Are you trolling, or just incredibly stupid? Ras sacus are actually basically just as efficient as fabs when you factor in their bp and dps; everyone knows this. Both can pay for themselves in just over six minutes. From many months ago on the old forum:

Cuikui wrote:
As some have already done, looking only at direct mass costs, an SCU costs 6500 mass to produce 11 mass/second, which gives a payback time of 590sec (9min51s).
A MassFab costs 4000 mass to produce 16 mass/second, which gives a payback time of 250sec (4min10s).

Except that MassFabs also need a constant supply of power -1500 power/second, which is provided by power generators that also have a mass cost. A T3 power generator produces 2500 energy/second for a mass of 3240, the energy cost is about 1.3 mass/(energy/s). A MassFab therefore has an additional cost of 1.31500 = 1950 mass from generators that are exclusively dedicated to supplying its energy. This brings the payback time to 372 sec (6min12s). On the other hand, SCU produce 1020 energy/sec, which reduces the number of power generators to be built, this can be considered as a cost reduction of 1.31020 = 1326 mass. This reduces the payback time to 470sec (7min50sec).

Taking the energy into account, a SACU needs only 26% more time than a T3 MassFab to be profitable. If we add the mobility, the tankiness, the builtin turrent, the reduced space consumption and the engineering suite, you explain why it is better to spam SACU than MassFab.

As Strogo said, these calculations somewhat understate how useful fabs are because they do not factor in any adjacency bonuses.

But the buildpower of ras coms is certainly quite important as well, so it's important to quantify that. They provide 56 bp, which is equal to almost 2 t3 engineers, or slightly more than a hive upgraded to the second tier. So that is worth about 600 mass alone, meaning they will pay for themselves almost a minute faster, if you value the bp. Even if you are not using the bp constantly, it is still worth a significant fraction of that number.

Their gun does 300 dps, which is almost as much as two t1 pd. Especially given that sacus are mobile making that dps more useful than pd, we could value that at about 500 mass (the cost of two t1 pd), meaning they pay off another 45 seconds faster (if you value that capability). Obviously ras coms are very rarely used as combat units, but IF they save you from building extra tele def, then you would need to incorporate that value, even if you don't think it's worth quite that much.

Having at least a few sacus just to drop on big reclaim piles is also pretty useful because of their hp.

So if you factor those things in, they are actually pretty close to as cost effective as t3 mass fabs, less any adjacency bonuses, which can be pretty significant. But, I would say the adjacency bonuses are somewhat offset by the sacu mobility, hp, and compactness, so you can protect them all under one assisted shield (which, conveniently, the sacus can assist themselves).

Overall, I think ras coms are superior to fabs, but fabs are a little better if you don't have much use for sacu bp, and aren't too worried about them dying and having to invest a lot to protect them. And still, it depends on the game situation, so it's hard to say one is just better than the other. It can be a good idea to build some fabs for more efficient eco first, then transition to ras coms when their other characteristics become more valuable. Maybe you have plenty of bp and need more eco before you can even take advantage of the sacu bp.

Edit: the combat ability of sacus is very situation dependent, even for the tele def example I gave. If you have 30 stacked in one spot of your base (dealing 9k dps), perhaps the marginal (additional) benefit of more tele def is basically zero, because you kill an acu teleporting fast enough anyway. But if they are teleporting shielded sera sacus to you, and hitting your shields with arty at the same time, maybe the extra dps becomes important to keep your shields from taking too much damage and collapsing.

What percentage of matches does this happen in? Unless this is happening quite frequently, will it really make a big difference in the long run to anyone's rating? I mean think what happens if someone just magically added 500 points to your rating. You haven't gotten any better as a player, so it will pretty quickly just revert to your true rating when you lose most of your matches to players "at your rating."

@rezy-noob Ya that's accurate. t3 arty is much better than novax for killing bases. But novax can snipe isolated targets very efficiently, so it's excellent on any map with enough of those targets for it to pay off. t3 arty is also much more useful on the common 10km teamgame maps than setons because of the range.
So the answer is obviously that novax is really terrible on some maps and really good on some others (but mass novax is pretty much always bad). People saying anything other than that are missing the point.

Because simspeed lag is one of the worst aspects of this game, anything we can do to ameliorate the problem is a great idea. I don't care how many cybran drone bots are visible. In fact, I would probably PREFER to see a laser beam similar to aeon because it makes it a lot easier to see exactly what the hives are assisting. Sometimes you don't notice they started assisting your smd or something else unimportant when that was your lowest priority.

