Reclaim
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There has been a lot of discussion in the the last thread about RAS SACU balance about reclaim, especially dead land armies in the T2 through T4 stages.
The core of the issue is that a failed assault at that point in the game leaves an enormous mass gift on your enemy's doorstep. This discourages aggressive tactics, and encourages strategies like nukes and T3 artillery, which in a worst case die quickly only for you to reclaim 81% of the mass back.
There are countless ways to address this, but first I think there should be some guidelines to agree on:
- Map reclaim should experience minimal, if any change. This includes unit wrecks like on Seton's. Most maps are already tuned with a specific amount of reclaim in mind, and updating hundreds of maps is unrealistic.
- Players should be rewarded for fighting for and securing reclaim fields, but not to the point of becoming more important than mexes or creating an endless snowball.
- Reclaim at the T1 land stage is relatively healthy, and should be looked at as an approximate goal.
If you disagree with any (or all) of these don't hesitate to say so. I'm happy to change or refine these.
With that out of the way, what are some ways to nerf reclaim?
- Reduce reclaim speed. This has been done before but could be done again. I don't think this is the proper approach though, since the limiting factors for reclaim are typically the amount and the travel time, not the engineering capacity to grab it all. It also impacts map reclaim just as much as anything else.
- Reduce reclaim value by tier. This is perhaps the simplest and most brute force method, but that doesn't mean it's the least effective. It would however impact map reclaim unless some kind of exceptions were coded in. As an aside, it could be interesting if T4s did their death damage a split-second after the wreck spawned, reducing the reclaim value.
- Introduce a reclaim decay system. Make higher tier unit wrecks slowly reduce their reclaim value over time. This would encourage players to grab reclaim as quickly as possible. Again, exceptions would have to be made for map reclaim.
What are some other ideas? What do you think about those above?
Community ideas:
@KaletheQuick said in Reclaim:
- reduce wreck HP by tech level
- add 'wreck' option to target priorities
- buildings should still leave 81%
- Add "better reclaim view" and "unit selection cost" to the base game of FAF
- Instead of reducing reclaim by tier, determine the % reclaim left after a unit's death based on the ratio of energy cost to mass cost.
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I have some ideas. Raw stuff, just throwing it out there.
- reduce wreck HP by tech level. Making it more likely stray fire ruins reclaim.
- add 'wreck' option to target priorities, so you can retreat and burn the Fields on your way out unless the foe prepared well for a counter attack.
You must deceive the enemy, sometimes your allies, but you must always deceive yourself!
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I don't think reclaim is the problem. If you want to push bases at little or no risk you just build megalith or shielded mobile artillery. People that complain about mass gifts are those who look at poor late game decision making and then say its bad.
The number one reason T4 units die on push is because of 0 air control and getting bombed.
The number one reason T3 Spam dies on push is that they walk into shielded T4.
As it stands for a defensive base the only broken thing is the T2 artillery as that counters mobile artillery significantly. T2 artillery is already very expensive though.
I'd suggest decreasing T2 artillery fire rate, increasing its dmg so the dps is the same, and making it more accurate. That way T2 artillery is still useful, as a firebase unit and defense against fatty, but its not so broken as to render Mobile artillery useless.
Buffing t2 mobile shields would also greatly assisting sieges.
Also if you are truly spamming t3 armies then why is it so hard to send t1 engi at the back of it to pick up the reclaim?
What happens is people (especially high rated players) are complaining cause they'rein a team game where some random unknown 1000 builds monkeys and feeds 20k mass at a time. The reason they want to remove reclaim is so they don't have to deal with unknown randomers making their life hard.
It has nothing to do with balance.
Reclaim massively rewards aggression as it means you get to reclaim some of the mass you spent on units to win an area, therefore recouping the investment cost. Without it, then to take map control is significantly more costly than it otherwise would be, and this actually favours turtling.
