Why are base SACU's getting a health nerf?
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makes ras boys less tanky
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I'm also confused by this - the only discussion I've seen has referred to it being because RAS SACUs are seen as too powerful; but if that's the case, why not just nerf RAS SACUs (which I see in a number of games), rather than all SACUs (other than RAS SACUs I hardly ever see other SACUs - sometimes some of the rambo presets might appear, and never some of the ones like engineer preset).
If it's because certain stats are wanted for RAS SACUs (rather than just making the upgrade more expensive), then why not reduce the cost of the base SACU to compensate, so they're at broadly a similar power level to before (unupgraded) but RAS SACUs are weaker
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Ill explain in detail when im home
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If it is only because of ras scu's, is it not possible to put a negitave modifier for health? I mean this will nerf certain pre-sets and custom combinations for no real reason. I like the combatant acu for cybran. Or base with gun upgraded. The nerf nearly halves the health for these. Im definitely in favor of the build power nerf and engineering upgrade changes, but not this.
Edit: We posted at the same time. Thanx @TheWheelie
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D Deribus moved this topic from General Discussion on
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Where do you even see this?
Also why do you think the balance team is super stupid and misses something as obvious as a base health nerf not just affecting RAS? -
Moved to Balance Discussion, but since it's a question I won't enforce guidelines
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@femtozetta I never said anybody is stupid. I am just asking. Am I not allowed to?
TheWheelie kindly said he would give feedback later, so I'm content with that. -
This post is deleted! -
will 3 mercies and a combomb to the face still be overkill?
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The long term plan for sacu's is to make the presets more specialized and more viable to encourage different kinds of sacu upgrades throughout the game. For example having viable engineer presets, viable combat presets, viable army support presets, etc.
One of the main reasons for nerfing the current base sacu statline is because it makes certain paths obsolete. For example you barely ever need engineer presets because a rambo sacu can just throw down a sam right at the frontline in 10 seconds. Since you make more than 1 it means you have insane bp in your combat units at the front making engineer presets useless.
Hp and damage have the same reason al be it less impactfull. A good example for this is when a gc walks into a ras boy farm and dies to ras boys because 8 ras boys have the same dps as a gc, which makes no sense at all.
Therefore the basic sacu hp dps and bp will be nerfed, but the upgrades will be balanced out to negate the effect. That means that shield and nano upgrades will give extra more hp that was removed from the base statline, same for the engineer and gun upgrades.
There was an option to choose to make it work in reverse. This means keeping the base sacu as it is but making certain upgrades lose you different stats. Like gun giving you reduced bp, or engineer/ras giving you reduced hp/dps. There are quite some problems with this however. First of all it's gonna be very clunky because what if you manually upgrade your sacu to have both ras and engineering quite? Should it lose double as much? It's also very unintuitive when players upgrade their sacu and then it becomes weaker in areas. There isn't anything like this currently in faf so we felt like it wouldn't fit in.
The 1 downside of this all is that the base sacu becomes even weaker than it currently is but it was always a trap to begin with. It has always been bad to make because it is not specialized in anything. It's bad to use as bp cause why not use t3 engineers instead. It's bad to use to fight because why not make actual combat units instead. It would be nice to have it be decent, but so far none of us could think of a way to make it work properly.
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These changes seem like a positive effect to me, for both the units themselves, as well as the overall game.
The changes 'nerf' Support ACUs without technically 'nerfing' them - bringing them in line at a more reasonable position as a unit.The stats removed from the base unit is transferred over to an upgrade, as @TheWheelie mentioned.
So, therefore units will still have the same total stats, overall as before, albeit with the upgrade.My favorite part is how this makes each upgrade far more specialized.
Gun upgrade is now... GUN upgrade.
Shield upgrade is now... SHIELD upgrade.
Engineer upgrade is now... well, you get the point.
That being said, one concern I have is that this change will affect veterancy.
Granted, this is a small change, but a change nonetheless.
The factions that have personal shields as upgrades on these units will still get their health back;
However, when that SACU gains a point in veterancy, they will be missing out on a portion of their new max HP,
because the base HP is lower.Again, not a big deal, but that means one faction will have a slight advantage over others as,
when that unit vets, they will get all their HP, whilst the factions with shielded SACUs won't.
And, this stacks even more so every time the SACU vets, creating a larger and larger gap in max health pools.Though, again, just a minor concern.
~ Stryker
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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@TheWheelie Thanx for clarifying the reasons.
In the GC example you gave, this would get mitigated by the base damage nerf you are implementing (300 to 100). If said SACU's are upgraded with the gun however, it would be like walking into 16 percies that are immune to being sucked up. The GC has a specific weakness to SACU's in that it can't use its arms against them. If that was a chicken, it would not happen.I think one of the reasons base gun coms and combatant coms are not used more is because the transition to SCU's is a bit expensive and time consuming. At least that is why I find myself almost never doing it. T3 support factories cost half as much as the gateway and there is no option to build the gateway until other t3 tech is done.
In conclusion I think the damage nerf should probably be used first to see if it resolves the balance concerns.
I am however debating from the viewpoint where I know I may be mistaken. If this is the direction the balance team wishes to take it, I will accept it and stop arguing.
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The concern I have is that several quite different units have the same icon and mostly the same appearance. Is it possible to use a different icon for each upgrade path?
