Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF

It's the same concept as swifties vs ints. Ints win in sandbox easy whether micro, no micro, half micro, whatever.

But the player that makes swifties has that period early on where he gets to dump a large mass concentration into air and the int player needs time to catch up in that mass concentration. Combine that with a speed ability to choose when and where to fight and swifties win more than they lose.

Also it isn't as simple as simply matching the janus/swift/notha player in t2 facs. A janus is almost twice as much mass per unit of buildtime as an int is. You need almost double the facs to keep up.

And also Janus are the same speed and act as the aggressive units so the inty player is playing permanently reactive while janny guy can sneak in some shots every now and then while losing nothing in the process. There's no amount of flak that will protect u against the terror of the skies, the janny.

so can I go full janus as air on senton? I usually avoid that slot because ecoing for 10 minutes is boring

@mach Not really since asf are king. Maybe if ur team uses ur janus to crush extremely hard, but in general u can't rely on that. U can't end the enemy air player with janus, all they need is 1 shield and 4 t2 mex in their core and they'll easily pump out enough asf to kill all ur janny. Mostly the janny issue is relevant in 1v1 where u don't have the space/time to go t3 air because of the upfront investment.

Janus are mega relevant in teamgames just not on maps like sentons where there is the absolute maximum distance between the t3 air bases and because of the eco meta on sentons which means people have a lot more resources to defend.

They were good enough that quite some ppl started to complain why they weren't getting nerfed, although now that some time has passed most people have become better at countering them.

@blodir said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

In order to satisfy moderation:

Some Sort of Ethos: I've played the game since 2013 and been one of the top rated players ever since. Yay!
Identify a Problem: SAMs disproportionally strong vs air to ground compared to ASF. SAMs make air outside of exps almost completely useless, but it's difficult to nerf them since they are already so weak vs ASF.
Showcase the Problem: Pick an abitrary teamgame of length >30min
Find a Solution: Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF
Justify the Solution: SAMs can be nerfed now and you can do more stuff with air to ground as a consequence

The issue why Sams are OP vs Gunships and to a lesser extent Strats but suck vs ASF is that Sams have AOE and Gunships move in clustered up together tight formation, strats are less clustered but still to some extent. Even if it doesnt look tight it is a tight formation, the different between 0 AOE and 0.1 AOE is that it is going to hit others Gunships that are far from the one being hit. ASF do not have this issue to the extent Gunships and strats have because the mass density of the area affected by the AOE of the Sam does not hit as many ASF in terms of resource value. Consequently Gunships have +/-6k HP, strats +/-4k HP to make up for the splash damage despite strats costing almost 2x what Gunships cost and having less DPS than Gunships.
The only way to achieve what you want is to increase DPS on Sams and their remove AOE. At the same time you would have to change ASF HP and DPS and the same on Gunships and Strats etc.
The following quote by you is not a solution, it is a wishlist with no clear way of how to achieve it.

Find a Solution: Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF

Well suffice it to say, it would require a more extensive rework of several unit settings to achieve your goal. Not impossible at all, I could certainly write up something workable that would achieve the aim but my opinion doesn't matter to the decision makers so, I guess we let them figure how whether to give Strats 5 or 6k HP and Gunships 10 or 12k HP and make Sams do 500 or 600 DPS...

T3 air is so oppressive in the game. 1v1's its basically the opposite however if you get to T3 it can still get oppressive even in a 1v1. T3 Air always ins with 2 giant blobs of Air just staring at eachother.
The single point of T3 Air being so Oppressive (not OP) that it basically eliminates ground pushes late game especially if you are down in air because the enemy can cheese it so well with bombers, gunships, mercy spam (it happened before lol), etc. It's just not fun with how Air is balanced

Of course this is my opinion and experience.

T3 Air also eliminates any interesting plays late game because you locked on ground because for one T3 Omni exist (needs to be NERFED HARD IMHO but thats another topic). You can't sneak anywhere on the map because the Enemy Air will just see you instantly. Maybe we should nerf ASF Speed? No, in my opinion thats like a middle nerf. You aint actually solving the problem. You are hindering it but not fixing it. ASF should have more buildtime and T3 HQ Upgrade & Supports should cost more, the Power Adj should be nerfed too.

T3 Sams IMO is an easy fix, just revert like maybe half or third of the AoE.

Why are people talking about nerfing aoe in a thread about making sams stronger vs asf

@ftxcommando

Aoe makes it way stronger against Gunships & Strats
You can just nerf ASF dont need to buff SAMs

Nerfing ASF necessitates nerfs to pretty much every other air unit. Nerfing sam aoe brings them back to being the noob trap unit they were prior to the aoe buff, even if you give them double the damage.

