SACU Rebalance

Philosophically I think the whole point of a modular upgrade system is to leave identifying the best combination up to the player.

For tele just increase the cost. It'd make it more costly to install after construction, but with custom presets what's the issue? Retrofitting in the field costs more, price for flexibility etc. etc.

It would also change the balance on things like tele gc if you can have pre built tele bois due to how the math behind sacrifice works. Tele gc is a niche that happens maybe once every 500 games, but imo it’s a fun niche in chill games. Pretty sure prebuilt tele bois would be a massive buff to tele gc which I don’t think we want.

Then also rebalance sacrifice. I'm raising the subject at this time because the early stages of a major SACU rebalance is the best time to do it.

Let me figure out how feasible this is before we have another fight to the death over it though.

There needs to be some level of justification for it to make finding out if it's possible worthwhile, and we've already gotten confirmation that it'll be a pain to implement.

I'm struggling to find any benefit whatsoever to being able to do this. The only change I've ever made to an SACU after it's built is adding teleport/sacrifice/tml and those are entirely one off cases where I wouldn't want a prebuilt of those cluttering up the build menu anyway. Misclicking a tele boi would royally suck if you don't realize it asap.

If it was just a feature I could ignore, then I'd be fine with it. This is not the case; it has balance implications that both myself and Nomander have pointed out. Not only regarding costs, but one of the weakness of tele bois is that they're telegraphed far in advanced. If you see a Sera or Aeon SACU getting upgraded while scouting, you know they're making tele bois and can plan accordingly. I have won and lost games with that knowledge from scouting, and with how strong it can potentially be it should be telegraphed like it is currently.

There needs to be some level of justification for it to make finding out if it's possible worthwhile

On the contrary, sometimes I've found out if as many as six totally useless things are possible before breakfast.

@exselsior said in SACU Rebalance:

I'm struggling to find any benefit whatsoever to being able to do this. The only change I've ever made to an SACU after it's built adding teleport/sacrifice/tml

Reclaim value & veterancy are based on the initial SACU cost (i.e. they're not taking in account any upgrade added later). There are a lot of important tradeoffs there. Do I want fast veterancy for battle SACU? Or high reclaim so I can regain my mass when it dies? Etc

I'm totally fine with current presets system, but if SACU will be drastically changed it would require changes in presets to not make them broken

@sainserow said in SACU Rebalance:

Reclaim value & veterancy are based on the initial SACU cost (i.e. they're not taking in account any upgrade added later). There are a lot of important tradeoffs there. Do I want fast veterancy for battle SACU? Or high reclaim so I can regain my mass when it dies? Etc

AFAIK that was fixed some time ago and now the veterancy and reclaim should work properly for both upgraded and preset SACUs.

@tagada Good to know, but when did that happen? Can't find it in any patchnotes (re-checked last 4 years official patchnotes)

@tagada said in SACU Rebalance:

AFAIK that was fixed some time ago and now the veterancy and reclaim should work properly for both upgraded and preset SACUs.

I think this was planned, but not finished. See also #4070. Veterancy that is dispersed does take into account enhancements. But how much veterancy that is required to level up does not. And sacrifice also does not take into account enhancements.

What about https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/6040 ?

I've checked it in current game and basic seraphim SACU & battle preset gained the same 400/4000 veterancy (10% progress) after killing 1 harb. My question is why such a change wasn't explicitly mentioned in any game patchnote ? It's quite a significant change worth mentioning, it's very strange to have "hidden" patches.

@tagada said in SACU Rebalance:

What about https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/6040 ?

That just equalizes the requirements I think, you'd have to check and verify it in-game

@sainserow said in SACU Rebalance:

I've checked it in current game and basic seraphim SACU & battle preset gained the same 400/4000 veterancy (10% progress) after killing 1 harb. My question is why such a change wasn't explicitly mentioned in any game patchnote ? It's quite a significant change worth mentioning, it's very strange to have "hidden" patches.

It is mentioned here in a release on GitHub, which you can find a direct link to in-game in the changelog dialog.

Okay a small 3 days later than planned but better late than never.

What i will write here is the vision that i have on where to take the sacu rebalance. Note that a lot is still up for debate and nothing is set in stone.

The global picture

So i assume everyone knows that aside from ras boys other sacu's are barely seen in the average teamgame. The reason is simple: they're just not good enough because of a multitude of issues. They cost too much mass or e, take too long to build or just have upgrades that aren't worth getting. Generally speaking sacu's are a giant untapped resource that's kind of just sitting in the game being ignored by almost everybody.

Therefore they're gonna get rebalanced so they will be worth making. The general idea is to create 3 main sacu presets for each faction. A rambo preset, a support preset (more info on this later) and an engineer preset (of course there are also other more faction specific niche presets). The rambo preset will basically work the same as the current presets do (but better balanced) while the support presets are an entirely new (mostly) preset that's meant to support big armies. The engineer preset kind of speaks for itself, but the main difference is that they will be more usefull at the front than they currently are.

The way i envision the impact of this is that in mid to lategame land armies you will see multiple sacu groups as part of the bigger army, instead of evergrowing numbers of t4's.

The details

To allow the 3 main sacu presets to exist we first need to look at the current sacu upgrades, their presets and the sacu's themselves. It is extremely important that wrong upgrades do not overlap with different presets as this might make some presets obsolete.

