Atlantis
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yeah i understand your point. I also like to keep the micro that we have in the game.
But i think that BS shooting T3 subs is breaking the balance, when you have bs it's not worth it to suicide the torp on T3 subs, it's so much better to freely kill the T3 subs by ground fire.
Also as i said i like to keep micro (air fights, dodging shots, army movement etc etc etc), but i don't like bs groundfire, because it's pretty counter intuitive etc (see previous points).Well i never disagreed with the fact that groundfiring isn't properly balanced. It is way too strong vs atlantis/tempest/sera t3 subs to the point that most of then are in a bad spot just cause groundfire exists. I just think that the solution shouldn't be to remove groundfire but to make tweaks so it's way harder to do.
It's actually surprising if you look at other rts games how they are completely riddled with weird unintuitive features. In sc2 when you send workers to mineral patches they lose all unit collision functions and can go straight through other units. In Aoe2 shooting uphill will give you a big dmg penalty, but if you delete the unit before the shot arrives the penalty will just disappear and the shot will deal full damage.
Now the interesting part is that both of these features get "abused" by pro gamers and when they do everybody watching the stream is shouting what a sick move the player just made, because these weird unintuitive features enabled for more strategic gameplay and micro. As far as i've seen the majority actually likes it when these kind of plays are getting made.
Now i'm not saying this is an argument as for why groundfiring is good. I just wanted to mention that this "problem" is not at all exclusive for faf and that it isn't necessarily a bad thing.
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Ground firing submerged units is unintuitive. Part of this problem is the "can't ground fire directly onto units". Perhaps a code fix allowing players to ground fire directly onto the point they click?
This "ground fire" mechanic adds micro to the game. This is good.
Main problem is slow, submerged experimental units getting killed freely because of ground firing (because they are slow). Someone suggested having damage taken underwater from surface weapons be reduced. This might balm peoples pain but adds another "hidden" mechanic to the game, which I view as bad.
The problem can be viewed from another angle. The way underwater (submerged) units are detected is by sonar. You won't know where to ground fire without it. In recent patches sonar has been nerfed by an increase in maintenance cost. Perhaps sonar should be nerfed further to bring it inline more with it's Radar counterpart?? -
Yes, groundfiring subs is unintuitive, created by engine limitations, unhealthy for balance, and makes little logical sense.
That all said, I'm highly pessimistic about removing this feature. Credits to the balance team for all the great work they've done thus far, but this would require a complete rework of the entire underwater balance. That to me sounds like an enormous task, and I'm afraid of having another firebeetle situation where we have a unit that no-one knows what to do with.
I'm not convinced such a task would be a wise use of the balance team's time, nor that the final result is ensured to be a net benefit to the game.
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sorry but what farms is talking about in other games' examples all sounds like exploiting bugs, while it does take micro and knowledge of those bugs to do so, and therefore more "skill", those things were never supposed to exist in first place even in the games' very designs, you could say that any of the bannable bug exploits we have listed here on forums takes skill to do, you have to know how to do them (skill) and then micro to do them, why are they then not considered fine and this (groundfire hitting underwater, which it isnt supposed to) is? building under a transport to kill dropped units would "reward micro" as well, terraforming "rewards knowledge" of how to do it as well, walking with acu while upgrading as well, and so on.
and @deribus while it is a big task, not doing it is just ignoring these problems in the game, submarines currently already are in bad situation except on useless extreme instead of OP because of this problem, fixing this would simply show how unbalanced they are without this broken mechanic to keep them in check, which is not how balance is supposed to go about it
so how about instead of rewarding knowledge of bugs and their abuses, we reward strategy within what units are supposed to be able to do and balance them based on it instead of bugs?
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sorry but what farms is talking about in other games' examples all sounds like exploiting bugs, while it does take micro and knowledge of those bugs to do so, and therefore more "skill", those things were never supposed to exist in first place even in the games' very designs
How can you possibly know that? You really think that game developers of those games wouldn't fix these things if they were "bugs"?