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-Would it be possible to start the game out, in the first 10 ticks let's say, where all units leave 81% of their mass in reclaim, but after that, some kind of reduction for land units or all units? That would ensure map balance stays the same even if it would create a weird situation of a titan wreck being worth more if it is pre-placed.
-buildings should still leave 81% so there is a reason to fight for them. An attacker who successfully takes down buildings and holds the territory should get the opportunity to try to scoop them.
-Add "better reclaim view" and "unit selection cost" to the base game of FAF so players are made more aware of reclaim.
-Instead of reducing reclaim by tier, determine the % reclaim left after a unit's death based on the ratio of energy cost to mass cost. A unit with high E/M would leave less % of mass as reclaim. That ratio indicates whether it is a fragile high-tech unit or a dumb box of rocks. Ratios here are approximate because I didn't want to type all this in to a spreadsheet (and the unit DB may be slightly outdated in light of the new patch)
5:1ish - Mantis, Medusa, Hoplite, Banger, Rhino
6.6:1 - Wagner
7.5:1 - Viper
10:1 - Mole, Deceiver, Trebuchet
11:1 or bigger - Loyalist, Brick, Bouncer, Monkeylord, Megalith, pretty much all air unitsSuggested values:
At around 5:1 it would be ~81% reclaim
At 7.5:1 it would be 75% reclaim
At 10:1 it would be 55% reclaim
At 11:1 or above it would be 40% reclaim"reduce wreck HP by tech level. " -- i think wreck hp is based on the amount of mass in the wreck itself. So I don't think you can change this. Also, if your entire army dies, you've got nothing left to shoot the rubble.
"add 'wreck' option to target priorities, so you can retreat and burn the Fields on your way out unless the foe prepared well for a counter attack." -- this suggests weapons with no AOE could be used to kill reclaim. wrecks aren't normally treated as targets at all, so a unit with this toggled would have to behave differently than it would with any other target priority. it wouldn't really be a change in "priority" of targets, it would be something much deeper. Also: YOU MONSTER, how can you even consider encouraging people to destroy reclaim? It would be kind of silly if the new meta was to retreat once half your army was dead, and shoot the rubble on the way out even while you take some damage from enemy units.
reduce reclaim speed: doesn't solve the problems. If you make a mass donation at your opponent's doorstep, they won't have any problem getting engineers (existing ones, or building them straight out of factories) to collect the mass.
reclaim decay system: but we love reclaim. Watching it slip away from us would be stressful and unwanted. It also doesn't solve the problem, which is about big battles near built-up bases (with lots of build capacity), not raiding units dying in far-off places on the map. And it's against canon. How can there be reclaim available on maps if reclaim decays?
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From noob poin of view
I'd prefer to not add extra complexity
so please - no reclaim decayReclaim speed - will mess with T1 stage (stated as healthy). Also can mess with starting buildorder even more than reclaim amount nerf
Reclaim numbers - will need simple and predictable system
For example
T1 - 81%
T2 - 64% (20% less)
T3 - 49% (40% less)
T4 - 36% (55% less)...
T9 - 1% -
@KaletheQuick said in Reclaim:
- add 'wreck' option to target priorities, so you can retreat and burn the Fields on your way out unless the foe prepared well for a counter attack.
This would be a pain to implement since wrecks don't have targeting bones. Would also suck to micromanage because sometimes you do want to kill wrecks and sometimes you don't.
-Would it be possible to start the game out, in the first 10 ticks let's say, where all units leave 81% of their mass in reclaim, but after that, some kind of reduction for land units or all units? That would ensure map balance stays the same even if it would create a weird situation of a titan wreck being worth more if it is pre-placed.
That'd be the goal, and I'm sure it's possible. The question is who's going to code that.
Add "better reclaim view" and "unit selection cost" to the base game of FAF so players are made more aware of reclaim.
Absolutely. Forgot to add that to my OP.
Instead of reducing reclaim by tier, determine the % reclaim left after a unit's death based on the ratio of energy cost to mass cost.
