The Last Thread about RAS SACU Balance

[TheWeakie]

what is your vision of what lategame should look like then

[Lapkee]

If this topic is about meme...

[Azraaa]

@TheWheelie

Late game should have options... Right now your kind of forced into this standoff late game where the middle of the map is a wasteland with tons of reclaim your just licking your lips at and I understand reclaim is very vital to the Game of course.

I'm not saying remove but it's so important to the game in some many aspects its hurting more then helping. Every T3 you lose is basically 1k mass on the enemy's doorstep which may look good but it's really not good, because you end up rewarding certain bad behaviors and punishing certain gameplay styles.

This is where stuff like turtling and being aggressive diverge Because reclaim will always lend in favor of the defender but late game it lends so hard into that said defenders favor your basically forced to play like him even if you have 80% of the map, you cant attack with your large useless army too risky too punishing especially if he has lots of pd and his own big base. You lose 20 pervicals there goes 20k mass to the enemy for example.

By late game theres so much reclaim you might as well not even have mexes. What I'm stressing is this is just one step towards creating a healthier playing environment. Where you can be proactive late game instead of it being almost a 100% chance of mass economical artillery/experimental spam.

If the game wasnt so stalematey you could play 20km more proactively, because you could actually attack, you could invest into these larger pushes without having to worrying if you lose this single reclaim field the game is just cooked. 20km is a prime example of economy being extremely out of hand. Most of the time theres simply too many mexes, too much early game reclaim which turns into a super quick stalemate because you reach t3 and t4 so quick that reclaim is pretty much out of control, everyone has these large bases full of ras coms, Sams, Pd, And Armie. That any push any proactive gameplay is immediately shut down because even if you gain ground it's done nothing to the enemy in fact you've probably done more dmg to yourself given the enemy more reclaim and demoralized yourself into this slog fest of a game.

[Azraaa]

In reality late game without even talking about stuff like T3 Mex income or ras income or mass fabs. Theres just core issues like too many mex points theres too much natural reclaim things like that which flood the FAF Vault, and of course you cant do anything but I hope we get a clean selection of maps for TMM, that will address these issues.

I just dont want my late game to turn into this slog every game.... I want active, productivity and proactivity. Late game feels like map control just doesnt matter at all theres just so much mass everywhere quick and easy ways to get mass like RAS Boys and things like T2 Mex being 9 income and then t3 mex being 27 things like this which just make the economy go wack late game contributing more and more into this late game slog and disgusting lag fest of a game where nothing is fun or active or anything

[Lapkee]

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

because you end up rewarding certain bad behaviors and punishing certain gameplay styles.

I have your point here. Not like it's really matter, but... My 2 cents Its not only about mass, but about APM and other stuff like this, but you need to have more resurses, one way or another to crush opponent. If you attack and units die - its mass gift, and if you defend and happens the same, you can have almost all mass + mass from enemy units if you are not crached by superior forse. So - attack and crush and you are good, defend and cruch - you are good. But - attack and do some damage and you are in in trouble if damage aren't sigininficant. Exchange 1:1 allways good for defender.

A problem with RAS - is that they are much, much more
easier to pay off. If you make rambo, you have to move it to the front, and control for long time for profit. If you make RAS, you need just not suiside it, and wait for some time.

If, other things being equal, one player attacks, and the other makes the economy, then it is the aggressor who is "on the counter". He needs to crush before he completely falls behind.

But I don't thing that lowering reclaim value is good fix, because then attack will become mindless suiside of unint's.

[Azraaa]

Reducing Reclaim wont make it exactly mindless attacking. You'll still be able to lose if you literally gift mass.

Reducing reclaim will give more options, I didnt say dump it down to 5% of original or anything. I saying like 40% of orginal. You'll still get punished but not as nearly as hard, if you didnt know navy reclaim was changed to 40% of original.

RAS and T3 Mex income are really side problems not a super serious issue so I wont get into that topic. The main topic is reclaim

[Lapkee]

ASF reclaim was redused even more, and we still have seton air meta. Because if you are attack and lost - there no way to comeback. And if you have t4 and enemy have t4, and you attack and lost it, he can have mass, and if you attack and kill it, but your exp is wonded and you not cruch his base or com, you have to go back. Low hp exp can be used for defens almos as good as full, attack is different story.
The problem with turtle gameplay is that all comeback mechanisms only work for the defender. If any comeback is posible - its will be from defending side. There the way to rebuild after successful but not fatal attack, using reclaime mass, and no way for redo unsuccessful. Nefing reclaim will also nerf strategy "attack, secure, reclaime, repeat". 6 ravs can kill ML on blockpost. If you have ML and exchange It for 6 ravagers, you have 80% or 40% but of ~6-10k of mass, and if you have 6 ravagers and exchange for ML you will have 80% or 40% but of ~20k of mass. That woks for mantis and t1 pd with small numbers.
So even if you have full map control vs one turtle base, but equal eco you better to siege it. If you have more mass, you better eco on it, and only them attack. Because "have mass, eco, attack and fail" means - "give chase to comeback", and have mass, eco, attack and fail" means - "gg wp better luck next time". So every agression becames siege.
If there was a way to, convert mass in somethig, that will be not a siege weapon, that but bunkerbuster, hmmm....

