The SCU Rebalance
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Good Stuff
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Was fun to play, had a game with beta balance, and then did some testing. I like a lot of the changes such as splitting the shield upgrades on the uef scu and the bp reduction.
will be interesting to see how the sera regen field affects t3 naval combat, the sera BS gets 90 regen per scu, and all the while the scu is knocking a chunk off of it's cost with the +3 mass.
I think that removing sacrifice gets rid of a very interesting feature and that keeping it in would allow for some cool plays in scu combat. More than just a late game cheese option for tele-gc or tele-paragon, sacrifice preset has a ton of versatility and can be used in many situations. For example if opposing scus are winning a fight but they get too close, you can quickly sacrifice into a T3 massfab for an epic kamikaze doing massive aoe damage to groups of units (or a t3 pgen for slightly more damage but less aoe). You can support the rest of the army and squishy units like sniper bots by quickly sacrificing into a T3 shield. Or many other things really, there are tons of possibilities with it. It would probably need to be rebalanced, maybe a cost increase.
Also Chrono doesn't seem too strong, I think it could be useful against shielded rambo coms if you have absolvers, or groups of units, but the stun itself isn't very strong and does not last very long. It'll get focused down pretty quickly, you can upgrade the cheap first shield in 32 seconds if using the chrono support preset at least.
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Maybe it makes sense for the SACU to start with low bp and the t1 engineering suite, like the ACU, and then the engineering upgrade gives access to t2 and t3? Having build power is already very strong for a combat unit, and having the T3 build suite even more so. With a base t1 build suite, less of the power budget of every preset is allocated into engineering, and can make balancing it as a combat unit more straightforward.
Also, we may have talked about this but I don't remember for sure: SACUs should get selected with units and not as an engineer - this is not something that can get changed with selection deprioritizer - to make it easier to use with mixed armies.
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in beta all SCUsn are selectable together with armies
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@FurudeRika said in The SCU Rebalance:
The strenght of offensive and defensive upgrades was reduced, to bring them closer to the strenght of T3.
Why? Not for or against it as I haven't tried it myself yet, but I'm curious about the reasoning. Were Rambo SACUs OP?
The [UEF] rambo preset has... the lowest range of all rambo SCUs.
This is the other change that stood out to me. Sera SACUs currently have the shortest range due to make up for OC. Are the new UEF upgrades so good we have to nerf the range? Or are Sera Rambos getting a range buff?
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What's the point of having access to T3 technology if that engineer takes 3 years to build a unit.
Literally we're just promoting stale Hive gameplay where you sit at one point in your base and build 50 hives and make a game ender. This will kill any sort of proxy T4 gameplay that you get in team maps where naval /water is near the enemy base.
The reason engineering suite doesn't get upgraded is because HP etc are more important for most SACU, rather than an extra bit of BP.
I fear that all of the above will just increase the problems that changes are meant to be resolving. But I guess this is all yet to be seen once this is released as the new version so that a significant portion of games are playing on that balance patch.
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In current balance all rambo SCUs except aeon have the same range (35), you might have been building one of the useless presets where the SCU had OC but not range (sensors). The range was the gunupgrade was slightly reduced because currently they could kite even percies. The reason rmbo SCUs were not op in 1v1 was their insane bt and e cost, so it required too much investment to get them, but because this patch aimes to fix that issue unnerfed SCUs would be straight op. (e.g. in current balance aeon rambo SCUs (the 4.4k mass) have 40 range vs 34 percy range and more hp/mass than the percies)
Since UEF already has percies they are not rly in need of another slow, longrange combat unit,the idea is to make it sth different.Forumpros doing balance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wTcguJZh3A .
When a canis player remembers to build more than 3 units https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hjp8xJHuyA . -
just to be more precise : current sera rambo preset is useless (doesn't have the range upgrade) and you should always build the advanced combatant preset. This will be fixed in the patch with scu, as we remove advanced combatant preset and we change the nano preset to be as the current advance combatant preset.
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@FurudeRika said in The SCU Rebalance:
The Seraphim have 1 rambo ... Multiple regen fields do stack additively.
Every other aoe does not stack, why the change?
This could be quite overpowered. There is 2 options: either regen is pretty much irrelevant to prevent regen stacking, or it would be so op, that people will spam regen sacus instead of ythotas. -
So for are full rambo SACU no longer comparable to early directfire/“breacher” Experimentals (Monkeylords, and the Collosaii (Chicken and GC))?
