Further testing info
-- ??exploit found?? combat reclaim is insanely fast, to the point that massing engy's would be better than land units at t1, possibly t2, engineering stations (the hive incredibly so) can easily devour swarms of units if you give the orders
Yes. Fixed. I noticed that early, but I wasn't sure if it affected combat and how the reclaim vs unit damage stuff works is deep in the scripts. The hive can no longer reclaim; the kennel drones can, but they have an HP of 6 and are expensive (IE, just shoot them down). Also changed engi reclaim time (which is too fast to begin with).
--Uef cruiser dps is something around half the output of the seraphim one, across fewer projectiles, 15 dps for a purely anti-static weapon is really bad if your opponent can get a shield or two up even without anti-missile, seraphiim one is valid at anti-structure still , so more a Uef problem of not being able to actually break things before a shield and a half dozen TMD get put up to stop your missiles
In WoG, Seraph cruiser missiles do 37DPS, UEF do 18DPS.
In FAF, Seraph cruiser missiles do 250DPS, UEF do 120DPS.
The ratio between these two ships hasn't changed. UEF missiles also fire in bursts of 4. Shields are also pricy (2500m or so and another 2000-3000m in energy), so you can't counter every base expansion with them.
Cybran and UEF have really bad expansion and ability to reach t2, it's really effective to speed an acu teching up with Aeon or Seraphim, but due to linear decline of build-power as you add engineers UEF and Cybran fall really far behind in terms of buildpower on any kind of large project in tier 1, or when they need to build things outside the range of already built engy stations
Aeon/Seraph engis cost 2x as much as the UEF/Cybran ones-the build rate per cost is the same across all factions T1 engis. 100 mass is a lot for a T1 engineer. For upgrading your commander, you'll just need exactly 2x the engis to do the same thing. Unless you're having issues fitting them around the ACU...
basicly Aeon and Seraphim get to add 4+4+2+1+0.5 etc.... to build timers, where UEF and Cybran are stuck with 2+2+1+0.5+0.25 etc....., add in some hiccups with extra build time per each individual unit coming off of a factory (about 1-2 seconds average)
one of the most impactful things in this regard is Seraphim and Aeon split-push bases
in about 2-3 minutes a single t2 transport of engineers can get 6+ factories to start producing tier 1 units
it takes about 4 minutes for UEF or Cybran to get an un-upgraded engy station and a further 2-4 minutes to get factories up to match, expansion both eco and military wise suffers due to the discrepancy
A cybran T2 transport full of T1 engis can build an engi station in about a minute. And that station has the same build power as 10 more engis for much less cost. The engi station can then assist production of a second; each one equivalent to 6 aeon engineers. If anything, I would think that Aeon/Seraphim would be in trouble.
Also remember that the UEF station drones can fly and have massive build powers-you can just move these along with your engineers to wherever you want.
it gets worse when factoring that the superior building capability is also backed by double-tiered RAS, a massive boost to early t-2/ late t-1 economy
Just to clarify-you're building RAS late T1? 250Eis going to cost a ton of mass in power (probably over 4000)-you should be attacking your opponent!
Engineering stations can be used to more quickly upgrade mexes in the core base, which is a real bonus against RAS. The UEF commander RAS also produces a decent amount of energy.
---our possible fixes if it helps were if possible,
eliminating declining Build power to make the numbers line up so that "swarm" engineers aren't left in the dust as soon as multiple stack on a build,
I'll think about this, but I would request you play it some more. Remember that swarm engineers are also much cheaper and allow UEF/Cybran to multitask more efficiently, since more engineers can build more projects at the same time.
reducing the build time of engineering stations so that UEF and Cybran can get to building quicker and expand in the mid game, reductions to the BP of build stations might be needed later if this is done, but it would require testing to be sure
Let's wait on this change for now.
or the simplest would be to just make the t1 engineers all use 4 BP as a starting point, Aeon and Seraphim maintain a signifigant edge in the case of starting up bases and small-scale builds such as single or double mass plots, but lose out once engy stations get involved in bigger bases/ triple and quad mass plots
Remember that Aeon/Seraphim engineers also cost much more. Aeon also get higher tier engineers to counteract engi stations, and Seraphim engineers' buildrates increase substantially with each ACU upgrade.
--ishlovoahs using less transport space than other t3's has also been ridiculously dangerous, dropping a single transport with 8 loaded upp ontop of a section of eco is basicly impossible to stop without t3 AA, due to a combination of really high HP on the bots (flak won't deal meaningful AOE damage to them unlike how it shreds most t1 and 2 units in transports) and the transport itself being able to tank t1 AA/flak AA, or interceptors more than long enough to go where it wants and drop off its payload
Yes. I should have fixed this. Ilshavohs are sort of orphans in since they are stronger than T2, but weaker than T3. Stats are closer to T3, so it makes sense to give them a T3 slot.
---final issue is t1 arty in larger numbers can rush past armies without bothering to actually fight them pretty often and just focus on nuking your economy buildings, maybe just lower the HP so that you can be encouraged to use them as artillery instead of using them as swarmy building nukers?
Infantry should rip them to shreds Do you have a replay you can show?
Positive notes
Cruisers no longer wipe whole land armies on their own
and submarines are able to do their job rather well without threat of cruise missiles swatting them
-as always making an effort to say that while we found a bunch of issues the mod is really interesting and we had a ton of fun with it, just kind of hard to make points about positives without basicly repeating your description of the mod back to you
I uploaded some of these suggests as version 16. Let me know how it goes.