[ThomasHiatt]

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

RAS and T3 Mex income are really side problems not a super serious issue so I wont get into that topic. The main topic is reclaim

Actually, the title of the thread is "The Last Thread aboud RAS SACU Balance."

[Lapkee]

Ok, it can be as simple as this: You can counter the exp or \ and t3 spam with your exp, or t3 spam, or turrets maded by RAS SACU, ok? Exp bp was nerfed, t3 spam was nerfed. Was PD nerfed even once?

[Tagada]

Pd's are not the issue at hand here. The problem is that you can spam RAS bois that give you economy but if your enemy decides to push you already have BP in place (Ras coms) that are hard to kill and can easily build tons of PD's.
The problem with the later stages of the game is that the amount of mass you have in units compared to your income is growing. Basically usually the longer the game goes on the longer it would take for your economy to re built the army you have. This indirectly makes reclaim insanely important and thus promotes very static gameplay.
I think that in order to achieve healthier gameplay in later stages of the game we would need to encourage players to trade more during the game. The easiest way to do that would be to reduce the amount of reclaim you get from higher tech units.
We should look over some games and see how the value of Total mass in units/mass income changes through the game when we reach different stages and then adjust the reclaim in order to bring values of different stages closer together.
I would need to go and see some replays but from the top of my head the difference rn is huge. (This is for 10x10 land maps, different maps have different values and it also depends if you make land, air, navy).Early t1 stage is ~2k/~25, Late t1 stage ~4k/~35, t2 stage ~8k/45, late t2/t3 rush ~14k/~60 , t3 stage ~20k/80, late t3 stage ~30k/100. As you can see from this very inaccurate approximation from the top of my head the value of the units on the field grows much quicker.
To address one of the arguments against changing our beloved 81% reclaim value. I really disagree that changing that number for different tiers will confuse ppl so that they won't know how much reclaim they will leave. First of all most people have no idea how much units cost so they don't know how much reclaim a Rhino will leave anyways. Changing the % of reclaim left by t2, t3 units won't really confuse ppl since it's quite intuitable, higher tech units leave more mass, it doesn't matter (in sense of understanding) if a brick leaves 800 or 1k mass, it leaves more then your t2 tank, that's all you really need to know. If we are talking about judging how much mass will a failed attack donate you do it with experience and on the fly judging so people will just adapt with time to those changes.
Another counterargument is that with such changes all the wreck props (reclaimable units) on the maps will be changed with such balance change. I am really not to sure what's the best way to address this issue but I don't think it should stop us from balancing the game. Possible solutions are: Just let it happen, most maps will be absolutely fine with slight reclaim decrease. If author wants to adjust his maps, he will do it, as for GPG maps and Classic ones whose authors are inactive we could look over them and see if any would require changes and adjust the wrecks there as needed.
The other idea is to separate the values for civilian owned units or w/e but I am not sure if this is even possible and it's extremely hacky and then unintuitional for future mappers, so I don't think this is the way to go.
Over all I think there is a need for some changes to the values of reclaim in order to make the gameplay especially during later stages of the game healthier, more action packed and rewarding. If we look at other RTS games, especially SC2 we can see similar pattern. Pro matches there used to be either cheeses or games where something happens in the early game, then both players macro'ed, maxed out and clashed once. Right now games can be a 30 minutes of nearly constant fighting, often in different parts of the map at once.
As for the exact number I don't have a proposition yet, I am not even sure if we should balance it for t1, t2, t3 ,t4 or for each tech stage for Land, Air, Navy separately. It needs to follow a logical progression -> higher tech units yield more reclaim (in total since they cost more) but they yield lower % of their cost. With such changes I really hope that we could also buff micro compared to macro since players would be more rewarded for constantly trying to use their units and to find weakness in opponents defense (as it is currently during t1 stage on most 5x5 and 10x10 maps).

[darkym]

Just make RAS bois produce only power and like 1 mass per tick, ez.