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@FurudeRika said in The SCU Rebalance:
you might have been building one of the useless presets where the SCU had OC but not range (sensors)
Well, today I learned Sensors gives more gun range (for some reason)
Since UEF already has percies they are not rly in need of another slow, longrange combat unit,the idea is to make it sth different.
Sniper bots are a lot more of slow longrange combat units than Percies are
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@archsimkat said in The SCU Rebalance:
Maybe it makes sense for the SACU to start with low bp and the t1 engineering suite, like the ACU, and then the engineering upgrade gives access to t2 and t3? Having build power is already very strong for a combat unit, and having the T3 build suite even more so. With a base t1 build suite, less of the power budget of every preset is allocated into engineering, and can make balancing it as a combat unit more straightforward.
Also, we may have talked about this but I don't remember for sure: SACUs should get selected with units and not as an engineer - this is not something that can get changed with selection deprioritizer - to make it easier to use with mixed armies.
I think that's cool. Why not give sacu the same engineering arm like acu? And have the support preset have t3 arm. And for the love of god put engineering suite and ras on the sams arm to avoid OP ras acu garbage. If underwater pgens / fabs shall still exist, at least make them garbage in every other regard or send them to the front line but without +400 perverted nano options.
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RAS SACU had to be nerfed as to me more than 90% of the games were just an eco shit show where everyone is going for t3 eco->arty/exps and in case your opponents are attacking you and loosing their exps/spa,RAS SACU's could just recalim,rebuild and still give you a ton of resources,moreover they were difficult to kill due to the hp->t3 engies became useless almost entirely.
Thank god the combat SCU are reworked,this might introduce smth but ''oh no,i am playing a teamgame,let's make a spider'' and the 3.5 stage is more likely to be seen in games that are below 1700.
Those are really good changes,now it's time to nerf air and the proper balance will be restored
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The SCU Rebalance focuses on Rambo and Support SCU's, RAS SCU is it's own thing that will be discussed and rebalanced separately.
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Proposition, remove SACU upgrades entirely, instead have a selection of uniquely balanced units for different intended roles.
The main reasoning for doing so is simple, it would significantly boost freedom to tweak and balance each type of SACU. For example, instead of having to give every SACU the same base movement speed and the same upgrade giving the same regen boost, one could easily choose rambos to move slower but have even higher regen, support units to move faster but have slightly lower regen, or any veriation their of.
As a secondary benfit, it also streamlines and standardizes the process of picking and building units, making it fit the already well established methodology used in all other factories.
Besides, there is never any good reason to go and get, for example, a ras preset and resign all the upgrades into a rambo. Just go and build another rambo, it would be faster, cheaper and easier.Ok thats the big thing out of the way, now for smaller balance details.
UEF engineering upgrade is largely redundant. If you need lots of build power over long range, build kennels. If you need the ability to start building t3 buildings anywhere on the map, just use a transport to move t3 engies or the SACU its self. If you do want to have the SACU to have engie drones, then at least cut it down to one upgrade teir instead of two.
I am all in favor of faction diversity, but in this exact case functionality has been sacrifeced to for the cause.The base stats of unupgraded SACUs are absurdly high. This was fine before, but now with the intention of lowering them down to fit in with t3 land, being able to build a non experimental unit with a hp over 15k and high regen ontop is excessive. Additionally, the fact that only Aeon SACUs can be one hit killed by overcharge is a bit unfair. Lower the hitpoints of all factions unupgraded SACU to 15k or less.
Remove Aeon sacrifice upgrade and instead give it as an addition to the engie upgrade for no extra cost. Sacrifice is simply way to neiche to justify its existance as a seperate upgrade, ontop of being largely redundant (Two mutually exclusive construction upgrades, just why?)
Buff or replace seraphim SACU TML upgrade. Getting SACUs into play happens much later then getting T2 TML laucnher meaning its much eaiser to counter SACU missiles, they also cost significantly more to build and are semi redundant because you can just use the SACU to build TML laucnhers anyway. As it stands they have very little reason to use instead of other options.
I prepose a few possible changes:
Massively boost the range of the SACU TML so that it substantually out ranges T2 TML.
