super realistic scenario in terms of mex spread on real maps. Maybe realistically it'd be like 4 fab caps (you can micro novax to edge of range easily) down to 2 (you simply lose too much damage switching targets). This is the most OP part of novax but its underrated.
For shields I went down from killing 7 UEF shields placed in a line to 4. I guess realistically it's still 7 shields down to 3, but idk if you can find 7 uncovered shields. Maybe the shield killing is not changed too much.
For engis the changes make it a bit less effective but engis are usually clumped so it's not a huge difference.

Energy cost

It's 32k e over 4s every 20s (1600e/s avg). Like with most weapon energy drains in this game, it's just not significant economically, since it results in only 2.1k mass of pgens/storages (5.8% cost of the unit).
In my experience the relevant ability energy drains in this game are:

overcharge (auto oc example)	T1 7500e/5s, T2 18000e/5s, T3 45000e/5s, T4/SACU 90000e/5s	1500e/s, 3600e/s, 15k e/s, 18k e/s	1.9k mass t3 pgens, 4.7k, 19.4k, 23.3k	Reduce this to however often you OC but its still a huge e cost, especially at lower techs. Usually you're just scraping by on large stores of overflow to kill high tech unit timings instead of constant power production for continuous overcharges.
Mobile shields (Asylum example)		55e/s	71 mass t3 pgens (32% unit cost)	Significant but less noticeable late game due to shield spam being not so good due to overspill
UEF Rambo shields (Other sacus suck)		500e/s	648 mass t3 pgens (11% unit cost)
Sera Tele SACU		15k/20k/25k e/s	19k mass t3 pgens (94% unit cost), 26k (125%), 32k (156%)
Multiple uncapped Salvations after your para and air grid die	25k e/3.1s	8065 e/s	10k mass t3 pgens (5.2% unit cost)

Harbs, obsidians, and titans also drain a bit but it's only in a fast T3 rush and after the 2nd T2 pgen it isn't an issue in teamgames.

I would say that the energy cost should be upped significantly with a proportional decrease in unit cost. This would make novax spammers far more vulnerable to T3 artillery, tele, and novax by placing lots of T3 pgens and storages around. The main outcome of this will be that it will be easier than it is now to come out ahead by responding to novax with T3 arty. At the current rate, the 2 pgens you need for 3 novax are trivial to defend.
You do have to consider that with significant mass cost being in the energy costs that air players could turn off ASF and make cheap novaxes. I think that's not an issue because novax isn't strong enough to offset those lost ASF. An effective example of this economic switch would be tele and Yolona, both of which can destroy the entire enemy air grid with a minute of finishing. Even if you start the novax spam lategame, the enemy will respond much better because your novaxes arrive 1 at a time before the deathball accumulates.

Build cost

The 25% mass cost increase just makes the unit terrible to justify competitively. You're already better off with T3 arty than novax, this change makes it far more so. Basically killing off the unit, even in an arty support role. I think the retargeting nerf is sufficient in terms of its damage output, and the suggested power nerf would make an arty response sufficiently powerful.

E ratio and its increased amount aren't large enough to matter.

Small buildtime ratio increase also isn't a huge deal. It affects the first novax but once you have engis to spend your mass on novaxes that engi requirement is fulfilled for practically the rest of the game, so it doesn't heavily counteract novax spam which was your goal.

Intel nerfs

Omni nerf is fine, it prevents easily finding cloaked stuff on the front (most useful usage) or in their base (irrelevant as you usually have better targets than a cloaked ACU). It also prevents novax from detecting stuff underwater, stealthed or not, which is a fine tradeoff.
Removing radar and nerfing vision sucks because the novax loses a lot of its ability to support Mavor by finding and destroying hidden buildings, and loses its general support capabilities when shields finish building (you have a 36k/45k mass waste sitting around wittling down T3 mex).

[Caliber]

Ok so some revisions after further testing and advise.

