Smol ACU Adjustment

@phong said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

If you want to nerf guncom, t2 com needs to be nerfed as well. What do you think should be done in that regard? What do you think about auto-OC frequency being tied to mass storage count (with tweaks to damange / energy if needed) ? How much slower would a com need to be, do you think, to allow spam to be useful, and why would you rather not change com speed, but dps instead?

You can just nerf t2 bp I don’t really care tbh, the value gun provides is additional range and with OC that still gives insane value. A gun ACU should have t2 units to push into a t2 ACU, the t2 ACU is expending more resources to hold him back generally since it isn’t like you are going to need less than 2 t2 pd to halt a gun ACU oc’ing your defenses.

I don’t want OC nerfs because it’s one of the few genuine micro opportunities the game provides that feels genuinely good to abuse. Tying it to mass storages is intensely map specific and just makes too much math involved when damage already varies on your e production.

Speed, dunno. I think touching speed would break more things than touching the gun would, though.

Maybe there's a way to nerf Auto-OC but not manual OC. It's what i was suggesting, with only auto-OC frequency tied to e storage. The damage scaling on OC right now technically exists but is severely quantized by unit health and firing frequency rather than e-storage amount, especially at the early t2 stage that seems to be the problem.

It's a bit disconcerting to see you dismiss this suggestion because you feel there's too much math involved, while refusing to acknowledge the problem i pointed out with noobs and attention. That you fail to address it can only mean you know the problem exists because otherwise you would have torn it apart by now, but it's less important to you than the chore of doing the maths

No, there are tons of high rated players that can’t even bother to do the trivial division to figure out how many e storage for what tech level. I can imagine a single percentage is even aware your e storage will never use the last 10% of your e so you actually need to overbuild e storage a bit more than you would expect. Combine that with whatever equation for mass storage impacting frequency, especially since mass storage isn’t actually a controllable variable you can minimize if you want to play the game properly, and you remove player agency with the tool while also making it less intuitive.

solution: OC button now has a % display when you enable auto-OC. with 1 storage, you right click, it says 25% or something. by the time you're at 100% auto-oc firing speed you can OC bricks like you can now. something like that. doesn't seem so complicated to me. tweak mass cost of e-storage and % to land on some fixed point you think is reasonable, the mass tax for idling your acu in the middle of a t2 army. The first time you almost die to a t2 army you disable auto-oc, do it manually, and make a note that 25% is not quite enough to be so lazy. no division required.

OC button really should show what its max damage with current e stored is at least

The mass cost, and capacity for the e-storage was initially chosen as some value that seemed reasonable at the time in order to use the ACU vs t2, t3 and experimental units, with a consideration to how granular this investment needed to be, that means, how much mass needs to be spent to enable overcharge in the first place. Currently we're doing 5 damage/mass invested in e-storage, and the damage maxes out at 15k for 60k energy which translates into 12 e-storages or 3000 mass. Now let's see how we could tweak auto-OC fire rate and change nothing else.

I'll pull a number out of my ass: say that 2 storages should only give you 30% auto-OC frequency. that means 15% fire rate per e-storage, with a cap at whatever multiple of 15 you want, or 100% of manual-OC firing speed at 7 e-storages. how's that ? you get to AFK your ACU if you put in around 1500 mass in e-storage. you want a bigger tax? make the ass-number 10%. All that research I did and showed in the first paragraph was useless. The math, trivial. Impact on manual OC, almost none, aside from the fact that now, lazier players incidentally do more damage with their overcharge, but that's sort of irrelevant at t2 stage and I can't see how this side benefit would invalidate the whole idea. Just make 3x more e-storage if you want auto-oc to be as good as it was, easy to remember and hopefully, easy to display in UI, along with whatever else you feel is obscure about OC right now.

@ftxcommando said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

@zeldafanboy said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

Make overcharge an upgrade in stages. Tech 1 OC (Does 400 DMG max)-->Gun--> Tech 2 OC (Does 3000 DMG max)---> Tech 3 OC-- (Does 20,000 DMG max)

This doesn’t actually solve anything and is already what overcharge is already functioning as by making damage predicated on e spent.

Yes it would because these upgrades would be time consuming and expensive, as well as actually requiring the commander to stay still while acquiring them. Instead of 2 engines in your base building 1 e storage basically on demand which takes care of all of t1 and 90% of t2 threats. Then just build 3-4 more to deal with T3

i realize my tongue slipped earlier and i said mass storage instead of e-storage. apologies. My suggestion, to be clear, would only have to do with e-storage

@thomashiatt I like your proposal of a speed range nerf for the commander a lot more than FTX's because it's less drastic, and I think it goes well with the recent speed buff to T2 land. But the difference in range between a t2 pd and a guncom is the distance between t2 pds that you need in order to creep with little concern. Is there anything we could change to prevent pd creep from becoming too cheap, relative to what it is now? it would also warrant a proportional nerf to turning speed for t2 range bots, otherwise they could kite too easily, right?

@phong said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

I like your proposal of a speed nerf for the commander

Range nerf for ACU, or speed nerf for T1 land.

I haven't seen a range bot used at all since whenever they were last nerfed, so I'm not really worried about them. They were previously pretty useless against a gun ACU, so if they become more usable that would be good. I don't know anything about PD creep, it doesn't happen to me and I don't really play team games. I imagine that using T2 MMLs to counter T2 PD is just another thing that makes the T2 stage more important.

