Another Novax conversation
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@Caliber said in Another Novax conversation:
Energy costs just makes sense, radar and omni both have energy drain so why is the novax the exception?
From a gameplay perspective radar/omni only have an energy drain because they can skip tech tiers through upgrades. Putting the mass cost of the radar into the form of energy upkeep encourages teching up to appropriate pgen efficiency levels before being able to build a high-tech radar independently of engineer tech at the front.
There is also an additional point that expendable units with an energy upkeep are expensive to build but cheap to replace. Radars/omnis are killed rather often for a structure, especially T1 and T2 radars.Novax does not fit into either design idea because it is not upgradeable from anything and never gets destroyed since it is artillery. The only thing upkeep would do for a Novax is punish energy stalls (not like this game gives many opportunities for an enemy to do that), increase its effective mass cost, and make it slightly harder to defend since there is another pgen somewhere on the map.
I will concede that thematically it may make sense, but balance-wise if you add energy upkeep to Novax it would simply get a cost reduction. I say "may make sense" because on one side there's arty and intel energy drain, but on the other hand mobile units don't have intel (but not counterintel) or weapon energy upkeep.
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@Dorset said in Another Novax conversation:
I agree with you something dramatic needs to be changed not just cost changes.
I've discussed this idea last year over voice, and I'll post it here. It has three parts. The goal is to actually utilize the satellite layer. This layer exists in the game, but there's not much going on there. Ideally these satellites become part of armies, like any other mobile unit. To support the Fatboy - from above!
Not a ground station, but a factory
At the moment you need an additional ground station for each satellite. This is a little bit cumbersome. Both from a programmers perspective (the satellite is not shared when your defeated - it is rebuilt at the station). As I think it thematically lacks a bit.
Proposal: turn it into a factory. Allow it to pump satellites, like a regular factory.
Multiple type of satellites
Instead of just having one satellite, there will be three:
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- A scout satellite. Relatively cheap and provides various types of intel. Enables the UEF to have Omni intel on-site to counter stealth and cloak, for example.
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- A missile-based satellite. This would be the 'default' satellite, at the same costs of the current satellite. It fires a salvo of missiles. And those missiles can of course be intercepted by TMD. The missiles do not track, just like regular missiles. They will have some AOE though. And of course, you don't want to use this against Cybran missile deflectors
. By being missile-based, the satellite is easier to counter:
- A missile-based satellite. This would be the 'default' satellite, at the same costs of the current satellite. It fires a salvo of missiles. And those missiles can of course be intercepted by TMD. The missiles do not track, just like regular missiles. They will have some AOE though. And of course, you don't want to use this against Cybran missile deflectors
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- It makes the satellite worse against mobile armies. Just like mobile missile launchers.
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- It makes the satellite unusable against naval armies, as they are usually packed with mobile TMD.
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- You don't need to built shields everywhere, likely just 2 TMDs at each location.
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- A laser-based satellite. This would be similar to the current satellite, except that it's designed to bust shields. The beam is continuous. For its costs, it will deal relatively low damage to non-shielded units (think 1/4th). And it will deal about half the amount of damage against shields as the current Novax does. But then of course continuous.
All satellites will have an energy upkeep. The rational of @Nomander that upkeep is unusual for mobile units is correct. But given that these are the only units on the satellite layer, they can be their own niche. They are essentially flying buildings anyway. All weapons of the satellites also have upkeep to fire, just like for example stationary artillery and the Ravager do.
When a player runs out of power the satellites simply stop firing because of the weapon upkeep. When a player loses the last Novax center all satellites become uncontrollable and unelectable. They start losing health (and visually: orbit). When their health drops to 0, they crash to the ground.
Allow SMDs to intercept satellites (manually)
This idea is not new. It's used in LOUD. I like it thematically. It provides the player with an option to immediately counter a satellite if the player thinks it's necessary. For example, countering the laser-based satellite would be a no brainer if you are also being shelled by artillery.
Now, I don't talk about costs here because that's all too soon to discuss. It's the idea - the theme and the experience of it, is what this proposal is about. And of course the positioning of the units in the roster, what are their purpose and how do they remain balanced mechanically?
A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned
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@Jip really cool info.
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@Dorset There's a lot possible in this game. Of course, not everything. But if as long as you don't draw outside the lines then all of this wouldn't even be much work.
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@Jip Well I have zero skills or knowhow to be able to offer any assistance but I am sure happy that we have people who know how and are willing. I looked at a simple log file trying to troubleshoot my crashing and my brain nearly exploded from whatever the hell I read on that notepad lol
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@Jip I like this idea, and FWIW, using SMD to kill a satellite also exists in BlackOps with the 'Artemis' Aeon Experimental (nuke) Satellite.
