I also would like an anchor/hold position toggle button.
I sometimes will use a select all navy units hotkey to send in everything to attack and when that selects the sonar it is a problem. Selection priority wouldn't have anything to do with that, and I prefer the select all key rather than zooming out and selecting all units.

And I actually would love a toggle button that you can use hold position ANY unit, including land units.

Sometimes you want to send all your land units in for an attack, but would like to keep a small group in a specific location to defend against drops.

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."

@Valki said in Monkey Lord - roleless T4 that needs a Buff:

At certain ratings Monkeylord are far from bad, might it also be the most-built experimental all games combined?

FAF has a wide dispersion of usefulness in units, is the Monkeylord really an outlier in terms of usefulness?
In casts I seem to see it more often than Novax for example.

It is horrible to argue balance is flawed because "at certain ratings" players are too ignorant to know the best strategies. Obviously low rating players are doing things wrong, hence, their rating. e.g. "Yeah, 'at certain ratings' mass storages around t3 mexes are rare, so their adjacency bonus needs to be buffed." The problem has nothing to do with game balance, it is ignorance.

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.

I like the idea of a movement speed buff, and while we are at it could we consider increasing it's turret turn speed? The monkey is especially frustrating when it is attacking different useless targets on opposite sides of it, which require a very long time for the turret to turn. This is especially critical when you are just getting in range of what you really want to attack (e.g. acu) with a move command but it takes an extra 5 seconds to actually start attacking because it was focusing on some t1 tanks behind it.

@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.

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!"

Thanks! I just uninstalled citrix and now I can play again. It seems weird it kept me from playing even if it wasn't open but simply installed on my pc.

So after all of this, the game suddenly started to crash whenever I try to join or host a lobby. Not sure what exactly caused it. I have attached the log which notes an access violation. Any ideas on how to fix that? I have already tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game.

game_22007354.log

@mostlostnoob

Based on the link to that other forum post I deleted the game music files. I also changed the sound quality to 16 bit 44.1k hz just incase that would help rather than 48k hz.

I have attached a recent game log.

Unfortunately, another issue that seems to have just popped up now, is that for some reason I am not able to save new templates or make new changes to my hotkeys. I can save a template and then I have it for the rest of that game, but then the next game it is gone again. It seems to be the same for hotkey changes.

de6c7956-34e0-4a35-97d5-56f8338e3b95-game_21335293.log

Thank you very much for the quick response! I tried making those changes and have not had any unhandled exception crashes in the few games i have tried yet, but am still having the issue where it basically crashes when i try to exit the game. It is just annoying in that I have to keep task manager open on another screen to force it to end the task, but at least the game seems playable now.

I just got a new pc and have had issues with faf. Have only tried a few games but it gives an unhandled exception frequently, and it seems to do so even on solo games when i tried to set up my settings, crashing every single time i try to close the game.

b7cd491f-97b4-434d-858e-8aa7da0d8a07-game_21299866.log

Thank you in advance!

Or else to just look at roughly ten minute sections of the game with the scaling being appropriate for that section.

@comradestryker Yeah I guess I don't care near as much about those things. Maybe it would be possible to have the best of both worlds, and have the wreck available as soon as the animation begins. Then you get all of the benefit of the dynamic animations, AND you can issue your commands without delay. I dunno, maybe that is impossible. If it's impossible I would just prefer immediate wrecks, because I'm never thinking "oh look at that pretty animation as the building is destroyed." I'm feeling frustrated about having to wait for it to finish because I'm playing a competitive real time strategy game...

Edit: even if there is a game limitation such that you cannot begin reclaiming until after the animation completes, perhaps it could still allow the order to be queued up? This is usually the main issue, not the 1-2 second delay in being able to construct the building...except when you are trying to build new shields in an arty war.

@jip I guess it must be just for sera extractors, but you also have the same kind of issue when you destroy other buildings. e.g. you ctrl k a bunch of factories adjacent to mexes and want to give a reclaim order on the wreck and then build storages around the mex.

So just generally speaking, it would be nice if all buildings in general became wrecks faster just so you can give reclaim orders and new build orders faster.

This is a pretty counter-intuitive game mechanic, but pretty much everyone learns about it if they are trying to get better. It's one of those "spend apm, gain a slight advantage" kind of things which i dont really love as it doesn't add anything to the game strategy-wise, but just forces higher apm to maximize your play. I don't really mind it either though, and don't think there is much of a good solution without changing game mechanics significantly. However, just reducing the upgrade cost vs the straight build cost for mexes I wouldn't mind either.

One thing that REALLY DOES bug me, is the time for the animation of the mex ctrl-k that you have to wait for before you can place the t3 mex order. Can we speed that up? It's only like 2 seconds or something, but then when the game is lagging it feels like i'm wasting A LOT of time staring at my mex waiting to be able to give the build order, but it's not long enough to justify looking away and doing something else.

I also would like an anchor/hold position toggle button.
I sometimes will use a select all navy units hotkey to send in everything to attack and when that selects the sonar it is a problem. Selection priority wouldn't have anything to do with that, and I prefer the select all key rather than zooming out and selecting all units.

And I actually would love a toggle button that you can use hold position ANY unit, including land units.

Sometimes you want to send all your land units in for an attack, but would like to keep a small group in a specific location to defend against drops.