Buff Wagner back

Can any other amphibious tank hit a submerged Wagner even? If not why buff? It is meant to travel to and stay in water.

Thread clearly doesn't meet the guidelines. I suggest you go find my last Dual Gap game, where I built 100 Wagner, so you can go provide a replay of wagner being useless. I am currently unable to retrieve said replay ID.

Wagner have too low hp to safely cross any mildly sized naval army, and have terrible torps to boot. Stealth is laughable.

IIRC the justification for wagner nerf was that they are extremely powerful for raiding on larger naval maps like Roanoke. The nerf does make them pretty awful even compared to other hover tanks.

Still brings up the point that NO other default T2* hover tank can even hit a Wagner once it is under water.
Still brings up finding then using the unit for it's desired purpose.

@Psions said in Buff Wagner back:

Thread clearly doesn't meet the guidelines. I suggest you go find my last Dual Gap game, where I built 100 Wagner, so you can go provide a replay of wagner being useless. I am currently unable to retrieve said replay ID.

Wagner have too low hp to safely cross any mildly sized naval army, and have terrible torps to boot. Stealth is laughable.

It meet but barely.

Any hint how too find your replay? Game length, other players, your position?
You have a lot of Dual Gap games. Maybe more that I have games on all maps.

@advena said in Buff Wagner back:

It meet but barely.

Tbh you are missing 1 key point, and I've hinted at it several times just maybe not in away you understood properly.
You need to explain how you are using these in your personal games and what you've seen. While a replay would help a simple description of where the problem may be occurring can be done in text.

Wagner is complete gorbage. Make them able to better kill pd so they dont get hardcountered by 2 pds on islands

I think a good change would be to change their gun in a way they can hit pd reliably without hitting walls too much that way they are still sheit against units but get more viable at their actual only role: raiding

This post is deleted!

Looks like I should explain how I see roles of T2 amphibious units and why wagner is bad in some of them.

  1. Raiding. Wagner is fine. Overall unit strength is not that important as speed, stealth, cost and DPS.
  2. Land fallback option in different cases. In this area wagner is shit because of bad stats. This I suggest to fix.
    Reasons when you want to have fallback option:
    2.1) Swamp maps. They are rare and have other balance issues.
    2.2) Overall choice of more mobile army in some cases.
    2.3) Bad main tank performance in some cases. Notably Aeon against T1 spam and Cybran at hilly maps
  3. Navy fallback option. Not applicable to wagner. (Unless you make it floating on surface)

Most important problem IMO is 2.3

@advena Wagner basically is everything the t2 floaties are but worse, and missing the ability to properly damage navy. Blazes are much better at raiding than a wagner.

The stealth is pretty irrelevant.

the wagner at 200 mass or with more hp would be broken underwater, what they need is rocket damage to function better vs broken t1 pd and t1 spam out of range šŸ™

Why not give Wagners stealth??????? Would emphasize their raiding role, fit well within the cybran faction theme, add fun and surprise to the game and I think stealth is an underused feature in faf where radar is so important in general. Come on!!

They already have stealth functionally speaking when they are underwater unless you mean sonar

Iā€™m a shitty 1k Global. Any balance or gameplay suggestions should be understood or taken as such.

Project Head and current Owner/Manager of SCTA Project

Add a Float/dive button?

You cannot combine Wagner's role as annoying amphibious raiding unit on large map and a decent ish normal tank. Right now it does the first well while being a weak normal tank. If you buff it then it will become OP on large navy raiding maps, if you change it in a way that nerfs it's raiding role you remove the only thing that's special about it. There is a case to be made for nerfing it's under water speed even more while buffing it's raw stats but again, you take away Wagner's advantages in its specialty because you want to bring it more line with standard bland tanks.

I was going to make another thread on Wagner, but instead I'll necro this one. I feel like Wagner is still in a bad spot, at least in casts I watch I never, ever, ever see it built. I'm not sure why and don't have a coherent case against Wagner as it is now, but I want to loosely summarize my thoughts on Wagner so we can figure it out.