[Blodir]

@Tagada to be fair sc2 lategame is totally fucked snoozefest just like supcom is, but for different reasons. In sc2 you simply run out of lategame tech really quickly and also hit the supply cap quickly so you can't eco either. After about 10-15mins no more tech or eco is acquired and like 90% of interesting decisions in the game are gone. Supcom does this way better since you are making macro decisions throughout the game all the way until you hit a game ender (which more or less ends the game, which is also good). Supcom/sc2 are pretty much polar opposites in this respect, sc2 lategame is only micro and no macro, whereas supcom lategame is all macro and no micro.

I think it would be much nicer if we had a nice mix of macro and unit control all the way to the game ender stage in both games

[Azraaa]

Tagada explained it much better then I did

[FtXCommando]

Really disagree with the mode of argument that “oh people don’t know things so we lose nothing by making the game more complicated anyway” and I don’t even agree with it being more complicated to adjust reclaim values.

If anything adjusting it could result in the game becoming more intuitive as it enables removing exceptions like “oh unit fell in water? cut reclaim value by 50%.” I would also be against having every single subcategory in this game having their own reclaim percentile as that is absurd information to keep track of even for the .1% of FAF.

If a reclaim adjustment happens it should just be:
Structures - Old 81
T1 -
T2 -
T3 - Either like 51% or the old-reclaim-in-water value around 40%
T4 - Hard to say because gut instinct is to keep it the same as T3 for a healthier game but that also runs counter to the idea of a general linear decrease of reclaim to keep things consistent.

Have the other two techs somewhere in the middle with an intuitive linear decrease.

[FtXCommando]

It’s also worth nothing that these changes are likely to actually reduce aggression in teamgames even further as often major t2 pushes rely on the fact you can recycle the 81% of your unit carcasses as well as the defenses of the enemy back into your eco to make the attack worth it. Now you will be gaining even less, especially since the reclaim will also be taking damage from battle and getting reduced further.

[Dragun101]

@Ftxcommando the reclaim variable stuff is all called in the various Unit Blueprints. So it would just the changing the variables from 0.9 or whatever its set at to whatever you’d want it it to be.

But this contradicting myself, but I want to agree with Ftx (despite literally saying otherwise). One aspects of FAF I don’t think people quite get, is we still see players coming from GPGNet Era and/or Steam.

These little changes add up and can be offputting espacially if not known or a player isn’t informed that changes from FA occured on Macro not just unit rebalancing scale

[Tagada]

The difference between GPG Era/Steam and FAF now is already massive and something you should expect. After all the game is being constantly worked on and tuned.

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

Really disagree with the mode of argument that “oh people don’t know things so we lose nothing by making the game more complicated anyway” and I don’t even agree with it being more complicated to adjust reclaim values.

I am not sure if you misunderstood what I meant or w/e. I am for adjusting reclaim values of different tech units in an intuitive way. I also don't agree with the argument that changing the value from 81% to 80, 65, 55 (example) will be confusing for people. If you wanted to keep it simple you wouldn't have it at 81% in the first place instead of 80%. The point being that as long as you don't change it drastically and you keep the different values in line and progressing in logical fashion people will understand it naturally. Ofc, some will complain about it but it's to be expected with most of balance changes. It doesn't necessarily make the game more complicated either, sure it changes it but nobody actually thinks exactly about how much reclaim his army will leave. You don't consider the total reclaim number, you consider the amount of units. So for example. at this moment leaving 10 t1 tanks worth of reclaim is ok but not great, 30 is bad etc. Same for t2 tanks, t3 tanks. The % change only adjust the subjective number of units you consider to be ok/bad/good to loose. So now it's ok to loose 3 Rhinos instead of 2. And the difference between tech tiers is already there. I am fine with loosing 3 t1 tanks, but 3 t2? Hell now. So having a 81% of reclaim for all normal units doesn't give you anything. Adjusting it to 80, 65, 50 won't mess with people's ability to assess the worth of reclaim that their tanks will leave (given they get used to new subjective values) more then a change of all reclaim to flat let's say 60%.

[FtXCommando]

My point was directed at you suggesting having different values for all of t1 navy t3 navy t2 air and t1 land which is incredibly esoteric.

And the idea you don’t think about the reclaim of your attack is kind of bogus. That’s literally how you determine the utility of the attack. Do you never notice a buildup response to your attack and then either go elsewhere or just stop continuing to produce units because the returns are just not worth it anymore?

[techmind_]

Also having t3 mex/arty/pgen leave 81% of reclaim means that defender actually don't loose that much mass unless wreck was destroyed.
So it does not even make sense to "raid" unless you can kill everything and can 'steal' mass with engies.

[Azraaa]

That's really where I'm coming from... Your pretty much only hurting yourself late game if you attack imo.