@wikingest said in Novax needs to be nerfed, here's why.:
@CheeseBerry So correct me if I am wrong, it is little hard to understand.
You have totally changed your mind, and you no longer want to protect all mexes with shields?
No, I'm saying that the opportunity cost to make a novax is quite high, usually too high to justify making one, even on setons.
Lets get at this from a different angle.
What does it mean for something to be OP?
You could define it in quite a few ways, but for our purposes here, I'd define it as:
"Something is OP if it is the obviously best option (in the sense of increasing your chance to win the game) in a large percentage of gamestates and among a variety of alternatives".
This definition doesn't capture some important nuances, like inter-faction balance, but it's good enough to evaluate sats.
According to the above, sniper bots for example are slightly op right now, because there are lots of possible ways to play aeon/sera t3 land, but sniper bots are often just straight up the best one.
Similarly we can ask the question: "If I have ~35k mass available, a safe position to build something and a couple minutes of breathing time, what should I do with that?"
If the answer to that would always be "make a novax" then the novax would be op.
Mine, and FTX's, argument is that you should almost always spend that 35k mass on something else, because while having a novax is obviously good and strong, there are better ways (in the sense of trying to win the game) to spend it.
If we use your example of your opponents making literally no shields around their t3 mexes, and you killing all the reclaim manually, it takes 395 sec = 6:35 min for the novax to pay for itself.
Even my, admittedly suboptimal, mass fab example from above takes 34k / 96 = 355 sec = 5:55 min to pay for itself.
So yeah, the novax is not op. It's just really annoying.