Adjustment to the reclaim rates

Changes to the reclaim rates have been merged to FAF Develop for testing. With these changes, we aim to make the new feature of Area Reclaim work with FAF's gameplay (Area Reclaim is also on FAF Develop). These changes are also an experiment to reduce the volatility of the early game and slow the rapid progression of high reclaim maps.
If you lose a reclaiming engineer early on it won't be as punishing and with the area reclaim it will be easier to requeue the reclaim orders quickly.

Current stats of the game:
Reclaim speed of Props (Rocks): 50 m/s
Reclaim speed of Trees: 50 e/s
Reclaim speed of Wrecks: 25 m/s

Proposed changes:
Reclaim speed of Props (Rocks): 10 m/s
Reclaim speed of Trees: 50 e/s
Reclaim speed of Wrecks: 20 m/s

Before jumping to the conclusion that this will completely break the game and it will feel very weird please make sure to test out the changes. You might be surprised how these changes feel despite the 5x decrease. Especially if you used an attack move and now will utilize the Area reclaim instead.

For comparison here is a replay of me testing it out on The Ditch. The map where these adjustments will have the biggest effect.
Replay ID: #22701041

These seem like good changes to me, as long as manual reclaim remains the most effective way to reclaim by an adequate margin.

In so far as these changes might 'smoothen' out certain rng elements of the early game I'm interested in testing out this change.
As it relates to area reclaim however I'll borrow some of Cheeseberry's words from when I was chatting with him recently;
"so, I think lots of the "arguments" that have been made against area reclaim are just straight up garbage. But there were exceptions.
Good arguments against it were, for example (non exhaustive list of good counter arguments):

• your preference of apm being rewarded (which would be reduced with the current implementation)
• the meta changing to one that is decisively less fun on small-rock-heavy maps"

These are essentially my two reasons for being against area reclaim also. I'm a 1v1 guy who enjoys throwing in some extra effort in the first few minutes manually reclaiming. Also I enjoy the aspect of the game on maps like vya or crossfire canal which involve building strategically placed Engie factories, the correct number of engineers out of these factories, and then actively spreading said engies out over the course of the game to collect all the reclaim.
I don't want the meta to become building significantly less engineers, each with a 100-order queue of reclaim commands which you can set and forget. This seems markedly less skillful and interesting to me.
So anyway this change sounds interesting. But I don't believe it will do much if anything to address my two contentions with area reclaim.

@Paradox_of_War The argument of APM reduction is used in various places, and I agree that it can be perceived as a downside if nothing else changes.

There are a lot of other games where during the early stages there's not much to do. Take for example Warcraft 3 where Grubby (a popular caster of the game) is effectively either talking on stream (unrelated to the game) or spamming rally points like a Starcraft II player.

Personally, in addition to these changes, I think it would be interesting to make the first tech more accessible by reducing the mass and build time requirements of all tech 1 units (including structures) by (roughly) 33%. As a result:

• the tech 1 stage starts sooner.
• the tech 1 stage will consist of more units, both mobile and structures for you to manage (this is why we play the game afterall).
• the value of tech 1 extractors during the early game is increased, encouraging expanding over turtling.
• a tech 2 extractor is worth more mobile units, increasing the risk to tech up.
• power becomes a more relevant factor.
• early bomber is less effective, as you'll have more redundant units before the bomber arrives.

That way the 'real game' starts sooner, it's less trivial to just blindly tech up and at the same time once the tech 2/3/exp stage is reached the game plays largely unchanged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

@jip I've always wanted to see a longer tech 1, but would a cheaper tech 1 phase risk making tech 2 faster to get to?

I don't know, but it is off topic. I simply responded to Paradox stating that there are other ways to fix the problem of APM reduction.

It's extremely obvious what reducing build costs and -times of all t1 units by roughly 33% will do. It will make t2 less relevant. T1 will be able to trade much more efficiently with t2, whilst being easier to make than ever and still being easier to access, not requiring upgrades of several factories to T2. Fixing this would require a rework of T2 factories & units, therefore a rework of T3 factories & units, therefore a rework of T4, in addition to all air units, point defenses, ACU upgrades, etc.

Like Terraria said, slippery slope. This isn't a good solution. Not on topic, but something to take into consideration nonetheless

FAF t1 stage is already way way too prevalent in 1v1 and that change would functionally kill tech games in 1v1 entirely beyond quick t2 air to snipe half dead acus

t1 is also just the most boring stage of the game and should not be getting increased in general, games should be encouraged to stay at t2 stage as a median result over anything else

Let's get back on topic and not discuss some hypothetical further. Currently, there are no plans to change the tech 1 stage, and I doubt we would ever buff the whole T1.

This is a terrible idea the only ones up voting this to no surprise is the moderators.

@thewreck said in Adjustment to the reclaim rates:

This is a terrible idea the only ones up voting this to no surprise is the moderators.

@tagada Do you mind responding to what I said? When you have time of course

@deribus misclick

@jip I dont think you exactly understand what I meant. Besides the first 40 seconds when your initial factory is building, there is never really a dull moment, in 1v1 at least. Whether its queuing up extra factories, extra pgens or expanding in 3,4,5+ different directions with engineers etc, the game gets very intense very quickly on most maps. My point was admittedly less relevant to most players as its specific to me being a very sweaty 1700+ player motivated to break into the absolute top level of faf 1v1. I dont think the opening is boring but still I'd appreciate my 110% effort to be rewarded regardless. A super high effort and optimized opening is a significant variable that separates the BEST players from good/great players.

In terms of your idea to reduce t1 cost by 33%, I must say with all due respect I find it insanely unhinged xD. T1 is already extremely prevalent in all faf game modes, but especially in 1v1 I wager around 50% of my games or more never reach t2. T1 mass extractors are already so much more efficient than t2 which is what cause all-out t1 spam to largely be the meta on most 10x10s (and virtually all 5x5s). It sounds to me your comments are more geared towards big team games 4v4-8v8, where admittedly t1 is less pronounced (although I would argue is in a perfectly reasonable place) but I did mention in my post I was commenting from the perspective of 1v1. Anyway hope I didnt come across too hostile, just passionate!

Seems like it slows down high level play and does little to nothing for lower rated play. I think this is similar to what Paradox is saying, but imo area reclaim solves a problem that doesn't necessarily exist. What I mean by that is no low rated player is losing games because they didn't click enough rocks. There are a million other mistakes they're making that are far more important than clicking rocks. The difference between attack move and manually clicking rocks is meaningless until maybe 1600+ and that's being very generous, realistically it's a higher rating than that.

Even watching the replay was kind of sad, felt so much slower than normal ditch progress which sucks because that's fun to both watch and play.

Yes, it makes it less volatile early game and makes losing engineers less punishing, but I feel that that's the only real benefit and even then it's only a benefit at high level play.

Would there be a range indicator for this so that I can know the reclaim area? For instance where I would like to set the attack move point to reclaim only "rock a" and "rock b" but not "rock c" and where I know I can set the attack move point so that I can reclaim all "rock a" and "rock b" and "rock c"?

@exselsior yeah I just watched the replay and it looked so sad.

@paradox_of_war terari summarised it best for me:
"now they are making reclaiming slower to make it fair to everyone (you can no longer outscale old men because of manual reclaim)"

When will M29AI be released that can just play for us instead?