Posts made by arma473

You can find the folder through the client, if you click the button in the top-left corner (the button with three horizontal lines)

That's a good idea. Friendly could be a slightly different color than unfriendly. I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to implement. The engine already knows how to test whether a projectile is friendly or not (when it is looking at whether to impart friendly fire damage).

A lot of it is already obvious, based on the direction the projectiles are traveling, but that would mean shots from unexpected angles would stand out on the display. That might help you to notice something that you need to react to even if you don't have the unit in your vision/radar.

We should look for ways to use subtle (or bold) differences in color to convey information to players. Any time there is ambiguity about what we're seeing on the screen, we should consider whether it's possible to give cues to the user through varying colors.

E.g. have a different color for the shield bar if the shield is up or down. If the shield is down and it is recharging, showing a different color would be a simple way to communicate that.

one is landscape, the other one is portrait. So it probably just won't work for me. I'm doing okay without fake fullscreen so I guess i will just stick with that. Thanks for your help though.

Is there a way to get any kind of optimization without fake fullscreen? Can I use AHK to prioritize the thread, without fake fullscreen?

This is how another person fixed it:

"Got it fixed - logged out of FAforever website then back in. Logged back into Steam and it's now linked."

@tatsu said in [Guide] : fake-fullscreen and optimisation:

@arma473 no it's not accurate.

you just use the ui party mod as stated. you'll see it's ideal. and the screens truly behave as two independent screens even though you're in fake fullscreen.

According to that thread, I'm supposed to use UI-Festival instead of UI-Party. Do you know if that's true? So I have to get UI-Festival through github because it's not in the mod vault.

Or does UI-Party currently support different-size screens?

I have 2 monitors. Is it accurate to say that if I use "fake fullscreen," I have to choose between "treat both screens together as 1 monitor" or "just don't use your second monitor"?

Without using fake fullscreen, I am able to use my second monitor to display the map (like having a giant mini map that I never look at because my first monitor is so wide that it takes up all my vision anyway).

Legend of the Stars 2020 Substitution Qualifier Tournament
List of All Games Played
November 28, 2020

Round 1

Series 1 - keyser vs MilchRatchet
#13242671 on TAG_Craftious Maximus
#13242847 on Theta Passage - FAF version

Series 2 - FunkOff vs LuXy
#13242687 on Theta Passage
#13242882 on Theta Passage
#13243050 on Theta Passage - FAF version
#13243196 on Cadmium Green

Round 2

Series 3 - darkym vs Morax
#13242802 on Roanoke Abyss
#13243144 on Z-D Rasty Lite
#13243514 on Vya-3 Protectorate

Series 4 - Eternal vs Se7ven
#13242655 on Z-D Rasty Lite
#13242868 on Theta Passage
#13243117 on Regor VI Highlands

Series 5 - harzer99 vs keyser
#13243092 on Regor VI Highlands
#13243276 on Roanoke Abyss

Series 6 - LuXy vs Yudi
#13243427 on The Ganges Chasma
#13243633 on The Ganges Chasma
#13243765 on Point of Reach v4

Round 3 (Semi-Finals)

Series 7 - keyser vs Morax
#13243728 on Regor VI Highlands
#13243848 on Point of Reach v4

Series 8 - Se7ven vs Yudi
#13244023 on serenity desert
#13244321 on Chiron
#13244545 on Cadmium Green

Bronze Match - Morax vs Se7ven
#13245006 on Z-D Rasty Lite
#13245507 on Chiron

Finals - keyser vs Yudi
#13245145 on Regor VI Highlands
#13245369 on Point of Reach v4
#13245632 on Z-D Rasty Lite

Also: here is a search string that you can enter into the Java client to pull up all tournament games (copy it to your clipboard, then in the FAF client, check the box for: display search query, and then paste this into the query input field, and press enter to perform the search directly from the query input field).