@azraeel said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

T3 air is so oppressive in the game. 1v1's its basically the opposite however if you get to T3 it can still get oppressive even in a 1v1. T3 Air always ins with 2 giant blobs of Air just staring at eachother.
The single point of T3 Air being so Oppressive (not OP) that it basically eliminates ground pushes late game especially if you are down in air because the enemy can cheese it so well with bombers, gunships, mercy spam (it happened before lol), etc. It's just not fun with how Air is balanced

Of course this is my opinion and experience.

T3 Air also eliminates any interesting plays late game because you locked on ground because for one T3 Omni exist (needs to be NERFED HARD IMHO but thats another topic). You can't sneak anywhere on the map because the Enemy Air will just see you instantly. Maybe we should nerf ASF Speed? No, in my opinion thats like a middle nerf. You aint actually solving the problem. You are hindering it but not fixing it. ASF should have more buildtime and T3 HQ Upgrade & Supports should cost more, the Power Adj should be nerfed too.

T3 Sams IMO is an easy fix, just revert like maybe half or third of the AoE.

You are missing the point. There is virtually no difference between DamageRadius = 0.1 and DamageRadius = 1. I tested this years ago. I think if my memory is not failing that there is something about DamageRadius not working in decimals but only in integers.

Besides that, as soon as you introduce splash damage in any amount, any overlapping hitboxes will magnify the damage dealt by Sams. Gunships have this stupid behaviour that if you tell them to attack anything they all fly in shift-G mode to the target, then once they reach the target they go into reverse gear, spread out and hover around the target while firing at it which clumps them up in one big blob with tons of overlapping. You wont achieve any meaningful improvement by only reducing splash damage alone, whether by half, 2/3 or even 3/4.

Essentially why any number 'n' of gunships suck so bad vs sams is because when attacking they take up to 'n' X 'Sam DPS' which makes it equivalent to the DPS of 1 sam spiraling up towards a variable 'n'.

Splash or no splash are the only 2 real options.

@ftxcommando said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

Nerfing ASF necessitates nerfs to pretty much every other air unit. Nerfing sam aoe brings them back to being the noob trap unit they were prior to the aoe buff, even if you give them double the damage.

As I said, it would take several changes...

You need to look at it in terms of the magnification of damage. The more ASF there are the more damage a Sam with AOE does. The AOE of a Sam doing 1 damage vs a sam doing 2 damage can be the difference between a volley doing 1 damage and it doing 3 or 5 damage. This means that whether you have 200 or 300 ASF over the enemy base you will not have a linear increase of 50% above his air grid. Should one really be penalized for have more ASF by giving the losing player a catchup bonus? Should 5 sams really be able to take down 15, 20, 25 ASFs in 6 seconds instead of just 5 or with a doubling in damage 10?
10 ASF=3,500 mass 400,000 energy. 5 Sams = 8,000 mass, 80,000 energy and Sams will prioritize incoming Starts so the ASF being there wont matter much to the player who has no air.

Like everybody in the game is currently unaware of the strength of sams and drastically overbuilds asf so I don’t really see why they would be nerfed. Pretty much any ASF number over like 700 (can do as low as 150 on a map like hilly or canis) is a mistake in a game and you were better off sam creeping by that point.

@evildrew said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

10 ASF=3,500 mass 400,000 energy. 5 Sams = 8,000 mass, 80,000 energy and Sams will prioritize incoming Starts so the ASF being there wont matter much to the player who has no air.

1 sam costs 800 mass, not 1600 though

also target priority mod is a thing, so sams can prioritize whatever the player wants, which is a good thing before you argue against it

@ftxcommando said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

Pretty much any ASF number over like 700

Oh wow, only 700. Super common to see

It is quite common on any spread out 20x20.

@ftxcommando said in Make SAMs weaker vs gunships and strats, but stronger vs ASF:

Like everybody in the game is currently unaware of the strength of sams and drastically overbuilds asf so I don’t really see why they would be nerfed. Pretty much any ASF number over like 700 (can do as low as 150 on a map like hilly or canis) is a mistake in a game and you were better off sam creeping by that point.

It's not 700 that's just a completely artbitrary number, it basically comes down to:

(enough asf to snipe exp) * ((amount of enemy air exp) + 1)

The reason is simple, SAMs make all air to ground units that are not exp mostly completely useless.

However in practice it doesn't work exactly this way, because usually u don't want to lose air sniping enemy air exp out of fear that they will poop out another one in 30 seconds and SAMs are not so good vs asf so even if you are fighting over your own SAMs the player with more asf probably wins.

Your formula doesn’t work. The faster you can get a spread of sams to protect everything the less ASF you’re going to need. That’s why hilly and canis will never see more than like 200. 3 sams in base stop all early aggression and each person can build 10 sams out to make half the map impenetrable. At that point, you just care about having enough to intercept any rushed t4 or 20 strats.

700 is arbitrary because I never seriously attempted to discover a magic number for something like sentons. It’s just a value I’ve argued about and basically the largest number anybody I’ve had this convo with would say. I’d personally put it closer to 550 or so.