The nuke imbalance issue - an analysis and proposed superior solutions

Over the past years the balance teams (past and present) have always favored increasing the cost and slowing the load speed to try and improve the balance when addressing the relative value of nukes.
In this post I will present the nature of the imbalances and explain how adjusting different values can improve the balance.

Issues:

1. The Range on SMLs is extremely high while the range on SMDs is relatively low. This leads to the relative value of SMLs scaling with map size and target dispersion on the map.
2. The Damage Radius (Inner and outer rings) is counter intuitive versus how nukes work in reality. In FAF, nukes have a large inner ring and smaller outer ring. The Inner ring doing enough damage to kill almost anything in the game while the outer ring deals very little damage to a smaller periphery around the inner ring. In reality the explosive damage by a nuke centers a high amount of damage on a smaller inner ring while the outer ring is much wider where the blast wave and radiation kills off everything living but does no explosive blast damage.
   Consequently the damage dealt by nukes is quite extensive in FAF due to the high damage radius and nukes can deal damage many fold their own cost when targeting almost any commonly observed base structures in the game. The return on investment of a landing nuke would shrink drastically with a reduced inner ring.
3. The cost of SMLs and SMDs, nuclear and counter-nuke defence missiles can only be a fixed ratio, it cannot scale up or down with map size and target dispersion.
4. Nukes can be used offensively and defensively to attack bases, or counter unit pushes. SMDs are only 1 trick ponies.

The short comings of balance team's current approach:
Increasing the cost of SMLs and load times of nukes does not address issues 1&3. It addresses to some extent issues 2&4.

Better solutions:
Option 1: Reducing the inner circle size to be 1) effective vs select structure (i.e. T3 Arty, game enders, highly clustered economy buildings), 2) be balanced vs select mid range value targets (i.e. core mexes at start position, smaller air grids, spaced out massfab-pgen clusters) 3) ineffective vs other lower value structures and units on the move due to less chance to hit them. Inner ring damage could be lessened to 50,000, outer ring to 1000 (that allows low HP buildings and most T1&T2 units to die. This addresses points 2,3&4 but fails on point 1.

Option 2: Reducing range brings Nuke Subs and Nukes on battleships into relevancy on bigger navy focused maps but this does not work for big land only maps where SMLs would need to be placed closer to the enemy base. That would definitely swing the balance towards the favor of SMDs but would still be situationally dependent. It would address issues 1&3 but not 2&4.
A range of 700-725 would appear to be approximately the correct range looking at some maps but that could vary depending on map design and probably those short coming make this option inferior to option 1.

Proposed solution:
Option 1 seems to be the best. It could be combined with Option 2 but it would need some more elaboration and calculations to determine the correct values and some gameplay to validate the expected improvements. Past costs increases of SML and nuclear missiles would also have to be scaled back to a more balanced ratio.

please don't nerf nukes into just another normal explosion but slightly bigger, this is the only game I know of that has them properly powerful and not some minor inconvenience, when a nuke lands, it should destroy everything in the area, it is a... nuke

Or we can just make nukes cost more, exactly as we did, without some stupid total rebalancing of the unit feel.

Range of 725 doesn’t solve any part of the issue. You essentially stop air players from nuking each other on sentons, but this was already basically impossible without some insane nuke rush cheese. Assuming comparable skill in both players, they’ll both have comparable eco to stop it. The problem with nukes is that it forces all slots to play with the reality that a player that is in a stagnant slot can always make it and if you are not at around a third to a half full t3 mex when he does make it, you’re dead. This reality directly hurts the spawns closer to combat than other spawns.

The slots nukes would actually work on and still allow a snowball win on any decent 20x20 would still be getting nuked and allowing a snowball win.

@ftxcommando said in The nuke imbalance issue - an analysis and proposed superior solutions:

Range of 725 doesn’t solve any part of the issue. You essentially stop air players from nuking each other on sentons, but this was already basically impossible without some insane nuke rush cheese. Assuming comparable skill in both players, they’ll both have comparable eco to stop it. The problem with nukes is that it forces all slots to play with the reality that a player that is in a stagnant slot can always make it and if you are not at around a third to a half full t3 mex when he does make it, you’re dead. This reality directly hurts the spawns closer to combat than other spawns.