id=="13242655",id=="13242671",id=="13242687",id=="13242802",id=="13242847",id=="13242868",id=="13242882",id=="13243050",id=="13243092",id=="13243117",id=="13243144",id=="13243196",id=="13243276",id=="13243427",id=="13243514",id=="13243633",id=="13243728",id=="13243765",id=="13243848",id=="13244023",id=="13244321",id=="13244545",id=="13245006",id=="13245145",id=="13245369",id=="13245507",id=="13245632"

@Blodir said in The Last Thread about RAS SACU Balance:

• reduce reclaim % (scale % inversely with tech level, like 60%, 40%, 20%, 10%, for t1, t2, t3, t4 respectively)

This I think is needed. People are punished too much for using T3 units and so much of the meta around the use of T4 units is about where the reclaim ends up. Reduce the reclaim that is left and attacks become a lot more economically viable. This would also be an incentive to tech up (so you don't give so much mass to your opponent). We would see a lot more aggression I think.

I don't like the other suggestions. Watering down T3 or boosting its DPS isn't going to solve the problem.

Apart from land units, air/navy/buildings should probably keep leaving the same amount of reclaim. No reduction based on tech level.

@BananaSmoothie If you're nervous about the ladder, (1) your first 4-6 games usually involve going up against 1k rated players. You aren't going to win those anyway, so you might as well get them out of the way (2) host some custom 1v1s with a rating limit. Call it something like "1v1 Under 500." Then you get to pick the map and pick your opponent and it's not even a "real" ladder game. If you understand why you lost, you can improve. If you don't understand, or if you just want someone else's perspective, ask someone to look at your replays. You can also invite better players to 1v1 with you. Host a "1v1 All Welcome" and if you get rolled by a better player, ask them what you could have done better. They might not know, they might tell you something untrue, but most people LOVE to give you their opinion if you ask for it. You will have no shortage of advice and then it's up to you to evaluate it to decide which advice is good.

I do think TMM games involving low-rated players will be a great way for people to learn about FAF because you will have a teammate who will tell you some things during the game. It will be an opportunity to get advice/direction from many people that you might not otherwise team up with.

As a long-term casual player, you probably know all about the units and what they can do.

But you probably have bad eco management. I didn't bother to learn eco management when I was a casual. That's the first area to work on if you want to get your skill/rating up. The guide from FtX is designed to educate you on that.

If your goal is to keep improving beyond that, so you can be a team game beast, you can learn a lot by playing 1v1s, because you have to take responsibility for all aspects of the game. In team games, other people will scout for you, they will overflow you power, they will send units to save you sometimes, etc. In 1v1s, everything that happens is basically up to you, so you learn much more quickly where your deficiencies are. If someone is going to coach you, the fastest way for them to assess your abilities (so they can decide what to teach you next) is to watch your 1v1 replays.

So even if you prefer team games, the path to enlightenment is through the ladder. To get good at team games, you should play 1v1s (to become well-rounded) and you have to play team games (because team games have different dynamics from 1v1s).

Some high-rated players might say "I never needed to play 1v1s to get good at team games." But ask yourself: is your experience similar to their experience? Did you just effortlessly git gud? Just because they can be well-rounded, high-skill players without playing 1v1s doesn't mean you will.

I don't think you need to wait for your skill to plateau before you ask people to look at some of your replays and give feedback. I think it's a bad idea to wait until you get frustrated and hit a wall, before you get feedback from good players. You also need to think for yourself (not all advice you get from others will be good advice) and you need to analyze your own replays if you want to improve.

If you're interested in a longer written guide, I wrote one that is focused on 1v1s: https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=17559

If we just develop some DeepMind AI agents that can play FAF at a 1700+ level, we could subject them to all manner of modding/changed circumstances and see what happens.

Without that source of data, it sounds like your random balance idea should only be played as mirror matchups.