@ftxcommando this hand-waving away of gun vs t2 is a bit sus, especially in light of the forum guidelines. There is currently a small window where a guncom can prevent a t2 com from establishing a base at all, and since pd creep is a thing, it can be an all-or-nothing sort of fight. I'm not convinced that halving the guncom's damage doesn't affect this tenuous relationship between the two upgrades. If this window of time were to become too small or dissapear, that might be an auto-lose for the guncom. by how much do you suppose t2 build suite should be nerfed to keep this balance or change it for the better ?

@thomashiatt so a guncom would need to invest into t2 land as well before he can contest a t2 com's emergence and creep onto the map? That's one way of countering t2 pd creep, probably the optimal one given enough space to retreat and prepare. But if "enough space" is too much, like on some 4v4 or even 3v3 10x10 maps, you might be forced to take it on with t1 land or sacrifice too much map control and time. So what do you think the new range should be?

Removing auto OC will basically only hit low rated player who already don't use their ACU or don't have the apm/concentration to micro it much.

For me OC is a medium skill floor and high skill cap to know when to use it and to micro ACU to get it work, auto-OC just bring it down in level for lower rated player to use it.

It's like the mass fab autoturn off option, you can technically have high apm and skill floor to turn them on and off but even high rated player didn't do it. It was either just stall or build more power than needed to ensure no stall. The autoturn off just lowered it skill floor for everyone to help with it.

Maybe have the Auto OC deal a fixed dmg but when you use it manually it does the increase dmg so that way skill floor stay low but skill cap still exist.

See with JIP if doable (make auto OC only use the base 5000E while the manual OC use max able to do max dmg)

@phong said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

@thomashiatt so a guncom would need to invest into t2 land as well before he can contest a t2 com's emergence and creep onto the map? That's one way of countering t2 pd creep, probably the optimal one given enough space to retreat and prepare. But if "enough space" is too much, like on some 4v4 or even 3v3 10x10 maps, you might be forced to take it on with t1 land or sacrifice too much map control and time. So what do you think the new range should be?

I don't know, I only play 1v1 and don't have problems with PD creep. I don't know any exact numbers either, that's the balance team's job. If T2 HQ is made a little cheaper, I'd expect you can hold off a PD creep with t1 arty, gun acu, air, or whatever in time to get some MML out.

@brannou said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

Removing auto OC will basically only hit low rated player who already don't use their ACU or don't have the apm/concentration to micro it much.

For me OC is a medium skill floor and high skill cap to know when to use it and to micro ACU to get it work, auto-OC just bring it down in level for lower rated player to use it.

It's like the mass fab autoturn off option, you can technically have high apm and skill floor to turn them on and off but even high rated player didn't do it. It was either just stall or build more power than needed to ensure no stall. The autoturn off just lowered it skill floor for everyone to help with it.

Maybe have the Auto OC deal a fixed dmg but when you use it manually it does the increase dmg so that way skill floor stay low but skill cap still exist.

See with JIP if doable (make auto OC only use the base 5000E while the manual OC use max able to do max dmg)

The difference is using OC is fun and should be encouraged as a micro mechanic, mass fab toggling is not.

@phong said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

@ftxcommando this hand-waving away of gun vs t2 is a bit sus, especially in light of the forum guidelines. There is currently a small window where a guncom can prevent a t2 com from establishing a base at all, and since pd creep is a thing, it can be an all-or-nothing sort of fight. I'm not convinced that halving the guncom's damage doesn't affect this tenuous relationship between the two upgrades. If this window of time were to become too small or dissapear, that might be an auto-lose for the guncom. by how much do you suppose t2 build suite should be nerfed to keep this balance or change it for the better ?

Each PD is like 540 mass. You need 1000 mass in pd + 800 mass in upgrade to beat an 800 mass gun equivalent upgrade. The gun player should have accounted for the t2 transition and began playing for his own t2 transition either via ACU or factory. With the low strength of the t2 acu in terms of actual damage, you can either break the pd with mmls (basically all the dps), use range bots (low risk of dying), or just properly spread t2 tanks so oc can hit max 1 at a time.

Honestly I just don’t consider t2 acu a big problem in games because it costs mass to do anything productive. That is then mass you can interact with that also doesn’t end games by itself. A gun acu is something that you pay one cost for, gets like perpetual free value, and the only real solution to it is ending the game.

You don’t see t2 Aeon ACU when gun vs t2 is a consideration. You don’t see t2 Cyb ACU when t2 vs gun is a consideration. You see it with UEF and Phim cuz they can go both so any danger can be responded with a 15 second pause to rush the gun upgrade if needed.

Gun needs more energy so some of that mass is funded by 5+ fewer pgens you need to build. I also remember that back when T2 gave more health and regen it was considered an autowin against gun. Nerfing ACU gun does risk bringing this issue back.

Random thought from skimming this - what if we took away the AOE of oc when you don’t have gun upgrade? It comes back as normal with gun upgrade.

@exselsior said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

Random thought from skimming this - what if we took away the AOE of oc when you don’t have gun upgrade? It comes back as normal with gun upgrade.

So my problem with that basically comes down to it not shifting meta hard enough. I read it and I basically see games playing out with gun ACU being mandatory for pushes, when it kinda already is.

Another thing is that it encourages cancer gameplay early on. Take something like sentons with blocking ACUs with units, that sort of gameplay is heavily rewarded with such a change. IMO, a general nerf to ACU damage leads to a healthier early game because you have less volatile ACU v ACU exchange and the ACU is still a large stop gap against dumb cheese all ins while still rewarding a decent meatshield mass investment so that the enemy cant simply surround you with tanks spread far enough apart to not really care about the OC.

@exselsior

The problem with OC is that it can completely invalidate T2 units up to a certain threshold. The AOE is what makes OC good against T1, the pure damage is what makes it good against T2. So you're mostly nerfing OC against T1 and not changing it vs T2.