Novax isn't too powerful on most maps, but it is actually very, very good on setons, and probably similar maps with spread out bases and lots of mexes. Just do the math:
Let's say you are the air player and have 13 mexes to defend. Only the core 4 mexes can possibly be defended with less than one shield per mex, even assuming 1 is sufficient for those 4 mexes giving a total of 10 so far, you'll still need a bunch of extra shields if you don't want your air grid to explode, plus your smd in the middle. So you'll still need probably at least 13 t2 shields (with maybe a couple t3 shields on the air grid because you need their longer range). If they are sera shields, that's 13x700 mass, equaling 9100 mass, PLUS you will need an extra t3 pgen for power to run those additional shields which drain 13x250=3k power. One t3 pgen, which won't even totally cover that power drain, is 3240 mass. That puts us at basically 12.5k mass spent (rounding up since we still haven't covered the full power drain) on countering the novax. BUT THIS IS JUST ONE PLAYER! There are 4 players that all have to do the same thing or the novax will just target them instead. Are you able to multiply by 4? Now the enemy team has had to spend about 50k mass (12.5k times 4...) because all the other slots have to build very similar numbers of shields, PLUS a bunch of apm queing up engies to build shields on every mex plus every important structure not otherwise covered by a shield (usually you don't have every pgen or hq right beside your mexes) to avoid significant damage from the novax. Some spots like the corner trio of mexes for beach you might get away with fewer shields, but you'll probably need a couple extra shields somewhere else that aren't on mexes so I think it basically evens out and this is a pretty fair estimate. Even if the other slots can get away with just 10 t2 shields (so we save 9x700=6300 mass) it's still going to be well over 40k total mass spent. But the novax STILL gives very nice scouting, PLUS it can STILL be used on any units not shielded, such as navy or t4s, or landed asfs, sams, etc. And it can help to soften up shields for a strat snipe of an smd too. And AFTER the enemy builds all those shields, you could still simply reclaim your novax, which takes a whole lot less apm for you to recover the mass than for the enemy to reclaim all their shields. Even further, you can just start to build the novax and not finish it, and possibly force out a whole bunch of shields in anticipation of it and not even invest much at all yourself.

UEF and Aeon shields are a bit cheaper for both mass and power, but give less range and don't affect the calculations too much. Generally, due to the small range you will need a couple extra shields to protect your buildings if you are aeon so you don't end up saving too much anyway. iirc the lowest tier cybran shield isn't strong enough so you need at least ed2 which makes the cost also similar. If you say about 600 mass times 10 shields for each of the other 3 players, that's 18k mass, plus 9k mass for the pgens to run the shields, so 27k, plus about 11k for the air player's t2 shields. So 38k total mass for a pretty conservative estimate.

Still, I haven't added in any cost of having to build t3 shields to protect the air grid. T3 shields cost a lot of mass. Maybe just 2-3 is sufficient depending on your air grid size, but that's another 5k or more mass you have to spend. So about 55k total mass will probably be spent by the team, and at least 40k. So, even if you use far more optimistic numbers by using other faction shields that are cheaper, it's still definitely going to be cost effective to build at least one novax. Building a second probably might not be worth it, unless you can surprise them and snipe an smd or something before they realize you made multiple and build additional shields. That shouldn't happen, but if there is one player managing multiple bases in the late game it would not be impossible.

edit: so does it need to be nerfed? Well I think it's quite weak on maps where you need far fewer shields, like canis, so it's hard to say overall.

I really love the idea of just adding bp into the factory by sacrificing engineers into it, though I could see us maybe wanting some upper limit on it. There would be pros and cons such as not possible to raid the bp with bombers or tanks, but also inability to repair the damaged factory. Allowing them to be stationed might go a little too far by giving tons of flexibility plus removing the risk of losing bp to bombers.

@archsimkat Of course you at some point need to learn how to play the game properly. A noob friendly mod is like learning to ride a bike with training wheels. At some point the training wheels obviously need to come off. The question is whether allowing (NOT forcing) games with training wheels to start can help some people not get too discouraged initially or actually learn the game a bit faster by not being overwhelmed by all of the different things there are to learn in the game right from the start, or if they simply develop bad habits that become entrenched. It certainly might be better to just learn decent build orders, but obviously, a lot of people don't bother. It's plausible that some people don't want to watch a build order youtube video, but will just play the noob mod, then eventually learn more and like the game more and stop using the mod because a lot less of their games were ruined in the first minute of the game.

Edit: I think generally in the game, not just in a noob eco mod, it would be good for an audio warning if you are stalling. "You must build additional [pylons] Power!"

I like Blodir's ideas on making the game less static in the mid-late game, especially making t3 units a bit faster.

