The SCU Rebalance

Turinturambar

This thread is to give an overview on the ongiong SCU rebalance which went into beta today and serve as a place for feedback regarding it. Because the current version of the SCU rebalance is just a rough draft and will likely still go through many changes. It will (most likely) not be part of the next balance patch. Nothing of it is yet is final (even adding/removing of upgrades is still possible) and things that are not directly related to balance itself (upgrade and preset names and desciptions, graphic effects,...) are still on a rudimentary level. So please, at the current stage, do not provide feedback related to those things.
If you have feedback/ideas regarding the SCU balance you can give it here. Presenting a reasoning of how a potential change/addition would benefit the game, giving a replay as illustration etc. will significantly increase the chance of your idea being applied.

The SCU balance has two goals. First, to adjust the SCU strenght to the current power of T3 land and second, to increase the strategic diversity in the mid to late T3 and experimental stage, where SCUs should help by adding more strategic choices and help compensating a factions weaknesses.

In the SCU rebalance all ACU presets fits into one of 3 categories.

Rambo - pretty seflexplanatory, serves as a combat unit that performs well when microed. Rambo upgrades are for the most the same as in the current balance, with only a few things added and some obsolete/inferior upgrades and presets removed.
Support - is supposed to be used together with a large T3 (and T4 army) to provide buffs/bonuses to it, which are different for each faction. All support presets have the engineering upgrade.
Special - anything that doesnt fit in the first two categories, like RAS, TML, ...
For this purpose the place of some upgrades position (left arm/right arm/torso) was changed, so that essential rambo and support upgrades are on the same position, to prevent a mixed category.

Before going into the individual changes for each faction, I will list a few general changes that were applied to all SCUs.

All unupgraded SCUs bt (buildtime) got significantly decreased.
Most upgrades energy cost was significantly reduced. These two changes are needed to make building SCUs a viable choice in 1v1.
The strenght of offensive and defensive upgrades was reduced, to bring them closer to the strenght of T3.
Obsolete/missleading upgrades and presets were removed.
The SCU bp (buildpower) was significantly reduced, to give the engineering upgrade a meaningfull role in the game, because currently the raw SCU bp is so large a few rambo SCUs at the front can easily build defensive structures even without the engineering upgrade.
RAS SCUs bt got heavily increased.

After this I will come the the individual faction presets. For each preset i will only list the fully upgraded version here. In the game you will also find rambo/support presets which lack the more expensive upgrades, so they can be build earlier in the game (so that e.g. for sera you can also build rambo SCUs without the expensive oc upgrade in the midstage of the T3 phase where you can't afford the full rambo preset yet.) Especially these incomplete presets are just a guesses of what might be relevant and will be adjusted/removed if found to have no practical use.

Aeon

The Aeon have 2 rambo presets and and support preset. The first rambo preset is the same AoE preset as in the current balance. The second one has, instead of weapon AoE, a new upgrade which increases the projectiles dps, giving it high single target damage compared to other rambo presets AoE. The Aeon rambo SCU still has the highest range of all SCUs. The Support preset has the chrono upgrade, which works as a weaker version of the ACU chrono and should make kiting, aswell as overwhelming an enemy army significantly easier than it currently is for aeon. Multiple chrono SCUs do not provide stacking effects, though they can cover a larger area.

Cybran

The Cybran have 1 rambo preset and 2 support presets. The rambo preset is the same as in current balance (AoE stun). The first support preset provides a large stealthfield (it can easily stealth an entire army). The second support preset provides a speed buff field, which increases the movement speed of its surrounding, non experimental, units. Both support presets also have the aa upgrade. Multiple speed buff fields do not stack.

Seraphim

The Seraphim have 1 rambo preset and 1 support preset. The rambo preset is the overcharge preset from the current balance (gunrange+nano+oc). The support preset gives a regen field, which gives surrounding units additional health regeneration based on their max hp (it does not add hp like the ACU regen field), which has a max value for each tech tier. Multiple regen fields do stack additively.

The UEF have 1 rambo and 1 support preset. The rambo preset has AoE and an increased RoF, but has the lowest range of all rambo SCUs. The support SCU has the intel upgrade (which also provides jamming) and the bubble shield upgrade. While the bubble shield strenght was significantly reduced (in current balance it is even stronger than the ACUs bubble shield upgrade), its size was increased aswell, so that it is better at shielding UEF T3/T4 armies.

Dragun101

While I get the intention of reducing the BP. Was 20 as a number chosen specifically/Specific Reason? I feel 30ish be better*.

*an SACU having same BP as a T2 Engi feels wrong. Is main thing. Hence my question if that value was chosen specifically or roughly arbitrary decided.

A Former User

Why can't Seraphim SCU have RAS? They are dead if game lasts too long as their economy is not mobile.

Dragun101

Sera SACU have higher base eco generation

Turinturambar

"Was 20 as a number chosen specifically/Specific Reason?"

Yes it was chosen so low, so that a small group of rambo SCUs (3-4) cant easily spam up T2 shields/sams/pds.

advena

SACU BP nerf:
Big buff to engineer stations I see.

Engineer upgrade cost almost as another SACU (1500 mass)
This makes eng-SACU BP/mass ratio 35+. More than twice as Cybran eng-station.

WTF balance team?

If you so scared of RAS SACU then put BP and RAS upgrades to same slot or just remove RAS upgrade from game

Seraphim rambo:
Phim have 2 ways to make a rambo:

Overcharge + NanoRegen + Gun Upgrade (range and sensors)
Overcharge + NanoRegen + Regen Aura

Second one have better tank and also a support SACU. Mixed category detected

ThomasHiatt

SACU BP decrease seems pretty intuitive to me. The ACU starts out with 10BP and if you want more u spend 800 and 2400 mass to get the T2 and T3 engineering upgrades. SACU are supposed to be like ACUs not T4 engineers. It is quite a bonus that even a vanilla SACU can build all tech levels and have twice the BP of an ACU already.

FtXCommando

Kinda don’t see the point in Aeon having the longest range SACU tbh. Feel like Cybran needs the range bonus even more, especially if Aeon gets chrono attached to their SACUs.

Tex

I just want to go and say that as soon as I read aeon SCU's will be getting a chrono effect I felt my heart skip a beat. Plz plz plz reconsider. Its not a fun gameplay mechanic whatsoever, and its really strong.

Azraaa

Good Stuff

Evan_

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.

archsimkat

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.

Turinturambar

in beta all SCUsn are selectable together with armies

Deribus

@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?

Psions

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.

Turinturambar

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.

keyser

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.

techmind_

@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.

Dragun101

So for are full rambo SACU no longer comparable to early directfire/“breacher” Experimentals (Monkeylords, and the Collosaii (Chicken and GC))?

Deribus

@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