@Khada_Jhin said in Points of Imbalance.:
So all in all the units and balance is fine. And victory comes to the person who have chosen the better place and time to fight?
Seems about right lol.
Originally, it was 10-12 bricks to kill a Monkeylord.
By making the Monkeylord mass efficient versus bricks, the balance team has severely degraded the usefulness of large T3 land formations. I posted about this in this thread, which does a decent job of explaining the argument.
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/171/i-think-the-relationship-between-t3-land-and-experimentals-should-be-re-examined/5
For assault experimentals to not step on the role of T3 land, they have to be something other than "powerful mass efficient land unit". Originally they were sucker punch units, and T3 land always had a role because it was able to reliably kill assault experimentals in a mass efficient way.
When you look at the disadvantages of amassing significant bricks, it becomes clear that they should be more mass efficient than assault experimentals. Assault experimentals require next to no infrastructure. No extra factories, They're easy to produce.
Pushing out bricks requires a significant investment in factories. The HQ system has mitigated this to a large extent, but it still requires a ton of infrastructure to pump mass into T3 units at the same rate that you can dump mass into an assault experimental.
And I don't want to even change that, I want T3 land to have its own advantage, in mass efficiency.
In terms of mass efficiency, bricks should kill T4 with a significant bonus. That makes up for the production investment in Bricks.
I feel like this system was more or less working well at launch, and it was changed via the T3 nerf (which I think made sense as T2 was pretty damn irrelevant).
There are a couple of ways to fix this as I see it:
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SACUs enhancing the functionality of T3 formations sounds great provided that the buffs are large enough to actually give T3 formations decent mass efficiency versus assault experimentals. Keep in mind that in addition to T3 production, you have to invest in SACU production... it will have to be a significant buff to T3.
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Moderate nerfs to assault experimentals across the board, perhaps with corresponding build time buffs.
I don't really care how this is handled, and I trust the balance team to figure out the details. I just think it should be addressed.
If people remember one thing about anything I'm saying in all these posts on this topic, I hope its this: Assault Experimentals must serve a role that is distinct from the role of T3 land formations. Originally they were sucker punch units, I think that's a good tried and true role for them, but try not to be myopic about it. Whatever they are in the future, I think they need to be further distinguished from T3 units because its hurting unit diversity in some situations.