Sacrifice Modification: Proposal
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I am working on getting replays from skilled FA players as I type this.
I have Odin is willing to play Sera, and will be talking to some Aeon players, as well looking for good UEF & Cybran players to face them but now onto the topic:
So I created a Mod called Sacrifice Rebalance which does the following-
Sacrifice is changed to a toggle ability (mechanically), in which activating it for 5 seconds the unit's build power is increased by 50%. At the end of 5 seconds the engineer takes 30% damage of it max health. All else equal you can proc this ability 4 times.Why?
- Pet Peeve, I hate idea of giving Sera and Aeon Engineering stations when we already have a mechanic for what to give them to rapidly scale BP quickly.
- Sacrifice is only used to 'really' meme strategy, such as TeleGC. I would like to see this rework see sacrifice used more throughout the game and add nuance to playing Seraphim and Aeon.
- On a slightly serious note, it should add efficiency to higher tech engineers over their lower tech ones and in late game w/ engineer pathfinding starts dying. It becomes an easy way to recycle several lower tech 1 globs of engineers quickly.
I am to be clear not a good player while I have theoryhammered (or theoryCommandered) what I think this will do, and what it limited by (early game resource storage and in some way its not different than a Mantis assisting a Cybran Engineer). And I expect it mostly to boil down to rushing T2 PD or PD in general. Alongside experimental rushing, and getting faster HQ's and economy upgrades.
I do call this a modification because its wholly different then sacrifice as it is currently, its not truly a rebalance. Furthermore I am also giving it to Seraphim.
/GetsBehindFlameShield
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Sounds quite overpowered to give Aeon and Seraphim the ability to complete their early mexes, pgens, and factories quicker. Then they just get more resources and more units from the start of the game and nothing is fair anymore. ACU can leave the base sooner, can start ecoing faster, the advantage just snowballs from the start of the game.
Also sounds terribly annoying and un-supcom to have to go to your engies every 5 seconds and hit some button to activate an ability like it's starcraft.
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I could always remove it from T1 engineers and keep it only for T2 and above or have BP increase scale differently across tech levels.
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It is actually a nerf. Sacrifice kinda gives same mass as ctrl-k + reclaim, x1.5 buildpower for 30% of hp does not give mass, if you actualyl try to repair them this is straight mass waste, using this on sacus is really bad, becasue they cost too much.
Killing engi to have 20 seconds of 1.5x buildpower is SUPER situational. I don't even sure why i would use this ability.
At least i use sacrifice of t1 engies during t3 phase to get some mass to current building to get rid of pathfinding issues.TLDR: mod does not fix any problem and makes sacrifice even more useless. Maybe remake sacrifice to 'merge engies' ? merge 2 t1's and get an engi with 2x buildpower, 1.5x range and 2x hp. Merge 4 engies for 4x buildpower, 2x range and 3.5x hp and so on ?
It will allow you to have sort of 'mobile' engineering station which has worse range but kinda scales after up to t3.5. -
If you know a bomber is heading towards your engineers, being able to boost their build speed temporarily could make a big difference. Or for getting a point defense up just in time before tanks arrive. If you expect the engineers to be shot to death anyway, giving up 30% of their health isn't even a real "sacrifice."
A t1 engineer would have a better chance of reclaiming an enemy tank or LAB if this was triggered.
If you let t1 engineers have this, it's a massive boost that would be hard to balance. If you take this away from t1 engineers, then almost no units whatsoever have it.
It also has no connection to SupCom lore. Seraphim are supposed to be about mindlessly murdering the enemy and opening up a gateway to a parallel universe to bring across alien horrors, not heroic self-sacrifice and hard work.
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Here's a copy of the rework I suggested back on old forums:
Instead of directly funneling the mass/energy cost of the unit into the structure, the unit will begin to build at 3x its usual build speed. The engineer will shed health over the course of the duration, and it can only be cancelled by the premature death of the engineer. If the unit is not killed, it dies and refunds 40% of its cost directly into storage. [EDIT: No idea why I had the refund but I'd probably remove that]
For T1-T3 engineers this would last 10 seconds, allowing them to do 30 seconds worth of building before death.
For SCUs, it would be 1 second per 150 mass cost of the SCU. Which would be 19 seconds for just Rapid Fabricator and 43 seconds for RAS. This is about 33% less efficient than the Engineer numbers.
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I agree with thomas. It completely brakes early game balance and engi hp is not a sacrifice, as the engi does anyway from a single bomb or two acu shots. The increase in bp is just straight OP: get pd up super fast, get expansion facs up fast, get air fac up fast for earlier first Bomber, sounds ludacrious. If you want to fiddle with engis, make them able to merge once a T2 hq is unlocked; merge into higher tier so called support engineer: who doesnt have higher tech blueprints but less pathing cancer.
