Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread

@sylph_ said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

It might just be that the teleporting ACU instead opts to jump in 2 or 3 hops rather than 1 big leap.

But that will take longer and you will have to charge your teleport in less safe locations than your main base, so there is a tradeoff between one long range jump vs multiple short range jumps.
It also opens the possibility of short range teleports that are much quicker. For jumping up a plateau for example.

@clyf said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

I never assume they're not silently lurking about.

Yeah I also think some of them read it and I know a lot of the balance suggestions are pretty psycho and they don't wanna deal with that, but as people that have to make decisions they should at least have some transparency as to what they are thinking about stuff, especially if it got positive feedback from multiple people.

It just makes contributing unnecessarily harder when you never know if something you could work on right now is even wanted or not. They want less work and there are people ready to do the work, but nobody wants to do work that just gets thrown away in the end.

@ftxcommando said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

You build shields for extra hp so you can teleport out while being attacked by air?

With t1?

No, it's a response as to why T3, tele and billy shouldn't be all possible at the same time.

I am the forum goblin that reads all balance posts

I just do it during work on my phone so i barely respond cause i suck at typing on it

@thewheelie hello forum goblin, you should buy a garlic press!

FTX 2 days ago I used UEF teleport to kill shady by making torp launchers, so yes people do use UEF tele.
Last week I used a sera sacu to take out an SMD and nuked an air player.
And it was glorious!

The thing you guys are all forgetting is that not every one is 2k, and that seems to be where all these complaints come from. You elitists feel free to alter your games however you want, but please don't ruin the fun for the rest of us.

You want to make tele pointless? Fine, I'm sure the 25 high rankers who are super bothered by this and never play any games where people use tele, will love these changes.

While you're there though and talking about how it cant be stopped and its unfair etc, maybe take a look at the satellite you cant shoot down, or the t4 bomber you can cntrl K and kill anything under shields or the floating arti you can just spam and end any naval game with. Other than that you could just not alter stuff that has been great fun for 15 years and everyone likes.

You can literally walk away from a teleporting UEF acu making torp launchers and survive, sounds like game was over or shady was afk

@storm said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

t4 bomber you can cntrl K and kill anything under shields

the crash damage was already heavily nerfed?

@storm said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

the floating arti you can just spam and end any naval game with

Well excuse me for finding crippling Zthuee spam hilarious...wait, what were you saying earlier? Oh right:

@storm said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

please don't ruin the fun for the rest of us.

@ftxcommando I’m going to assume it’s the same game I was watching the live replay of before the replay crashed, and in which case if I were shady I would have intentionally sat in those torps to end my misery even if I wasn’t afk.

But yeah, the only way current UEF tele is even remotely useful is with a stealth tml base and those are so easy to counter.

I am just here to say can you stop balancing the game? I honestly can't keep up with how often you change things. its making it impossible to learn the game

@khal Are you getting a popup window whenever there's a change?
If so, do you pay attention when the game brings up the 'update' popup window?

I'm asking this because a friend of mine was immediately closing it without reading it (or about it), and didn't know about things like mobile factory changes!

(I'm asking this with the best intentions - I haven't found that many of the changes introduced by the balance team were major enough to 'spoil' my learning of the game, exception: the massive 15% vision change, which I dearly hope get's revisited...
It's possible that the reason for my experience being different is mostly playing 1v1s, where low-tech units are typically the most influential, now that I think about it.)

Still, I just wondered whether the problem was you being surprised by the changes, or that you can't get a 'feel' for the current balance situation?

I'm not sure about the UEF Billy nuke changes as 2 of them can now kill any game ender regardless of shielding. All you'd have to do is teleport next to the game ender fire the first billy, it impacts the shields dealing 12k damage all of them, then the second one teles in a second later and billies again overmatching whats left of the shielding and dealing the full 12k damage to the game ender.

To counter this you'd have to have 4 tmds in range to shoot the billy down before it impacts the shielding which gives the tmds a second or two to react which I'm not sure is possible due to they're projectile speed? Aeon tmd cant stop this as the billy would have to touch the magic ball but there'd be a shield or 3 in the billies way. An unreliable counter would be units with aoe that kill the billy as its being launched so triads and oblivions might be viable. The only real counter I see is a bubble SACU that can just tank the 24k damage.

I'd love to be proven wrong as the tele billy opens up some interesting strategies but in its current form i think it might be too oppressive.

@willowisppsi On the contrary, from what I've seen, aeon are the BEST at stopping this, since their TMD is quite effective against a billy!

