Do you think late T4 stage on land/navy maps is too short due to T3 arty or game enders?
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It’s just a paragon/yolo problem on sentons where paragon pays itself off in 30-60 seconds and yolo has the brutal reality of smds where increasing bp isn’t a particularly great option to deal with it (unlike bp on shields for mavor and scathis or outbuilding the destruction of pgens) and those smds can still get edge nuked.
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Not everyone wants to play one game for 1.5 hours, building 50 exp each, as if it were a t1 unit
that's not what's being talked about at all. I have seen tons of games where the optimal move is to make a game ender somewhere between the 30 and 40 min mark. The most classic example of this is 2 opposing sentons ponds winning their navies but 1 guy goes for a proxy while the other goes for a game ender (both starting at min 35 so its still "early" on in the game, not 1,5 hours in). It is way too easy to have a good shot at winning the game while doing nothing while watching your game ender slowly tick up compared to putting in 100x the effort in a proper invasion just to lose to a game ender.
Also it is true like ftx said that a paragon and yolo are the 2 main contributors to this imbalance. It used to just be a paragon that's op but since the yolo bugs got fixed it's now way too strong.
This does not happen on 10x10 maps or maps with a small amount of resources. This doesn't happen in a 1x1, 2x2, or 3x3 game. But if you are playing 20x20km slopgen, where there is a huge amount of resources, or Seton, where in late game navy gives a huge amount of reclaim that is building a game ender is an absolutely normal way to complete the game.
yea it doesn't happen on 10x10 maps, that's because t3 arties are the game enders on those maps which you do often see.
Aside from that i don't understand your argument about nto seeing it happen in 1v1 to 3v3's. Does that matter at all? We saw 0 game enders being build in LOTS so it doesn't matter that they're breaking teamgames!
If anything it's the opposite that if they were made more often in lower player count games it's an incentive not to nerf them because it would ruin the unit for those type of games, but as it stands you basically never see them being build anyway so that is of no concern.
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@KnownSniper Seton is very different from other maps by having 2 large water pools. I'm not sure if we should build a balance based on this map alone.
On land maps, if you build exp instead of game enders in an equal situation, you will win in most scenarios because your exps can safely reach and kill enemy bases. On most water maps, a navy victory will be enough, as the t3 range of navy units will be able to destroy all bases.
And only on Setons and similar mapgens is the mid too small to let exp through it (since they will be destroyed by the enemy navy from another side), but at the same time the air base is far enough away to be out of the firing range of navy units. Plus, air base has enough energy, bp, smd, and a convenient place to build a game ender. The choice of game enders is better because of the features of the map, the location of the bases, and the terrain. And not because game enders are too unbalanced.
Therefore, you are unlikely to see game enders on maps like Maridia, Metir, Skadi etc. Even though there are more resources on these maps and the games also last 30-40 minutes or more.
If you don't build game enders in a situation where you've won the navy side on Setons and you have a good eco and 100k reclaim, then I don't understand in what situations it is necessary to build game enders at all? Only on Gap of Rohan, where there is only 1 gap and it is impossible to break through it with equal play?
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I got some evidence in the discord discussion after throwing out a 10% cost nerf idea and saying this:
I think I was just throwing out a number [10% cost nerf] to reason about if I was to look at it from nugget's/farm's perspective, but it came off a bit too much like a decision on a change. It was kind of a random number without thought behind it. Personally I'm still not convinced of such a change because like you [maudlin] say there's a lot of different maps that have to be balanced for and maybe setons is just an unbalanced map for this specific scenario, which is unfortunate for its legacy.
More specifically I'm not convinced because:- Nuggets/farms have the argument that invasion is too slow so a cost nerf is needed.
- their evidence is "I've seen games where it's optimal but they didn't do it"
- no replays where it's optimal but wasn't done
- no replays where this optimal move was done and the enemy invasion was equal mass but simply couldn't win, particularly when not vs para/yolo
- they themselves use house rules to not have any recent experience using or playing against the strategy
- they both say its true on mapgen as well but there are no replays and no explanations why. I also checked nuggets' replays and saw that he often plays drawn out/setons-like naval mapgens and such types of maps that aren't relatable to the average mapgen player, so taking that into account lowers my confidence.
- ftx says its purely a para/yolo problem, so a cost nerf is not needed.
All of these I guess you could say they're too low-rated players just going off experience (quite harsh ik but like there might be some errors to look out for, like maybe opps are too bad at defending):
- skrat and spcr (mlgtastic) argue that the ender's cost gets it killed by land
- sainse argues t3 arty would be unbalanced and claims that the timing just isn't possible/doesn't happen as early as nuggets says it is
- maudlin claims the timing isn't an issue
Nuggets and farms responded that searching replays is too tedious compared to the chance of a satisfying balance conclusion, but farms still gave a replay.
From @maudlin27; Rainbow cup game where T4 land push wins vs ender:
FYI this was the game I recalled (T4 land push vs game-ender):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdv1ZoqBvbc
24329811
20x15km map, has AI enemy teams in the corners which complicates things, but has the benefit of being a cash prize tournament so you'd expect teams are going with the strategy they think is best.