Heck, you could remove the base SACU and all upgrade options and just make the various "upgrade paths" completely different units (without upgrades). It would likely be simpler to use and I think wouldn't lose much (does anybody ever convert a rambo boy into an engineer boy on the front line, or similar)?
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Base SCU should be comparable to the base ACU, bad at everything until it gets some upgrades. They should just have more powerful upgrades since they are a late game unit. I do think it is slightly problematic that they all have the same icon when they will be able to do very different things. Adding a bunch of good SCU upgrades is almost the same as adding a bunch of units into the game, but you get to sidestep the massive debate about whether it is okay to add units to FAF. You also don't have to make new models, icons, and whatever, but that comes at the cost of readability.
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This is only a first baby step when it comes to the SCU. Basically a band-aid for now. Long term there was a full rework of SCUs planned with new upgrades, rebalances of current ones and most importantly every preset becoming it's own unit, so you could no longer upgrade the SCUs. This is the only way we found we could realistically balance them since otherwise changing just a single upgrade would have affect different presets.
Sadly the rework that has been worked on in some capacity since 2018 or 19 has basically been in limbo since around 2 years. I am not 100% certain yet but I think we will try to tackle it in the 3rd quarter of the year.
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I have to say I don't like the idea of not being able to change sacu upgrades once they are built, the upgrades should be changeable at any point, just like with acu, even if it makes balancing them harder, otherwise you are deleting that unit to replace it with something that didn't exist in original game, everyone always knew sacu as being equivalent to acus in how you upgrade them, but with that change you are basically turning quantum gateway into "t3.5 land factory"
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You don't like it but what's the opposing proposal? Just keeping them what they are? Nobody even swaps upgrades as it is, they just add sacrifice or teleport to SACUs sometimes.
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If you want to make the base SACU's more cost-efficient without making the upgraded SACU's more cost-efficient, you could just decrease the cost of the base SACU's and increase the costs of the upgrades accordingly (to balance out the change in cost of the base SACU).
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@comradestryker said in Why are base SACU's getting a health nerf?:
That being said, one concern I have is that this change will affect veterancy.
Granted, this is a small change, but a change nonetheless.
The factions that have personal shields as upgrades on these units will still get their health back;
However, when that SACU gains a point in veterancy, they will be missing out on a portion of their new max HP,
because the base HP is lower.That's why shield upgrades give more hp than nano to begin with. Yes this will inbalance it a tiny bit but it's to such a low extent it's almost irrelevant. Also the combat upgrades need to be rebalanced to begin with since aeon and cybran are pretty bad so worrying about something like this is kind of irrelevant.
@chenbro101 said in Why are base SACU's getting a health nerf?:
think one of the reasons base gun coms and combatant coms are not used more is because the transition to SCU's is a bit expensive and time consuming. At least that is why I find myself almost never doing it. T3 support factories cost half as much as the gateway and there is no option to build the gateway until other t3 tech is done.
What is a base gun com? If you talk about just the scu with 1 gun upgrade then don't worry about it, it's just a terrible version of the rambo one. Also the gateway cost is not the main contributor to the lack of rambo boys. The main one is the time it takes before they start to make an impact compared to their total strenght and mass u put in.
@cyborg16 said in Why are base SACU's getting a health nerf?:
The concern I have is that several quite different units have the same icon and mostly the same appearance. Is it possible to use a different icon for each upgrade path?
Heck, you could remove the base SACU and all upgrade options and just make the various "upgrade paths" completely different units (without upgrades). It would likely be simpler to use and I think wouldn't lose much (does anybody ever convert a rambo boy into an engineer boy on the front line, or similar)?Idk if that's possible but it sounds nice yea.
Not sure about removing the upgrade utility. There are certainly situations were you use it, like upgrading the sam upgrade on cybran rasboys, or engineer upgrades on any ras boy, or the tele upgrade on sera to go tml tele sacu, or sacrifice on aeon, etc. It will make it easier to understand and balance, but it will remove some interesting combinations since you don't want 10+ presets for all kinds of different combo, especially if you combine it with unique icons.@thomashiatt said in Why are base SACU's getting a health nerf?:
Base SCU should be comparable to the base ACU, bad at everything until it gets some upgrades. They should just have more powerful upgrades since they are a late game unit.
That is the long term plan yes.
@penguin_ said in Why are base SACU's getting a health nerf?:
If you want to make the base SACU's more cost-efficient without making the upgraded SACU's more cost-efficient, you could just decrease the cost of the base SACU's and increase the costs of the upgrades accordingly (to balance out the change in cost of the base SACU).
Yes but it will never be a well designed unit because it does everything in 1 unit.
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@thewheelie said in Why are base SACU's getting a health nerf?:
What is a base gun com? If you talk about just the scu with 1 gun upgrade then don't worry about it, it's just a terrible version of the rambo one. Also the gateway cost is not the main contributor to the lack of rambo boys. The main one is the time it takes before they start to make an impact compared to their total strenght and mass u put in.
Yes, I mean scu with gun upgrade.
They have their uses. 2800 mass per com means they are slightly more expensive than 2 percies with slightly lower dps but much more hp. 1 gateway and 7 of these cost the same as a GC and can just about trade with one.That is not possible if you put nano on a cybran scu. You end up with fewer scu's, each one lasting for only a second or two longer with this upgrade. As you stated, Rambo coms are very expensive. It's only viable later on.
I realise this is a rather niche use of them, just putting their uses out there. It wont be the end of the world if they change in this new direction you are pushing, but I will have to have a little cry and a lie-down.
