Restructure air by delaying tech 3 air
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@javi said in Restructure air by delaying tech 3 air:
Feels like the less players, the more balanced everything is.
Ban all games larger than 0v0 for perfect balance!
But yeah, as I mentioned, the biggest source of this need to rush T3 air is how dangerous T3 strat mex snipes are. If you make them less dangerous (reduce aoe to prevent multi-mex kills in starting base) and less easy to make (higher mass and bp cost), it should also be much less prevalent for players to rush T3, since it's not as big of a deal. E.g. if you can shield each of your mexes before a strat is out, it'll in most cases be a waste of mass, given you'll most likely donate it's mass to the enemy when it inevitably gets shut down.
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@javi most teamgames maps is what? Canis 5v5 or smth like that?
As for targets for your t2 air you go for t2 pgens/t2 air hqs and buildpower around them, then mexes. You can also use gunships to raid vulnerable mexes and armies without flak. Like, you are 1v1 player, dont you know how to abuse air? Or your only purpose in life is to get gun and go monke? -
@javi said in Restructure air by delaying tech 3 air:
@tomma on most team games T2 air is just for snipes, what are you going to attack? The 5 t1 mexes that aren’t deep in the enemy base? Yeah cool other dude invested his mas on T3 air and your T2 air is now useless.
1v1 and 2v2 see where air is balanced perfectly. Feels like the less players, the more balanced everything is.
Alright you are being unreal. Let me end this with actual replays.
https://replay.faforever.com/17804806
Game of me going t2 air where my mirror goes t3 air. I kill the power of 3 different players and delay t3 air from my mirror by both forcing sams, killing t2 pgens, and then killing the engie support allowing my team to exploit their delayed t3 air from another slot.
https://replay.faforever.com/17764243
Game of me going t2 air from a support slot. I operate as the ASFs for my air player for the first few minutes and force Yudi to respond to my janus with ints because if he doesn't we get full air operating capability and can bomb the whole map into oblivion. If I went t3 air instead, I would have died to Tex's land pushes. I sniped power, land, bp, and ACUs.
Me operating as the ASFs is pretty important because Paralon often does totally gimped strat rushes that kill his eco since he does them 2 minutes earlier than the typical timing. The janus being out is a hard counter to that tactic.
https://replay.faforever.com/15685194
In this one Yudi and I use t2 air to keep land pushes back on a primarily monkey push map. This was one of my first games using janus so I was pretty bad with them.
https://replay.faforever.com/17708269
This game enemy team knew we were doing t2 air cancer and attempted to counter it but that left them open to my t2 land push and it resulted in game loss.
https://replay.faforever.com/18202812
This game I just straight up 4v1 with janus.
https://replay.faforever.com/17541745
Game ends on t2 stage because of frigs gaining map control and t2 bomber spam meaning air control won't be won for several more minutes in combination with then needing another few minutes to transfer mass into torps to deal with the navy. By then, everything is dead and game is lost.
https://replay.faforever.com/16063045
A completely lost game where all navy slots are dead but correct t2 bomber play results in a win.
But I guess 1v4'ing or 2v'4'ing teams with Tagada-tier players isn't OP enough and we need to buff it so that people can win an air 1v1 in 1100 rated canis.
A few others:
https://replay.faforever.com/18944676Yudi outplays Farm and I with t2 air here.
https://replay.faforever.com/18218102
Another game of janus just winning the whole match.
https://replay.faforever.com/18890108
Game of me and Farm beating Blodir's t3 air strat rush when our team doesn't even have a t1 air factory with decent support to go t2.
I don't want to spend 30 minutes finding it because it was a map gen custom game so I can't look for it via map previews, but I also had a game where Farm crushed my t3 air rush with corsair/int abuse where he pretty much slaughtered my team by the time I built up the 15ish asf I needed to actually beat his int cloud.
Remember teamgame tournaments are almost always decided at t2 air stage, not t3 air stage. Because it's the earliest point possible to dump 2-4 players of mass on a single point of failure and cause a cascading snowball that results in a win. T3 air is too expensive and slow if you are actually working to win a game in a serious environment, but even in a casual teamgame t2 air is viable enough to force at least 2 slots to have to prioritize you and leave teammates at peace to do whatever is needed to win a game.
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^ tl;dr nerf Janus.
