While the old designs do have some jank stuff happening, I think they serve a purpose in making the HQ silhouette stand out from the support factories. They also seem "grander", like a steady evolution of what you poured all your hard earned mass into.

Soulripper can pick up units and experimentals like a dropship. And also shoot other gunships.

Minus points for not saying "Did you know?"

When it comes to balancing, there has been rather large divergence in the method of implantation in what and how something is changed.
Not that this is good or bad, but there does seem to be a random factor in some of the changes that are being made. I guess this is because the FAF is a collaboration between individuals with different ideas and mindsets.

For instance there is a trend of normalisation, such as making each unit useful for its cost and class, either shifting its power up or down (e.g. mantis made slower and same cost as other t1 or beacon more range and cheaper than it was).

Secondly there is the direction where other units are statistically worse and are compensated for with the strength from other units, sometimes even units of different tiers.

And third there is the direction of units being worse or better statistically because it makes the game more interesting or asymmetrical.
What I want to ask is what decisions lead to how these are chosen. And when is one argument for a direction better chosen over another?

Thats cool! I shall overlook the lack of "Did you know?" for that one.

At the very least I think giving sonar to these spy planes would be reasonable.

For me, it would help if the client did not fail to log back in after a disconnect. Forced to close client to log back in using the browser and can then not reconnect to a game.

In regards to naval vs air, I have noticed that for equal cost in either mass or energy, torp bombers seem to win out in most cases against cruisers. This is not really what I want to address in this post, but rather how this difference in cost efficiency increases exponentially and not linearly when more of each unit is added into an engagement.
I know that exponential efficiency differences are basically expected when comparing most unit interactions, so I would like to discuss if this is desired or not in regards to cruisers vs air.
If not, I would like to make some observations and proposals.

The Problem

Depending on the faction, each cruiser is affected by this more or less than the others. Some of the reasons for this happening are different , but the main ones shared by them are different variations of overkill and wasted shots.
Wasted shots happen when a cruiser fires right before the target dies, either because other cruisers had the same target, or the target dies after another volley was fired.
I will break down how this happens for each cruiser below separately.

Seraphim Cruiser
This unit has the least problems in this area and may actually have the reverse happen. The flack projectiles have higher AOE than missiles and don't disappear when a target dies.
The close range gun has high projectile velocity, so they don't tend to be wasted.

Aeon Cruiser
The missiles will overkill targets.
If more than one cruiser fires at the same target, you will end up with a lot of wasted shots since the missiles cant redirect to a new target.
If the target is at max range, they can waste a third volley before the second one connects.

UEF Cruiser
They don't overkill torp bombers by much.
The volleys have a slightly longer reload time so they don't tend to waste volleys.
They do suffer badly when multiple cruisers target the same bomber.

Cybran Cruiser
The missiles overkill's the target.
They will almost always waste their third volley unless the bombers are directly above them.
They can waste a lot of shots when firing at the same bomber, same as with Aeon.
They take longer to start firing when a bomber first enters their range, about one second. This happens with all units that have a laser designator by the way, so I think it is a bug.

I made most of the observations while playing or watching replays.
Here is a replay where I mess around a bit to see what happens: #19276982

Proposed Solution

Depending on what is possible, I would suggest either letting missiles redirect when their target is dead, or have something similar to what was done with TMD.
If this is done, cruisers will no longer waste their shots and the scaling problem should be alleviated somewhat.

Always thought the exp chicken should get egg laying instead of the megalith. So...
Ilshavoh become ythotha on vetting up.
Ythotha can lay eggs like a megalith that spawns ilshavoh.

Wanted to start a thread about unexpected or little known interactions involving units in supcom faf.

Did you know: Torp defence doesn't work against torp bombers?

Ah I remember metal fatigue. Surprised someone else even mentioning it.

@sharkcode Can you play any other games besides CS2? Are there any other symptoms you notice? Was your OS installed on a formatted drive? What OS are you using?

The detection issue is annoying, bit I like microing monkeys and megas to attack shorelines like this. Smart players start ground attacking the location.

@tarantellaswan Funny you should mentions this, was thinking before of a reconstruction bot implementation. Wanted to call it
"The Necromancer" reconstruction bot. Would get a list of surrounding wrecks and rebuild on the spot with the same mechanic as rebuilding on dead buildings. Guess that could work as an upgrade for an SACU, but would require a lot of work.

Aeon aura to increase range of units around it? Something like +5 range, so harbs have close to same range as bricks and percies.

Ok, so how about an upgrade that increases capture range and speed? Call it hack module or something. So for cybran sacu they would have something like hack, emp gun and AA? Would that make a good enough support ACU?

The stun gun is technically a support upgrade while AA is offense. You could put stun as an alternative to gun and giving the upgrade increased range.

@cocainediesel I would like that if it is possible.

@thewheelienoob Except its per unit. So no, a 1000 mass is not nothing.

If the base stats go down, lower the cost too. You can add that cost to the RAS upgrade. That way RAS SACU's cost the same but come with the nerfed stats and combat SACU's become easier to get.

As for new allocation on Cybran SACU, I think RAS should be on BACK and AA on same arm as stun gun.