I think RAS sacus are a bit overpowered, but if they provided say, half the resources they currently do they would be total garbage and would be sufficiently nerfed into oblivion. I don't mind them as a game mechanic, because they are pretty similar to fabs for income generation, and the build power is nice to help replace a few (hundred) t1 engies we would otherwise see . Maybe 7 mass and 750 power, and a build power nerf would make them quite balanced. Maybe we could go with a nice even 10 mass income, 1000 power generation, and increase the cost by about 50% (10k mass?). As it is they are a bit less efficient than fabs for eco (if you don't have a use for the bp), so that would be a huge nerf, and they would be swiftly replaced by t3 fab farms.

I also think reclaim is a bit OP. Part of the reason it is difficult to actually punish the "inefficient" ras sacu stockpiling is because there is the inherent defender's advantage, which is compounded by reclaim donations from any attack that doesn't completely win over the territory. Maybe 50% mass value for reclaim would be good, I dunno. I have always felt like reclaim makes the game more defensive and static than it should, plus it makes it a lot more work to learn an optimal build order on a new map because the amount of reclaim and distance away it is changes everything about your build. If anyone wants to make any comparisons to starcraft 2, this is one of the biggest IMO. You can do basically the same builds on every map of starcraft.

Also, I don't think it makes any difference whatsoever whether the reclaim proportions differ for different tiers of units, but I don't see why it shouldn't be the same either. In basically every single battle, the exact amount of reclaim is quite difficult to predict, because it is impacted by artillery shots landing on wrecks, overkill, etc.

@FtXCommando
Arguing we shouldn't fix one problem because it would make another problem worse is a bad reason to not try to fix both problems. If Cybran is currently garbage on t2, that is just another problem that needs to be solved. I can agree an extended t2 stage makes it even worse for cybran, but maybe the point is we should stop ignoring that problem too.

"all combat upgrades" need to be reviewed? How often do people get gun AFTER t3 mexes? Almost all acu upgrades besides tele and ras are well before t3 mexes, or after only a small number, and a small increase in mex cost would have a very small impact at that stage in the game.

"unit considerations do not change when you adjust mex values" I never said that. In fact, that's obviously the whole point! You will have a greater incentive to stay in the t2 stage. My point was that it doesn't make the game much more complex in deciding what KINDS of units to build in a situation, simply because that situation will last a bit longer. Earlier you claimed it was an "extremely important frame of reference" which was the point I was refuting.

"Is there never a choice between t2 mex vs more tanks" For the last time, THAT'S EXACTLY THE POINT (except t3 mex). This choice doesn't "disappear" for t3 mexes, but if it's practically a no brainer, it's more of an illusion of choice. Sure, the air slot on setons can choose to go t1 air rush too. That's a choice, right?! Obviously, a nerf to eco makes units more valuable. It almost sounds like you are agreeing with me! "This transition is reflective of your adjustment in mex output. You make teching less effective, you make units more effective. It's zero-sum." I would say going from "almost zero reason to build t2 units" to some reason is a net benefit for game quality by diversifying potential strategies.

"How many of these maps will now be garbage? Are you fine with just throwing out some random % of maps without checking to see what maps are now trash?" Well, it seems like the majority of teamgame maps currently played by the majority are likely to be made better by making these changes. Hence, people complaining about the issue...

"pretty much any guide out there on FA or FAF that will now be outdated" How many guides are based on optimal late game eco? How many people do you think will think "damn, I shouldn't have skipped t2 in this teamgame and just made t3 mex, LIKE THE GUIDE SAID!" Seriously...

FTX, you continually engage with an arrogant attitude and consistently refused to actually make an argument, rather offering attacks and unsupported denials of others valid arguments, until I pointed out you weren't actually making any relevant arguments. You can do away with the hyperbole. Of course making t3 mexes slightly more expensive will have side effects throughout some relevant parts of the game, but I see them being primarily in the t2 stage, and having the exact effect that we are looking for!

@Tagada said in Is mercy too strong in team games? What you think?:

While discussing if such mechanic is healthy for the gameplay is another topic the main issue right now is that because of the activation radius which is 25 (that's quite a lot, for comparison the vision of an ACU is 26) and the fact the projectiles that AA shoots needs to reach the mercy before it can transform itself into projectiles that cannot be stoped creates the situation where even if you have a lot of aa around you then if it's not between your ACU and the mercies you will still die.