That's an interesting idea. It does naturally reduce the reclaim value of higher tier units. There are a few downsides however:
- It's virtually impossible for players to do that mental math in their head
- Determining reclaim amount by a strict mathematical ratio like that is quite inflexible. It's difficult to change if the balance team decides T1 units are too much and T3 units are too little mass, for example.
- That's a big change to the air game, especially strats. Strat rush is already an incredibly powerful strategy, but it has the downside of leaving a 1.7k wreck on the ensmy side. Reducing that would be a pretty big strat buff.
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I don't think most people actually understand how damaging changing base mechanics of a game can be due to unintended consequences.
We see this all the time with patches
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It's virtually impossible for players to do that mental math in their head
Determining reclaim amount by a strict mathematical ratio like that is quite inflexible. It's difficult to change if the balance team decides T1 units are too much and T3 units are too little mass, for example.
That's a big change to the air game, especially strats. Strat rush is already an incredibly powerful strategy, but it has the downside of leaving a 1.7k wreck on the ensmy side. Reducing that would be a pretty big strat buff.What mental math are they needing to do in their head? Sorry, I think I missed something here.
And if simply redoing the reclaim values is an option, starting with the mass/energy ratio thing and tweaking from there is an option. They do that in games a lot, have a defined curve and then deviate from it intentionally for balance and stuff.
You must deceive the enemy, sometimes your allies, but you must always deceive yourself!
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It isn’t a real balance suggestion if there isn’t an idea making a mechanic complicated solely for the point of making it complicated and not really addressing anything a simple yet intuitive system could do just as well.
There are a grand total of 0 people in this game that are even aware the mole and trebuchet have equivalent mass:energy ratio.
Feel like strat bombers are the only real thing holding back the idea of a gradual reclaim decrease. Can’t imagine anything else quite as immediately damaging that benefits from the change. Might need to make an exception just for it, who knows.
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Map reclaim should experience minimal, if any change.
Changing unit wrecks and leaving wrecks already on the map is not possible.
Maps do the following:
- Pull a unit from the game files
- Place it where it is intended to be
- Kill all units with a script, before you spawn.
If you change the units for a balance patch, because the maps pull the units from the same place, they're still going to be affected by the changes. The only real way to circumvent this would be to create a "new" unit to place on the map without the reclaim changes. That is however, entirely unfeasble for FAF to do.
Regarding reclaim nerf for t3: I'm for it, but I don't think it will do much to make the meta around not tossing away units go away. It's a natural consequence of later game units in video games, unfortunately.
You would need to do a number of other changes in tandem:
- Make reclaiming more of a planned tactic rather than a fire and forget thing.
- T1 is always considered fine because at the time, you don't particularly have 400 t1 engineers sitting around for you to send everywhere on the map.
- Artificially extend the """t3 stage""" which implies making T4's better + more expensive
- Most people want to use T3's but by the time you have those in a teamgame you can very easily squeeze out a rambo boy, a monkey lord, or othersuch post t3 unit before the T3 player can invest enough mass to do damage.
- etc
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I think reducing reclaim to a flat 50% at all stages would be intuitive and promote a more aggressive meta. Reclaim is too much, that's for sure. Any agression that isnt guaranteed to succeed is currently considered a mass donation, high level gameplay is static and boring.
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Instead of reducing reclaim you could make buildings less tanky, so it's easier to make leaving the reclaim worth it. This would reward exploiting weak points more and would also allow for easier comebacks by good play like sneaking in a drop or getting a few units behind enemy lines.
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@KaletheQuick said in Reclaim:
What mental math are they needing to do in their head? Sorry, I think I missed something here.
I just meant knowing how much reclaim units are worth.
Changing unit wrecks and leaving wrecks already on the map is not possible.
Wrecks just store a reclaim value, and that value is constantly adjusted as they get reclaimed or take damage. Would it not be possible to write a script to adjust any reclaim at ACU spawn to its previous value?
