@thewheelie
I know it is not easy to read all that has been posted but I did mention that I am not against having a group of people (be it active contributors in a council member position or whatever else we can agree on as long as they are not campaigning and on the jury at the same time) setting guidelines, looking at the proposal of candidates and excluding the clearly unserious ones that do not meet the guidelines.
A pre-requisite of any candidate should be the goal to shape the game in the way that maximizes the game's balance across all spectrums. I know many think I only play one map and therefore do not have the ability to understand the depth of the game to a large extent but I can assure you that this is a false assumption.
This doesn't have to be a political office where people who do not deliver on their campaign promises and get to stay in for X years while running the game into the ground with no way to stop them until they leave.
I doubt T_R_U_putin would want to candidate, but if he put something together that appeared feasible and coherent then why not. If he or any one said they would occupy the position for 1 year and only change the cost of nukes and nothing else, then that would be clearly insufficient. A serious proposal should cover all aspects of the game, from T1 to T4, economy, military, offence, defence, unit relevancy, increasing strategic optionality. I know that sounds like a lot of fluff with no details but i don't want to write a 25,000 word essay.
I guess you have a point that me saying my model is flawless was a bit of an absolute statement, but I have been building financial models and complex tools in excel to analyse and solve problems for a long time both at the place I worked at for the longest part of my professional career and as part of what I do these days. So I am very confident, some might say overly confident in my ability to not only scrutinize other people's analysis but also an expert at doing it myself.
Well first of all, the balance team has no vision, at least no one that is expressed of how they intend to balance the game so the direction the team is going is really unknown. If you want my opinion of what is wrong with the current balance and the direction the game has gone from my perspective, I have talked to some of the points but I will reiterate and expand:
There are a 2 main extremes when it comes to play styles:
- Active offensive play
- Passive defensive play
Active aggression (spamming units) is generally most effective on smaller maps and maps with widely dispersed mexes while passive ecoing up generally succeeds more frequently with the increase in the size of the map and the concentration of mexes in one location.
The game has shifted too much into the favor of the passive defensive playstyle.
A) Overly focused on lessening certain strategies to shift the game in a specific direction.
For the most part there have been a lot of extreme nerfs of units over the years which have taken them out of the game almost completely or reduced them to fringe status because they fit into a particular interval on that spectrum and by trying to delay the point at which they can become relevant just increases the risk or lessens the reward to a point where you find you can't succeed with it anymore. It becomes easier to defend than to attack despite the risk being on the attackers side. That leads to less frequent use of those plays and a streamlining of strategies that only focus on very few choices. The outcome of this process is relegating strategic play by restricting the number of viable/interesting strategic decisions players have that can swing a game back and forth. Games more and more are determined by who can execute on the remaining few strategies the most efficiently, that's not a strategy game anymore.
One unintended consequence of consistently nerfing units is removing many midgame strategies and shifting the meta into the favor of purely ecoing and delaying the game into the endphase, i.e. game enders.
B) Double buffing/double nerfing - Improving the balance by bringing Unit A's effectiveness closer towards Unit B's and then adding another change of the same magnitude that places Unit A beneath Unit B essentially inverting the initial imbalance.
So in practice what that has meant over the years is, some people didnt like getting bombed early on small maps, the consequence the T1 bomber was nerfed and then T1 mobile AA was made beyond OP since 1 mobile AA would negate t1 bombers for practically nothing in cost. Luckily that was reversed and the T1 bomber reinstated after 5 years of hurt. Well actually the energy cost of the T1 bomber got cheaper from 2250 E (in 2016) to 2025 E (now).
Regarding the cost increase of Cybran frigate and the cost decrease of Aoen frigates, I agree that those changes improve the balance but then you guys also added changes to the range. This is a double buff or double nerf example where changing one aspect was sufficient. I can only imagine that you guys had these 2 ideas and instead of agreeing on one you just did both to make everyone happy. However that was not the right thing to do.
C) Trying to balance mainly by altering cost, HP and DPS.
The Nuke nerf: You could have changed the range on the SML without touching the cost and load times which worked very well on 10x10 maps for a very long time and by reducing the range solved the problem of needing more than 2 SMDs to cover bases in range of the SML on 20x20 maps but instead you chose a solution that worked from the players' perspective who play 20x20 but does not work for the players of 10x10 maps.
D) Many units with low relevancy to the game (i.e. across the entire spectrum of maps) - Too specialized and thus little useful outside of only rare scenarios in which they can be effective but not always are. Examples:
Fire Beetle (I would bet they are seen in less than 0.5% of games with cybran players), Janus Bomber, Nuke subs, T2 Subs, Cruisers (could be design much better to participate in navy fights), Strat bombers (there is nothing strategic about them, they are higher tech, are faster and drop bombs that do a more damage on impact but are more expensive and have less DPS than T1 bombers)
E) Stone-paper-scissor principles are not present in many aspects (f.ex. T2 Navy, T3 Navy, economy) of the game and the balance team does not appear to be gearing patches towards them, instead it focuses on addressing individual issues in isolation. Excessively dominant units such as T2 Destroyers are only considered against each other but not against other options such as T2 Subs and Cruisers leading to less strategic options to play navy causing execution only determined outcomes based mostly only on micro as explained in point C.
F) A lack of foreseeing unintended consequences when making changes or accepting them as a price to pay even when they outweigh the benefits.
Finally;
I know I may come across as arrogant to people who don't know me. Yes I am totally convinced of myself when I am discussing analytics and making models in spreadsheets because I know I am very good at it.
If you set up the live session, I will do my best to be there. Make a post with time and date when this will take place, what the topics of discussion are if it is not a free for all and lets see how that goes.