4 aeon TMD, spread around the game-ender, seem completely reliable in stopping billy missiles without them even exploding!

Other faction's TMD, OTOH, have a billy explode into shields before 4 surrounding TMD can take them both out, requiring a bunch of shields to stop the billy from doing damage!

[edit - I did a bit more testing against double-billy launches for this

• UEF and seraphim require 4-8 TMD to be positioned between the ACUs and their billy targets - spreading 4-8 around the target is ineffective.
• Cybran sometimes just about get by with 4-8 TMD spread around the target - but I'd get extra just to be safe!
• Aeon are by far the best (Aeon TMD OP since forever! :D) - Aeon TMD can reliably defend against double-billy nukes even if they are spread around the game ender being defended. In fact, only 1 aeon TMD is needed for reliable defense against double-billy (2 if you want protection from every angle)!

'4-8', means 4 if the firing ACUs are 30 range units away, and 8 if the ACUs are 256 away.

Overall, the best defense against double-billy is probably a combination of shields and TMD. Enough TMD to shoot down a single missile (~6 in a circle around the game-ender, unless you're aeon, in which case just 2 on opposite sides seems fine). and enough shield to tank the rest!
I'm sure it's possible to co-ordinate a double-billy between shots of aeon TMD, but have you ever tried that even when you're NOT co-ordinating your timing with another player? The 'downtime' on aeon TMD is REALLY small, and the 'uptime' gives basically missile-invulnerability!]

Perhaps most crucially regarding what you were saying - all factions can defend against double-billy with sufficient TMDs - or even IN-sufficient TMD and a shield or two!

(I only tested about 60 nukes - there might be positions where this changes, but I did try to get close to the target as suggested. figures generally depend on range - the further away the billy is launched, the more TMD are needed to stop it before it hits a shield and blows)

@khal said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

I am just here to say can you stop balancing the game? I honestly can't keep up with how often you change things. its making it impossible to learn the game

No? Multiplayer games need ongoing balance adjustments or they die. There are only 2 balance patches a year, and almost none of them make substantial changes that require learning much of anything. There's almost nothing to learn in the balance changes as it is unless you're trying to memorize unit stats which is quite irrelevant for actually playing the game even up to a fairly high level.

If there's an anti-tele tower, it shouldn't just prevent a teleport, it should actually kill an ACU that teles in its range, which would necessitate more scouting/strategic play.

Scouts no tele tower
Begins teleport
Enemy sees teleport effect and speed-builds an anti-tele tower next to it
Teleport completes and you die
GG EZ

@deribus give it a 20 second warm up period

@exselsior said in Pending Balance Changes Feedback Thread:

Multiplayer games need ongoing balance adjustments or they die

While I'm certainly not against balance changes, I think this is one of those 'truths' that gamers often accept, that just isn't true.

Tons of games turn out to 'self-balance' really well over the years. Starcraft would go months and years without balance patches, yet the metagame kept changing as players learned and adapted.
Streetfighter 2 was known for how overpowered Honda and Dhalsim were, until players learned to play, at which point Ryu, Ken, and Guile were OP.... Except until it was zangief... Then years later dhalsim... Years more, boxer... Years later, Sagat. Nowadays, claw is broken! This is all despite zero balance patches.
Chess hasn't seen a lot of changes in the last few decades, or even centuries (admittedly there are a few per millennium!)

big segue-anecdote upcoming - skip at leisure! :

• I often see players get angry when a game doesn't get a balance patch for a few months, and more often than not it annoys me. I remember playing 'league of legends', and a new character came out that the community considered 'OP' due to getting un-blockable damage every time she landed 3 attacks. There was also a character, then considered 'trash', that would dodge attacks randomly - so she would never hit the 3 'stacks'. I had a blast taking advantage of this for all of maybe 2 weeks, at which point the developers buckled to community pressure, nerfed the 'OP' character that I'd been enjoying beating, and also completely re-designed the underplayed character that countered it!

I'm not against balance patches, but for many games, particularly "strategy" games, I think it's important to give the players plenty of time to devise, refine, and adopt strategies. I think this process takes many, many times longer than the 3-6 months between updates.

Sorry if this sounded like 'erm actually'. I totally understand the desire for changes, especially to keep a game 'fresh'. I just wanted to offer the suggestion that, as strategy gamers, it's important that we try to, and have the time to, overcome things strategically, before the game itself is changed.

I think games can work fine without constant balance updates, and often the best games do better with fewer, rather than many.

Is there any news on improving the Fatboy? It needs either longer range (to outrange t2 arty) or better shields.

If it's not listed, then no. But it's on the to do