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one thing not to be forgotten is, that groundfire is a good solution to the obnoxious mechanic of shift g stacking subs.
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While I can't exactly disagree with what is being said, and while I freely admit that I never used it for its aa or air building/staging, I think it is a very good unit for:
a) intel (I think this point isn't being stressed enough, the vision it gives is VERY handy)
b) very good torps and the only sub you get (your t2 torps options as uef navy are very good, but are not subs, so very easy to kill)
c) very often forces your enemy to focus its attention on ground-firing it, which gives the rest of your navy more time to hit the enemy fleet (an argument could be made that given your battleship hp, it doesn't matter much, still), and often it's enough to move it a little to make their battleships completely miss the shots (its weird shape makes it sometimes very hard to hit).
I'm perfectly willing to accept that I'm bad and I might agree that a mass cost could definitely make it "better", but I don't find this unit to be useless at all.
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How can you possibly know that? You really think that game developers of those games wouldn't fix these things if they were "bugs"?
I cant know, Im not them, to use farms' example, tell me is it good game design that arrows fired uphill doing less damage should suddenly do more damage if you suicide the unit that fired them before they hit? Sounds more like an unintentional bug. Lets do that in supcom where then you get an artillery that when it fires a shot that shot does more damage if you ctrlk the artillery before the shot landed. Sure it adds "gameplay" (if you can call it that) options, but so does any action a player can take, so to use my previous point, why not allow all the bug exploits that are listed as bannable as well then? Why not terraform when it can be done? Just because it can be done doesnt mean it should have ever been an option at all.
You can just take any game filled with bugs and say that they arent bugs because if they were then developers would have fixed them. How many bugs did faf fix that steam fa still has? Were those bugs at all since gpg didnt fix them? No, it is up to us to decide what game mechanics should and shouldnt exist at this time (because gpg doesnt exist to do that instead), instead of doing nothing about those bugs because we wrongly consider them valid gameplay mechanics.
We should first fix the bug, then balance underwater units once the bug is gone. 2 negatives dont give a positive in game design and 2 bugs dont cancel each other out.
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It's not a bug, it's an imperfect solution given the engine limitations. While I agree that given the slowness of Tempests and Atlantis it creates a weird balance I don't think it's a realy problem with subs. They are fast enough to dodge the shots easily and unless you pack them closely together (which makes their torp defenses insanely strong and without a groundfire it would be impossible to counter it efficiently). If your opponent is spending so much APM for ground firing why can't you spend half of that APM microing your subs?
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because the whole microing to hit them with weapons that shouldnt be able to hit them vs microing submarines so they dodge things they shouldnt have to dodge thing shouldnt exist, these 2 things should be balanced with valid mechanics instead of with these bugs (that a lot of players probably dont even know about because of how nonsensical they are)
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There is no real difference between exploits and bugs aside from what “community opinion” deems is acceptable. FAF could have allowed terraforming and expected mappers to take it into account. FAF could allow people to abuse aoe on t2 pd. FAF could allow people to block nukes with novax.
Any argument should be based on explaining why the change is beneficial to gameplay/what issue it’s solving in current navy meta. All this moralizing and relativism is bullshit. At least pick a better topic like how government is just legalized crime.
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Edit: i completely forgot about this, I don't know if its a engine limitation, but it would be a very nice buff if the Atlantis was able to produce units while moving... but that depends on the engine
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Quick and dirty solution that I think will (somewhat) satisfy both people for and against groundfiring subs.
Submerged units revive 50% less (or whatever percent you want) damage from all attacks except torpedos and depth charges.Bam. Groudfiring subs is still advantageous, but not to the point of rendering them obsolete. Bonus points for making tempest submerge not useless.
Its not a perfect solution, HARMS would need to be nerfed a little to stop it getting overbuffed, and sera t3 subs would still get one shot by tempests and summits (assumeing 50% resistance). But it should work.