@Nomander said in Novax rework:

I would say that the energy cost should be upped significantly with a proportional decrease in unit cost.

Did you mean build cost or weapon energy drain cost?

Beam lifetime: 8 -> 4s
Damage: 60 (4860 volley) -> 120 (4920 volley)
Yaw/pitch speed: 360 -> 8 again to slow down the novaxes instant op retargeting
With beam lifetime halfed and damage doubled im not shure how it does more damage (should be the same) but anyway this was done further to reduce the amount of time that the novax has to fire at vulnerable units. (until shields come back on ect)

In testing the standard novax could easily kill these four t3 shields when down with time to spare in a single shot, my changes only allow the novax to kill 3 out of 4 shields in this standard arty setup.

Energy/shot: still 8k per second unless some one comes up with a batter figure? it will do for now.
Omni: 60 -> 0 no change
Radar: 200 -> 150 added radar back in but at a smaller radius
Vision: 60 -> 40 no change

Build Cost Mass and time have been set back to their original values.
energy has been increased massively to follow the Air EXP energy cost increase in a previous update (seeing as this thing is classed as an air unit)

BuildCostEnergy = 512,000 < 1,022,000 -741 per second this falls between the Czar (1,530,000) and the soul ripper (812,000) closer to the ripper than the czar

Another change that I have made is with movement, as standard the novax behaves exactly like a gunship, it changes direction very quickly, so I have reduced the movement characteristics of the satellite so that is is slower to change direction, I my opinion this also makes it behave a little like its actually in orbit and not just a gunship

I am also experimenting with the SMD idea that many people suggested although I havent figured out how to get an SMD that only auto targets nukes to manualy target a unit (satellite)

As well I have made signifigant progress in getting the "Novax factory" concept working I might have to upload that as a seperate mod when finished, with other types of satellites including missile and scout satellites.

[Nomander]

@Caliber

Did you mean build cost or weapon energy drain cost?

I meant that the mass cost of the base station should be reduced and the energy drain of the satellite's firing cycle should be increased.
The energy drain makes novax spam require much more shielded area for the pgens and storages, which makes artillery a better counter-response.
The mass cost reduction offsets the mass cost of the pgens so that the total cost of novax + its required power is competitively viable.

Energy/shot: still 8k per second unless some one comes up with a batter figure? it will do for now.

8k/s * 4s/20s is only 1600e/s average. I would say that you could do 18k/s * 4s/20s (3750e/s) and reduce novax's cost by 4000 mass. Then you'd need 1.5 T3 pgens (4860 mass) + 6 storages (1500 mass) per novax. Subtract 0.375 pgens (1215 mass) if all 6 storages are adjacent. Storages can efficiently gain double adjacency for another 0.375 pgens saved. Adding it all up, 6 doubly adjacent storages + necessary pgens comes out to 3930 mass of power infrastructure per novax, in the most volatile form of power we have in the game. You could fit such numbers under a single shield with your novax but if you start spamming you'll need multiple shields + multiple engi assist clumps. That would make arty much more efficient vs novax spam while keeping a singular novax reasonably defendable.

With beam lifetime halfed and damage doubled im not shure how it does more damage (should be the same)

Due to a very old "bug fix" beams deal 10*lifetime + 1 ticks of damage (except beams that dont deal dmg every tick, but that's only in mods, on the cybran zapper, and steam version of rhino/cerberus).

