FAF Beta - Feedback
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What a big nerf for nukes! I personally wasn't expecting to see one. What skill level have they been excelling at the most?
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Nukes have been present and excelled at most of the skill levels. They are often one of the safest investments with a huge payoff during the early T4 stage as you don't risk donating any mass, if the enemy doesn't scout and respond in time he will lose his base and most often the game and even if he constructs an SMD there are usually more nuke-worthy targets. This is the most apparent in team games where by constructing 1 Nuke Launcher you force 2-4 SMDS and often still kill one of the bases with the first nuke since someone always makes their SMD too late.
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Interesting. I hadn't considered the mass difference in big team games requiring multiple SMDs. I also wonder if this is a problem with the difficulty/cost of scouting in the post-SAM/post-ASF phase.
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Nice to see some love for the kennels. All changes look very promising, hopefully the current meta-build-orders will change a bit.
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I doubt any build orders (except for maybe a nuke rush on some team game maps) will change as there are no early game changes.
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Kennel is still more mass and e intensive per unit of BP while being garbage that doesn't instantly transfer to diff projects. If I was a dude with no shred of faction decency I would still never use kennels. The "buff" in rebuild cost is adorable when they start out less efficient than hives and each rebuild just makes it worse and worse.
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T Tagada referenced this topic on
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@captainklutz I dig it, the nuke being 15k mass always made it very easy to make and seemed like an every/every other teamgame staple, specially when going +4 players
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asylum
Idk, but extremely low priority change either way
titan loya
Idk probably ok for titans although I'm unsure. Loyas feel underwhelming to begin with kinda strange that they don't get any compensation. Also, it looks really weird and indecisive that u are reverting a change. Like there's a lot of numbers you could have chosen (for buildtime, and for other stats) and you just decided that the original was the absolute optimal?
Titan nerf is good in principle.
Sniper boats
Looks like an overnerf and in general increasing cost seems a weird direction since getting to a large mass of t3 units is already difficult. Also small amount of snips is easier to shield than a large mass, so promoting a smaller amount is a strange direction. Like why not do the total opposite and make it ez to mass a large amount of weak snips which are hard to cover with shields?
Snip nerf is good in principle tho.
wassah
Good change. Also very high priority
czar
Good change, but might be overnerf. U are allowed to change multiple stats at once to compensate
ripper
Again good, but mega overnerf since ripper is pretty worthless to begin with
valiant
Idk, low priority change.
sparke
Good
kennel
Idk probs good. Pretty high prio for the gappers among us
nuke silo
Nuke nerf is probs good, but this direction indirectly buffs hive farms which are a favorite of the gapsters. Would be more interesting if it would be actually worth building multiple launchers.
nuke subs
Idk, low priority
overall
Addresses some problems that are in line with current gameplay trends. Would be ok if this was like a bi monthly iterative patch i guess. But seeing as it has been actually forever since last patch it's pretty disappointing. Could be tackling bigger design issues and actually making significant changes, but yea this is still better than nothing.
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стоимость ахвасы с 780.000 до 2.000.000!? мне не нравится, не вижу больше смысла строить ее в игре. но я готов принять это, если бы тоже самое сделали и со стационарными артилериями, и может быть станет все
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@ftxcommando said in FAF Beta - Feedback:
Kennel is still more mass and e intensive per unit of BP while being garbage that doesn't instantly transfer to diff projects. If I was a dude with no shred of faction decency I would still never use kennels.
I agree... having a drone build range increase would've been preferred. And a small BP increase, too (30?).
Though the mass reduction was something I did not see coming. I don't mind that one bit, though.The "buff" in rebuild cost is adorable when they start out less efficient than hives and each rebuild just makes it worse and worse.
While the new reduction in rebuild time and rebuild cost is neat, it still is quite punishing to go 25 seconds (From 40) without your BP. If it were possible to assist your Kennels in rebuilding their drones, then the new 25-second (per drone) wouldn't still be that harsh.
The rebuild cost (current or new) would have been offset by their ability to gather reclaim effectively - What I really would've loved to see was the attack-move / patrol thing implemented to gather reclaim and A T3 Kennel blueprint.
The T3 Kennel blueprint wouldn't change much aside from being able to immediately (re)build an upgraded Kennel. This way the Kennel would have one more advantage over the Hive, as, like you said...
"a dude with no shred of faction decency"... "would still never use kennels"What's the point of the flying ability if you can't even use them to gather reclaim effectively?
These changes are great! But... just not the changes the Kennel quite needed.
~ Stryker
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I 100% agree with bi montly iterative patches as Blodir said. This "balance patch" literally will not change gameplay too much except for the nuke balance and air exps maybe.