The slots nukes would actually work on and still allow a snowball win on any decent 20x20 would still be getting nuked and allowing a snowball win.

Depends where you place the nuke on setons and what you define as the base, i.e. core mexes or all mexes or the usual navy yard locations. Take 700 as range, you would have to have a secure navy to place it on the coast as close as possible to reach more than 2 key locations of the opposite team's bases from the navy slots, front could reach 3-4 bases, air only 1 base. I don't see how you think that isn't doing something.

Yada yada. Why are you so hell bent on killing the unit fantasy, instead of balancing it in current state?
What do you accomplish by killing the current feeling of the unit? And how powerful it feels to use?

@xiaomao said in The nuke imbalance issue - an analysis and proposed superior solutions:

Yada yada. Why are you so hell bent on killing the unit fantasy, instead of balancing it in current state?
What do you accomplish by killing the current feeling of the unit? And how powerful it feels to use?

I frankly do not have any idea why you post on matters you clearly have nothing to add to. All you do is complain and give useless criticism with no factual evidence or any level of conceptual analysis to back it up.

Are you now just pretending to be stupid? A feel of a unit is important to how players feel about it. What you are proposing in both cases neuters the unit making it nothing like the current tool. Which feels great to use across different scenarios.

Option 1 kills the feeling of the unit by making it feel like nothing but expensive TML which already feels lackluster even though it's very powerful tool. Thus killing the unit fantasy.

Option 2 falls under the same problem of making the unit feel like just a little bit more fancy TML instead of a game ender that it is supposed to be, not to mention totally killing the idea of it being the great ballistic missile we know from real life. All off that while adding unnecessary layer of frustration for such big and important building being range restricted to range smaller than t3 artillery...

If you can't take this into account I don't think you are person who should work on balance. As it's not just numbers but also feel of the unit.

I'd say the way units feel is even more important than the numbers. Nukes should be scary and overpowered and fun, everyone in real life has to fear them when one player gets them as well. Retaining large effective AOE and unlimited range are important to that I think. Increasing the cost of nukes is fine. Increasing the cost of SMD could be good as well, I don't like that TMD and SMD just get auto-built without any scouting or thought most of the time.

@thomashiatt said in The nuke imbalance issue - an analysis and proposed superior solutions:

I'd say the way units feel is even more important than the numbers. Nukes should be scary and overpowered and fun, everyone in real life has to fear them when one player gets them as well. Retaining large effective AOE and unlimited range are important to that I think. Increasing the cost of nukes is fine. Increasing the cost of SMD could be good as well, I don't like that TMD and SMD just get auto-built without any scouting or thought most of the time.

So in that case; how about a smaller inner ring but an even larger outer ring than current with say 2500 outer ring damage. That would wipe out all shield buildings, mass storage T2 mass fabs all T1 & T2 units and damage everything else severely. Why would that take away any of the feel and not be scary?
Many T3 buildings would survive in the outer ring limiting the effectiveness of nukes. I just don’t think 70k damage over a large footprint and a tiny outer ring doing close to nothing is reasonable.

Another direction to go is make them travel much slower and/or announce where enemy nukes are targeted. Would make nukes more of a base elimination weapon than "select and delete T4 army".

Nukes are already quite hard to hit at moving armies. Making them even more obvious totally kills their viability as anti army tool, unless you are aiming at armies that are literally at your doorstep. Currently every decent player upon hearing the Nuke launch is gonna split all of their armies and units, so making this gamble even more unpredictable for the player nuking the army is gonna kill everyones will to actually even try sniping anything that's not 2km away from you.

in my opinion it should be even more in other direction: enemy nukes shouldn't be announced at all unless/when you have intel over them

it's just another broken thing in intel system, giving you free info, similar to knowing when enemy destroys/upgrades a building you scouted 10 minutes ago even if you didn't have any intel over it at the time, because the icon changed color, it makes no sense

and if they moved any slower there would be enough time to reclaim the base before the nuke arrives (yes I already do this on expensive buildings sometimes)

as a counter to no warning given, I suggest nukes should be targettable by anti air fire until they reach space (novax altitude), so air can destroy them until then, once they are in space though, only smd should be able to stop them, even once they start descending to target (hp rebalancing would be needed obviously)