Veterancy removal for most units

I would like to see veterancy bonus removed from basically everything. The only reason to keep it for ACUs is because it would be hard to balance the game where people expect ACUs to get those bonuses.

There is no reason why robot armies would "get smarter" from veterancy, or why individual units would benefit. If the AI actually is learning from experience, the entire army should get stronger. It isn't consistent with the Supreme Commander "backstory."

The game designers originally had veterancy different, it was based on the number of kills rather than the amount of mass killed. They said the reason they did this was to punish players who spammed too much t1. They wanted to create a mechanic to punish t1 spamming in order to encourage a different style of play. It was a bad reason to add a game mechanic and the mechanic itself was done badly. Doing it based on the amount of mass killed is better, but it still just doesn't belong in the game at all.

If we get rid of bonuses, the only reason to keep track of "veterancy" is sentimental, so you can look at a unit and say "wow, three stars, this little striker did a lot, what a hero"

We should not be afraid to lose this particular game mechanic. FAF already has a lot of mechanics, probably too many. Sometimes, cutting something is better than adding more stuff. The veterancy bonus mechanic just isn't needed.

@arma473 said in Veterancy removal for most units:

There is no reason why robot armies would "get smarter" from veterancy, or why individual units would benefit. If the AI actually is learning from experience, the entire army should get stronger. It isn't consistent with the Supreme Commander "backstory."

Having a well balanced game with interesting features is more important than the logic and/or backstory. Researching some extra range or attack upgrade in Aoe2 will instantly give all archers anywhere on the map extra range and attack. Does this make any sense? No. Is this good for gameplay? Yes

I agree that we often need to make concessions in favor of gameplay at the expense of backstory. But this feature doesn't make the game better and we already have too many features. How often do people actually take advantage of a "three-vet striker" or a "five-vet t1 bomber" to actually do something special? If you had a three-vet corsair, could you use it differently than a zero-vet corsair? Is there a different use case for a two-vet monkeylord than a zero-vet monkeylord? The bonuses make the game a little more complicated without actually making it better.

I don't think veterancy makes the game better. You try to kill some unit and then it gets some more health and then you get mad. The person who owns the unit should be happy enough that the unit has killed 2x its mass cost already, they don't need some cheat health and regen bonus win more mechanic.

@arma473 said in Veterancy removal for most units:

I agree that we often need to make concessions in favor of gameplay at the expense of backstory. But this feature doesn't make the game better and we already have too many features. How often do people actually take advantage of a "three-vet striker" or a "five-vet t1 bomber" to actually do something special? If you had a three-vet corsair, could you use it differently than a zero-vet corsair? Is there a different use case for a two-vet monkeylord than a zero-vet monkeylord? The bonuses make the game a little more complicated without actually making it better.

I never said anything about vet itself. Just wanted to mention that your reasoning was wrong.

Agreed, even if it is a nice mechanic, if it slows the game down there is no point in it.

I don't think it's wrong to take backstory into account. It's one factor among multiple factors. Realism is good. Having intuitive mechanics is good (intuitive meaning that someone who knows nothing about the game itself would assume that it's supposed to be that way--like the fact that a unit named a "bomber" is a plane that drops bombs, or that bigger tanks beat small tanks in a fight). Modeling every projectile is good. Units being responsive to orders is good. Those are all things that are generally good, and are generally supported in the game, but we compromise on all them in various ways because you can't have everything. Having good gameplay is the most important thing, but it's not the only thing.

If we only ever asked "what tweaks can we make right now to make the game a little bit more balanced/interesting" without worrying about those other factors, the game would become really bad, really fast. Probably every unit would have toggleable abilities like the Loyalists or like Overcharge to reward APM. We might cap the amount that you're allowed to zoom out because it makes the game more fast-paced. We could drop the unit count, make units bigger so they have flashier graphics, and add global upgrades so that players have to commit more to a particular type of tech. Basically make it more like StarCraft 2 and Supreme Commander 2.