Although I feel the biggest point is Blodir's comment of "U are allowed to change multiple stats at once to compensate"
I feel like these patches are just a little hesitate to change balance in any impactful way you know to make the game feel a little newer in someways. I don't like to bring it up but kinda how SC2 does it.
Don't get me wrong I'm no 2400 like Tagada & I havn't won any tournaments but like if you are going to make a balance patch why not shake up the balance more then just nerfing some late game units in which I believe wont even make too much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. The biggest one for me is changing Ahwassa Dmg Radius from 20 -> 19? Like what... that literally makes no difference. 1000$ no body will notice this in game and it won't affect anything. Ayslum is 40 -> 45, it's ok i don't mind it. Although yet another small change although probably will be kinda impactful depends I don't think you'll ever build a lot of them (I'm talking like building 10+ I feel like it's usually like 5-7 you build to cover an army + acu.Sniper bot nerf is a god send. I don't know if its overnerf. That's not really my field of expertise lol, but a nerf was definitely needed.
Ripper unironically needed a buff not a nerf lol
T2 UEF Destroyer change is good."Could be tackling bigger design issues and actually making significant changes" what a dream... (Also im not trying to be toxic in this post so don't berate me) but seriously tho what a dream for tackling real design issues.
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Please don’t do big changes for no reason just to shake up meta, thank you. If I wanted that I would simply pick a different map to play.
My problem here is that (some) problematic units that fall into clown tier are identified (kennel but I would also still say uef destro) but the buffs are too marginal so the units go from FF-tier to D-tier, you still don’t want to make them and work to ignore them except in the rare 1 of 25 game situations. UEF destro buff seems to be done in the context that bulwark exists and stacking even more hp on the destro in combo with bulwark can be hugely oppressive. But the issue currently is that UEF doesn’t have a great frig to fall back on to delay and allow a build up of 6-8k mass in destro/bulwark/coopers. If UEF frig is an ultimate meh unit then it needs a destro that can support itself independently so it doesn’t immediately die to either cybran frigs or aeon destros. The current situation of giving this tiny buff with no adjustment to UEF frig keeps UEF navy in its “t3 skip or ignore navy” dynamic.
And sparky is nice but it’s still just so residentsleeper it has no ability to build land facs. Like just let people load a transport with sparkies and do aggressive drops what’s the deal?
Unlike others I would love the issues the patch addressed if the changes were a bit less timid in terms of buffs. Timidity in nerfs is ok because of the prevalence of nerfs in FAF IMO.
Also no chrono nerf?
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@ftxcommando said in FAF Beta - Feedback:
Please don’t do big changes for no reason just to shake up meta, thank you.
True & Fair, that's not exactly what im saying I'm kinda of saying what you are saying. " My problem here is that (some) problematic units that fall into clown tier are identified" -> "the buffs are too marginal so the units go from FF-tier to D-tier"
I think that sums up the complaining.
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I do agree with one thing and that is the BUG/soul ripper did not need a nerf. It’s already such an awful unit compared to the ahwassa and Czar’s performances. Kinda like the Atlantis aswell.
As FtX said, maybe we want to move these from F tier to C or B tier. Some units fill in niche purposes but they at least should do it decently. Atm some units (such as the Atlantis or T1 subs) don’t even cover a niche slot because there is another option that does their job much better or/and have extreme flaws (such as the soul ripper being slow and lackluster or a sub instantly dying to a Torp/becoming useless past T2)
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@femboy said in FAF Beta - Feedback:
I do agree with one thing and that is the BUG/soul ripper did not need a nerf. It’s already such an awful unit compared to the ahwassa and Czar’s performances. Kinda like the Atlantis aswell.
Yeah, this seems very odd. Washers are definitely too strong but lumping in the Soul Ripper just because it's also an air T4s is not enough justification to nerf one of the currently worst units in the game. If the ripper gets it's E-requirement doubled it drastically needs some sort of compensatory buff, otherwise I can't see a realistic scenario to build it over gunships/bombers, something I'm already having a hard time doing.
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@taunoob1 said in FAF Beta - Feedback:
@femboy said in FAF Beta - Feedback:
I do agree with one thing and that is the BUG/soul ripper did not need a nerf. It’s already such an awful unit compared to the ahwassa and Czar’s performances. Kinda like the Atlantis aswell.
Yeah, this seems very odd. Washers are definitely too strong but lumping in the Soul Ripper just because it's also an air T4s is not enough justification to nerf one of the currently worst units in the game. If the ripper gets it's E-requirement doubled it drastically needs some sort of compensatory buff, otherwise I can't see a realistic scenario to build it over gunships/bombers, something I'm already having a hard time doing.
Literally everything this man said. Cybran air T4 has been lacklustre, this makes it more so.