Using in-game timestamps (rather than video):
at 29m40 teams are roughly equal on eco (1.1k mass), and they largely remain similar after this for a while (bottom team fluctuates between 1.2k and 1.0k)
The mavor is started by bottom team at some point before 34m (at 34m17 it's 32% done); the top team briefly started a paragon before abandoning it and focusing on building GCs and other units
Mavor completes at 39m
Top team pushes with GCs, bottom team manages to land a nuke on a couple of the GCs (and later the AI also nukes one of top team's GCs). was very close but top-team's push with the GCs wins.
From @knownsniper; public/casual high-rated setons where he plays without eco bar (!!giant blunder!!)
anyway just for you this is an example #27433457
due to a disconnect the replay stops at min 38
https://puu.sh/KQj23/ea24a46581.png
in a completely even position (income is the same total mass generated is the same, also 1 min after this time nory wins top navy so both navies are equal)
but there's this to watch the end https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2822304906?t=05h11m32s
Here's @sainse's local replay that doesn't end early.
My take on the rainbowcup replay is that units showed to be better than Mavor. Nukes hindered the land push a lot but then air came to save the push, although everything was still quite slow. Thankfully Mavor is weak compared to Para/Yolo, particuarly vs units, so it didn't deal complete game-ending damage in the time it took for the land push to win.
It might've been a bad emergency defensive situation for the Mavor because there was Fatboy spam instead of other T4s. If the fatboys were swapped out fully in cost then maybe the mavor would've stayed alive with most of the bases destroyed, and the game would've continued for a while, which is a fair situation imo.
If Para/Yolo were built then they defeat the push easily and the north team would've lost because they had no follow-up with arty or ender (which can potentially defeat a yolo that spent its time nuking units, but they can't win long-term against para's defensive shield and smd capabilities).For the setons replay I think:
- Popiska and farms didn't cooperate which led to an ineffective strategy for the team as a whole. They should've either gone farms 2-3 Ahwassa + Popiska 600 ASF or farms should've contributed mass to Paragon. I think the Paragon would've lost but the air attack would've killed the Yolona at minimum and secured future air domination by killing ASF and killing all bp that could've been making SAMs, which allows a followup with more air or a land invasion that skips all the flak setup.
- Farms delayed his invasion by 3 and a half minutes because he didn't manage his engineers, factories, and transports correctly. This was because he was focused on irrelevant things as seen in the stream recording, doesn't use ferry orders for transports, and had no eco bar while playing. At 5:13:43 in recording or 41:46 in replay he checked his mass bar and he floated 51k mass and overflowed +145 out of 474 income. It was safe to drop engis for invasion at min 38, Yolona started min 41, and nuke landed min 45.
- It was quite lategame so doing an all-in with a land invasion at that timing was already more risky than usual invasion timings.
What I'm convinced in right now is that paragon output should be nerfed and Yolona cost should be shifted from energy to 225k mass to stop air players having a ridiculous 37k/63k mass advantage (17% cheaper than mavor, 25% cheaper than paragon) compared to other enders when turning off their air grid and going into Yolona. 225k mass with lower energy requirements should put it at a similar timing as before for ender rush eco slot build orders (no air grid to pause). It could be slightly lower at 210k mass since it has to eat through the game's accumulated SMDs, but still it needs a significant shift into costing more mass instead of energy.
A work-in-progress opinion is changing Yolona to cost more time when nuking units. A simple answer would be 1.5x missile BT, 1.5x missile HP, and 1.5x minimum reload time, but with how extremely powerful nukes are there could be changes to SMDs from there, so the Yolona change has to wait for whatever happens in that area.
- Nuggets/farms have the argument that invasion is too slow so a cost nerf is needed.
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In my experience, no. Building a game ender in a dynamic game doesn't randomly result in a victory for the team building a game ender, because the game is dynamic. The team that invested in units destroys bases and gets more map control, which in turn presents opportunities to snipe the game ender. Here's one of the most fun and memorable mapgen games I've played where exactly this is demonstrated, featuring basically every experimental in the game, nukes, novaxes, t3 artilleries, and the game still going on for 20 more minutes until a mavor is built that almost immediately dies to a snipe that wouldn't have been possible without farms's land push: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6rfgLVvZWs (Almost 4 years old, but I don't think interactions changed too much).
This is more difficult on Seton's for example, but if one side won navy you could go through there, especially if they are doing an invasion. Typically a game ender is funded by the entire team, and so to take it down, your team should cooperate fully aswell.It's also a bit of an oversimplification to say "just watching the progress bar go up" because in the meantime they have to manage defense with much less mass available. The team that built units can also react by spreading out their own infrastructure so that the game ender isn't as effective and buy more time for their units to do serious damage. And yeah, maybe sometimes building a game ender with 200k reclaim is more effective than setting up an entire base from scratch on the opponent's side of the map. Are we going to change balance because of this one-off phenomenon on Seton's?
frick snoops!