That could be a fun game, but it wouldn't be FAF. Preserving the unique identity of FAF might be equally important to "Having a well balanced game with interesting features."

The veterancy impact on sim speed is absolutely inconsequential aside from situations with immense unit counts fighting one another. This is only a problem in combat between ints and asfs. You would accomplish virtually the exact same thing (if your main argument logic is centered around sim speed) by just removing it from those two units.

So remove it from air units and t1 spam like frigates and tanks and that's good. Why make a principle debate out of it. I think we mostly want to get rid of asf lag and maybe large navy fight lag.

I would still like to see some numbers how much it helps

@arma473 said in Veterancy removal for most units:

If we only ever asked "what tweaks can we make right now to make the game a little bit more balanced/interesting" without worrying about those other factors, the game would become really bad, really fast. Probably every unit would have toggleable abilities like the Loyalists or like Overcharge to reward APM. We might cap the amount that you're allowed to zoom out because it makes the game more fast-paced. We could drop the unit count, make units bigger so they have flashier graphics, and add global upgrades so that players have to commit more to a particular type of tech. Basically make it more like StarCraft 2 and Supreme Commander 2.

In your opinion it would become bad yes.

Neither tanks nor frigates impact it significantly. The point is that you have 100s of units all calculating their damage based on the proportion of damage they do when units suddenly die and so on. This doesn't exist anywhere outside of giant air fights.

@speed2 said in Veterancy removal for most units:

I would still like to see some numbers how much it helps

It was tested before and I asked Sprouto about it at some point once people started throwing around accusations of the vet system being some key reason for FAF being super slow and LOUD being super fast. He told me that it's mainly a factor during the situations I described above. I BELIEVE you could expect simspeed to fall 2 less than with vet on all units during major air fights but I'm not 100% sure.

This correlates with the information IceDreamer told us from his tests where he said vet is extremely inconsequential of a factor in sim speed performance as he was mainly looking at general trends through the game rather than specific spikes at certain periods of gameplay.

Do we want to make the game more inconsistent or remove an entire aspect of the game in order to speed up simspeed for 30-40 second air fights? I'm not convinced by the argument.

Well it can be easily tested as we have a perf test map that is throwing thousands of ASFs at each other. So I assumed it was tested there

The vet system brings too much gameplay and fun to the table to just blatantly remove it. Just so the Setons player can have instead of their -10 air fight, a -7 fight for their ~30 seconds. Not a very good argument against the whole vet, because normally there is not a problem with that.

The vet system is not perfect, but at the moment it is good enough to focus on other problems. cough RAS SACUS cough

Could be the air revamped to produce less spam? Debatable.

On some units I have noticed and used the vetting. early raiding bombers benefit quite a bit from it. It enables them to deal a bit more damage after the enemy got some mobile anti air up . Also labs benefit from it because they usually loose some hp because of bad micro and get some damage due to reclaim. So eventually they should die to engies but the regen allows them to keep raiding until there is a tank in their way. Same goes for early t1 tank engagements.

We could make veterancy less cancerous if we removed the "current hit points" gain when a unit gains veterancy. The unit's max HP could go up, while the current HP stays the same. That would completely remove the whole "vet vet vet vet vet vet vet" angle to the game, which Thomas correctly describes as an annoying mechanic. ("You try to kill some unit and then it gets some more health and then you get mad.")

OR, the unit's current HP increases proportionally in the same amount as the unit's max HP goes up. So if an ACU has 1400 hp out of 10k max, and gets a vet, and goes up to 11k max hp, it would only gain 140 current hp (up to 1540). So the veterancy bonus itself would not provide an instant "get out of jail free" card.

@arma473 said in Veterancy removal for most units:

That would completely remove the whole "vet vet vet vet vet vet vet" angle to the game

As for me that the only reason to keep vet on EXP and ACU
It brings emotions

How about someone makes a mod that removes vet and i run tests on sim speed impact. I would create huge naval battles, huge t1 spam fights and so on and see how it impacts things and prove with videos.