Jokes aside, the whole T2 air is only for snipes sounds a lot like the people who don't like full share. People tunnel vision on the acu like nothing else exists. T2 air is very strong and underused. I almost completely stopped using T2 air for snipes once I got better than the 1200-1500 range or something like that unless someone is clearly asking to have their acu die to t2 air easily. I regularly use t2 air to snipe eco though.
I think delaying t3 air doesn't really solve much. It makes t2 even stronger and just delays the issue - people will rush t3 air regardless if the map calls for that. T2 drops are already kinda op given T2 transports are slightly faster than inties and having asf a few minutes later makes them that much more oppressive, right now I feel that they're balanced out a bit by only having a relatively narrow timeframe where there are no asf to counter them.
I've won air and seen it won more often with mass inties or inties + swifties/janus vs t3 air more often than I've won with t1 land vs t3 land. Yes air has an impact faster than land, but that's only to an extent. A relatively quick t3 land drop can be brutal for example.
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t2 trans actually got nerfed some years ago to be .1 slower than ints. It used to be that you could lock a transport in enemy base and it would still land. Now they need to at least get to your map half unscouted to not be caught in time with ints.
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Huh I could have sworn it was changed back or something, felt like I've had a few times where inties stayed just out of range trailing the transport without shooting. But you're right, looks like the transports top speed is 14.3 vs 15 for inties.
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@maudlin27 said in Restructure air by delaying tech 3 air:
I can't immediately think of a big downside to buffing inties, but think we should consider going further than some suggestions here - e.g. if they were buffed to both be .1 speed faster than strats (which could also be done by nerfing strat speed), and to trade mass efficiently with ASFs (this could be achieved by nerfing ASF damage rather than buffing intie damage), would it be a bad thing? (It might be, I'm just speculating) - The main thing to balance them being oppressive is they have poor fuel and die really easiliy to any flak or SAMs, so I don't see them as being as oppressive as ASFs, and there's still a clear incentive to get T3 air and asfs since asfs don't die easily to ground AA.
It could therefore turn air fights from a 1 unit approach to a 2 unit approach, as well as greatly reducing the power of a team getting t3 air ahead of the other team. It introduces an alternative comeback mechanic if you lose air - i.e. you just build loads of inties and try to fight near your own AA. It also makes air staging more interesting.
While a comparison was made earlier about T3 land (e.g. titans) vs T1 land, Navy already sets a precedent for a T1 unit being useful into the T3 stage - frigates can trade mass efficiently with later tech naval units if there's enough space for them.
I'd also forgotten about the SAM semi-bug fix that buffed them so am happy with the changes proposed to that.
Want to note strictly speaking Inties do favorably trade e or m into ASF (actually every unit does. Until you take into account how “damage” degrades in combat more or less. Or kiting works etc)
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Pardon dbl post, but thoughts on mobile shields working on transports?
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won't change anything, asf will delete it in a second like anything else, they can already do so by attacking an air unit that is below a shield such as landed or taking off and do more dps than a monkey does to it
I think I suggested before that all air units should have their hp reduced by something like 10x and all AA damage should be reduced the same to stay the same, because it makes no sense how high their damage and hp are compared to other layer units, tanks take more shots to destroy 1 landed plane than 1 tank
EDIT for ftx: (won't change anything about the asf being the answer to everything)
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Changes a lot, stingers and broadswords are now certified insane
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@ftxcommando said in Restructure air by delaying tech 3 air:
How about this as a quick proposal for people that think early strats are a problem:
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Reduce all strat damage to variants of 2600-2800.
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Buff t2 mex hp to 3000 for all factions (I’m fine with going so far as to revert the hp changes in general but whatever)
Now that sounds like a good idea to reduce the devastation of early T3
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It's abundantly clear from the discussion that the problem isn't the ASF itself, but the relationship of the air tiers, not only to each other, but the rest of the game. Stat changes to individual air units will never come close to adequately addressing that - you have to reseat just where air stands in relation to the rest of game, and then quantify the relationship that each air tier has to the next. There has always been a clear disconnect between T2 and T3 in this game, but it's widest in the air units.
The OP was closest to the subject, identifying that the entry floor (construction cost) is simply too low for Air Factories, especially in the energy requirement, and that the ability to mass produce them may also be out of line in relation to not only themselves, but other air tiers.
Also correctly identified is that any such change will directly impact the relationship of surface based AA, to the air game - and that too must be considered in context of the overall relationship of AIR to the rest of the game. Again, individual stat changes are not going to solve that overall issue.