First, raw stats, taking each T2 tank as reference:

  • Versus Blazes: Wagner is 65% more expensive, has 10% more health, twice the DPS, 0.6 less speed and 2 less range. Compared to 2 blazes, Wagner is 20% cheaper, has 55% of their combined health, same DPS.
  • Versus Yenzynes: Wagner is 35% more expensive, has 10% less health, 66% more damage, 2 more range and 0.3 less speed.
  • Versus Riptides: Wagner is 8% cheaper, has 33% less Hp, 5-10% more DPS, 4 more range and same speed.

Just like OP post wrote, when looking at pure numbers Wagners are the worst tanks in terms of sqrt(DPS * health)/mass ratio by some margin, especially against Blazes. It's not a huge difference, so why are they not being built? I think the answer lies in the fact in them not being good in many scenarios where other hover tanks are.

  • First obvious scenario is fighting navy. All other tanks can do that, Wagner cannot. That covers maybe three quarters of all hover tank usage.
  • Second scenario is crossing water to get to another landmass and do major raids, e.g. kill a bunch of factories or a smaller land force. Obviously Aeon is strictly best here (hover flak + shields) followed by Seraphim (hover flak), but even between UEF and Cybran Wagner is at a disadvantage, because of worst DPS * health/mass ratio but especially because of abysmal HP making them very vulnerable to air.
  • Third scenario is small raids across water, e.g. sending a few Wagners on Roanoke to kill a few mexes. Wagners are good at it and were nerfed specifically to not be OP doing this. This one is an unknown to me. Does anyone build Wagners for this still? How does this compare to Zthuee spam on maps like pizza?

I feel like there is a problem, but don't know what it is. Maybe Wagners are overspecialized and therefore almost never worth building? Maybe it's okay for them to be really, really good for some things, uniquely so, just like Zthuees, Auroras or Ilshavohs, and a nerf was an overreaction? Or is it a case of FAF community not understanding that Wagners are still good and it will eventually rediscover the unit?

Wagners work great against cancering UEF navy, what are you gonna do, send a 1k mass boat to deal with each 250ish mass wagner driving around the map?

Doesn't do much against Aeon and Cybran because they have torpedo spam built into their navy mix. Sera it should also be fine against.

Torp bombers cost less than Wagners, can target Wagners and they 2-shot them. Doesn't that work? Conversely, if I have Wagners driving around the map in enemy half, I'm not going to send my air force to all of them to protect them from torps.

To think about it, that's another Wagner weakpoint: only amphibious T2 tanks that can be targeted by torps like the rest of navy can.

@advena I totally think that the wagner should be a kickass amphibious tank... Particularly given the difference between 'hover' and 'amphibious'... (Namely, that I really think an 'ocean bottom' unit should probably beat a 'hover' unit in a mass-for-mass fight... All other things being equal.)

Now this part is a bit of an aside, but can you elaborate on your 'justification'?
quote: "I use DPS*HP/mass^2 as combat effectiveness estimation"

This seems like an interesting equation to use, but I feel like it's one that skews results or points to unnecessary and perhaps misleading conclusions.

The nature of the game, as far as I have experienced it, is that more expensive units have an effect of 'compacting' mass on the battlefield, giving them a significant advantage against equal mass spent on more spread out (cheaper) units.
Most of this is simply down to units not being able to attack until they are in range, and thus the more expensive units always being able to bring 100% of their firepower to bear in a battle - compared to cheaper opponents.

Your equation suggests that Titans are much more effective than percivals, but neither are as good as strikers...
(And this isn't even taking overkill into account!)
That equation generally suggests that cheaper units are better, mass-for-mass, than expensive units, which is something I don't see ingame.

I'm thinking you might just be better off not squaring the mass cost before dividing by it. Just a thought. x

Give the Wagner some torp defense