It seems to be both unrealistic and problematic for gameplay that the mercy has basically nil hitpoints, but is still invincible during the most important phase of its attack, which should be the most dangerous phase. So what if we made it into a more realistic actual kamikaze plane? We could give them a more normal amount of hp (similar to what other bombers or fighters would have), a lot less maneuverability and slower speed, but targetable the entire duration of the attack. I am also imagining a very cool stuka-like sound effect for the attack path (about what the activation period would have been, or longer).
I concede this would be a significant change and probably requires quite a bit of testing to figure out the best balance of hp, damage, etc.

edit: to get an idea of the type of sound effect, this clip gets the point across.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W3KDB0yHYM

Also, perhaps you could make it so that the mercy can only begin its attack dive from a certain minimum distance away (30, 35 perhaps?), and the sound effect begins at that point and so it gives a little bit of advance warning of the impending attack.

@jip said in Engineer Always-reclaim:

You're asking me to:

Take a share of my time to implement your feature.
Take a share of my future time to maintain your feature.

It's not mine. I was considering how it might be helpful for lower skill players and providing some pros and cons on their behalf. Just read my first post:

@corvathranoob said in Engineer Always-reclaim:

So I don't really have an opinion whether it's a good idea to do this or not, but don't think it matters much anyway because it is pretty easy to attack move some engies instead so this gives very little advantage or help to noobs anyway.

@jip said in Engineer Always-reclaim:

Your response is insulting.

@rezy-noob said in Engineer Always-reclaim:

watch your language,@CorvathraNoob

I think it is more insulting to be trolled when you're trying to contribute to the conversation and bring up points of view that other people may not have considered, than anything I said.

I know English is not everyone's first language here, so I will clarify what I said.

I did NOT say Jip was stupid. I said I DIDN'T think he was because we both clearly knew the proposed change would save more than two clicks a game. So, since he was NOT stupid, he must have been trolling.

I chose my words very carefully to show how egregious his derisive and contemptuous response to my argument was. I would say "please read my words more carefully next time," but the point is moot because I won't be contributing any more thoughts because I'm done with being trolled and insulted.

@jip said in Engineer Always-reclaim:

You're right: it is probably three: you want to move them to the reclaim field first. And if you use any hotkeys (I'd recommend trying that out) then it is two again.

Yeah, now it's obvious you're just trolling. Thanks.

@jip said in Engineer Always-reclaim:

The OP specifically doesn't want attack move:
4# engi will not move to far in enemy territory!

You are 100% wrong. The main complaint is the mundane micro of issuing the order. You can very obviously prevent engies from going "too far into enemy territory" by not setting the reclaim order "too far into enemy territory." Further, this is why I said to issue the attack move directly underneath the engi.

@ghnaf said in Engineer Always-reclaim:

Yes, i know attacke-move and i use it ofc. It´s just about less clicks in many situations.

@jip said in Engineer Always-reclaim:

The alternative is to just attack move an engineer. That way you control what happens. And it is just two clicks.

Ok, multiply two clicks times many different engis or groups of engis, times many times per game. Spoiler alert, it's much larger than two.

@jip said in Engineer Always-reclaim:

Then come back and tell us how it worked out while the engineers were reclaiming that T2 PD you wanted to rebuild.

Every single time I see someone do this I cringe because the build time is almost never as important as the mass forgone. You gain HALF the mass and build time, while losing the 80% mass reclaim value. I actively and intentionally reclaim dead t2 pd before rebuilding them, so I would love this feature.

So I don't really have an opinion whether it's a good idea to do this or not, but don't think it matters much anyway because it is pretty easy to attack move some engies instead so this gives very little advantage or help to noobs anyway.

But from a technical perspective, could it be done by just automatically issuing an attack move order directly underneath idle engis? (and maybe have this order time out or only get implemented once a minute or something, so if there is nothing around to reclaim the engi doesn't continuously get new orders?)
You could make the argument it is helpful for some noobs but worse for better players because they want to know when their engis go idle and would be better off disabling the toggleable ability.

But in that case you could have the best of both worlds. It makes life a bit easier for noobs, but doesn't reduce the skill ceiling either. Otherwise, we'd have to accept the argument that attack moving engis AT ALL reduces the skill ceiling of the game and makes it worse, because manual reclaiming requires more clicking...and we all know the faster you click the more skilled you are, right? Sure, but just like including both attack moving engies and manual reclaim is perfectly fine, ADDING a less effective, easy option doesn't remove the skill ceiling. It is perfectly fine to allow some automation of tasks as long as there are also ways to do things more efficiently by micromanaging more.

So I'd say it just comes down to whether or not there is a reasonably easy technical solution that doesn't bog the game down much.

@haachamachama said in New changes to the 2v2 TMM:

TMM pairs has always been inconsistent due to the lack of players, so having huge disparity between the players is inevitable

Ya, that's exactly why I thought this was so common that the statement wasn't really true, though eliminating the smaller maps when you have only higher rating players is an improvement.