It'll be interesting to see if the sniperbot nerf is too strong.
"Design is an iterative process. The required number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time."
See all my projects:
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Generally I like the approach to the changes - I'd much rather small to moderate changes to buff/nerf something to see how it goes rather than overcompensating and ending up either ruining a unit or needing a new balance patch to nerf an overpowered unit.
The only two that surprised me were the soulripper nerf (it makes sense given the changes to other air experimentals but would ben ice if it could have something to compensate it, e.g. a small mass cost reduction, since it's by far the weakest of the three), and the nuke silo change (more for the reasoning, as while seeing 1 early nuke is very common I've rarely seen multiple nukes and if I have it's usually been to that player's detriment - i.e. I'd see the issue more that an early nuke is very powerful in teamgames, especially a heavily hive assisted one that can be both built and loaded quickly, rather than that building a second nuke is really powerful. However, I'm not sure what alternative option would achieve that better - construction build time increase? increasing energy cost of the missiles?)
In terms of each specifically:
- Asylum - fine, it was the best mobile shield
- Titan - fine (they're really good). Feel bad for the loyalist as it feels weaker than the titan
- Sniper bots - Hopefully it's not an overnerf, but most of my experience using them is with my AI since I struggle with the attention/apm to use them as a player so Im not well placed to comment anyway
- Ahwassa - fine, it's really strong if you have air control
- Czar - fine - another strong experimental
- Soulripper - as above feels like it could use something to compensate
- Valiant - good, since it's the only destroyer that is bad vs subs
- Salem - good
- Sparky - good, it could use a small buff and fits well with its theme
- Kennels - good, they could use a buff and this still gives them a clear differentiation to hives
- Nukes - as above, overall ok but I dont see a fast second nuke as that much of a problem
- TML change - nice QoL change
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I think nerfing bug e is fine. If you buff its weapons to be as good as the others, it would then just need its e nerfed like the others anyway. It's just that the weapon buff hasn't come yet.
Dunno what you could do to help bug though, give it emp like rambo scu, or maybe some big aoe gun like a treb but direct fire, or a bunch of hoplite rockets, or something else idk. Considering how infrequently they're built, you could make their emp quite large/powerful before it becomes too good. Maybe it could even emp t4s and still be balanced, so it could act as an exp sniper.
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First of all, thanks for all the feedback, keep it coming.
I will be reading through everything and replying in bulk.Aeon Chrono:
The PR is done and awaiting the last tweaks, once it's merged it will be featured here.Soul Ripper:
I will look into buffing it in some other areas, it seems as if the personal stealth buff introduced in the last patch was not enough to make it viable in most scenarios.Kennels:
More changes will likely be coming but they aren't here yet as they require more discussion and testing. For now, these are meant to bridge the gap between the hive and the kennel but I agree that something more is needed.Loyalist:
We will look into slightly tweaking it in other areas as currently, it feels like a slightly worse version of the titan with occasional big impact due to its ability (Yes it's actually useful and very powerful if used correctly although that's pretty situational and hard to pull-off)We're planning on tackling the navy, mostly underwater, gameplay and adjusting it to make the navy - torpedo bomber and surface-underwater interaction more interesting and less one-sided. There will also likely be a frigate rebalance alongside so that while cybran will still have the best frigate it will be much less oppressive.
I can't guarantee it will make it into this patch (January) but we will do our best.In terms of other more drastic changes: I am not in favor of doing big changes without good reasoning just to shake up the meta. FAF gets a lot of its diversity from maps so I don't believe we need to change the meta drastically every other year because, in my opinion, it doesn't really get stale if you consider how different the game plays on Theta, Loki, Ditch, Seton's, 16 bases 20x20 mapgen.
That is not to say that we are opposed to bigger changes, they just need to be done on the merit of the gameplay being either boring and simply not fun, or broken. If you have any suggestions you can create a separate thread or suggest it here as well. You also don't need to propose concrete changes, just a direction.Overall I feel like currently the balance and the meta are in a good state without any single strategy being dominant in most map scenarios (T3 land rush was too strong hence it got nerfed) and the biggest offenders: Ahwassa, Nukes, Snipers, Titan/Loya rush and spam on bigger maps were eliminated.
We will also be looking into adjusting the costs (probably some Energy Cost nerfs) for T3 and Experimental Artilleries as well Yolo/Para. Alongside adjusting the Reclaim % left by higher tech units we hope to prolong and improve the dynamism of phases: late T3 / early T4. Hopefully, it will also be enough to create a new phase of mid-T4 that is rarely seen which will feature many land and some air experimental fighting instead of people defaulting to Nukes/Artilerries which will cost significantly more E and therefore require more infrastructure and won't be as easy mass dumps as they are right now.