Which is great, although the fact that SMD can shoot down the Artemis and not the Novax currently is... weird.
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@Jip said in Another Novax conversation:
@Dorset said in Another Novax conversation:
I agree with you something dramatic needs to be changed not just cost changes.
I've discussed this idea last year over voice, and I'll post it here. It has three parts. The goal is to actually utilize the satellite layer. This layer exists in the game, but there's not much going on there. Ideally these satellites become part of armies, like any other mobile unit. To support the Fatboy - from above!
Not a ground station, but a factory
At the moment you need an additional ground station for each satellite. This is a little bit cumbersome. Both from a programmers perspective (the satellite is not shared when your defeated - it is rebuilt at the station). As I think it thematically lacks a bit.
Proposal: turn it into a factory. Allow it to pump satellites, like a regular factory.
Multiple type of satellites
Instead of just having one satellite, there will be three:
-
- A scout satellite. Relatively cheap and provides various types of intel. Enables the UEF to have Omni intel on-site to counter stealth and cloak, for example.
-
- A missile-based satellite. This would be the 'default' satellite, at the same costs of the current satellite. It fires a salvo of missiles. And those missiles can of course be intercepted by TMD. The missiles do not track, just like regular missiles. They will have some AOE though. And of course, you don't want to use this against Cybran missile deflectors . By being missile-based, the satellite is easier to counter:
- A missile-based satellite. This would be the 'default' satellite, at the same costs of the current satellite. It fires a salvo of missiles. And those missiles can of course be intercepted by TMD. The missiles do not track, just like regular missiles. They will have some AOE though. And of course, you don't want to use this against Cybran missile deflectors
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- It makes the satellite worse against mobile armies. Just like mobile missile launchers.
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- It makes the satellite unusable against naval armies, as they are usually packed with mobile TMD.
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- You don't need to built shields everywhere, likely just 2 TMDs at each location.
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- A laser-based satellite. This would be similar to the current satellite, except that it's designed to bust shields. The beam is continuous. For its costs, it will deal relatively low damage to non-shielded units (think 1/4th). And it will deal about half the amount of damage against shields as the current Novax does. But then of course continuous.
All satellites will have an energy upkeep. The rational of @Nomander that upkeep is unusual for mobile units is correct. But given that these are the only units on the satellite layer, they can be their own niche. They are essentially flying buildings anyway. All weapons of the satellites also have upkeep to fire, just like for example stationary artillery and the Ravager do.
When a player runs out of power the satellites simply stop firing because of the weapon upkeep. When a player loses the last Novax center all satellites become uncontrollable and unelectable. They start losing health (and visually: orbit). When their health drops to 0, they crash to the ground.
Allow SMDs to intercept satellites (manually)
This idea is not new. It's used in LOUD. I like it thematically. It provides the player with an option to immediately counter a satellite if the player thinks it's necessary. For example, countering the laser-based satellite would be a no brainer if you are also being shelled by artillery.
Now, I don't talk about costs here because that's all too soon to discuss. It's the idea - the theme and the experience of it, is what this proposal is about. And of course the positioning of the units in the roster, what are their purpose and how do they remain balanced mechanically?
Yes please
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@Jip said in Another Novax conversation:
A missile-based satellite. This would be the 'default' satellite, at the same costs of the current satellite. It fires a salvo of missiles. And those missiles can of course be intercepted by TMD. The missiles do not track, just like regular missiles. They will have some AOE though. And of course, you don't want to use this against Cybran missile deflectors . By being missile-based, the satellite is easier to counter:
It makes the satellite worse against mobile armies. Just like mobile missile launchers.
It makes the satellite unusable against naval armies, as they are usually packed with mobile TMD.
You don't need to built shields everywhere, likely just 2 TMDs at each location.Imo it probably makes more sense to make it similar to this http://faforever.github.io/spooky-db/#/XNL0403. Firing an artillery barage of rockets that do decent AoE so it's usefull against armies (but is possible to be microed against it because i assume the missiles take some time to arrive due to travel time). That will also make it overcome being useless against atleast smaller quantities of navy.
I really like the idea of building different kinds of sats though.
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I Like the idea of making the novax a factory with different types of sats.
The only thing I would say is I dont like the idea of extra damage to shields, I believe it would give the uef too large of an advantage in arty war type scenarios/late game, Im my mind energy weapons like beams should do less damage to shields as they are also energy based.
UEF already has the mavor which just deletes shields anyway.
I actually tried creating the sat missile variant and it looks pretty sweet, kinda reminds me of space invaders as it moves around droping projectiles.
I gave it the same firing sequence of the uef cruiser for testing.Removing the firing sound creates the effect of it being in orbit too.
