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
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?
@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.
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.
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 ͡°)
@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.
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)?
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.
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.
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"
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.
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).
pfp credit to gieb
@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.
@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.
@thewheelie Thanks for taking the time to explain.
While you mention it was a trap to begin with to build SACUs, I'd note that particularly at lower ranks the Seraphim SACU was a decent unit in its own right, since it provided you with flexibility even if it didn't excel at any one area. It gave a mini-RAS effect, had enough build power to get SAMs to protect from air with enough health to get near the frontline where engineers would just die, if the enemy didn't kite them would have enough combat efficiency to break through a slightly smaller force, could get upgrades (particularly the TML) to surprise the enemy, and could get reclaim near the frontline. They'd be worse for any one of those roles than anything specialised in any one of those areas, but could be a 'safe' option in some scenarios. Now they'll clearly be a bad option to build, so the pool of semi-viable units gets reduced from these changes.
In terms of how to have the base SACU decent without making the other upgrades overpowered, an alternative way of achieving the same goal but without making a number of already rarely seen units become even worse could be to reduce the SACU mass cost and then increase the cost of upgrades to compensate.
For example, taking the Seraphim SACU, it's health is being reduced from 15.5k to 11.5k, and its dps from 400 to 100, so it's had a massive reduction to its combat power with no change in its cost, and it wasn't overpowered originally. Trying to balance by decreasing its cost and adjusting other upgrades while not perfect (since sometimes they'd get multiple upgrades) could still give something that makes the base SACU less terrible, especially as for many upgrades you'd want ot be getting multiple upgrades together for it to even be worthwhile. As an illustration of an alternative for the Searphim SACU (similar logic would apply to the others as well):
i.e. currently the planned changes would heavily nerf the base SACU; the missile preset; and the combat preset. With the above changes, all of these would have the nerfs significantly reduced or potentially be comparable with their current power-level. There would be a very slight boost for the nano combat preset (-200 mass but offset to some extent with a loss of resources and BP), and a slight nerf for the rambo preset (no change in mass cost, but a slight loss of resources and BP) - obviously the costs for the upgrades could be adjusted further to achieve a different outcome.
M27AI and M28AI developer; Devlogs and more general AI development guide:
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/2373/ai-development-guide-and-m27ai-v71-devlog
https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5331/m28ai-devlog-v130
I think the tension is due to factional differences in use of sacu. uef wants to be a super engineer, cybran wants to be a sneaky boi, seraphim wants to be an experimental (or exp killer) and aeon... not sure what aeon is gunning for tbh.
They should be balanced accordingly. UEF for example might be good as late game shield for percies, (with aoe shield upgrade) but fundamentally the uef does not need more frontline pressure. Percy does that fine and with fatboy their late game land is rounded out extremely well. (not to say its strong or weak, but that it has bombardment and front line abilities and no glaring weaknesses) Therefore, ras and build power makes sense as the primary design, even if other options are available in a pinch
cybran similarly do not need more late game combat pressure, between monkey and brick and crab. BUT they could use more utility. stealth and cloak plus engineering allows them to grab hard to get mass, set up hidden tml bases, etc. underwater utility would also make sense so they can be used with t3 torp defense.
Sera late game land does have some issues, specifically the chicken cannot be spammed because if they die next to eachother they start killing each other (they also have extremely dodgable damage). Sera sacu should be a spammable combat unit that they can switch to AFTER the first few chickens have come and gone. they should have high build time so it takes time to mass them, but they should be able to go head to head against experimentals. (the cost efficiency of this depends on if they can reclaim or are producing resources themselves. if they are then they should need to do some of that to be cost worth it)
Aeon dont need more direct combat at late game, and are probably most appropriate as ras bois to help aeon get and defend salvation, paragon, and experimental spams that they love so much.
I think the worry for me is that reworked sacus might crowd out their t3 land counterparts or fight them for use, or do things that are factionally apropriate, but dont make sense in totality. for example i remember sera sacu might get aoe regen field. This is awesome and would encourage more unit diversity for the faction, which is awesome, but sera t3 doesnt actually need more utility, thats the point of the t3 mobile shield, they need a solution to their poor t4 phase.
I think the problem is more that there are very few real holes in rosters for SACUs to fill. You say sera t4 stage sucks but I extremely disagree. The most difficult thing they have to counter is a mega but that belongs to a faction that has no built in survivability for their land pushes, hence why it’s so versatile in utility.
Hard to find a fit for SACUs when the biggest thing they got is like, tele game ender cheese or UEF bubble boys so UEF doesn’t lose immediately to half the t4s in game.