Buff stats of the TML projectile to differenciate from the t2 version (More missile hp, faster travel speed, larger AoE, EMP effect, stuff like that)
Replace the ability to build TMLs with a MML weapon, kind of like a land equivilent of the seraphim crusier. -
A proposal moreso for SACU production rather than the SACUs themselves: increase the build power of the quantum gateway by ~10x, and also increase the build time of the SACUs by ~7x. This way, the first few SACUs that are built by the quantum gateway (probably combat/support presets), which are likely the most impactful ones, can arrive on the battlefield sooner, and it helps alleviate the ridiculous late-game RAS SACU spam that a lot of people dislike. Now, SACU production will be scaled by building additional quantum gateways instead of additional engineer/hive BP. This change is similar in nature to the HQ change, where air/land/navy production went from assisting with engies to building support factories.
Also, I agree with Elusive's suggestions to only have presets per faction that can be individually balanced. The presets can be made more distinct and suited for their roles by tweaking additional parameters (such as movespeed, regen, build suite, build power) that can't be done by upgrading from the same "stock" SACU. Each faction could have the combat/support presets Turin described in the original post but with t1 build suites and adjusted hp/movespeed, in addition to an engineering preset (faster movespeed, lower hp, t3 build suite, and high bp), as well as a RAS preset for the factions that have them.
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@archsimkat said in The SCU Rebalance:
A proposal moreso for SACU production rather than the SACUs themselves: increase the build power of the quantum gateway by ~10x, and also increase the build time of the SACUs by ~7x. This way, the first few SACUs that are built by the quantum gateway (probably combat/support presets), which are likely the most impactful ones, can arrive on the battlefield sooner, and it helps alleviate the ridiculous late-game RAS SACU spam that a lot of people dislike. Now, SACU production will be scaled by building additional quantum gateways instead of additional engineer/hive BP. This change is similar in nature to the HQ change, where air/land/navy production went from assisting with engies to building support factories.
Just make the gateways non-assistable. It would be lore-friendly. Gateways aren't even "building" the units, or at least, not the important part of them. They are importing them from across the galaxy. A t1 engineer can do a lot of things, but it should not be able to boost that process.
@archsimkat said in The SCU Rebalance:
Also, I agree with Elusive's suggestions to only have presets per faction that can be individually balanced. The presets can be made more distinct and suited for their roles by tweaking additional parameters (such as movespeed, regen, build suite, build power) that can't be done by upgrading from the same "stock" SACU.
If we have multiple presets, we should have different 3D models for each of the SACUs. I don't know how hard that would be to set up. Do SACUs already change their appearance with upgrades? If so, we can use existing models?
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As I have already stated, currently we are unsure if the SCU rebalance will include the rebalance of RAS SCU's, changes to them may be released later as this rebalance aims to promote the use for SCU with armies to increase the diversity and possible strategies at t3 and t4 stage.
The BP of the gateway was already increased (although obviously not as much as you suggested) to bring the SCU production time in line with that of t3 units. The BP of the Gateway is 180 compared to that of t3 land HQ which is 90. The BT of Basic SCU (except Sera) is 8 280 compared to that of Percival and Brick (4800) which means that the Gateway produces a raw SCU in a similar time ( 46s, 57s for sera) to that of a T3 HQ producing a t3 Heavy Combat land units (40 for harb/Othuum, 53 for Percival/Brick) but it's much harder to assist the Gateways compared to factories.
Regarding the suggestion of removing the upgrades altogether and having only presets, I think it's an interesting idea however I am not sure if it's even possible, I will add it as an experimental idea to the doc.After a lot of recent testing with Turin we came to a conclusion that a lot of values need adjusting (mainly reducing the cost of Raw SCUs slightly, decreasing the cost of basic gun upgrades, rebalance of the Engineering upgrade for UEF, reducing the HP of cybran SCU (from highest to lowest and instead giving HP buff to the Nano upgrade) as well as few other minor tweaks, we are currently waiting for some more input from the community and then we will implement those changes into the beta and continue our tests.
Please note that all the changes I am, and will be speaking here about are not final and upon revision we may choose a different path for certain upgrades.
I will try to keep you informed with all the changes and perhaps write a short summary after we implement the changes into the beta so that it's easier for you to give constructive feed back. -
Tagada, removing upgrade options and leaving only presets is actually quite easy. I can create a mod to do that if you want to see what is it like.
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@Tagada said in The SCU Rebalance:
Regarding the suggestion of removing the upgrades altogether and having only presets, I think it's an interesting idea however I am not sure if it's even possible, I will add it as an experimental idea to the doc.