Also, would there be any convenient communication to the players of which units are better/worse? Like the way text pops up on some maps instructing you to notify CookieNoob of map errors. Or are the players supposed to click on a factory and scroll their mouse over unit options in order to find out which units are better/worse than default balance? It might just be whoever has the best memory of default stats and the fastest reading comprehension gets to learn which units are buffed/nerfed, which would be kind of an unfair advantage.

In the lobby, it would show their names. And the client shows the names of people in a lobby even if you are out of the lobby.

To achieve this for a tournament, the admins would probably need to create new accounts to be used by tournament players. E.g. they could tell Tagada he needs to log out of his main account and log in to an account called "TournamentPlayerOne", and give him the password to that, and do that for 16 different players who all would need to log in that way.

Also the admins would have to find a way to hide the country flags in the client for those accounts. (Probably the easiest way would be to just shut down national flags for everyone for the day of the tournament--this is the way I think, lazy AF. That's easier than re-writing the code to specifically not show flags for just the 16 tournament accounts, although that also would be a good option, especially because the accounts could be re-used for later tournaments.)

The challonge would have to be set up according to their fake names, not the real ones, or we could figure out who they are just by looking at the brackets.

Probably the admins would have to assign each player a color so we wouldn't guess them by their color.

We wouldn't be able to tell them by their chat messages because they could intentionally do chat messages in the style of another Playerino.

Then it would be up to the TD to decide when each player's identity is revealed. (When they are eliminated? Or wait until the end of the tournament?)

Players would probably have to be locked out of their main accounts for the day of the tournament to prevent a defeated player from logging back in under their real account during the tournament, which would give it away.

Even if you created a parallel "game mode" like Galactic War, Aeolus would still show who was present in chat, so it would provide clues about people's identities. I think "tournament accounts" are the only way to make this work.

@Deribus @speed2 Yolo missile HP definitely will be increased. Otherwise it would only take 1 SMD shot to kill a Yolo missile. On stream today @JaggedAppliance said he thinks it was just mistakenly left out of the patch notes.

If you had to buy an upgrade in order to make nukes, we could reduce the price of nuke subs. And we could get rid of the whole "Sera battleship nukes cost more because we know Sera players have to make battleships anyway so giving them same-price nukes would be OP compared to what other factions have to pay for separate nuke subs so we will also make Sera battleship nukes a little bigger to make up for the increased price."

This upgrade should be un-cancelable, pausable, it should be started automatically when the unit is created, but start paused. And it should be capable of upgrading while the unit is moving. So every time you make a "nuke sub" or a sera battleship, it always starts with the upgrade paused and you can decide whether to unpause it. There's no reason to allow it to be canceled.

If we're going that route, perhaps T3 subs should only be able to fire tactical missiles when they are surfaced. I like the idea of making it matter whether a sub is surfaced or not.

There other ways we could use upgrades to expand the game:

Upgrade to Ythotha to add a regen field. If they buy that upgrade, when the ythotha dies, the "lightning storm" does no damage at all, but continues to provide a regen field for allied units. So this upgrade would make the ythotha "safe" to send with your army. You would get more use out of them if you had the option to send them with troops without worrying that your ythotha will be sniped down and then your entire army gets fried.

Monkeylords should have a very expensive cloaking upgrade. It should be expensive to make the upgrade and after the upgrade finished it would cost a lot of energy to have the cloaking ability active. But this would make monkeylords more relevant even into the very late game.

Upgrade to t2 pgens to add an armored shell. It would primarily cost mass, not power. It would add a lot of HP (and for Cybrans, add regen rate). When an armored pgen dies, it has a smaller death explosion/blast radius. This would be an alternative way to protect against snipes. It goes against the current meta which is that you want to get T3 pgens and then recycle your T2 pgens to get mass back. Instead you would be spending extra mass to make them safer.

neroxis_map_generator_1.1.16_xykof4acunyww_aiea_am_aaaaaac7xws4a

neroxis_map_generator_1.0.18_yqiznsafdektk_aiedinqveq

FAF would be improved if we could integrate a simple, effective autoclicker that would make manual reclaim less cancerous. SupCom 2 apparently had something similar, where you could "paint" orders on the screen, or at least Chris Taylor talked about wanting to have that feature as part of SupCom 2.