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When reclaim is being placed: ask every time: if game time < 1.0 seconds (less than 10 ticks) then adjust reclaim values. That would add a logical test every single time reclaim was created, so it would slow down the game, but it would fix the problem.
OR, "at tick 10, iterate through all reclaim that exists on the map, if it's a certain kind of wreck, boost the mass values." That process would run only 1 time, so it wouldn't slow down the rest of the game, and it would happen before ACUs even spawn in when nobody is trying to use the UI at all.
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Kale in theory you could check something like army Civilian replace reclaim value with x value instead. Also secondarily. Just put this out there.
Make T3 Cheaper. To take an absurd example. If you a Percy only costs 800 mass, it only leave 640 reclaim. Obviously a lot more would tequire adjustment here for balancing but just wanted to put the idea out there
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Map reclaim should experience minimal, if any change.
Changing unit wrecks and leaving wrecks already on the map is not possible.
Maps do the following:
- Pull a unit from the game files
- Place it where it is intended to be
- Kill all units with a script, before you spawn.
If you change the units for a balance patch, because the maps pull the units from the same place, they're still going to be affected by the changes. The only real way to circumvent this would be to create a "new" unit to place on the map without the reclaim changes. That is however, entirely unfeasble for FAF to do.
This is only partially true.
As a proof of concept:
A mod that allows you to determine the multiplier for initial wreckages and 'dynamic' wreckages. This was only a few lines of code at the right places. I'll not go into details here but you can have a different reclaim value for initial and 'dynamic' wreckages without any of the suggestions.
I'll leave the discussion as to what to do as is.
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I favor (through whatever means necessary to implement), a slight reduction on mass gathered through reclaim, as I am a fan of aggressive gameplay and would like to see mass donations not be game ending and/or not having the giant reclaim fights where you are stuck fighting all or nothing over a reclaim field. As much as I want to say gut it hard, I'll instead just say a 'small' adjustment of 5-10% be tested.
Reducing wreck HP sounds interesting, as destroyed units would lose more $ based on overkill. Giant fights in reclaim fields would do more damage to surrounding wrecks. Higher tier units have more damage, and thus, more overkill potential. Maybe I am reading too much into it, but if tuned too heavily, it might get annoying seeing percies leave no wrecks due to 1600, 1450, (whatever the value is at these days) alpha strike damage, opposed to a bricks measly 150. Also if there is a way to make ACU Overcharge not leave perfect wrecks behind, that would be good. But idk how to do that without breaking OC's energy draw values...
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Can we have Ythotha lightning storms deal damage to reclaim? That was disabled because people like getting reclaim. But being able to send a weapon that by definition WON'T leave reclaim for your opponents actually could be a significant advantage in team games. It would be impossible to "donate" mass with an Ythotha.
(This would also make it basically impossible for the owner to reclaim it to get mass back, unless you could get some engies on "factory attack move" to scoop fast while the storm was happening...)
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I favor (through whatever means necessary to implement), a slight reduction on mass gathered through reclaim, as I am a fan of aggressive gameplay and would like to see mass donations not be game ending and/or not having the giant reclaim fights where you are stuck fighting all or nothing over a reclaim field. As much as I want to say gut it hard, I'll instead just say a 'small' adjustment of 5-10% be tested.
Reducing wreck HP sounds interesting, as destroyed units would lose more $ based on overkill. Giant fights in reclaim fields would do more damage to surrounding wrecks. Higher tier units have more damage, and thus, more overkill potential. Maybe I am reading too much into it, but if tuned too heavily, it might get annoying seeing percies leave no wrecks due to 1600, 1450, (whatever the value is at these days) alpha strike damage, opposed to a bricks measly 150. Also if there is a way to make ACU Overcharge not leave perfect wrecks behind, that would be good. But idk how to do that without breaking OC's energy draw values...
Aggressive gameplay is not mass donating if units are balanced properly which thye're not currently.
Stating its good because it removes fighting over reclaim fields, and saying you are in favour of aggressive gameplay is contradictory.