@Caliber said in Novax rework:

energy has been increased massively to follow the Air EXP energy cost increase in a previous update (seeing as this thing is classed as an air unit)

I would class the novax as a strategic weapon like artillery/tele/nukes/enders (directly attacks enemy eco, bypassing land/air/navy units). I haven't seen or done much analysis about how balanced the energy ratios for those weapons are, but the energy cost of air T4s has a very deliberate reasoning of preventing land players from rapidly dumping reclaimed mass into an air T4 whose counter of ASF needs huge amounts of energy production and buildpower.
I do remember a balance change that massively increased the build time of artillery and game enders (4-3x) (#2631). No documentation in the PR, but there is some in the patch 3704 changelog. And the reasoning for the T4 nerf in that patch is this: "Experimentals have had very low build times which often made thoughtless mass sinks. With the T3 land nerf Experimentals will be a stronger force on the battlefield so build time is increased to compensate for this and to make XPs less of a cheese weapon thrown up in very short periods of time with little build power" (patch 3696 changelog).

Considering these two things, you can treat high buildtime as anti-rush mass costs for both air and land players, and high energy cost as anti-rush mass costs for land players.
There is also one detail about tele's extreme energy cost in that the pgens to build tele power the tele ability, which is very nice for building tele only once, and less so for multi-teles (though tele is so strong that multi tele is still very worth doing, especially if the first tele succeeds, so this cost isn't felt too hard).

Some comparisons (lower is better for both values):

Unit	BT/Mass	Energy/Mass
Novax	1.24	14.2
T3 Arty	1.51-1.64	18.75
Nukes	1.52	25
Scathis	1.10	16.7
Mavor	1.33	26.7
Paragon	1.30	30.0
Yolona	1.33	53.3
ASF	8.53	114
Shield Nano Tele SACU	2.31	82.5
Ahwassa	1.41	40.0
Czar	1.13	34.0
Soul Ripper	1.66	28.0
Sera Sniper	6.92	34.6
T4 Land	~1.8	~12.5
Percy	3.75	10.9

Your novax energy increase leaves it at 28.4 E/M, which would be similar to a land player rushing a nuke, so based on my experience I'd get like 3 pgens to build novax quickly enough, instead of the current 2-ish. It's also not exactly a 2 -> 3 pgen difference but a 1 -> 2 pgen difference, since when you build novax you'd have a T3 pgen for your T3 land that you would be re-using as you divert mass from land to the novax.

Basically, the E cost increase would slow down the first novax by an extra T3 pgen, which is not a big deal for a novax spammer. Despite that, I think it's a beneficial change if it goes along with the energy firing cost + mass cost reduction because it will elegantly prepare power to fire the novax while not having a big impact on rushing the first novax due to the mass cost reduction.

[Nomander]

@Caliber said in Novax rework:

I am also experimenting with the SMD idea that many people suggested although I havent figured out how to get an SMD that only auto targets nukes to manualy target a unit (satellite)

This would probably kill the unit due to the differences in smd missile cost. Anyway to implement such a thing you need to:

1. Create a secondary weapon on SMDs because the primary weapon can only target projectiles.
2. Script to link this weapon's ammo to the primary weapon.
3. Two ways to make it manual fire:
   • Make it an overcharge-commanded weapon: Set ManualFire = true, OverchargeWeapon = true, add overcharge to SMD commandcaps, do whatever Sim-UI scripting needed to make UI disable OC order when there is no ammo.
   • Make it a tactical/nuke launch-commanded weapon: Set ManualFire = true, NukeWeapon = true (if nuke order), add tactical or nuke to SMD command caps, undo the UI code that makes the mouse ignore units while in tactical/nuke mode (but only for SMD), and I don't think you need to do sim-ui scripting to make the launch order button work.

[Caliber]

@Nomander said in Novax rework:

I would say that you could do 18k/s * 4s/20s (3750e/s)

I like this

@Nomander said in Novax rework:

This would probably kill the unit due to the differences in smd missile cost

What if it was made so that the Novax would take 2,3,4 or so missile to shoot down?

[Nomander]

@Caliber said in Novax rework:

What if it was made so that the Novax would take 2,3,4 or so missile to shoot down?

