Fire beetle balance suggestion

Northern-Newbie

Certainly the Firebeetle may have not seen as much success as the ever so prevelent Units as the Mercy or the Corsair but it might be due to be being stuck on Land for the most Part and the Cybran transports absolutely not being the Best for huge Drops (given Seraphim transports have more slots and can still drop T1 Arty with good payoffs if the transports can fly through gaps in AA) there certainly could be place for the Fire Beetle..
if it were only that tad more durable and faster since even with a successful drop of a good amount of Fire Beetles they are quickly dispatched due to not being as blazingly fast as an Mercy and having to fight Land Fortifications like other Tanks, the ACU and maybe PD

on the Flipside they are about as cheap as some TML butreally arent worth their "wasted" Mass in Tanks

Marked_One

https://cnc.fandom.com/wiki/Terror_drone_(Red_Alert_2)

they remind me of these little guys for some reason haha

MazorNoob

@BlackYps Did you change the lua to do that or is it just a graphical effect? If it's lua, maybe I'll try and pack it up into a mod to show some viability to the idea.

BlackYps

I didn't have to do some complicated lua coding, but I changed some blueprints. Not sure what you mean with graphical effect.
You can have a look here: https://github.com/BlackYps/Napalm-Beetle

MazorNoob

It's a complete mod already? Please please please upload it to the vault so I can bug everyone to enable it for their games!

BlackYps

Will do, kinda forgot about it to be honest. If you can't find it in the next days, remind me again.

MazorNoob

Following recent balance forum rule changes, I decided to check how often beetles are actually built. So, I did the following:

I grabbed 2000 replays from id 13370143 downwards, skipping IDs that gave me a 404.
I ran the replay parser on replays with the following script:
```
#!/usr/bin/fish
for file in scfa/* 
 ./fafreplay commands $file -c IssueCommand 2>/dev/null | grep -q xrl0302
 if [ $status -eq 0 ]
 	echo $file
 end
end | wc -l
```
This basically counts the number of replays in which commands were given to a unit type "xrl0302" (or fire beetles).
Finally, I counted replays in a similar fashion for a bunch of other gimmicky/niche units.

Here are the results:

Beetles: 18
Sparkies: 100
Mercies: 79
Janus: 187
Continental: 99
Spearhead: 42
Shard: 76

keyser

what would be interesting would be to look into the replay of high rated players, to see how much they are made at high level.

techmind_

@MazorNoob do this for atlantis as well and for ras coms, pls.

MazorNoob

@techmind_ Atlantis was built in 70 games. There's probably large bias towards dual gap, but still.

MazorNoob

@keyser None of the 18 replays with beetles I checked have a player with more than 1.4k rating in them. Mostly they're comp-stomps and 500 average rating teamgames. Maybe an API query can be prepared to fetch a bunch of recent high-rated games, but I can't be bothered to do it right now.

techmind_

Something like # mass spent on specific unit per average game OR #avg number of unit build per 1 game would be interesting graph to show useless units.

MazorNoob

Can't calculate that by parsing replays. IMO knowing whether a unit is built at all in the game is a good enough indicator.

Tagada

Over the thousand high lvl games I played I don't recall seeing a single situation in which people successfully built and used beetles. They are very very situational and require a lot of micro if you want them to be actually good. I am not really sure on how to remake them to make them useful while not making them OP or un healthy. I don't think they should be a snipe weapon nor a mine. One idea I have would be to make them a designated drop unit by giving them a lot of dmg vs buildings making them a nice run by units in late mid-late game and a very powerful drop unit to snipe Pgens, Mexes, HQ. You could give them no AoE so they would be terrible vs Engies in the base, t1 pgens etc. but let them be very good vs buildings themselves allowing you to easily snipe a t2 pgen or even an HQ. This however would need to be well balanced, if they would be too weak, people won't use them and instead they will drop arties. If they will be too strong it will be just OP considering how strong drops already are. 1 way to solve this would be to have different dmg multiplier for Buildings in General and Mexes, this way they wouldn't be OP in a sense that you can't just 1 shot an HQ, while making them a unique unit that would leave very little or no mass at all after killing t2 mex.

keyser

@Tagada I did use them successfully several of time, less now that they deal less damage though.
But if you didn't see them being used, it's also because people aren't trying them. If they were trying them and failing with them, you would have seen them being used a few time at least.

MazorNoob

@Tagada Every time I see someone saying "I have no idea how to remake beetles" then suggesting special buffs against buildings, I die a little inside. What you want is damage over time.
@Keyser People tried and failed with beetles a long time ago, when they had the last major change. That's exactly why you don't see them, yes.

Psions

Just return beetles to the way they used to be. They punished people that were too blind to see crap. As even a COM OC would counter it. Or building t1 walls around com 3x away. Even prior to nerf beetles were a niche rarely built unit like Mercy, but considered more reliable than mercy, because they don't die to random t1 aa fire.

Then remove the rule that states building under units is bannable.

Add a mandatory mod that means when beetles are put into a transport they lose any other commands.

Problem fixed.

MazorNoob

This post is deleted!

TheWeakie

beetles are already good since the latest patch. It will just time for people to notice just like it took half a year for ppl to realise mongoose were busted

Explosive

I used Beetles once this year.

I used them to kill an UEF Gun ACU combined with mantisspam.
10x10 laddergame ~1500 rating