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No, changing those costs does nothing (or makes the game actively worse for lower player game modes). This is strictly the reality that in a teamgame (4v4) you put 4x eco into 1x eco with air and t2 air is the first point any noteworthy air to ground dps comes into play. It used to be possible to do similar things with jesters but they got nerfed for that.
Changing t2 air so 4x eco can’t beat 1x eco in defense destroys the capacity of air in 1v1 or 2v2 where the discrepancy of t2 air is nowhere near as strong because everyone is making their own air defense, there are less independent targets, and dumping disproportionate mass concentration is simply not as possible without misplay from the enemy.
It’s also vastly easier to attack with 4 people than defend with 4 people, especially across a whole map.
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@sprouto said in Restructure air by delaying tech 3 air:
There has always been a clear disconnect between T2 and T3 in this game, but it's widest in the air units.
Air has no terrain or even collision so when a fight begins it's just who has the larger HP/damage pool that can keep firing. There are no air siege units or aoe units. It will always be like this no matter how expensive you make T3 air tech transition.
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@zeldafanboy said in Restructure air by delaying tech 3 air:
Air has no terrain or even collision so when a fight begins it's just who has the larger HP/damage pool that can keep firing. There are no air siege units or aoe units. It will always be like this no matter how expensive you make T3 air tech transition.
You missed the rest of that point, which is that no one adjustment is going to solve this. This is a class issue - and a tier issue. The combat factors are, in part, responsible for that gulf, as is the production cost - both of the factories and the units. You have to address it all, or you'll just continue to have these circular discussions.
If there was an easy fix, the previous 99999 balance debates would have found it by now.
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Exactly, this problem won't be completely "solved" unless you deeply reworked the game by adding multiple new air units and completely changed how T3 air feels and plays which I think is outside the mandate (and frankly current capabilities) of the balance team
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Air doesn’t need a big anything. You can halve torp damage to 400 and introduce a t3 air aoe aa gunship and the issues are resolved.
Making t2 air fundamentally not broken in teamgames will require breaking it in smaller games and so it’s subjective opinion on what you want to prioritize in balance. Since like 80% of this thread seems to prioritize strats as a problem, it looks like most of FAF can’t see how busted t2 air is so there is no real point in changing it. I certainly wouldn’t make t2 air even BETTER because dudes have the idea strats/asfs are somehow too insane, though.
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I don't think it's outside the role of the balance team - they just need a model that allows them to see where those units sit in relation to each other. The data for the units is the easy part, hard simple numbers - it's the performance relationships between those factors that describe the 'curve' of air units in general - and that units sit on or near that curve, is what will bring balance.
The problem is really quite simple, without that kind of relationship model, you just have pure fantasy - so any argument about X does this and Y does that - is completely circular. Adding a bit of E there, or shaving one value a bit, doesn't change that discussion, since any one change may shift the curve of several important metrics.
As the most simplistic basis - I'm sure someone has built a table showing how much firepower (DPS) you get for Resources expended (Mass and Energy). It's an important indicator that you've got a generally smooth cost transition from unit to unit - versus DPS. If every other factor about the unit was equal - that would be relatively balanced - but there's more to it.
You have to somehow quantify those other differences, such as the relationship between mass, HP and speed - an especially important one for air units. Again, the mass/HP/speed relationship is a metric that helps you assess balance - but only between like units.
This is just an example of how complicated balancing can be. In the end, you end up quantifying just how much speed, a bulked up fighter can have, with a given weapons package - and how much additional E you might need to spend on that unit, to bring the combat speed back up to a point where it can tangle with a much lighter air unit.
In the end - it's really the difference between magic and science. A lot of good points are made in these discussions that want to head in that direction - but never quite make it there.
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Nope, mathematically modeling the price to statistic ratios of different units and making sure they follow some trendline is not going to lead to a fun balanced interesting game, the fact that you say "the problem is really quite simple" is totally off the mark. Balance is very complicated. You have to look at all the aspects of the metagame at a high level holistically. Think of how strong torp bomber spam is right now, and how that affects navy. Now think about how the best counter to mass torps (aside from hover flak which half of the factions lack) is ASF. So if you just tuned down T3 air stats to be "in line" with what they should be, you are indirectly making naval even weaker against torp spam.
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Statistically is an increase in the speed of snipers a buff or a nerf
