Smol ACU Adjustment

@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.

@mazornoob said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

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.

You can just swap the cost of gun and t2. There are so many ways to make t2 fine. And honestly, the whole crux of my point is that t2 ACUs ironically promote more dynamism in teamgames that gun does because they provide mass concentration that can be interacted with to lower the efficiency of the enemy. What am I supposed to do against a gun acu? Either kill it (10k+ investment as stated), make it myself (stagnate the game), or kill all enemy e storage(i guess?).

I would literally prefer having t2 acus be a dominant meta in teamgames. That isn’t the point of this post, that’s about how inherently problematic the efficiency of ACU is. But there are a ton of slight nerfs to give t2 ACU to make it equate to this nerfed gun since 80% of the value still comes from OC + range combo.

@ftxcommando said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

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

OC is fun true, but I don't care if it's automatic or not. This is your opinion.
I like FaF because it is more macro heavy than other games. Strategy over APM. And I have already enough to micro. To be honest, it would probable be a nightmare for me to give my ACU all 4-5 seconds an OC order.
I can totally see that you like the skill expression and competition, but as an old casual player you would make the game stressful for me and competing to the starcraft kids a nightmare - I remember I played Warcraft III 20 years ago with ~160 APM...
When I watch FaF and exclude people like farms I see mostly people which can't cross the 1.5k border. Most players are below.
I seriously think removing or nerfing auto OC is a false direction - OC in general is an other thing.
PS: @FtXCommando this suggestion may hit the game and community but your latest approaches I really like. Creative, disruptive, out of the box thinking.

With a single Energy storage, Auto-Overcharge is like an extra attack with quite a bit of kick. Perhaps change the scale which energy storage boosts the power of Overcharge damage? Also, is there a chart somewhere that displays the current energy storage/energy use of Overcharge?

Nerfing the ACU would be the healthiest change to the early and mid game ever seen, not even joking.

@ftxcommando said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

why are you guys like 1200 if u can manual oc spam while doing proper base management i cant do that

im 1200 and auto oc is my best friend:P i manually oc ed when i was lower rank, but the possibility to do base stuff (funneling all the reclaim that the oc gun com lets behind e.g.) made me just turn on auto. i know i should do it manually to be a better player, but there are much bigger problems in my gameplay befor i fix this.

maybe you can make the com stop walking for a little longer wih auto oc, bcs i have the feeling that most times its no disandvantage to use auto oc or to make a higher "reload" time, so you have to use it more strategic and manual oc would have a much higher worth, bcs you dont want to risk that your com blasts away a single t1 maa when there is no air around.

Well for auto-oc to exist it would basically need to be something at around the 1k rating where you start to consider the trade-offs on it being not worth it. It should effectively be worthless at the 1500+ level. I have no idea what the penalties should be to make those the intended rating ranges for it.

Make it always pick the target that takes the longest time to rotate the turret?

@mazornoob said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

Make it always pick the target that takes the longest time to rotate the turret?

For someone trying so hard to make beetles different you sure don't mind throwing retarded ideas around when it doesn't come to the unit you like.

You are supposed to make OC tad bit worse, not make it retarded all around gimmick that is better off being removed.

it's called a joke

@xiaomao said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

You are supposed to make OC tad bit worse, not make it retarded all around gimmick that is better off being removed.

That's what someone at your rating should be thinking it is, though.

@ftxcommando said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

@xiaomao said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

You are supposed to make OC tad bit worse, not make it retarded all around gimmick that is better off being removed.

That's what someone at your rating should be thinking it is, though.

My point is that it shouldn't be made something that literally punishes you for using it, to the point you are better of not using it at all. Cuz at that point you are better of just removing it all together.

Well, yeah. You use it if you're so bad at the game you literally can never zoom in on your ACU because you are too busy looking at your eco bars. So you turn it on because it is strictly superior to OC stuff badly to never OC'ing at all.

idk why it is even a consideration to make something act worse even for "balance", there is already enough bad unit behavior without making additional things work worse, they should only improve and be balanced around their proper behavior

also don't understand why or how you are supposed to make things be used differently based on rating, as if rating is some kind of physical parameter that can consistently or at all effect whether a unit functions or not

basically to make auto OC worse than manual OC you have to either make it act stupid (like mazor joked and I obviously disagree with such change) or have it physically a different and weaker weapon (makes no sense but at least the controls are intact, however now you have a weapon that only exists while you are manually using it (in an rts game)), and it already is better to manually OC if you can spare apm as you can pick better targets or wait a second for units to clump up instead of spamming it off-cooldown and hit less units with it, the only advantage auto OC has is it can shoot without stopping the ACU movement and other orders and ofc, without player babysitting the ACU and instead playing the game

Somehow your take is that auto oc is more 'playing the game' than manual oc. Incredible.

my take is units should attack things on their own instead of having to be told manually to do so for each shot, yes

last I checked this was a strategy game