Or perhaps just a "target priorities mod" for engineers, such as: "when you are on attack-move this time, only try to grab rocks/wrecks that have at least 25 mass"

My idea was that if you give an engineer an "attack move order," and the order immediately preceding this attack-move order was a manual reclaim order, that this should be treated as a special kind of attack move where the engie only goes after bigger reclaim and ignores the small stuff.

The autoclicker thing happened because FAF is broken by the importance of clicking on manual reclaim. That should have been taken as a sign that FAF needs to make the game less broken, not that FAF needs to crack down on Russian hackers.

Or just give mantis the "tank" icon and trust that players can figure it out. I would like that option. Let's not elevate purity over usefulness.

If we are going to have new icons for amphibious/hover tanks, perhaps instead of a "plus" inside, you just have 5 dots, laid out like a plus. Or make it a division sign (dots over and under a solid horizontal line). But then we have to ask if aurora should get this "light tank" icon (which would actually make sense, given that they float and they're literally called light tanks)

@RelaxBro said in Very long post about spread attack, UI mods and why improving player's controls and UI is apparently and wrongly considered a bad thing in FAF, also balance:

Nerfing thigs - makes players feel like if they keep use it, it will get nerfed more. Psycology proofs that. And so they do not want to use it anymore. Because 1) It was better 2) It may and will get worst if they keep use it.

People don't care about history. They use a unit because it's fun, because it works, because it makes them feel powerful and gives them control over a situation. In-game, they don't care if it's 5% weaker than it used to be. Maybe on the forums they say they care, but during the game, they use the units that work for them.

We could nerf RAS SACUs by 10% and people would keep making them because they like having RAS SACUs.

So now how FAF works - try to do something that need more control - be punished and overcome or be punished again, and also after you do that, be punished again, because you move to next level, do all over again. Try to do somethit that need less control - be rewarded and you also can improve to be rewarded more.
People do not want be punished, they want to be rewarded.

Microing units successfully provides an immediate dopamine hit, it's a fast and simple way to provide this reward during games.

But well, that wont affects 1% of 1700+ ladder (or its just seems so), or anyway. Who caries what balance do to players
below top level.

It's important to balance the game for top players, not all players, because the rest of us will eventually end up copying the top players as best we can. There is no trick that only top players can do. Everything is available to us, even if our execution is comparatively poor. You will see 300-rated players using triads to ground fire subs while they are mismanaging their economy. You will see 500-rated players following the exact pathway to a big economy (t1 into t2 into storages into t3) and then suiciding monkeylords as mass donations. By definition, you can't balance the game for medium-rated players because we're making a lot of mistakes, and while we can't play perfectly, we can change which mistakes we're making.

That post will not be readet or answered, tho. Because Im average joe, and must be grateful that can play at all, and even Tagada won't getting someting that coutns like reall answer.

Sadly, I think you're right. Shift-g move is a good thing and I think the establishment doesn't want to talk about removing it because they know we won't agree. They want to sneak the change past us and present it as a fait accompli. They say "we already had this discussion" and we're just supposed to accept that?

@Tagada said in Very long post about spread attack, UI mods and why improving player's controls and UI is apparently and wrongly considered a bad thing in FAF, also balance:

I really fail to see how units getting on top of the ACU and blocking it is such a bad thing, yes it may be frustrating but I think it's healthy. ACU's are absolutely busted compared to units and you want to keep your ACU in range of enemy units while keeping your units outside of enemy's ACU range. If you move in your units on top of enemy ACU you should be able to block him at the cost of clumping up your units and making them more prone to OC. After all it's only effective if you have a lot more of units bcs of how attacking vs defending unit formation works. If blocking wouldn't be possible it would make ACU even stronger (bad idea in my opinion) and even if you have 50% more t1 tanks you still wouldn't be able to kill enemy with an all in because of defenders advantage in engagements and Vet on ACU etc.

