Smol ACU Adjustment

Who's talking about nerfing OC damage? Your reasoning is: No auto OC -> players who didn't learn to OC lose games -> players get discouraged and go to gap. This is wrong for 2 reasons:

• Your argument also works for T1 bombers. Players who don't know how to defend against bombers get discouraged just the same.
• It also works in the opposite direction for T2 land. Bad players who build T2 land lose to bad players who enabled auto OC. They get discouraged from being aggressive with T2 land and only do gun + T1 + auto OC.

@thomashiatt said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

I hardly see managing some base thing instead of using overcharge as a tradeoff. Overcharge gets you hundreds of mass per second of net gain, double if you get the reclaim. Managing anything else in the game is negligible in comparison. And if your are using your ACU aggressively, but not watching it, you are just going to die.

Well according to FTX, you can use your ACU aggressively, AFK it and you're not going to die. If you mean you SHOULD just die, I can't but agree in general principle. But please, ensure that if you, for instance, have decided that you want to try an aggressive play style this game but have been caught slightly out of position by an attack, and are now a few overcharges behind because of all the orders you have to issue to units and factories and possibly engineers to salvage the situation, please ensure that's not the end of it right there because of a few missed spellcasts. If that were to be the case it might prove a souring experience, maybe not as sour as getting shift-g'd but of the same general flavour.

@mazornoob i thought your comment about energy was in reference to xiaomao's suggestion and my reply

@mazornoob i've failed to make myself clear, apologies. My argument was for nerfing auto-OC, not manual OC, but not removing it completely, with a mass tax for making it gradually better, thus providing an alternate path towards a good guncom that taxes attention less. I think energy storages could enable this mechanic just as they enable variable OC max damage, with storage count governing auto-OC fire rate.

You already have that path, it's called ACU upgrades.

@mazornoob said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

Who's talking about nerfing OC damage? Your reasoning is: No auto OC -> players who didn't learn to OC lose games -> players get discouraged and go to gap. This is wrong for 2 reasons:

• Your argument also works for T1 bombers. Players who don't know how to defend against bombers get discouraged just the same.
• It also works in the opposite direction for T2 land. Bad players who build T2 land lose to bad players who enabled auto OC. They get discouraged from being aggressive with T2 land and only do gun + T1 + auto OC.

An early T1 bomber can be devastating, no doubt. But as a noob, your first encounter with one is most likely in some team game. You lose a few engies, ask for help, see inties and maa responding and countering the threat and teammates dodging with their engies. You get tested on what you learned from this interaction as more T1 bombers show up. The learning loop is shorter, it's not game over unless you're playing 1v1. As for T2 land, I want a betterment of the current situation, and I've said multiple times I agree the problem exists. Ideally the t2 land spammer should win, unless the defending player has built enough t2 storages (more than 2, maybe 6 or so) to make auto-OC as good as it is now OR they manually OC, at the cost of whatever else they might have been doing with their attention

If you know enough about OC to build storages and set it to auto, then you know how to use it manually. There is no learning loop. It's dead simple "point at the T2 unit" micro. I'd even argue that auto OC makes it worse, because a player who only auto OCs will lose to a manually OCing player without knowing why.

@mazornoob I think Zelda suggested further ACU upgrade refinement as a solution to the problem in the OP, I got the impression that in their current state, the guncom is seen (by me as well) as too strong. I think his suggestion is interesting because upgrades limit com mobility and take time, which increase the opportunity for spam to do damage. Perhaps it's worth considering

@mazornoob well, knowing how a mechanic works in principle and being able to execute it under pressure are different things, in my opinion. Knowing I can compensate for my lack of discipline under pressure by making some insurance is maybe what makes the difference between deciding to try guncom again right away but applying this knowledge (by paying the noob mass tax) or deciding guncom will have to wait until I'm way more comfortable with the game in general before i attempt it again. There is, for sure, room for improvement in how OC mechanics are presented to the player, even now, and maybe this is a good opportunity to address that.

To clarify: I agree that auto-OC should never be as good as manual, no matter how many e-storages you build. Players attacking should do their best to cast OC manually. It's when you've chosen this upgrade path and are suddenly on the defensive that I think auto-OC has the most value, and when the gun ACU perfoms worse than the T2 version in less skilled hands. That's when you have to not only micro the ACU but scramble units, adjust rallies and build emergency PD. Auto-OC is probably overpowered in its current state, but a valuable crutch to new players that I'd prefer were still available at some mass cost. Otherwise, their only option is to stay away from guncom until they get better at everything. There's value (more players graduate from astronoob) in keeping early exploration of these mechanics available, and knowledge of game mechanics is much easier to come by than general game skill, provided the UI, or wiki, or discord, do their job.

Gun ACU should be broadly more niche than t2 in teamgames anyway. It is vastly harder to interact and engage with compared to t2 which outputs continuous mass investments that have their own game interactions. I see zero problem in lower rated games seeing t2 more often, same as higher rated games.

Hope you're right. Please let us know when this change is added to faf beta balance, I'd enjoy trying it out, and it might help you assess the changes with more replays to peruse.

What if we take a similar approach to the SACU changes. Nerf the base ACU and add more upgrade chains. Like if we nerf acu dps by 50% and gun brings it back to where it is now stock, add a 2nd upgrade that brings it up to what gun upgrade does now.

That way the acu is nerfed early game but can still be useful later on.

@thomashiatt said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

I hardly see managing some base thing instead of using overcharge as a tradeoff. Overcharge gets you hundreds of mass per second of net gain, double if you get the reclaim. Managing anything else in the game is negligible in comparison. And if your are using your ACU aggressively, but not watching it, you are just going to die.

It is a tradeoff because defense requires constant attention, attack doesn’t. If you sit your ACU around you currently don’t really need any externality costs. You could send a scout at minute 5 just to be sure you aren’t dealing with a guy going pure all in cheese and you then don’t die with your ACU mid. You nerf the protection ability of ACU mid and you make it more relevant to keep more consistent intel + attention on it while you sit it around there.

Keeping OC where it currently is while nerfing “lazy” ACU aspects like the generic gun/auto-OC maintains the benefit of proactive play with it while punishing lazy play that simply uses the ACU as an army substitute for the first 10 minutes of the game.

So is the balance team going to say if the idea is even on the table or not? The thread is just 90000 words that nobody can even read at this point.

@thomashiatt said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

The thread is just 90000 words that nobody can even read at this point.

The big brain move is to use ChatGPT to summerize this forum post.

Ill mention the post in balance team discord.

I've read through the meanigful posts and I am considering the idea of nerfing the gun by reducing the extra range it gives.

@tagada said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

I've read through the meanigful posts and I am considering the idea of nerfing the gun by reducing the extra range it gives.

Don't you think that will make T2 pd creeping a little too powerful?

@tagada

Awesome, Aeon com really needed that relative buff