The second iteration of SACU changes is now live on FAF Beta Balance.

Please make sure to host FAF Beta Balance, since the changes are not on FAF Develop.

The complete changes can be found on the changelog website.

Previous discussions about the first iteration can be found in the "experimental changes" posts on the forum and on Discord.

Iteration Changes

This iteration tries to prevent SACU rushes while making them a little more efficient lategame, and addresses Seraphim overcharge and UEF bubble shield. We encourage everyone to play with these changes and provide feedback.

All the changes specific to this iteration can be found in this commit history.

Early SACUs

Early SACUs were very powerful because you could only fight them with T3 units, and any failure would result in the SACU regenerating all damage, reclaiming wrecks instantly, and securing the area with structures. To prevent this:

• Significantly increased energy cost of survivability upgrades.
• Slightly increased energy cost of combatant SACUs
• Removed ACU priority from SACUs
• Reduce buildpower of SACUs by 25%, except for engineer presets and UEF. UEF keeps their buildpower because their engineer preset's drone can be shot down by AA, they have a weak pushing T4, and it promotes using their unique Ravagers.

Lategame SACUs

We do want SACUs to be good lategame, especially to stabilize lategame mass donations or air losses, which are factors that make players hesitant to attack and overall idle the game.

• Mass cost reduction for high-tier survivability upgrades (Cybran cloak, Aeon 2nd shield, UEF shield)

Other

• Increase cost of Seraphim's overcharge upgrade to reduce its snowball potential. It's pretty much an upgrade over the ACU, and can replace the ACU's energy consumption, so the first OC SACU requires increased costs.
• UEF bubble shield receives a small buff to shield recharge time.

Future Changes

Future changes will be tracked in this pull request. When they are made, they will be deployed to FAF Beta Balance with a similar announcement here.