How is this possibly a controversial opinion????? The top players who fetishize having unstoppable ACUs are just WRONG about what they want to do to the game. We shouldn't let them take away shift-g move.

Footnote: I've spent a lot of time on this post and thought it through so I won't respond to some low effort quotation and BS claim by some random guy, so just don't bother. I am looking forward to get some answers from other top rated players, but mostly Balance and Game Dev Team as well as to use it in the near future in any related discussions so I won't need to spend 1h again explaining and argumenting my points.

I don't think you will find any random guys who DISAGREE with you about this. A change that makes it impossible for us to kill 2k-rated players even if we have them surrounded with a swarm of units is NOT something that the average guy would ever agree to.

There are basically an infinite number of resources. ACU health is a resource that regenerates. TMLs that get built in a launcher are a resource. Etc.

These videos appear to be designed to be about 4 minutes (not counting intro/ending) so they have to be focused, he can't talk about all possibilities out there. I do think it makes the most sense to highlight those 3 particular resources as the ones that you need to focus on/balance with your limited attention. There is a direct relationship between the 3 and nothing else comes close in importance.

When @FtXCommando first explained to me that we were balancing three resources, not two (mass/energy) I think I went up 100 rating points instantly. In my 1v1 guide (shameless plug https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=17559) I do describe attention as a resource so I'm not disagreeing with you, just that it doesn't belong in this particular video.

@TestPlay said in The "attack move" for engineers from factories:

I would think that it is sometimes easier just clicking on the 1 single engineer which stops at the FAM default point from the factory and changing the FAM point just for that engineer by moving the FAM point for that engineer (and this can be done for each respective engineers accumulating at that factory default FAM point), instead of clicking on the factory and having to change the FAM default point every single time for each and every engineer which comes out.

It would be easier if the game worked that way, but it doesn't.

Each single engineer does not get its own COPY of the factory's orders. The single engineer is SHARING the factory's orders with all other units "born" from the factory while those orders are active. Selecting a unit doesn't change that.

If you edit those orders (hold shift, click and drag to move a waypoint, or if you delete a waypoint with ctrl-shift right-click) you are editing the SHARED orders, so your edits affect ALL units for which those orders are active (all units "born" from the factory that have not yet exhausted the orders).

Hypothetically, you have exactly 1 land factory that is making nothing but tanks. You start with a rally point on the right side of the map. Five tanks come out and start traveling to that point. After the fifth tank, you select the factory and give it brand new orders, a rally point to the left side of the map, and five more tanks come out. What happens? The first five tanks go right, to the right waypoint, and stop; the second five tanks go left, to the left waypoint, and stop.

Now let's change it: you have exactly 1 land factory that is making nothing but tanks. You start with a rally point on the right side of the map. Five tanks come out and start traveling to that point. After the fifth tank, you select the rally point and move it (by holding shift, clicking on it, and dragging it with your mouse) to the left side of the map, and five more tanks come out. What happens? Well, for the first five tanks, any of them that already reached the waypoint have "exhausted" their orders, the waypoint is no longer their orders, so they will just stay put on the right side of the map. Any tanks that are still traveling to the right waypoint will turn around and begin traveling to the left. And all new tanks coming out of the factory will travel to the left. It doesn't matter which unit(s) or building(s), if any, are selected while you drag the waypoint. There is just a single waypoint shared between the factory and all existing tanks that haven't yet gotten to the end of their path.

This is really only an issue for factory attack-move because it's so easy to give new orders of any other kind. FAM is the only kind of order that has to be given from the factory itself. For anything else, if you want your tanks to have their own individual orders, just click on them and give them a new move order, or a new attack-move order.