The Last Thread about RAS SACU Balance

To all with a qualified opinion

The reason why RAS SACUs are still being talked about, and why this discussion has been filling numerous thread pages, is that they are very hard to balance and very hard to understand in terms of balance.

Fact is that many make them almost every teamgame, and some make them even in 1v1 (hint hint), and consistently win games and produce a questionable experience for the others involved.

On the other hand, some say they are never efficient, can be easily punished, etc.

Now im not the best player in the world, unlike I sometimes believe, but yet find it very hard to "easily" punish Yudi when he does it. In fact, I find it incredibly hard, sometimes impossible. I think they are broken.

BUT I dont want to make another argument about them being OP. I want to make the argument that they are simply too difficult to balance properly because they offer a unique combination of features that just doesnt belong together, and therefore shouldnt exist.

Usually in supreme commander, if you want eco you need to protect it. Map control with PD and units, you make a mex upgrade, protect it against units, after T3 mex stage you need to make fabs that are volatile and require building space, need to be shielded against sats, arty, bombers, etc.

This basic concept doesnt apply to RAS ACU. Its a mass fab that can relocate, specifically relocate under water, can make its own shield, can make its own sam, has a gun worth 3 ACUs and produces power, which removes the need to protect a power grid in late game. ??????

Its plain crazy.

Its already a versatile builder and fighter, a useful utility unit when sieging to protect key areas with infrastructure that doesnt die instantly. But why give it the supreme mass fab and pgen role aswell?

These features DO NOT BELONG TOGETHER, its impossible to balance the price of a mobile underwater mass fab + pgen that just walks out of a gateway.

Make it 300% more expensive? I dont know if thats fair, I dont want to think about it. I dont want to make a complex formula to estimate a fair price, I want to get rid of the RAS Upgrade on SACU and be done with it.

Any good arguments against that reasoning? I doubt there are.

Devil's advocate sake just get rid of RAS Preset but keep upgrade so if you want RAS Boys APM Hell Fun Time. /shrug

They need either a big nerf but I am not sure if straight up removing them is a good idea. I would like there to be a balance where you actively think and choose between either Mass fabs and pgens or RAS SCUS depending on the state of the game.
To achieve such balance RAS SCU's mass and power efficiency would need to be reduced significantly.
I am not sure exactly but my educated guess would be around 30% nerf.

what if they could only get either mass or energy generation but not both at same time, and if they get mass generation they drain energy while its on like a massfab, basically splitting ras upgrade into only mass or only energy

Make them either generate only mass, so that people have to still build explosive pgens, or make them only generate power, so that people still have to build explosive massfabs. Im in favor of giving them only power, so RAS simply become an expensive way to migitate power snipes.

What about massively increasing their death explosion radius and damage? That way they're a lot more dangerous to chill in your base, and if you keep them clustered together they'll chain

if u lose 1 boy ur losing all of them already

Yes, if you have them packed as close together as possible, and you take a mavor shell to the center of the group, many of them will explode. I'm saying lean into that behavior. Make losing even one guarantee to kill RAS coms in a wider radius, as well as having a mini-nuke detonate in your base.

That doesn't change anything. You will still put all boys under 1 shield and assisting it to keep infinite eco safe under 1 shield. If 1 mavor kills them all or only kills 1/3 of them doesn't impact anything other than game length.

RAS SACU have 2 problems:

1. Exponential growth
2. No sane limit of there number

№1 means that them is impossible to balance without making hard limit. №2 nuff said
They will be either complete trash or OP. Middle ground is possible but thin and different for different maps and players.

I personally prefer a simple solution of this case: remove them for good and put balance effort to something more exiting

some long time ago someone suggested making gateway unassistable

completely removing them will make some people angry i beleave

everything else can be assisted why shouldnt gateways be, maybe if you increase its build power and sacu build cost massively instead tho (like nuke launchers/defenses) so assisting it doesnt speed it up massively

@ZLO said in The Last Thread about RAS SACU Balance:

some long time ago someone suggested making gateway unassistable

This will nerf many other options like Rambo SACU, Eng SACU, and any other use of SACU

completely removing them will make some people angry i beleave

"No matter what you do there will be whine. No exceptions"

@Mach said in The Last Thread about RAS SACU Balance:

everything else can be assisted why shouldnt gateways be

Because everything else is built on the battlefield, which should be sped up by assisting engineers; whereas, lorewise, the quantum gateway actually teleports the SACUs into the theatre of war. Why would a "quantum teleportation" device be sped up by assisting engineers?

Quantum teleportation devices just transmit information and the object still needs to reassembled with mass and energy on the other side. It is the same as building anything else.

If quantum teleportation devices just transmitted information, they wouldn't be called quantum teleportation devices, they would be called phones.

@archsimkat said in The Last Thread about RAS SACU Balance:

Because everything else is built on the battlefield, which should be sped up by assisting engineers; whereas, lorewise, the quantum gateway actually teleports the SACUs into the theatre of war. Why would a "quantum teleportation" device be sped up by assisting engineers?

I thought that was so too, but then I dont see why gateways should use any mass or energy if they were teleporting SACUs that were already finished, after all when ACUs and SACUs teleport in using a gateway in some missions, they dont cost any mass or energy to do so, the only explanation is that SACUs are not being teleported in but instead are being built by the gateway itself, it not only being gateway but a factory as well

The simplest option is to just nerf the mass/power output or increase the upgrade cost and buildtime. Maybe a combination of both.

I don't think Ras SACUs are a bad concept, they help with managing buildpower and eco, while saving space and unit cap. They're just too strong and prevalent in larger games because they have zero risk and they are guranteed to at least pay back their mass investment. At the very least they should take much longer to pay back their cost

I am quite sure that the biggest reason people build bois over massfabs is ease of use. You don't need to queue up a shit ton of stuff, make sure it is somewhat shielded and also scale powergenerators in an appropriate amount. Instead you just spam a bit of buildpower and repeatbuild the preset. Removing the preset would throw a decent apm hurdle in the path to infinite bois. If I remember correctly they only got that much because the preset was introduced.

For whatever this is worth, I never make them. They take time to pay for themselves, so if you start spamming them you actually lose mass for something like 10-12 minutes (the first SCU will pay for itself long before then, but by then you have several more produced that put you into debt more than the first SCU benefits you so it takes longer than the time for the first one to pay for itself for the SCUs + Gateway to start helping your economy).

If someone starts spamming them, they're effectively giving you a 10-12 minute window where you will have more available mass to punish them with. Rather than trying to outeco them during this period, just make a big ass army and crush them.

I play 10x10s though, so this may not make sense on say, Seton's where there is a significant travel time component for your forces.

So, if you want to be able to play like a high rated elite 700 on 1v1, or 1200 in global... you know not to build RAS SCUs =P