The only thing that looks strange is the tmd, as the sat is almost directly over the target, tmd immediately engages the projectiles as soon as its fired making it seem like either the sat is not very high up or the tmd can reach orbit.
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How about a sat that projects a shield around an area
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The SAT layer is a nice idea from futurist stand point (what kind of future wouldn't have intel Sats) but an ammunition based orbital thing- kinda would ruin some of the sense of 'realism' for me. But that's just me.
@Jip said in Another Novax conversation:
Allow SMDs to intercept satellites (manually)
This idea is not new. It's used in LOUD. I like it thematically. It provides the player with an option to immediately counter a satellite if the player thinks it's necessary. For example, countering the laser-based satellite would be a no brainer if you are also being shelled by artillery.
Looking forward to things if this goes up for testing... fingers crossed
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I think novaxes are relatively fine as they are, Maybe a slight balance change, but you have to remember a novax is 36k mass iirc, 2 of them costing about the same price of a t3 arty +/- 2k mass, but the damage output is nowhere near t3 arty, yeh arty doesn't have the precision of a novax, but a novax doesn't have the damage of an arty, it takes 2-3 artys of novaxes to be able to penetrate anything heavily shielded, and at that point you could have a Game Ender up.
Yes maybe there could be a way to shoot down novaxes, but the day that happens i guarantee the novax will essentially be the next mercy, and if your opponent has time to build a novax and not get punished that is you not doing your job.
Maybe something could be done about the damage, but if your nerfing damage you have to give it something else, someone mentioned more aoe, but then would that give it shield spill at that point which would arguably be even better than it is now, or then you have to think "oh shit, they can hit two pgens at the same time" which will kill your grid faster, makes targeting engies much more worth, etc, etc...
Something as simple as a damage nerf or way to shoot it down wouldn't work.
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@CM_Nicholas said in Another Novax conversation:
Maybe something could be done about the damage, but if your nerfing damage you have to give it something else, someone mentioned more aoe, but then would that give it shield spill at that point which would arguably be even better than it is now, or then you have to think "oh shit, they can hit two pgens at the same time" which will kill your grid faster, makes targeting engies much more worth, etc, etc...
Shield spill is applied to all damage against a shield, of any kind. The only exception that I can think of is the tech 3 mobile shield buster of Aeon - I'm not sure if that spills.
@CM_Nicholas said in Another Novax conversation:
I think novaxes are relatively fine as they are, Maybe a slight balance change, but you have to remember a novax is 36k mass iirc, 2 of them costing about the same price of a t3 arty +/- 2k mass, but the damage output is nowhere near t3 arty, yeh arty doesn't have the precision of a novax, but a novax doesn't have the damage of an arty, it takes 2-3 artys of novaxes to be able to penetrate anything heavily shielded, and at that point you could have a Game Ender up.
In my point of view, the current 'goal' of a novax is not to bust a shield. It's either to grab all the unprotected but high value targets. Or to assist a Mavor to destroy the shields when they are depleted.
It also highly depends on what map you play. A Novax has little to no value on a map such as Dual Gap. It's much stronger on a map like Seton's Clutch where resources are more scattered.
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I personally don't think the Novax needs to be changed, but it seems the biggest complaint has been about shields. I know there's issues about hidden behavior in the game such as damage resistances. But I wonder if in this case it would make sense to reduce the damage vs shields and increase if it's damage vs non shielded targets. I'm not thrilled about these ideas of building different satellites and all this crazy stuff. It's already a micro intensive unit.
If it just does less damage to shields perhaps a 1 T2 shields can easily stop it, and it does more damage to units, you would be incentivised to use it for defense more, or it would really require other standoff damage units to make it able to get anything done against base infrastructure. -
I like the idea of lower damage to shields
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The impression I get is the main issue most people have with the novax (outside large teamgames on maps with lots of spread out mexes) is the apm required to shield mexes and rebuild any killed by the mex, than the strength of the novax if they had infinite apm, which is also consistent with my experience when I'm on the receiving end (unless I have a fatboy, but then fatboy can get countered by air anyway). Dealing less damage to shields wouldn't solve that issue (e.g. personally I just get t2 shields over all my mexes since while they dont fully counter a novax, they make it take so long it becomes very inefficient).
However, giving a low apm counter to the novax would solve the issue; low apm counters that wouldn't need to completely rewrite how the unit works could either be an offensive counter like SMDs having a manual toggle to fire at novaxes (with the novax satellite cost set to be the same as an SMD missile), or giving mexes a personal shield upgrade (that would give a similar effect to if they had a t2 shield covering them).