So first of all the base sacu's. They will be nerfed for 1 simple reason. Not because they are strong but because them existing as they do now interferes with the plan of having 3 main sacu presets. A few examples:

• The base bp of sacu's needs to be nerfed substantially to make engineer sacu's (especially at the front) ever worth it. There is currently zero use cases for an engineer sacu because rambo sacu's already have so much inherent bp on them that coupled with all the survivability upgrades they are simply that much better than engineer presets on the front. You can outbuild a single t3 gunship with a rambo sacu.
• The base hp of sacu's needs to be nerfed to give the planned support presets a possible counter: sniping them for their lower hp.
• It also makes no sense that the non rambo presets basically have the same dps as a percy when they're clearly not meant for fighting. I remember a specific game where i walked a gc into a group of 20 ras boys and i managed to kill 3 ras boys before their combined 6k dps (2.5x the gc dps) killed my gc in about 20 seconds. That kind of stuff should simply not be possible.

The base sacu will get some buffs in return although we haven't discussed the details yet. It's probably gonna be something like a cheaper mass cost and/or lower bt, but it is important to keep in mind that most likely base sacu's are always gonna be too bad to build because they try to do too much at once. The moment it is made a viable option for anything it will almost instantly become OP since it's viable to do that one thing plus has the additional benefits.

The way gateways are balanced will also be changed quite a lot. I want them to work in a similar style as factories: You have multiple of them with some adjacency. Gateways always had terrible adjacency because with it ras boys would become way too strong, so the plan is to buff the adjacency anyway to become similar to t3 land facs in efficiency, and nerf ras boys as much as it's necessary to not make them stronger.

More specific details

So the support presets are probably the most controversial but also the most exciting changes for me. 1 faction already has a set of 3 support upgrades that should work pretty well: UEF sacu's with a jamming, sensor and shield field upgrade (although obviously it needs to be rebalanced to be worth making). The other factions right now are lacking these upgrades though. We have come up with a few possible ideas but like i said at the start nothing is set in stone, so please mention it if you have a good idea. Maybe it will be used.

The current plan is for sera to get a regen field which has the same function as the current regen field on the normal acu. The plan for aeon is for them to get a chrono support acu (again similar function as the normal acu). Both of these kind of fit their faction theme since the main acu already has these upgrades. It's probably gonna be relatively hard to balance these upgrades properly since the effect can be very strong, but i believe that with enough testing it will be possible.

Cybran is by far the toughest one for me though and aside from a multitude of ideas we haven't exactly gotten many concrete ideas for them yet. A big issue is that both their sacu's and acu have a lot of niche upgrades that don't necessarily fit into a preset. Right now the only support upgrade that exists on the sacu is the sam upgrade, which is fine but nowhere near enough.

Here are a couple of ideas that we came up with/ got mentioned:

• Have a damage aura that damages enemy units (so the opposite of regen aura). You can combine it with cloak which is an almost unused upgrade to walk into enemy armies to damage them. It sounds cool but the main issue with this is that it isn't a support upgrade. That isn't necessarily the worst for cybran since they're kinda known as the aggressive faction, but it's also kinda easy to counter with spyplanes (although funnily enough you can have the sam upgrade on them as well to shoot them down)
• Have a damage aura that increases the damage of your own units that surround it. This feels kinda lame for me personally though.
• Have a speed aura since cybran is known to be the raid focussed faction. The issues with this however is that it's mostly useless in a straight fight (unlike the other support upgrades) and it won't work on a lot of maps where flanking is not really an option. It also is awkward that sacu's are very slow themselves and buffing the speed of units around you will make other units slowly leave it.

If you think you have a better idea we would be happy to see it.

All in all right now we are in the conceptual phase. We (think) we got the general idea down and will slowly start implementing these on fafbeta. Obviously a big overhaul like this needs quite a lot of testing and even then there will be no way we get it right the first time, but considering the current state of sacu's we have very little to lose imo.

You could let Cybran Support SCUs rebuild the wrecks of dead units.

Just wanna comment that I love the amount of thought that is going into faction diversity here. Re:

@theweakie said in SACU Rebalance:

The issues with this however is that it's mostly useless in a straight fight (unlike the other support upgrades) and it won't work on a lot of maps where flanking is not really an option

Might not be an issue necessarily: not every faction has to do as well as any other on any terrain. If cybrans are generally faster/lighter/more aggressive, then their strength would be in flanking, raiding, and winning by manoeuvre. If that doesn't work on maps that are more closed, then that's fine imo. Let other factions shine where they do their stuff best.

Make Cybran SACUs upgrade all nearby units' weapons to lasers.

Kidding..... kinda.

Only somewhat normal idea I can think of for Cybran is maybe giving them the TML redirect like Loyalists but also somehow add an arty redirect as well. Doesn't seem that great tbh but it's just an idea.

Overall I really like the plan so far.

Large deceiver field?

Why would cybran get a speed upgrade when there is a faction in the game that is perpetually forced to play reactive at all times on land as soon as titans are no longer relevant damage dealers, primarily because nobody wants to do anything about the fact all the mainline battle tools are the slowest things in the land game.

The stun gun is technically a support upgrade while AA is offense. You could put stun as an alternative to gun and giving the upgrade increased range.