Old Player Returning to SC:FA - State of the Game Questions

Hi y'all!

Very recent addition to the FAF community and am overjoyed to see my all time favorite game alive and well!

I've been browsing the forums and balance patches to catch up on what I missed in my absence, and couple questions came up.

1. What have been some of the biggest changes to gameplay over the years?

2. Are the factions well balanced? How about the balance between the T1, 2, and 3 stages of the game?

3. Do the factions still have respective strengths/weaknesses, and if so, what are they currently? It wasn't clear to me from some of the recent balance patch notes if factions have maintained their uniqueness or have become more and more similar in the interest of balance.

4. Lastly, what's the future of FAF and how can I help support the continued development of this game and community?

Thanks for any and all input!

This may help to answer question 1: https://wiki.faforever.com/en/FAQ/Changes-from-steam

1. See above
2. Better balanced than in the vanilla SC:FA game. How strong T1/2/3 stages are will depend largely on the map being played on - on a 5km 1v1 map it's mostly about T1 tanks, on a typical 3v3 team matchmaker map the T3 and experimental stages are fairly strong while T2 is usually very short, and there's more variety in units used (air, navy, land, T3 arti/nukes/similar)
3. Yes, similarly to SC:FA there aren't much in the way of differences at the T1 stage, and the differences increase with each stage with T4 being the most varied. While they have become a bit closer to being similar with the recent balance patch it's only to a small extent.
   All the differences would be too great to list and many are small/not noticeable. The ones that I'm more mindful of in terms of land units (others will have different views on which differences are most significant):

• T1 - Outside of Aeon and ACUs factions are near-identical. Aeon has longer range fragile hover tanks, and the option of a longer range ACU gun upgrade. Seraphim has a bad land scout that doubles as a bad mini-tank.
• T2 - Cybran gets mobile stealth instead of mobile shield, and its mobile missile launcher is better at beating non-Aeon TMD (missile splits on death). (Cybran and UEF get long ranged tanks in addition to their front line tanks but at my rank they're rarely used due to needing lots of attention to be worth it; tanks have different stats so e.g. Aeon has a front line tank that's a bit slower with lots of health, seraphim has a more expensive tank that is more powerful as a result, Cybran gets a tank whose shots are more easily blocked by terrain, UEF tank is the cheapest)
• T3 - Aeon+Seraphim get sniperbots. Seraphim gets a good mobile shield. UEF+Cybran get tougher front-line tanks and more mobile alternative front-line tanks. (other less noticeable/rarely seen units at my rank - Aeon's mobile T3 arti can fire while moving, Aeon gets an anti-shield unit, UEF gets a decent mobile missile launcher).
  *T4 - The most varied stage of the game, with each experimental being unique.

Regarding 4:
The aim is to continue to grow and maintain this community. We are always looking for more volunteers to help us. Here you can read about the various things we do. The easiest way to contribute is to test new changes and to report bugs, be it by using the alpha versions of new client releases or playing the fafdevelop/fafbeta game modes.

smurf