I think it's a possibility. People would have to get used to this new cost and there should be some UI changes to make it obvious you're using multiple antinukes to shoot down the sat (think teleport and capture reticles but showing ammo count). There's edge cases with partially damaged sats where you don't want to prevent players from damaging a sat without killing it because of cross-army coordination and punishing the mistake of flying a damaged sat into the range of a loaded SMD.

The uses cases would be (in order of usefulness):

1. denying sat from massacring naval production because we don't have good shields on water
2. denying sat intel
3. denying sat dps (quite useless because sat dps is very slow and shields are much better value over time than multiple SMD)

I've considered 3 scenarios for sat cost balance when getting shot down:

1. 2 antis and quick sat rebuild: 2 SMD cost 9.5k * 2 = 19k mass smd and power + 7.2k mass per sat shot down, which is less base cost than the Novax station (36k mass) and the firing cost is much less than the sat cost considering sat reclaim (5.4k mass land, 3.24k mass underwater). Considering that difference in firing cost, sat should have relatively high uptime when getting shot down constantly because paying ~10k mass for 5k damage and a few seconds of intel while draining 7.2k mass antinukes and donating a 5.4k mass wreck is a bad trade. To get that high uptime, sat needs to rebuild + travel to the other side (15km at 9 speed = 15 * 51.2 / 9 = 85.3s fyi) faster than just 2 SMD can load.

2. 2 antis and slow but cheap sat rebuild: This would be like the previous scenario but sat is made so cheap that the sat cost and wreckage reclaim outperform or match the antinuke firing cost. To prevent draining SMD for cheap, the sat rebuild time has to be increased. Since 2 SMD is much cheaper than the Novax station, 3 SMD (28.5k mass smd and power + 7.2k 2 ammo = 35.7k mass) should be required in terms of buildpower to match novax rebuild time. With 85.3s to travel across the map, and 2 ammo being built on average in 160s by 3 smd of bp, sat should rebuild in 74.7 seconds. The timings are made equal because the 3 SMD + 2 antis is a 1:1 mass counter if sat was made cheaper on mass to equal 2 antis - sat reclaim. If you want to block nukes, you build a 4th SMD.
   To get the actual buildtime and buildpower of the sat and station, I make T3 engi assist equal by using antinuke bt on the sat: 259.2k bt * 2 = 518.4k BT, and making the station build the sat in the desired time: 518.4k / 74.7 = 6939 BP.
   An alternative calculation is subtracting 3 SMD BP worth of BT from the 2 antis and using that as the satellite BT (and subsequently station BP): 518.4k BT - 3 * 1080 * 85.3 = 242k BT, 242k / 74.7 = 3240 BP. Well this just ends up being with the station matching the 3xSMD BP, and gives a big advantage to engi assist on the Novax station. Maybe that's ok though because SMD have the advantage of not being forced to idle like the station does when its sat is built and traveling. It gives an opportunity to eventually get a sat through someone spamming SMD and immediately killing sats. Also engineer buildpower is less mass efficient than SMD buildpower, so that is a disadvantage of doing this for the novax side.

3. 3 antis but slow and expensive sat rebuild: This would be like the previous scenario but with longer build times, less BP on the novax station, and less possibility for SMDs built earlier in the game to kill the first (few) sats. It also neatly uses the ammo of the 3 SMD that you build for buildpower.
   Calculations:
   259.2k BT * 3 = 777.6k anti BT, 240s anti load time - 85.3s travel time = 154.7s sat build time
   Variant 1: 777.6k sat BT, 777.6k / 154.7s = 5k station BP
   Variant 2: 777.6k - 3 * 1080 * 85.3s = 501k sat BT, 501k / 154.7s = 3240 station BP

Also with these calculations you can consider the travel time adjusting in real games. Lower travel time (distance < 15km) gives an advantage to variant 2 and higher travel time gives an advantage to variant 1.