Just one other thought, it might be slightly better to use an average rating in some situations rather than sharply defined categories. I'm thinking of when you have one team of two 1600s and the other with 1700 and 1490. I would guess all 4 players would prefer to stick with the 1500+ category of maps, because including the 1490 player's range, which includes 500-1000 rating maps, doesn't really seem optimal when basically all the players are quite a bit beyond that. I'm not sure the best way to design a system that avoids that, maybe something about the average or maximum deviation between all players. And maybe it just gets really complicated for minimal benefit so this isn't worth thinking too much about anyway, especially given the aforementioned lack of players...

@haachamachama said in New changes to the 2v2 TMM:

Lower tier, less competitive players will stay on less challenging maps, while higher tier, competitive players will not have to play those maps and keep within the higher brackets.

I don't understand how higher rating players "will not have to play those maps" if you have a 2000 paired with a 200 vs two 1200s. Aren't you then limited exclusively to the lowest skill maps, consistent with Askaholic's comment? Or has there also been some change that entirely prevents teams with large deviations in rating?

@ftxcommando said in Sparky Rationalization:

And all it serves to not be able to build radar and facs with sparkies is needless micro of having to go and pick out the specific t1 engie in a mix near your sparkies because you cant just select all your sparkies and your engie and use a hotkey for fac or radar. It's annoying and tedious and unironically like a third of the reason I don't bother making sparkies.

Yeah, it's just this quality of life improvement that makes it slightly less annoying to use sparkies. And it's the same QOL improvement for sparky drops and not having to bring a t2 engi along like farms pointed out, and then also have to be careful about which engi you select when you want to make the radar and/or factories at your proxy and then make sure your sparkies assist it and hope the t2 engi doesn't die to a couple bombers that a sparky would survive.
It's just something that would save you a few really annoying and seemingly pointless clicks.

@ftxcommando said in Sparky Rationalization:

And the difference would be efficient scaling, if you make t2 engies you're getting more bp for mass. If you make sparkies for scaling you are falling behind and paying a premium for the additional security that the rest of the sparky brings.

This is also 100% true. I think we can agree that giving sparkies this functionality would not make that big of a difference in the game. A small increase in mass cost would be fine as payment for saving the annoying apm.

@ftxcommando said in Kennel and Hives:

It isn't really just the cheap factor that makes hives better. I am absolutely certain that if you made hives and kennels the exact same cost you would still in the vast majority of scenarios make hives because it is simply too much utility to be able to instantly transfer bp to whatever project you deem necessary.

Yeah, that's why I said make them a lot faster too. I think with a significantly faster drone speed it would be worth paying a little bit extra compared to hives. How long does it currently take for drones to move the entire length of hive build range? 10 seconds? (I honestly don't know because the unit database isn't showing hive range so I'm guessing it's about 30, and drones have a speed of 4, anyway the point is it's not super massive) What if that was cut down to 3 seconds? Then you have very close to the same bp flexibility, even if it's not instantaneous, plus a whole lot more flexibility with the unlimited range. Since most of the time you aren't constantly moving that bp back and forth, and if you are it's not traveling that full distance so it's only taking a couple seconds and you aren't losing that much build time anyway. With that price I was also kinda assuming they could fix some of the other issues like reclaim and drones dying on transfer, but if we can't then I'd say maybe 17m per bp since those things matter, but seem rarely impactful to me.

I wouldn't mind seeing this change just from a quality of life perspective. I agree with farms that I don't think it's really a big change for general battles because you almost always have some t1 engies near the front lines for reclaiming and building radars or pd anyway, so the sparkies would just reduce the number of them and slightly reduce pathfinding problems, which is a good thing...and we could always just increase the sparky mass cost a bit to compensate.

Where I could see this ability change making the biggest difference would be sparky drops, which now could pop up a ton of factories very quickly. Maybe this is very good because it would make the game more interesting though.

Hives are definitely far better right now because they are so much cheaper. If you made kennels the same cost I'd think their unlimited range would make them a little better even if they are kinda slow and there are other negatives that ftx mentioned. I don't think their other aspects are net negatives, but they are currently not very useful at all.
Rather than a nerf to hives I'd rather see a buff to kennels, because pathfinding is the worst part of this game. Maybe if we started off by making kennels 18m per bp and made the drones move a lot faster they would be a lot closer in usefulness. If that's not enough of a buff, we could make them even cheaper later too. It would also be nice to solve the problem of drones dying when transferred and reclaim values being incorrect.