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Atlantis is a support unit used by UEF to counter submarines and also give brief airsupport. Its a multifunctional unit. The reason why its a support unit is because if you get it out at the front or in the open BSHIPS rape it. However, if it sits in the middle of your crap, it absolutely rapes enemy submarines.
Simply put UEF anti-subs are crap. Coopers are crap. Coopers are also very vulnerable to frigates.
Atlantis is not crap, it has decent DPS, nice HP, and is not vulnerable to getting bumrushed by frig spam. So you sit it below your bships somewhere near the center of your army and its very useful, so long as you have a good wall of frigs and shields to protect it.
For the cost of an Atlantis its actually more efficient than Seraphim t3 submarines. So don't knock it.
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@The_Mak What, most of the impact of any explosion is lost within the first few metres of the charge. So unless you're literally dropping those explosive shells ontop of the submarine, its probably going to have no effect. The only reason why the shockwaves are "stronger", is because water is more dense, this also means that the shockwaves travel less far. As with all things the energy released by the bomb is fixed, so its just a trade off for range and power.
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I guess its once again up to whether the "micro pros" on balance team can stand their skills in fighting the controls be turned obsolete by fixing the controls instead, something which seems to stall this game for a while now
cringe
The realism argument is pretty stupid, it's based on the idea that both:
- The atlantis is hundreds of feet below the surface of the water
- Naval shells randomly explode when they hit the water surface.
Both are false, the Atlantis barely looks like it can stay underwater at times, and probably has such a large surface displacement that it couldn't do so in reality. It only sits a few feet under the water at most, and can surface in mere seconds after the command is given.
Shells that could still deal damage if they went into the water have existed since WW2, the only thing that states that shells made thousands of years into the future cannot is your idea of reality that was, ironically, given to you from unrealistic video games.
@OP
Units are going to be worse than others in this game, It's just a fact of reality. Is making submarines more powerful than "complicated" surface units something that you really want to happen? Is it healthy for the state of the game for this unit to be relevant? It's something that you need to think about. -
realism wise - yea shells that do damage underwater may exist, but I doubt that them being fired on surface of water above a submarine's maximum depth and horizontally would do anything to that submarine x meters below, instead of being fired at it from directly above or however they are supposed to, or that battleships would use those specific shells as their standard ammunition vs non-submarine targets as well (because battleships dont change what they fire when groundfiring submarines) considering that isnt even what they are designed for, or that they would even do aoe damage
also saying "future technology has shells that can shoot submarines underwater because future" and "atlantis cant stay underwater because present" at same time?
I would like to see submarines taking longer than a second to surface/go underwater if thats what it takes for them to not get hit by surface weapons
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Battleships do not shoot in a straight line towards targets, it's farily easy to assume that a high arcing shot can get within suitable distance of a submarine, especially when the shell loses it's forward velocity in the water. The only thing that really stops battleships being able to hit submarines is the artificial limitation on the targeting.
"future technology has shells that can shoot submarines underwater because future" and "atlantis cant stay underwater because present" at same time?
Weapon tech can advance over thousands of years, the foundations of basic physics cannot. Unless you want to state that there is some magic unobtanium metal that allows it to sink but only so much, and can be randomly removed to then float again.
I know it's cool to be a hero of justice and "fix problems" but actually think about it for a second. Submarines in this game are completely underdeveloped, an afterthought to counter things that hide in the water, take no real skill to use, take no real skill to deal damge, and are entirely boring to use and watch. Is buffing subarmines into viability actually healthy for the state of the game? Don't ruin the fun of the game in some blind crusade to "fix things" and be a hero.
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To be fair, they would need rather extreme arcs to sink enough to be meaningfully close to a sub if they fired at the surface where it was - remember, battleship guns aren't made for high arc shots, so while they can arc relatively well depending on the ship, they are far from mortars or such where the shell lands more vertically than horizontally. As for the argument over the sub balance I certainly can't comment meaningfully, that's for the balance team to do, but I can agree the Atlantis feels relatively weak most of the time