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@waffelzNoob do you think this about every game ender? Imo mavor/scathis don't really pose an issue but para/yolo are massive problems because aside from being good offensively they're also super good defensively.
Also compared to 4 years ago yolo's were massively buffed to the point were u used to be able to counter them with 6-7 smd's but now its 10-11 (someone correct me if i'm wrong but i keep hearing this from others) because it's no longer as buggy were it doesn't want to launch and/or engi assist is better.
Also if it was just sentons i would agree with you, but in the last year there have been quite some instances with different types of mapgens which let to the same situation as you see on sentons.
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@waffelzNoob do you think this about every game ender? Imo mavor/scathis don't really pose an issue but para/yolo are massive problems because aside from being good offensively they're also super good defensively.
Thats true and something i wanted to bring up but I couldn't fit it in my story Kappa
I'm ok with para and yolo nerf because conceptually once they're up they can immediately kill the push that's been building up for minutes (esp yolo). I haven't played much mapgen in the last year and thus haven't encountered any game enders there, so can't comment
gotcha!!!
Ahhhh you got me xd I must've thought it was lame at the time but I have fond memories of the game regardless of that comment. I would probably find a T3 arty lame now too but I don't think they need a nerf. If they can make a T3 arty and still hold on they were probably either already winning or the game was just already at that stage. And if they can't hold on, game remains dynamic and becomes more epic than a game without it
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Easy start to help the SMD vs SML issue.
SML:
1080->810bp
Anti Nuke Projectile:
259,200->194,400BT
This makes ten T3 engies assisting an SML reduce its reload time from:
240->184.5s (current balance)
To
240->171.3s (changed balance)Minor nudge in the right direction while not impacting, un assisted SMDs at all.
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I don’t personally like the way SMD and SML interact fundamentally. They should be brought much closer to TMD/TML interactions which also induce additional gameplay interaction in their theater.
SMLs should operate somewhere around where they currently are.
SMDs should be cheap structures which load a single missile quickly (60 seconds even) but take a lot of mass at once to do it (think 100 mass per second). This way an SML has near zero shot of killing a key base even if scouted late unless an SMD is sniped beforehand. However, high priority bases such as air bases will need to keep stacking SMDs as time goes on, and each respective SMD runs a large risk of costing you in unit presence when you invest in it. The single missile per SMD is important for keeping agency in the hands of the SML owner as they have the insight into viable nuke targets.
In addition, investing in many SMDs in some tertiary base is not a high priority as wasting 2 nukes to kill something like sentons island is just not worth it.
Everybody is encouraged to utilize nukes in their gameplay without it causing ridiculous game swings where a whole base is eliminated and the game is over. Nukes revolve around becoming passive large investments as you get several missiles long term or tactical tools for forward bases/armies.
It can even be made so that SMLs are expensive structures with cheap missiles (in mass not BT) while SMDs are cheap structures with expensive missiles.
I expect the costs will have to be adjusted for everything but in general I prefer that as a philosophy to what it currently is where there is no depth to the resource-check it represents.
This would in turn also make yolo less problematic while still being a good game ender because you may force a dude to be pushed out of the game by spending 400-500 mass a second (yolo can also be stat adjusted to make this work) while keeping a priority area of the map safe, same as mavor or scathis.
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What about making SMD amphibious (like tmd)? Then pushes dont instantly die and nukes losers their biggest "OP" point
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please god can somebody please think of a map situation that isn’t just fucking sentons
this is not the biggest op point of nukes, like at all
I literally WANT even MORE nukes used this way
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Doesnt have to be setons, can literally be any map that has water. Setons is just the easiest example because its played the most. But if you want we can also balance around skadi that is played once every 2 months. Or maybe we just ignore all maps and balance on paper.
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yes all the nukes used on navy in skadi that are a problem (literally nobody thinks this)
I don’t even know who thinks nukes killing pushes is a problem, you’re literally the first person I’ve ever seen even propose this being a problem let alone OP
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Guess you arent in the streams then
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Thankfully, what an awful take
Boy I sure do love the not-op use of a nuke hitting all the core base infrastructure forever removing an entire player from the game because he was 30 seconds late to making an smd after a nuke was up for 45 seconds. Increase the ratio of these situations please
Damn we gotta get rid of that mega op usage of nukes where they could be launched at a push causing a person to dodge and potentially take a bad engagement or create stall time for defenses or destroy reclaim that was donated in error, god this gameplay sucks we need to ruin it immediately
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Nuking pushes is completely fine, idk why you are bringing pushes into this
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Oh gg, i meant to say proxy / invasions
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With my proposed rework a proxy would be kept safe with an smd that you built early on, it just becomes a high priority kill target and rushing the smd will delay ur land push by a minute while you build the missile.
The idea is that SMDs operate as more of a conscious swap from units into defenses when right now they’re more just something you’re supposes to build at some point and passively fill as the game goes on without giving it any real thought
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