It is not difficult at all to add a unit to FAF. This change would be almost as simple as making a "super-heavy pillar" and adding it to the UEF lineup just by copying the pillar's lua files, changing the name, tweaking the stats (20% extra hp and damage?), and adding it to a list of units that UEF t2 land facs can build.
Here, you would just be adding something like 4 new units per faction (support SACU, gun SACU, engineer SACU, RAS SACU), removing 1 unit (the existing SACU), updating the quantum gateway build list, and then making small tweaks to the 3 new units (you could remove the upgrades entirely and update their stats to reflect their diverse new abilities).
With no shared upgrade path, we wouldn't have to worry about balancing upgrades between types. The engineering SACU, if it can get upgrades at all, would have completely different ones available from the gun SACU. We wouldn't have to worry about whether the gun upgrade is on the same arm as the engineering upgrade. And it would allow the gun SACU to have upgrades that make it very different from an engineering SACU with upgrades.
Having completely separate units would mean no shared upgrade path, it would also mean you could make big changes between the unit types, like having different base movement speed. It would allow for things like: engineering SACU has no main gun at all; gun SACU only has t2 build suite--those in particular are probably very bad ideas. I'm just saying you could make these SACUs very different from each other in ways that are currently not possible, or at least, at the moment very difficult to do. It would be complicated now to have the upgrade paths for SACUs affect things like movement speed and the size of the death explosion but if they are 3 separate units with completely separate lua files/blueprints, it would be very easy to do.
The hardest part would be getting unique 3D models to work for each type of SACU. This would also open the opportunity to have significantly-different models for each type of SACU. Maybe some of the SACUs shouldn't even be shaped like humanoids. Seraphim could have some weird alien shape, Cybran could have a bug SACU, or Aeon could get a hover SACU. In the short term, we could stick with the existing 3D models (the SACU models + their upgrades) but in the future we could replace them with brand new models, which would open up opportunities for diverse new artwork in FAF.
Maybe make RAS an upgrade that only engineering SACUs can get. So you could use assistance on the upgrading engineer SACU (and it would already have enough build power to complete its RAS upgrade in a decent time). It's not like the bad old days where you had to click on each SACU separately to upgrade to RAS. Here you could double-click to select all engineer SACUs and give one command to upgrade them all to RAS. People generally keep RAS SACUs safe anyway, so their main use apart from generating resources is for build power.
Remove the ability to assist the gateway. That is lore-friendly (gateways are not like factories, you can assist a factory, you can't assist a transfer through the quantum realm) and would balance things better.
Having them as separate unit types would allow us to de-designate gun SACUs as "engineers" (so when you select combat units, they would be included). A lot of good things could come from this proposal.
It would also simplify the game. Right now there is almost nothing like the SACU (other than the ACU itself) in terms of being able to upgrade it in completely different directions. If you have 3 distinct types of SACUs that can but don't need to be upgraded after they are first built, it would in a way make the game simpler.
Having 3 distinct unit types would also make it easier to do something that Farms and other players want, which is to give them toggleable abilities that require more APM to use. E.g. cloaking but it only works for 30 seconds and then needs 2 minutes to recharge.
Idea for a Seraphim 4th SACU type: "artillery." They can manufacture and store one "missile" at a time, except they have multiple launch buttons. One launch button would send a long-range high-damage TML, maybe it has an extra 50% range 50% damage (9k damage) and 50% health (takes extra TMD shots to stop). Another launch button would simultaneously launch 2 regular tac missiles at a single target. Another launch button would send out a "cluster" missile that breaks open and does area damage (it would look like a mercy except once it opened, the individual warheads would spread over a wider area). I don't like the idea of a seraphim SACU that fires missiles non-stop because then there is no element of surprise and much less control over it.
Aeon gun SACU could get a special "shield-killer" toggled ability, like an "overcharge" but it fires an absolver shot. These things are basically not possible in the framework of having a shared upgrade path but they become much easier to do if the SACUs are completely separate units. Perhaps the Aeon gun SACU should be a hovering unit. That takes away some stealth and fits with the faction.
Teleportation should be nerfed for SACUs, e.g. limit the range so you have to get closer to the enemy to pull it off, and not all types should have it, or teleport SACUs should be a "fourth type" that can't do much else very well. Maybe a "scouting SACU" type that can teleport over short distance and provide intel which you could use to scout and expand but not really to break enemy bases/snipe SMDs. They would have less firepower, build power, and weaker death explosions but they would have a very specific role and could still be used for example to set up a stealthy TML base. Not all factions would need to have teleportation for their scout SACU.