Sat can also drain mass/s with its DPS vs shield assist or killing mex, but I don't think the SMD counter is going to be more efficient than assisting shields or rebuilding mex or stacking shields because it requires a high mass investment long before the sat comes, which means you can't eco (it's 36k mass SMD vs 36k mass sat compared to 36k mass eco + mass shields or rebuilding mex vs 36k mass sat). I'm not very confident in this guess though.

[Caliber]

@nomander thanks for the help on the mods discord, I was able to get the distance restriction working, although I ran into a few problems with it.

But rather than struggling with that I had the idea of disabling the weapon of the satellite past a "max distance" I believe is an elegant change to the satellite, reinforcing the "defense" part of the defense satellitte as past the max distance it is still usable as a intel unit.

In the mod I have set the distance to 650.

[Caliber]

Introducing the Manual Fire Novax Mod

As it says this mod changes the Novax satellite to a manual fire weapon,

1. The weapon now requires players to directly give each attack comand, why?
   - The current Novax is to easy to spam and que orders and just afk damage your opponent, very annoying considering the amount of apm it takes to counter and how little apm it takes to use. this changes that, now requiring constant APM to manage and get the most out of the unit.
2. The weapon now requires significant energy upkeep to use, why?
   - The current Novax has no costs past its build costs, unlike most other strategic weapons most of which require constant energy or mass, such as nukes, nuke defences, artillery shields, TML, but the novax is free to use, its main counter "shields require a good amount of energy to keep working only increasing the more of them you need to cover a larger area, now the novax's energy upkeep matches other strategic units you also now have to montor your energy supply as it can easily overwhelm your energy supply especially when using multiple sats.

As I was creating this mod it quickly became one of my favourite novax balance mods as its not a hard nerf to the unit itself but more an apm tax, requiring more from the player.

I encountered many issues that prevented me from making it as well as it could be made by more knowledgeable modders saddly I lack the understanding to improve on these issues currently.

Issues,

1, I wanted to keep the beam effects of the weapon but sadly I wasnt able to figure out how to get a beam to act as a counted projectile, so i was forced to make a custom projectile that looks similar to the blue beam, I am quite pleased with how the custom projectile turned out but the standard beam would have been be better.

2, Using Manual fire brakes turrets, I had to work around the turrect not working due to the manual fire machanic breaking turrets so in the end I had the novax behave similar to a Zcar in that it hovers almost directly over the target and fire down, I also had to make the projectile turn a little so that it was accurate every shot.

3, Missile Buttons, sadly I tried many times to change the "Load Missile" and "Launch Missile" buttons to something like fire weapon but in an effort to save my sanity i gave up.

4, I wanted the weapon to only require energy to recharge/reload but having 0 mass cost breaks the loading/charging function so it now has a mass cost of 1.

All in all Im very happy with how this mod come out, It works perfectly to showcase how the novax can function as a manual fire weapon, it just needs some polish.

Thanks for reading, happy gaming!

[Doompants]

@Nomander @caliber

I saw questions about how to get the SMD to target the Novax. It may benefit you to look into the BlackOps mod.

If you aren't aware, BlackOps adds a host of new experimentals, one of which is a nuke satellite (Artemis Satellite - Aeon) and when they added that, they also added code to allow SMD to target the satellite and shoot it down. They did that by modifying the blueprints for the 4 factional SMD themselves.

Now THEIR choice was to have the anti-sattelite fire NOT consume SMD missiles, but that is something that could be done either way.

In a balance/fix patch my playgroup uses, we took the untargettable tag off the Novax and now we also use the SMD to shoot down either satellite. We gave the Novax Sat enough hitpoints that it takes fewer missiles to shoot down than the Artemis, but it still takes a number of missiles to bring down, so it's easily balanceable.

I don't think it's a bad idea for Novax Balance, although it makes more sense in BlackOps where there is more than one satellite.

[Caliber]

@doompants thanks for the info ile look into it.

[Caliber]

Another idea that turned out better than I expected is the energy tether, Its purpose was to make novax spam less viable.