The latter (personal shield) would require almost no apm to do, and would just need a build time long enough that if you wait until the novax is already out and attacking your mexes you will suffer some losses, but if you scout the novax early in its construction then you should largely counter the novax's ability to do significant damage. E.g. if 800 mass upgrade for a T3 mex gives you a 5k personal shield with 120 regen, 26s recharge time, and -100 E drain then that's only likely to be worth getting to deal with an enemy novax, and it'd take a novax roughly 93s to kill a t3 mex (vs the current 27s).
As a simple comparison, for the same cost as a novax you could get a gateway+5 RAS SACUs that yield 55 mass per second, or 5.1k mass in the same timeframe (plus giving build power and energy). With a mex costing 4.6k (or 5.4k with the upgrade option) that means you could end up ahead if they tried targeting your mexes with the novax while you'd just got RAS+shielding (and the personal shielding for mex option means that the apm required for this woudl be negligible).I also can't see anyone getting such an upgrade outside defending against a novax - t3 arti tends to target power grids since they're much easier to hit and spark a chain reaction (vs trying to kill a lone t3 mex), TMD would be far cheaper (and more effective) to counter enemy TML, and combat units will usually be in large enough numbers that the extra health would barely make a difference. So the balance implications should just be limited to a lowering of the novax's strength through lowering the apm required to counter it.
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@maudlin27 there is no apm problem in shielding every mex. it's not harder than upgrading them lol.
The problem is the time and expense it gets to achieve this. I can order shield next to every mex I own, but they won't spawn immediately, and it has nothing to do with the apm
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@Sainse If upgrading protected novax, then it'd be 2 commands - double-click on t3 mex (to select all mexes); press upgrade hotkey (maybe a 3rd command of then pausing some other production while you wait for the upgrade to complete)
SMD targeting would take a bit more time and effort (probably want 3-5 per team depending on map size), but it'd have the added benefit of protecting from nukes (something players often do preemptively anyway)Vs currently where (if shielding with t2 shields) it's:
-Find nearest T2+ idle engineer (if you dont have one, then find non-idle engineer)
-Press hotkey for shield
-Potentially place in location that covers multiple mexes
-Find other mexes nearby for that engineer to go to that it can realistically reach and queue up shield build order
-Repeat above process a few more times with other engineers, until you've queued up shields to cover the main mexes you want to protect
-Potentially build a transport, load engineers, drop onto plateau, and have them build a shield (for any plateaus with mexes you want to protect)I don't get your expense argument - a T2 shield costs 500-700 mass; you could build 10 of them and it's still a fraction of the novax cost. It's not perfect novax defence, but it's good enough (and you can get a t3 shield where it'd cover 4 mexes or to cover t3 pgens). You'd need relatively large teamgames, and assuming players aren't going to get any shielding at that stage of the game, for it to cost more to defend the novax (e.g. in a 4v4 where each player gets a t3 shield to cover core base, air player gets another 1-2 t3 shields, and then yo uadd on the t2 shields cost ontop of that then it starts costing more)
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@maudlin27 T2 shields will only protect single t2 mexes. For core base you would need several T3 shields, which would bring the cost up to 12-20k mass. And then multiplied by the number of players in the team it will exceed Novax cost.
It's much more likely to be a real limitation in the game than the hypothesis that players cannot click t2 shield 10 times.
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Using "several T3 shields" sounds like heavy shielding for a Novax to nullify all damage it deals. Imo some core bases should be able to get away with T2 shields except those dense air/fab grids but that's besides the point.
If you pre-emptively shield heavily against T3 arty on every single slot it would also amount to ~80k mass (22 sera shields) or more, no? If that is true, then novax is balanced as "artillery" but is just so cheap people see it as coming out unfairly early. It's a similar idea with nuke where the nuke + missile + 2 pgens needed cost 34980 mass but an SMD + missile + minimal power costs 12680 mass so the nuke basically always pays off unless it's a map where everything is defended by 2 SMD.
I guess if we don't want to make it 2x cost 2x dps, then just like nuke it should simply have a cheap factory, no free sat, and extreme sat buildtime so it has an eternity to be scouted (way easier to scout a built structure than an unfinished one) and prepped for. The buildtime would depend on the estimate of how long it takes to shield things.
Also while the final shield cost can exceed the novax cost, you can build eco instead while the novax is building, and the equivalent mass in T3 fabs/pgens without any adjacency is 96 income or a premium Sera T3 shield every 38 seconds, while the Novax takes around 1:30 to cross the map, and then only does 57.5 mass/s of damage in a rather ideal scenario where it can kill a t3 mex every 40 seconds (2 reloads) and the mex gets rebuilt on top of its wreck. This is basically re-iterating the concept that the economic cost of the Novax isn't that bad because you can out-eco it easily, so if you go with a nerf it really has to be light on the overall cost of the unit. A nuke cost style nerf would honestly necessitate a small total mass cost reduction considering this.
